Benedict Jacka's Blog, page 68

Ask Luna #22

From: drizztmajere

Hello Luna,

I saw you answer a question about whether or not alex is considered an adept or a mage and i was curious about spells. Most wizards find a mentor and copy their spells but it seems alex mostly had to learn on his own so i was curious if he is still in the process of developing other spells for himself or did he give up?

Alex had to learn the very basics of his magic on his own, but once he left school he had a mentor. Very definitely had a mentor. I get the impression lessons went fast, too, even if not all of them was good. After that was over, I think he mostly developed his divination magic by learning from other diviners rather than working it out from scratch.

From: Lee

Hi Luna, I was wondering, is there such a thing as a fiction mage? If so what sort of things could they do with there magic, could they use the friction to use heat or kinetic magic?

I’m going to guess you meant ‘friction’ not ‘fiction’, though that would be a pretty cool power too.

I’m kind of hazy on the exact definition of friction to be honest – is it force, or heat, or something like that? Whichever, there are a few different magic types that can do something similar. Fire mages can do the heat-generating part, force mages can do the making-something-move-or-not part, and earth mages can make solid objects stick fairly well, as long as they’re made of the right stuff. I’ve never met a mage who specialises in friction, but I think I’ve heard about a couple of recognised adept powers that do use friction or something like it in a fairly specific way.

From: drizztmajere

Hi Luna,

I was curious about Arachne’s ability. She has made you a focus and various aides for Verus in the pass so i was wondering if it is possible for her to create something that would allow a non gater to operate a gate so that Verus would be able to hide all of his Magical items that he doesn’t want found into a shadow realm?

Almost definitely, yeah. Arachne’s abilities are kinda weird by human standards (magical creatures don’t do stuff the same way as mages) but if there’s one thing I know she’s good at it’s making items, so I’d be willing to bet she could whip up a gate stone. Probably wouldn’t take her long either.

The problem would be finding a shadow realm to use. The whole point of the things is that they’re really really hard to get to if you don’t already have a way in, and if you do have a way in it’s probably because someone else showed it to you, which usually someone else is using the place already. I’ve been to a few shadow realms but I can’t think of any I’d want to use as a storage closet.

From: Trask

Dear Luna,

Do you have any background information on Cinder? Like where he came from? Or who he was an apprentice to? That sort of thing. Also does Alex ever mentioned him? I wouldn’t exactly call them friends, but they seem to have a mutual respect for each other. Has Alex ever met up with Cinder just to try and get to know him and see what makes him tick?

Thank you for any light you can shed on the fire frenzied Dark Mage.

Yours,

Trask

I don’t know much about Cinder, and I’m fine with keeping it that way. Honestly, he freaks me out more than a little bit. I mean, he’s not as horrifyingly sadistic as some of the Dark mages out there, but he’s still the kind of guy you absolutely do not want to risk pissing off, and it doesn’t help that the first time I met the guy he was trying to abduct me. Yes, we’ve technically been kinda-sorta-allies once or twice, but it was Alex who did the talking, not me, and I’ve always had the feeling that the more distance I keep from the guy the better. Right now I don’t think he remembers me and I’d be happy to keep it that way. Alex seems to have some kind of working relationship with the guy, but then it’s Alex. He has this weird ability to strike up civil conversations with the kind of people you’d normally run a mile to avoid.

As for where Cinder came from . . . don’t really know, though I’m pretty sure he was apprenticed to a Dark fire master at some point. The one definite thing I have heard about him is that he’s supposed to not like women very much – some sort of grudge. (And yes, I know, that doesn’t stop him hanging out with Deleo 24/7, but I have no idea WHAT’S going on between those two and given that she’s actually MORE homicidal than he is there’s no way in hell I’m getting close enough to find out.)

Hidden Update

Was going to do an Encyclopaedia article on sound magic for today, but decided instead to do a brief update on the status of Alex Verus #5, aka Hidden.

