Benedict Jacka's Blog, page 21

Alex Verus Compared To Other Series

. . . by length, that is.

Ethan Sholly has done an in-depth listing of popular fantasy and sci-fi series sorted by their total word counts.  He’s still updating it (and some of the series aren’t finished), but here’s a picture of the list at the time of writing, so you can see how Alex Verus compares!

Some of these were surprises to me, others weren’t.  I don’t think many people will be surprised to see the Wheel of Time or Discworld towards the top, but I was surprised to see just how long the Redwall series was (apparently all those books really add up) and apparently Raymond E. Feist’s Riftwar Cycle kept going for way longer than I ever realised.

On the other hand, it’s also interesting to see many of the most enduring and influential series towards the shorter end of the list.  The entire seven-book Chronicles of Narnia is shorter than some Brandon Sanderson novels, while the three-volume Lord of the Rings, which is still regarded as the iconic fantasy doorstopper, is actually relatively short compared to many of the works that have come after it.

It’s odd to look at that list and see just how long the Alex Verus series ended up being.  Back when I was starting Fated, I never would have imagined that the whole story would end up taking me ten years and over a million words.  I wonder how long my next series will be?

Ask Luna #184

From: Daniel

Okay, so, did the Fateweaver kill Alex and take his memories/personality or what?

Some explanation of how this question came about and why it bugs me enough to ask:

The Epilogue of Risen is written from your point of view, so we aren’t getting any more peeks into the mind of the entity that came out of the Fateweaver merging with Alex like with earlier portions of the book, but “Alex” in that epilogue states that he can no longer path-walk or even focus very much on futures too far from the immediate moment. Also all of the items that were keyed to his magical signature don’t work for him any more (keeper signet, etc.; but there is no mention of the dreamstone, so whether or not he can still use it would be something of a “test” to determine if he’s still Alex or not).

Elsewhere on the internet someone compared this question to the Ship of Theseus debate (if all of the components of a ship are replaced, is it still the same ship?).

In other fictional works (about cloning and the philosophical debate about whether the original person dies or not when the clone wakes up) the stance is that if there is continuity of experience, then the “clone” is still the same person as the original (as long as the original body is dead before the clone wakes up) and in that fiction series the “clones” experience no gaps in memory when transitioning from original body to clone.

Meanwhile, according to Risen, there is a break in memory/continuity between when Alex thinks he is dying and when the Fateweaver/Alex entity wakes up (according to Fateweaver/Alex, he woke up after Anne was done helping the Fateweaver replace Alex’s entire body). Fateweaver/Alex also tells you that he’s having odd memories coming up in his mind that belonged to previous wielders of the Fateweaver (which indicates that the entity currently in the form of Alex and with his personality/memories being dominant is actually an amalgam of all previous wielders and it just takes time to assimilate new information).

Okay, I’m not really the philosopher type, so this isn’t really my field of expertise or anything, but as far as I can see, what you’ve done here is that you’ve spent a while asking a question, then spent a while giving an answer to your own question.  I’m not actually sure I can give you any better answer than the things you’ve tossed out already.  

For what it’s worth, as far as I can tell, it feels like it’s him.  That’s good enough for me.  

From: Sierra

1. Would you consider Tobias to be a master mage on the level of Landis? I only ask because he blocked multiple force blades from Barrayar point blank with the power of a jinn behind it when Rain who is very good had trouble blocking force magic during the mission in Syria. Was this just a situational thing or is Tobias just really good at defensive magic like Landis is?

2. Aside from being a non-lethal attack is there a reason why a water mage would use Hydro Blasts in dangerous situations. I would have thought Tobias would have used disintegration rays against Vihaela but he used water blasts, are they faster or more energy efficient, or is it something else entirely?

3. In the Arcana it mentioned that while not as good as air mages water mages have some sort of mobility effect do you know what this is? Force and air mages are obvious and fire mages can do their own Phoenix flight but what spell do water mages use when they want to get around faster?

