A Beginner’s Guide to Drucraft
It’s now about three and a half months until the release of An Inheritance of Magic, and you know what that means: it’s time to start on a new series of worldbuilding articles!
The setting for my new series is actually quite thoroughly developed by now. I spent much of 2021 and 2022 working out the details of the new magic system, the world, and the major players that operate in it, and as a result, by the time An Inheritance of Magic was sent off to the publishers, the setting was already complete enough that I could include a short glossary at the back of the book explaining technical terms and the rules of the setting. By necessity, though, glossaries have to be compact, so the glossary entries are each quite short.
The new series of worldbuilding articles that I’ll be putting up here on this website will be a bit more casual: since I’m not limited by page space, I can go into a bit more detail and go off on tangents which I personally find interesting but which weren’t crucial enough to put into the book itself. Page space is a very limited resource when you’re writing a novel: the more description and explanation you put in, the more it slows down the story, so for each paragraph of world information, you have to ask yourself “is this really important enough to be worth it?”, and there’s often no right answer to that question. Putting stuff up online is a nice compromise that lets readers who are interested in this stuff find out more without annoying the ones who’d much rather I just get on with the story.
Like the old Encyclopaedia Arcana, the new series of worldbuilding articles are going to be presented in an in-universe format. At the moment, my working list of articles is something like this:
EssentiaSiglsWellsSensingChannellingShapingDrucraft HousesDrucraft Ranks. . . though that might end up changing as the articles get written.
The first four articles will be coming out between July 14th and August 4th, following on from the release of Chapter 1 two weeks from today.
newest »
As you can imagine, we're all looking forward to the book and reading your posts over the coming weeks.
One question from your post - ' spent much of 2021 and 2022 working out the details of the new magic system' - did you ever bounce your ideas off anyone else whilst you were working this out?
My best friend of over 50 years is writing a book which covers his life at sea, sailing tall masted ships. The main element is his voyage as a part of the reenactment fleet for Australia's bi-centennial (1998). He gives me chapters to read to get my views. Sailing ships like these is quite technical, with how the 'sheets & lines' all work, navigating by stars in the time before GPS satellites, and simply determining the speed of the ship and the current it's sailing in. The tricky part (as you've noted) is how much of the detail do you put in the story without bogging it down or totally bamboozling the reader trying to visualise where all these ropes (lines) go and what they do.
Anyway, all the best and thanks for all your great work.