This book’s taken a little longer to complete than the previous ones.  Normally it takes me about 9 months-ish to write an Alex Verus novel, but Hidden‘s ended up taking 11-12, due to having been fairly extensively rewritten over the autumn.  (Minor bit of trivia:  this has been the first major rewrite I’ve done since Fated.  Cursed, Taken, and Chosen all went from first draft to final release with only relatively minor changes each.)  As a result, Alex Verus #5 probably isn’t going to be out until September-ish 2014, give or take a couple of months.

Still, the book’s written, and the good news is that it’s now past the rewrite stage and into the standard editorial track, meaning there shouldn’t be any more significant delays on the road to publication.  I’m just in the middle of doing edits now, which’ll take a couple more weeks, after which I’ll be putting the manuscript away and focusing on the as-yet-untitled sixth book in the series.

Hidden is going to continue what Chosen started, in that it’ll be more of a ‘series’ book rather than a purely episodic one.  I’m still going to try to make each new Alex Verus novel viable as a standalone story, but as the world gets bigger and past events become more significant, the drift is going to be in the direction of a long-term plot.

As for what’ll be in the book . . . I won’t go into too many details just yet, but Anne’s around a lot.  :)  I’m pretty happy with the story after the changes, and while the rewrite might have taken a while, I do think the book’s much better as a result.  Hopefully you will too!

Ask Luna #21

From: Margery

I love the books, they really make me think and help me relax. So thank you. How old is Alex?

He turned 31 last month. He never does anything for his birthday, so we ended up throwing him a party. Well, ‘party’ is a bit of an overstatement, since there weren’t that many of us, but everyone had fun, or at least I think they did.

A lot of people seem to want to know how old Alex is. I wonder if there’s a reason they’re asking . . .

From: Steve

It’s probably been asked a godzillon times, but has there ever been any romantic interest in Alex on your part?

What are your personal thoughts on Alex since the events at his old master’s house? Do you still respect and look up to him or has your personal view of Alex changed?

I actually figured most of it out the year before. I already knew Alex used to be a Dark mage, and I’d started noticing that he kind of had a thing about adepts-to-apprentices of about my age – whenever someone youngish who seemed to be on their own came to him for help with some sort of magical problem, he’d always seem to end up helping them, even if there wasn’t any really good reason to do it. And with some of the hints he dropped . . . well, it wasn’t too hard to put the pieces together.

So when he finally told me the story it didn’t bother me that much. The truth wasn’t actually anywhere near as bad as some of the things I’d imagined – you hear some real horror stories about Dark mages, worse than that one by a long way. I guess if he did it now I’d have second thoughts, but it was so long ago I just kind of shrugged it off. He’s always treated me well, and to be honest that’s what I really care about. Maybe that makes me a bit self-centred, but that’s how it goes.

And as for your first question yes, I do get asked that a lot. You know the thing about answering stuff like that on the internet? It’s public.

From: Kildayen

Hey Luna,

Any chance of an Encyclopaedia update soon? I’d love to see an article on shapeshifting.

Went up last week, you can find it here.

From: Helena

Hi Luna,

I live in Australia, and I am looking for an Arachnoid fae, as I desperately need to confer re a woven vest I need made. Are there any willing to converse with humans here? (I have mediocre seer ability – what good is a split second? – and am not of convict stock). I have several Haplopelma lividum that are more than happy to vouch for me, but I do not know if the fae associate with their smaller kin.

Sincerely H.

I’m not that well up on Australian magical creatures, arachnid or otherwise – Arachne once told me about one called the Redback, but from the way she talked I’m not sure you’d want to meet it (and if you did getting a woven vest probably wouldn’t be your biggest problem). I do know about a couple of mages who are supposed to have good contacts with the magical creatures over there – send me a private message with your email, and I’ll see if I can put you in touch with them. No promises, though.

Encyclopaedia Arcana #60: Shapeshift Magic

Shapeshifting is one of the most iconic of all magic types, but also one of the least common. True shapeshifting masters are very rare, more so than the great majority of life magic types and even most types of universalist.