Tobias is very good, but I don’t know if he’s master level or not.  Probably he’d be pretty close.  Being labelled a ‘master’ is more of a political thing than a skill thing – it’s more about how famous and admired you are than anything else.  They’re fast and easy to cast, and because they’ve got a strong kinetic component they usually do something even if they don’t get through the target’s defences.  Even if you shield against a hydroblast, it’ll probably still knock you off balance and make it hard for you to counterattack.  So water battlemages tend to spam them.  They’re also a lot easier to scale down to nonlethal levels than a disintegrate spell, so if you’re only going to specialise in one spell, and you’re not a complete psycho, it makes more sense to master hydroblasts than disintegrate rays.Water transport, mostly.  They can swim really, really fast, quicker than any sprinter.  Obviously that’s not much use if there isn’t a sea or a river around, but if you’re the one who gets to pick the terrain . . .

From: Brian

1. Do you know how many adepts Richard had in his army? Not a specific number just a rough estimate?

2. What happened to the survivors of Drakh’s army or the ones that he didn’t bring with him are they being hunted or sentenced by the Light Council?

3. Are there air adepts who can fly? And what are the more common air adepts types. I don’t recall meeting that many but for some reason I get the feeling after fire they are one of the most common unless I am mistaken?

Depends what you mean.  If you included all the ones that fought with him at one time or another, a few thousand.  If you limit it to the ‘true believers’ and the veterans, the ones who were the real core of his army, more like a few hundred.  There were also a lot who’d help out in various ways but who wouldn’t go on really dangerous missions.  That’s been an ongoing political argument for a while.  Some of the Keepers were arguing for harsh sentences and hunting down the survivors, others in the Council wanted a general amnesty.  So far the amnesty faction seems to be winning, partly because Landis backed it, and partly due to war exhaustion/Council casualties.  They tend to fall into two categories:  mobility types (who can lighten their body to jump or fly) and attacker types (who can use electrical attacks or blades of hardened air).  And yes, they’re one of the more common types.  

Quiet Month

Not much news this week.  I’ve been busy with the rewrite, version 5.

‘Quiet’ is how things are likely to stay for the next couple of months.  Apart from the next German Alex Verus translation (which is releasing in May), I won’t have anything coming out any time soon, so all of my time and attention will be focused on the new book.  On the plus side, these sorts of periods tend to be when I get my best work done.

As I mentioned last week, the deadline I’ve set for myself for this rewrite is mid-June.  So far I’m on course to hit it, at which point I should be able to give you guys a better idea of a release date.

Starting Again

Well, after seven weeks of notes and planning, I’ve started what I really, really hope is going to be the final rewrite of the new book.  I’ve got this one labelled in my notes as version 5, which should be an indication of how many major changes it’s gone through already.  Here’s hoping that there isn’t a version 6 (or if it is, it’s minor changes only).

Rewriting is hard work, so I’m not looking forward to this very much.  It’s definitely necessary, though – the longer I’ve spent looking at my notes and plans, the more sure I’ve become that doing a rewrite was the right decision, and now that I’m about ten pages in and looking at the original version, I’m absolutely certain.  There are lots of little things in the book stemming from decisions which made sense at the time but don’t anymore – when I started the book I was still feeling out a lot of the details of how the magic and the world worked, and it’s only now that I’ve got a clear handle on them.

Now that I’m getting into it, what this most feels like is the big rewrite I did of the first Alex Verus novel, Fated, more than ten years ago.  Still, there are differences.  When I rewrote Fated, a lot of the Alex Verus setting was still quite vague and undefined – I had a good idea of how the magic worked (since by that point I’d been developing and evolving it through four precursor novels) but the world itself was still very blurry and the long-term plot was nonexistent.  For this series, I’ve got a much clearer idea of what the larger story will be – I’ve got books 2-3 sketched out in my head in a fair amount of detail, with plans for at least another 6 or so books after that.  The plans are still fairly smoky with a lot of room for change, but they’re much clearer in my mind than the shape of the Alex Verus series was at any point in the first few books.  I’m looking forward to getting there.

But that’s getting ahead of myself – right now, I have to finish this rewrite.  The deadline I’ve set for myself is mid-June.  If I hit it, and if my editors don’t ask for even more sweeping changes, then I should be able to give you guys a solid publication date once it’s done.  Fingers crossed!

