Kell
I’m Kell. I write urban fantasy in an interconnected universe. I’ve published one novel so far, and I’m working on the sequel. The premise of the universe is: Did you ever wonder what happened after the Dark Lord was defeated, and when the magic left the world? It’s been two thousand years since the forces of Darkness were defeated. Now, there’s a modern world of cars, skyscrapers and officers. Elves run fashion magazines. Orcs go to office jobs, and everyone thinks that the age of wizards and dragons is folklore. It’s a perfectly ordinary world…on the surface. But magic hasn’t gone away—it’s merely hiding in the cracks of the world. My current series, the Revenant Records, is an urban fantasy series focusing on ghost stories, mysteries and dark adventure. It’s the story of an undead teenager, trying to balance her responsibilities to help lost ghosts, while maintaining a semblance of a normal life. I love roleplaying games and I’m writing a system for my story world/universe. My mega-fandoms are Doctor Who, Final Fantasy VII, and Transformers.
-
Entropy impacts your fantasy world
Entropy infects all systems. Things wear down, and either collapse or shake apart into new configurations.
Fantasy worlds are divided into a series of ages, where myths are split apart from legends and history. They might look like this Middle-Earth inspired history (at least my high school D&D campaign world did):
- First Age – Gods walk the earth, or make the world. Evil gods are dealt with or bound.
- Second Age – The great civilizations flourish, items of remarkable power of crafted and legendary battles occur. Famous institutions like kingdoms, and bloodlines are established.
- Third Age – Not as epic, as the first or second age. The hero grows up on a farm or distant location and learns about the age of magic. Perhaps they’ll inherit a sword or learn lost secrets. There are ruins everywhere. Some dark threat left over from the second age will return and be dealt with. Perhaps the hero will reconnect with one of the elite institutions established in the second age.
- Fourth Age – The age of magic ends, and everything changes. Elves sail away, gods leave the world, and hand it over to people, who, live in wisdom and peace and tell stories about the good old days to the kids.
This is also a metaphor for human life. The first age is childhood when you believe impossible things and dragons, the second age is when you’re young, fighting for your passions, the third age is when you get your job and learn how the systems of the world work. And the fourth age is when you’re paying off the mortgage, and you don’t have time to play D&D anymore or read books, but you’ve got fond memories of those days and will tell your bored family members about the good old days.
Let’s cut to 2020, COVID era. I’m in the fourth age of my life. During lockdown, I work through a bunch of intense personal stuff. One of them is that my epic fantasy novel series is doomed not to be finished in its current state—it’s lost in a muddle of endless rewrites. The book had lots of POVs, good character work and world building, but not much of a plot apart from an expedition across a continent. Time to recognize that it would never be done. I’ll never be Brandon Sanderson. (At least with that book.)
I get out my shotgun, place the barrel against the malformed, beating dreams of finishing that series, and pull the trigger.
Time to reboot. Start something else. I need to create I can finish. Shorter, less epic. Except, being one of those eternal gamemaster types, I can’t tell stories without a world.
Yeah, I could build any world I want and—my subconscious wants to design a setting in a fantasy world’s fourth age. When I was younger, the concept of the fourth age horrified me. Who’d want to tell stories in a world where the magic went away, and everything was about modern life, office workers and cars?
Now, I find that interesting. Because the past is a magical one, right? How would that influence the modern day? And how did the magic leave the world? What if something went wrong with the final epic battle between light and darkness? What if losing magic was a last ditch strike? A nuclear option. Not a gentle fading of magic like in Middle-Earth—a planned obsolescence—but a catastrophe mess that broke the world.
And what if magic survived, but became hidden, messy and complicated?
So that’s the key idea I had when designing my world. Modern, yet with a hidden layer of magic.
Now to figure out what that looked like. And what sort of stories would it drive?
How about you—did you build your world by thinking about this sort of thing to start with (themes) or did you start with some other idea? Or even a sense of a character or a vision of a scene? (I love the story by CS Lewis how his initial idea for Narnia was simply a mental picture of Lucy and Mr. Tumnus walking arm-in-arm through a snowy wood…)
-
Happy WBW! What part of your world would your protagonist (& others if you want) change? Aaaand go! ♥️
Hey @toribookworm22! My world was badly damaged when the Age of Magic ended. Zheist was created by magic; its supernatural ecology and metaphysical architecture were shattered when reality shifted to one driven by physics and technology (although some magic remains).
When my protagonist, Lukie, was murdered, she was shocked to discover there was no automatic paradise, only the dismal Underworld where souls hunted each other to survive. She made a pact with a ghostly sovereign of the Underworld to return as an undead revenant; surrendering her agency in exchange for the power to return to living lands.