Shifting Life

Shapeshifters are sometimes viewed as a subset of life mages, though it would be more accurate to say that the two types overlap. Shapeshifters have the same ability to sense life that life mages do, and they can regenerate and fortify their own bodies in a very similar manner. However, unlike life mages, they can’t directly manipulate other living creatures. Life mages turn their energies outward as well as inward, learning to affect others for good and for ill, but shapeshifters are among the most narrowly-focused of all mages, and instead of learning to affect other bodies, they’re hyper-specialised in affecting only one body – their own.

In exchange for their specialisation, shapeshifters can do things that life mages can’t. Life magic is primarily focused on working with the natural order of the body, and most healing spells are really just ways of optimising and accelerating the body’s natural rate of repair. Shapeshifters, on the other hand, learn to rewrite the structure of their body completely. They can sharpen the nails and bones of their fingers into claws, grow plates of natural armour over their vital organs, extend their legs or arms, and even add totally inhuman features like gills, extra limbs, or wings.

One a shapeshifter has learned basic alteration, the next step they usually attempt is changing into a different animal entirely. Although a larger change in gross terms, this can actually be easier than an individual alteration, since the shapeshifter is copying the ‘blueprint’ of another creature rather than designing one from scratch. It helps a lot if the shapeshifter has previously used their lifesight to perform a detailed study of the creature they’re attempting to change into, which is one of the reasons so many shapeshifters keep exotic pets.

Mass Effect

Although shapeshifters have free reign over their biology, there’s a physical law they can’t get around so easily: conservation of mass. Creating extra body mass requires a phenomenal amount of energy, and so while a moderately experienced shapeshifter can turn into just about any animal he can think of, he’s still going to be about the same size that he was already. Shapeshifters can get around this to a limited degree by making their new forms more or less dense, but only within limits.

More experienced shapeshifters can learn to take on the forms of smaller creatures by ‘storing’ their excess mass. The most common technique for doing this uses a type of space magic to shunt a certain fraction of their body mass into a small pocket dimension. Due to various practical considerations, the new body does need to be of a certain minimum size – making the brain too small, for instance, has some highly inconvenient side effects – so while a dog or cat is feasible, a flea isn’t.

Shapeshifting into a creature that’s larger than human is extremely difficult, and only master shifters can do it. The basic problem is that a large creature requires a lot of organic matter to make up its body, and that matter has to come from somewhere. There are various more or less ethical ways to do this, and the exact techniques are generally not widely advertised.

Learning the Form

Shapeshifting is an enormously versatile magic type – a skilled shapeshifter can solve almost any phsyical problem by adapting his body to the situation. It does, however, come with a catch. When a shapeshifter alters their body, they alter their mind to match, adapting their physical reflexes so that they don’t have to spend weeks relearning how to use their new limbs. Unfortunately, by doing so they risk making changes to their own minds that they didn’t want. The more extensively a shapeshifter changes himself, the greater the risk of losing parts of his identity or personality – instincts can be overwritten by the new form, and in extreme cases the shifter may forget who he’s supposed to be entirely.

For this reason, more careful shapeshifters tend to stick to shapes that they know very well. The more familiar a shapeshifter is with a form, the less difficulty they’ll have with adapting their mind to it (and with enough practice, they can learn it so well that changing their own mind is no longer necessary). It’s perhaps also for this reason that while shapeshifting mages are rare, shapeshift adepts are quite common. They learn one form and practice it over and over again until they’re as comfortable with it as they are in their own skin.

A shapeshift adept is often referred to as a were-creature. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the types of animals that humans best get on with, the most common shapeshift adepts are werecats and werewolves (or other canines).

Ask Luna #20

From: April

Heya, so I just finished reading Chosen, which I really liked by the way, I’ve read all of the Alex Verus books pretty recently. But I was wondering if you’re going to write a fifth novel? If you did, do you think that would be the final book or would you write more?

I’ve done some pretty weird things since I was brought in to the magical world, but writing novels isn’t one of them.

From: drizztmajere

Hey Luna,

I have always wondered if it was possible to have more than one power and was happy to see from one of your previous answers that it is possible if you are a hybrid. However from reading Alex’s latest adventure I began to wonder if he could develop time magic and this was what his divination mentor was alluding to in fated? And if not time something else?