Ask Luna #183

From: Celia

Hey Luna,

Have a quick question. I noticed that Morden and Richard both have mansions in Wales, and Alex’s safe house is also there. Why on Earth would Alex have his safe house so close to the homes of two of his biggest enemies?!? Did Morden just walk next door to pressgang Alex? I get that you can’t just chat up Morden and Richard to ask why they bought mansions in Wales… but is there a logical explanation for this, like is land in Wales cheaper and more available than in England?

Thanks so much,
Celia

I asked Alex about it and he said that he got to know the area while he was an apprentice.  So when he went looking for a safe house of his own, it was an easy place to start.  

Apart from that, it’s probably because Alex, Richard, and Morden were all looking for the same sort of thing.  People have been living in the UK for a really long time and it’s pretty settled.  If there’s a nice patch of land somewhere, someone’s probably built a house or a farm on it already.  So if you’re looking for an abandoned spot as far away as possible from everyone else, then your choices are Wales, the North, or Scotland.  Since Alex knew the area better, he went for Wales.  

(Also, I think you’ve got a bit of an exaggerated idea of how small Wales is.  Walking from Morden’s mansion to Alex’s safehouse would have been something like an 18-hour hike, and I can’t really imagine Morden spending that long trekking over fields full of sheep.)

From: Jenna

Hello Luna,
I have been following Alex’s adventures from the very beginning. There was one mystery that I was hoping that I would understand by the end, but the more I think about it—I just don’t understand. I don’t understand what Richard’s convoluted plan was all about. I know Alex asked him “why” at their final confrontation, but for Richard’s answer left more questions. Why did he need the death of an American teenager to fuel his portal? Why not just grab an adept from England? In fact, what was he even trying to accomplish by going through his portal to wherever? Did it increase his magical power? Did he just want an extended vacation where no one would try to kill him for being a dark mage? Was he trying to create his own shadow realm? I just don’t understand how doing any of that fit into his overall scheme of trying to conquer the world. Well, first England, then the world. Is there anything you can tell us about your own thoughts on this matter?

The portal Richard used was powered by some sort of blood magic ritual that needed the life force of an adept or a mage with an affinity for time/space magic.  I don’t know why he settled on that teenager in particular.  Maybe any time or space adept would have worked and she was just the easiest target, or maybe there was something special about her.  (Oh, and she was English, not American.  They ran to the U.S. to try to get away from Richard.  Obviously, it didn’t work.)

As for why he went to another world . . . that’s something we’ll probably never know.  Richard was always really secretive.  He didn’t tell anyone else about his plans, and the only way we ever figured out what he was doing was by talking to other people, or by doing old-fashioned spying.  Since there WEREN’T any other people who went to the same place that he did, the only way to find out what happened there would have been to ask him (not exactly very practical).  And given how many other things were going wrong at the time, it honestly just wasn’t very high on our priority list – we were a lot more worried about what he was doing right now.  

From: Ali

Hey Luna,

I was wondering what Alex’s last name was? And did he ever reconcile with his parents?

Ali

He’s very tight-lipped about his birth name.  Part of it’s because he’s concerned about people tracking down/harassing his parents, part of it’s issues with his mother.  

He did seem to get on better with them over time, but I’m not sure if it was reconciliation as much as gradually giving up on arguing with them about stuff.  Maybe he just lowered his expectations.  

From: Eleven

Good day Luna, I understand you talk with Chalice occasionally. How’s her political work going? Do you know who got the Council seat for Dark Mages?

Thank you,
Eleven

She seems to be doing pretty well.  Maybe a bit too well.  I think she’s still hoping to recruit me as an assistant.  

The Dark Council seat went to some guy I don’t know.  After what happened with Richard and Morden, anyone who was associated with either of them became politically radioactive to the Council.  So the seat ended up going to someone who’d never had any kind of dealings with either of them at all.  

A New Reddit Sub

For a while now, the main place for online discussion of the Alex Verus series has been the Alex Verus subreddit.  I occasionally get questions about why I don’t have a forum here on this website – the short answer is that growing/administering/moderating a forum community takes a lot of time and attention which I can’t easily spare, so I’ve been content to let this sort of thing develop naturally.  And over time, the Reddit sub has grown to fill the place a forum would.

However, there’s actually a second Reddit sub for my books – r/benedictjacka.  It was created by some guy who was trying to use it for advertising to drive traffic to various seedy money-generating sites.  Fortunately it never got much traction and the creator eventually got banned, so now with the subreddit being unoccupied, I’ve taken it over and one of the moderators from the main sub has cleaned it up.