And while she has the ability to rescue trapped ghosts and take them to the Lanes of the Dead where they can travel onwards, she’d change the current system in a heartbeat. If she had the power, she’d make it so that no one ever again fell into the black tarpit void of the Underworld, and everyone would move onto their afterlife without judgement or condemnation.
Alas, that remains an impossiblity for now…
-
Book Review: The Aosawa Murders by Riku Onda (trans. Alison Watts)
When I read detective fiction, I either gravitate to old, worn Penguin paperbacks with green spines and worn pages (I have a bunch from a bookshop haul last year) or Japanese detective fiction. A lot of Japanese detective fiction are puzzle mysteries, which I have a weakness for. For these books, I’m more interested in the mystery’s structure, which often takes precedent over characterisation. Usually in a puzzle mystery you get the plodding police officer, the eccentric detective and a way how it all fits together, which is usually prioritised over other factors.
The Aosawa Murders is the opposite—a beautifully layered mystery, a character study and a puzzle that is not clearly explained. There’s no scene where a detective lays everything out; instead you’ll either be frustrated or want to re-read the work carefully to see what you missed. I think it’s obvious who the murderer is, but the question is more why, and how the clues revealed throughout the book fit int the crime scene.
The story is told in layers, through several short stories where an unrevealed narrator is asking questions of witnesses associated with the case. Most of the chapters are told in directed conversation (I think that’s what it’s called) when I am clearly narrating in first person, but I’m also talking to you, the reader, and explaining this as I type out this blog post.
The story is about a mass poisoning of a family that takes place in the 1970s, who were gathered for the party. A few cryptic clues are left at the scene, which the book opens with; they’re made relevant later. A famous book, ‘The Forgotten Festival’ was written about the murders. In some stories, the narrator interviews the author of the book, in others it’s her research assistant. Other stories focus on the person arrested for the murder—more of a character study from those that knew him tangentially. There’s a segment from the detective that worked on the case. In the penultimate story, the interviewer confronts the probable murderer.
Everything is richly described, evoking the heat and feeling of the city during that period. The overlapping stories fit together like a mostly-complete jigsaw puzzle.
Recommended.
-
Find the word tag
-
Who are you calling ‘feral’?
I’ve sent my novel off for professional copy-editing! (Which means it’s nearly there, or closer than before.) Here is Nemu admiring the nearly-finished MS (or perhaps she looks a bit disgruntled that I’m implying that she’s feral!.)
Printing and scribbling on a hardcopy works for me, although I’ve heard stories that people can copyedit their own work by changing the font on their device. (I’ve heard of changing the font to comic sans works, or even making it really large.)
What works for you?
-
Heads Up 7 Up
Tagged by @mthollowell-writes. You can find their original post here!
Soft tagging @saltwaterbells, @minutiaewriter, @valanke, @repressed-and-depressed, @missaddledmiss, @ladywithalamp @blackrosesandwhump (no obligation) and anyone who would like to take part!
Rules: Post 7 lines from your current WIP and tag seven people.
I’ve sent my of book two of my Revenant Records series to the editor for copy-editing! We’re nearly at the end of the writing tunnel. Time to celebrate with this tag game.
1 – Lukie Carpenter raced through the darkened streets of the Thunderhead Ward towards her father’s house, working out what to say to him after being dead for twenty years.
2 – “Look, I’m doing this all wrong. Can we start again? Please. I’ve come back from the dead. I’m a revenant. Like a zombie, but more awesome. I’m still me, and—”
3 – You’re a soul-sucking undead monster. Everything you touch turns to shit. Look at what you did to Dad.
4 – Life doesn’t work that way, sunshine, her patron’s voice echoed within. You don’t get do-overs. If you do, you’re in a death loop, or psychic mind trap and you’ll have worse problems to deal with than trying to perfect your existence.
5 – “The supernatural is like fire. It burns you and leaves scars you can’t get rid of. And yet people keep wanting to play with it.” A scowl marked his face. “Stay away from it for as long as you can.”
6 – A rent to Stonerise opened in the same place where Lukie had attempted her initial assault. The spectral storm wailed in Lukie’s mind, and a seething vortex of gray mist oozed from Tenebra into living lands. Beyond, the true shape of the realm manifested: a sanguine sky, a castle carved from pure darkness, and a sea of twisted, heaving, suffering bodies, torn apart by feral beasts.
7 – The cobbled path ahead snaked through rows of neat headstones, and the night breeze dislodged the thick heat that had hung over the suburbs during the day. Trees rustled, answering the wind in a secret language.