It’s something I’ve asked Alex about, but his answer’s always been no. He’s a diviner, he does diviner things, and that’s that. Mind you, he can do a few things that aren’t exactly divination, like magesight and using focuses, so I’m not sure calling him a diviner exactly covers everything, but he seems pretty definite about it.

If he did expand in some other direction, my guess would be that it’d be something really closely linked to seeing into the future. Time sounds sort of possible, but I’ve got a feeling those two magic types are more different than they look.

From: Josh

Hi Luna,

Alex is recognized as a by the magical community as a whole, to be a mage. I’ve only ever seen him sifting through possible futures, one example of his magic. This comes across as an adept to me, rather than a mage. Can you please expand/clarify on this?

Also, do you happen to know exactly what Alex did to gain the trust of StarBreeze and Arachne? As magical creatures are typically leery of mages as a whole, it must have been something spectacular!

Now that first question’s an interesting one, and more than a little bit relevant to me.

Okay, so there are kind of two views on adepts in the mage world. The first is that they’re like retarded mages – they get to cast one spell and that’s it. The other view is that there isn’t really any difference between mages and adepts at all, they’re just labels. Sure, some magic-users have more flexibility and some have less, but it’s a sliding scale, not one-or-the-other. In Alex’s case, yeah, pretty much everything he can do comes down to seeing into the future, but the results he can produce with it are just as varied as any other mage (actually, probably more varied than some of the dumber elementalists I’ve met). Doesn’t it make more sense to judge someone by what they can do with their magic, not how they do it?

Well, you can probably guess which answer I think’s the right one. Whether I can get anyone else to believe me . . .

Oh, and as for Starbreeze and Arachne, I don’t know the story with Starbreeze, but Arachne told me the story of how she and Alex met a while ago. It’s kind of personal, though.

From: Gordon

Hi Luna,

1) This is probably a no brainer, but what does Alex usually do in exchange for the force wall disks and condensers that he gets from his suppliers?

2) Unless you manage to break your curse, someone else in your family will eventually end up with it when the unthinkable happens. You’ve been making great strides in controlling it so far. Have you given any thought to what you’ll do to pass on what you learned if the curse can’t be broken?

For items, he usually trades for them. He has a ton of random mostly-useless magic items in his shop which he buys from customers, so he’ll often trade a weird focus for a bunch of one-shots. Sometimes he just pays money, though, and I think with the force mage who makes the walls he’s got a deal where he provides some service or other, though he hasn’t told me what it is.

As for the other question . . . thanks for making death an even more depressing prospect. I dunno. Up until now I haven’t been thinking that far ahead. I still don’t, really. The one thing I’d really want to do would be to make sure that whoever she was, she had someone to explain it to her, rather than letting her find out for herself in the most awful way possible. I don’t know how, though. Even if I could figure out who it was and find her, what would I tell her? “Hi, you don’t know me but I’m your second cousin twice removed and oh by the way, once I die and you hit puberty you’re going to pick up a magical curse that kills anyone who gets close to you.” Yeah, that’d go over well.

I don’t know. I guess I’m hoping I’ll have long enough to figure out something better. Maybe if I ever get to the point where I can control it properly I’d actually have something useful to teach her.

Heffalumps and Royalties

A minor bit of news for this week, but it made me happy, so I’m sharing it.  While I was in the USA, I got my first royalty check in the mail.

Some background for those not familiar with the book-writing business:  novelists in the US and UK typically do not get directly paid for selling books.  Instead they sign a contract with publishers in which they get paid an advance against royalties, ie a non-refundable loan against the publisher’s estimate of their future earnings.  What this means is that when you sign a contract with a publisher, you get a lump sum of money for each book you’ve contracted to write.  Each time one of your books is sold, the publisher deducts a certain percentage of the sale price (the royalty) from the advance.  If the advance ever gets reduced down to zero this way, then future royalties get paid to the author.