I haven’t really decided what to do with the new subreddit as yet.  Now that the Alex Verus series is over and now that I’m starting work on a new series, the Alex Verus books are gradually going to become a smaller and smaller percentage of my total body of work.  So there’s some argument for trying to switch over for a site named after me rather than my books.  This’ll take a very long time though (decades), so there’s no hurry.

I also might just leave both subreddits up and see what happens.  I find it kind of fascinating to watch online communities grow on their own.

Long Term Plans

I’ve been spending the past month or so busy with plans for rewriting/rethinking my new series.  It’s been hard work, but interesting.

One thing that I’m doing differently with this series than I did with Alex Verus is to plan it out from the start in much more detail.  If you’ve been reading my author commentaries, you’ll know that Alex Verus wasn’t originally envisaged as a long-running series – in fact, back when I wrote the first draft of Fated, it wasn’t intended to be a series at all.  Cursed and Taken were also written as standalones first and series books second.  It was only around book 4 that I started to think seriously in terms of a long-term plot, it wasn’t until book 5 that I actually began to decide what that long-term plot would be, and that long-term plot didn’t really kick in until around book 7.

Having the series be mostly unplanned had both pluses and minuses.  On the positive side, it meant I was free to experiment and throw in weird new ideas from whatever I was interested in at the time.  A lot of the most popular elements of the books stemmed from random ideas that I came up with on the spur of the moment and just decided to toss in because they sounded fun.  It also meant that the series was free to evolve in surprising ways – none of the major storylines ended up where I’d been originally intending to take them, which I quite liked.

But it caused problems too.  Not all of the sub-plots in the Alex Verus series ended neatly – in quite a few cases I was forced to make a choice between having a plot go in the direction that would make for a neater and more coherent story, and having it go in the direction that was more consistent with what I’d established about the characters and the world.  In the earlier books, I tended to pick the first option;  in later ones, once the world and characters were more developed, I was more likely to pick the second.  In both cases, it meant some readers got upset.  There was also the issue that, in the long term, not planning things in advance caused me a LOT of extra work.  I’d frequently run into blockages where I just didn’t know where to go next – if I was lucky, that meant a week or two of thinking and planning, whereas if I was unlucky it meant realising that I’d taken a book in the wrong direction and having to rewrite it completely.

So with this new series, I’m taking the opportunity to try something different:  I’m planning out early books (and possibly even the entire series) in advance as far as I can.  I’ve currently got roadmaps for the various threads of the story that stretch out several books into the future.  My hope is that by the time I finish the rewrite of Book 1, I’ll have a general plan and shape for the series as a whole.  I don’t know if I’ll manage it, but it’ll be fun to try!

Ask Luna #182

From: Daniel

Now that Alex sacrificed himself to put an end to several different factional machinations, what are you and Anne going to do (assuming Anne made it safely out of Sagash’s collapsing shadow realm–did she?)?

Anne is still very much unwelcome in the UK for a whole bunch of reasons and that’s not changing any time soon.  I don’t think she’s planning to move back home.  

For my part, I’m running the Arcana Emporium, sorting out various things with UK adepts, and helping clean up the aftermath of everything that happened in that last year.  

From: Saffron

Where is Verus?

Trafalgar Square.  He should be there some time this week.  If you don’t see him, keep waiting, he’ll show up eventually.  

From: Owen

1. Do independent mages have apprentices or is it limited to Light and Dark?

2. Have you met any other Chance apprentices during your time in the Light Council training program? If so did you get along with and did your curse overlap with how they used magic?

3. When Chalice fist met Alex she mentioned something called slay machine, what is this exactly?

1. Of course independents have apprentices.  There are more of them than all the Light and Dark mages put together, it’s not as though they just decide not to train new mages.

2. A few.  Not many.  It’s not a common magic type to begin with and the ones that are don’t usually go through Council programmes.  I think they find it too restrictive.  With the ones I did meet, I could understand their magic easily enough, but we never tended to get on all that well for some reason.  