Example:  You sign a contract with a publisher to write a field guide to crumple-horned heffalumps.  They pay you an advance of £5,000, and put the book on sale for £10 with a royalty rate of 10%.  Each time a book is sold, they deduct £1 from the advance (10% of £10).  Once the book has sold 5,000 copies, it’s said to have ‘earned out’ its advance, and all future royalties are paid directly to you.  So if the book sells 5,346 copies, you’ll get a royalty cheque for £346.  If the book gets rave reviews in Crumple-Horned Heffalump Monthly and sells 15,000 copies, you’ll get a royalty cheque for £10,000.  On the other hand, it might turn out that the publisher has greatly overestimated the level of demand in the crumple-horned heffalump market (maybe a few other guidebooks came out this year already) and you only sell 37 copies.  In this case you don’t get any royalty cheques, but you still keep the £5,000 advance – they don’t get to send you an invoice for the £4,963 in royalties you haven’t made.

Looked at in this way, an advance is a good deal for an author, because you get paid no matter how bad your sales are.  There is, however, a catch.  The advances publishers pay are based (amongst other things) on how much money they’re expecting the book to earn them.  If a debut novel has miserable sales then the publishers will make a loss on the thing, which means they will at best offer a much lower advance for the author’s next book, and (more likely) won’t buy said next book at all.

(For those interested, this is what happened to my old Ninja books.  The contract was for two books, but sales didn’t come anywhere near to earning the advance out and so the publisher wrote the series off as a loss.  This is why there was never a third.  It probably also had something to do with why Simon & Schuster rejected the next few novels my agent sent them.)

So getting royalty cheques for the Alex Verus series is good news, and not just for the obvious reasons.  It means the publishers are probably showing a profit on the books that have earned out, which means they’re more likely to see the series as a good investment.  Which means they’re that much more motivated to buy more books in the series, which means I’m that much more likely to be able to continue writing Alex Verus novels while getting paid enough money to live on.

Which is nice.

Alex Verus: The Future (Continued)

About this time last year, I was writing a post about the future of the Alex Verus series.  Taken had just been released, I was 90% of the way through the as-yet-untitled manuscript for Alex Verus #4, and I’d just got home from my second convention.  The big news I had to share was that yes, there were going to be more Alex Verus novels after Taken, two of them in fact.  It was big news for me, and still is – getting a new series established is a nerve-racking business.  For every Sookie Stackhouse or Dresden Files, there are twenty or thirty urban fantasy series that fizzle out.  They don’t make a splash, not enough copies get sold, and when contract renewal time comes around the publishers say no.  The books fall off the end of the conveyor belt and everyone forgets about them as new releases come along.

So for me, getting that contract for Verus #4 and #5 was a really big deal.  It wasn’t just that my publishers and readers liked the books (although that mattered a lot), it also meant my series was past the most common point of failure.  It’s very common for SF/F publishers to contract for two or three books in a series, but most of those series don’t get beyond number three.  From an author’s point of view, this is actually a pretty good argument for trilogies.  Not only does it stop series bloat, it means you can be sure you’ll actually get to finish your story.

But no-one ever said authors were 100% rational, and while it might have made sense for me to design the Alex Verus series as a trilogy, that wasn’t what I did. The story I wanted to tell was much more episodic and uneven;  I didn’t have a middle and an end in mind, and at the time of writing Fated I wasn’t even very sure about the beginning (in fact, I wasn’t expecting it to turn into a series at all).  During Cursed and Taken I was still finding my feet in a lot of ways – I’d never written a series with any kind of real length to it before, and so I experimented, trying different things to see if they worked.

It wasn’t until Chosen that I started really thinking about the Alex Verus books as a series, a continuing story rather than separate episodes.  This is probably fairly obvious if you’ve read the book – the past and future figure into it much more strongly than in the previous two.  During Chosen I had to think about Alex’s past and the kind of person he was, which in turn led me into thinking about where the story was going.  And as a part of that, I started to get my first ideas about what the major plot of the series was going to be.

Chosen’s reception made me very, very happy.  I’d had the feeling at the time I was writing it that it might be the best of the series so far, but it was very satisfying to see that so many people agreed.  Sales have been great and I don’t think I’ve read a single bad review for it yet – now that I’ve said that I’ve probably jinxed it and I’ll get a bunch of people tomorrow telling me that they hate it, but whatever.  Important part is that I was happy with it and you were too, and that’s what counts.

Which brings us up to the present!  As of right now I’ve just finished the rewrite of Alex Verus #5, provisionally titled Hidden.  I’ll write more about that later, but for now the big news is that there are going to be more Alex Verus books afterwards, too!  We’ve got draft contracts in from both Penguin US and Orbit UK for Alex Verus #6 and #7.  The timeline is still very much up in the air at the moment, but here’s my (hopeful) schedule.  (Do note before you go writing these in that this is when I’d like things to happen, not when I know they’ll happen.)

• November 2013:  Start work on Alex Verus #6.

• May 2014:  Finish first draft of Alex Verus #6.

• September 2014:  Publication date of Alex Verus #5, Hidden.

So that’s where things stand right now!  There are various other bits of news, but none that are remotely as important as the new contracts.  It means I can get going on Alex Verus #6 without having to worry about whether it’ll be published, which is a weight off my shoulders.

Well, back to work.  I’ve got a series to write!

Yet More Reprints

More UK reprint copies in the post today!  Fated‘s now on its seventh printing, Cursed on its fourth, and Taken on its second.

Some news about the Alex Verus series coming up this Friday, so check in then for more.

Comicon Roundup

Aaaand back home from New York Comicon.  I’m writing this from the US, but by the time this goes online I should be landing at London Heathrow.

Comicon was pretty amazing.  I’ve been to a few UK sci-fi/fantasy conventions, and generally speaking they’re considered big if they hit a few thousand people.  Comicon had somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000.  I was there for four days but there was still more stuff than I could possibly see.  A few of the highlights:

Meeting my US editor, Anne Sowards, for the first time in person.  She’s been editing my books for a good three years and yet we’ve never spoken face to face until now.  She’s really, really nice.
Watching the cosplayers.  There were literally thousands and lots of them were amazing.  Standouts that I remember:  a giant Bad Robot, an excellent Gandalf (with Frodo following), dozens of Batmans, Black Cats, Poison Ivys and Harley Quins (all competing to have the biggest hammer), Cap’n Crunch, guys in full suits of Spartan/N7 armour, a really good Kaylee, and two dead ringers for Wolverine and X-23.
Getting to meet one of my beta readers for the first time (along with his friends).
My US publishers, Penguin (notably Colleen Lindsay) giving away just shy of 500 copies of Fated on Friday.  I signed the first hundred, but they thankfully gave me a break after that!
Having lunch with two authors I’d never had the chance to meet before, ML Brennan and Django Wexler, and hearing how they got into writing.
Watching a pro Starcraft II tourney, the Intel Extreme Masters.  (The final was Zerg vs Protoss, and yes, about two-thirds of the players were Korean.)
Having dinner with all the other Penguin authors on the Friday night.  My memories are a little hazy but I remember talking about arm-bars and takedowns with Diana Rowland and the feasibility of large-scale armies in D&D 3rd edition with Django.
Wandering around Artist Alley – I’ve heard so many webcomic artists talking about it in the various US conventions that they go to, but it’s the first time I’ve seen one.  It took me most of an hour just to walk a full circuit around all the stalls.

And one final thing that stuck in my mind was the queue on Thursday for badges.  It’s one of the few times in my life I’ve seen a queue whose length could most conveniently be measured in miles.  It also moved quite amazingly fast for its size, and I got from the back to the front in less than half an hour.

I could keep going, but I’ll leave it at that.  I do want to post up my favourite picture from the con, though:  this was taken just after the signing on Friday!

The one drawing on my face is Myke Cole, the laughing one is ML Brennan, Djanjo Wexler is in the top left with the bemused expression, and Richard Shealy’s looking on from behind me!

Last but not least, there’s also some writing news on Alex Verus #5 and beyond, but I’ll save it for next week.  :)

Still at Comicon

. . . or to be more accurate, just arrived at Comicon.  Today was convert-ticket-into-a-badge day and my first chance to look around.  It’s pretty damn impressive.  Makes the British conventions I’ve visited look really small.

My schedule’s in last week’s post if you’re looking to meet up with me!