3. It’s a way to sabotage mechanical things.  Easier than you’d expect, to be honest.  The more complicated a device is, the more things that can go wrong with it, and modern computerised stuff breaks REALLY easily.  It doesn’t take much to nudge one into a total crash/lockup.  Pretty much all chance mages learn it as one of their basic spells.  

From: Svetoslav

I was wondering – how many people actually knew Richard to be a diviner, and how come no one ever told Alex? Helikaon knew Richard was a diviner and he never said anything to Alex? Did Alex not ask around about this?

From what I understand, the Council and a few of their higher-ups knew, but kept it on a need-to-know basis.  Alex was never trusted enough to be told.  At least, that’s what I’ve heard – the other possibility is they didn’t actually find out until the war was halfway done, and then just pretended to have known all along (haven’t heard any real proof of that, but it’s absolutely the kind of thing they’d do).  

Cosmologies

I’ve been spending the last couple of weeks developing a cosmology for my new setting, and figuring out how to tie it into the story.

Turns out this kind of thing is a lot of work.  With hindsight, maybe I should have done all this before writing the book, but honestly, I’m not even sure it would have made things any easier.

Bad News and Good News

Some bad news for this week, though it does have a silver lining to it.

As regular readers know, I’ve been working on a new urban fantasy series as of last summer, and I finished the first draft of Book 1 at the end of January.  Since then I’ve been talking it over with my beta readers and thinking about what edits I’d like to make and where I’d like the series to go.

Unfortunately, the longer I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve come to realise that I’m not really happy with the book in its current state.  There are several reasons for this:

1) The series was originally conceived as an urban fantasy story with some progression fantasy elements.  It’s also much more human-centric than the Alex Verus series – in the first draft there are no magical or supernatural creatures at all.  While this has made the series more coherent and grounded than the Alex Verus books, it’s also meant that it’s much more “materialist” than most of my books have tended to be – much of the story has ended up revolving around money and power, and now that I look at the whole thing, I’m just kind of dissatisfied.  It doesn’t feel magical enough.

2) While I’ve developed a lot of the new world and setting in detail, creating a new urban fantasy setting is a huge job and a lot of stuff necessarily got left out.  In particular, a lot of the story elements in Book 1 are started but not finished – they’re not really developed, partly because I haven’t figured out where they’re going to go yet.  I did this a lot in the Alex Verus series, too, but I’m not sure it’s working well enough this time.  Several of my beta readers commented that the first book felt incomplete/unsatisfying (there aren’t resolutions to about 2 out of 3 of the main conflicts) and that’s not the feeling I want my readers to be walking away with after reading book 1 of what’s supposed to be a long-running series.

It’s a bit frustrating because I’ve been working really hard on this book for a really long time and I’ve now got it in a state where it’s finished and I’d really like for it to be done.  I’ve already got contract offers from my US and UK publishers for the first few books of the series and I could pretty much decide to sign those right now and have book 1 out in 12 months or so (if I seriously wanted to speed things up, I could self-publish it instead and have it out in a fraction of that time).  Unfortunately I think that if I do that, the result just won’t be good enough.  I’m sure lots of people will buy book 1 based on their good opinions of the Alex Verus series, but I don’t just want people to read it because they liked Alex Verus.  I want people to read it because they liked Alex Verus, then go on to like this series just as much.  And in the book’s current state, I’m not confident that that’ll happen.

So I’m going to go back to the drawing board and do a rewrite.  I don’t know how long it’ll take, but I’m expecting that it’ll be months.  (This means that the Alex Verus short story that I had been hoping to do in February isn’t happening any time soon, unless I get so sick of the rewrite that I decide to take a break and do something completely different for a few weeks.)

On the positive side, I’m sure that the book’s going to be much better by the time that I’m done.  Another side effect that I suspect my readers won’t mind is that with the new plans that I’m drawing up, the series is likely to be longer.  My initial plan for the series was that it would be quite a bit shorter than Alex Verus – the world was much ‘smaller’ and there wasn’t as long a journey for the main character to go on or as much to do.  With the new plans that I’m working on, the stakes are going to be a lot higher and there’ll be a lot more room for more important things to happen.

So that’s where things are at the moment!  I’ll give you more news once I have it, but for the foreseeable future, I’m going to be fully absorbed in rethinking/reworking the foundations of my new setting.