-
Short Craft Book Recommendation: Dear Writer, Are you Intuitive?
There’s a lot of advice on the Internet. A lot of posts. A lot of books. A lot of podcast. A lot of information to consume. But I hope you know that at the end of the day the most important knowledge is within you. What feels true to you? What feels right to you? What lights you up? That’s the gold 
Becca Symes’s book ‘Dear Writer, Are You Intuitive’ is a great craft book on this approach. She also spoke about it on this free podcast. It goes into a framework about different types of intuition and how writers may get blocked if they stymie their subconscious. If you identify as an intuitive writer, your subconscious knows what to do. Trust it.
-
Magic: Transmission and Effect
Here’s what you should think about when developing your magic system.
- Why do people use it? Viewing magic as a process, why do people want to use it? How do they use it to do something in your story that they couldn’t otherwise?
- How does it work? This is the transmission layer. By what mechanism does the magic do the thing it does? It’s perfectly okay to say ‘by the blood of dead gods spilled into the ethereal seams of the world’ but I like it when there’s some thought behind it. Even if the characters don’t know, stick this thought in your 90% of worldbuilding that the reader will never see. It’ll help for background consistency.
- What does it feel like to use magic? I love stories where people are exploring their powers (I enjoy superhero origin stories, except those we’ve seen repeatedly; looking at you Batman, Superman and Spiderman). How does it feel to channel and cast power? Anxiety of trying to memorise a difficult formula? Getting high from channelling raw energy from the gods? Is there a taste or sensation? Or even boredom, if magic is perfunctory?
- Who can use it? Trained wizards? Anyone who gets the spell right?
- Where does the magic fit into your world and society? Is it a secret? Only used by the elite?
Does your magic have an overall paradigm? Like a special esoteric programming code (spell) that can hack reality can if done right? Calling upon ancient gods for boons? The flavour is important to me. I read the first few pages of a book where the hero ‘magicked a barrier in front of the demon’ and while the scene was action-paced, the flavor of the magic didn’t grab me.
Let’s run my magic system through these questions:
- Why do people use it? To do things they can’t do via ordinary mortal means. Because it requires making a pact, it’s all for personal gain or desperation. Maybe to help with revenge, or to return after death to deal with your unfinished business.
- How does it work? Magic is a flow of energy from another dimension. A flow of extra-dimensional energy overwrites the localised reality, enabling supernatural effects when present. For example, to summon a zombie, you’ll need a source of spectral energy from the Underworld, the land of the dead.
- What does it feel like to use? Each realm has a distinct flavour of energy. Infernal magic is painful, like barbwire running through your guts. Death magic is sad and regretful, like holding a party that no one shows up to.
- Who can use it? After the Rending—the terrible event when the Age of Magic ended—all portals to other dimensions were abruptly sealed off. Demons, fae, nature spirits, angels are trapped in their home realms and have limited agency to influence the mortal world. However, if you make a pact with one, you gain their vestige—a shard of their soul—and this enables you to channel supernatural energy into the mortal world. This changes you—you’re not a normal mortal anymore. You’re now half an extradimensional entity. Someone who accepts a demon’s vestige becomes a cambion; another who makes a pact with a fae becomes a changeling.
- Where does the magic fit into the world? It’s secret and hidden. You have to figure out that magic exists, who you want to make a pact with, and hopefully find a patron whose goals align with yours.
The overall vibe is if you want magic, you hustle for it, and cut deals with powerful extra-dimensional entities. It’s a grungy, noir occult world. You take on supernatural debt and have to weigh the bargain you’ve made against the power you gain. Sometimes you may not have a choice but to agree.
“So everyone’s a D&D warlock?” someone asked when I described this.
Yeah.
Or John Constantine, as you sit on a teetering mound of debts and favors that are gradually spiralling out of control…
How about you? How does your world’s magic work?
-
The robot uprising and the end of the publishing world!
I can’t remember the exact title, but there’s an episode of Doctor Who where Tom Baker’s Doctor, and Romana are discussing life on Gallifrey, their home planet. The Doctor likes painting, but Romana thinks that’s archaic, as in her mind, computers do art. And while that was science fiction in the 1970s, today we’ve got AI tools that do art, and writing!
Every author business podcast I’ve listened to recently, and a lot of book-ish social media groups, are furiously discussing the impact of modern AI tools on publishing. There’s a mix of speculation, gossip and fearmongering.
- Publishers with low-effort, AI-churned out books will swamp the market place! No one will touch self-published books again!
- Readers won’t love us writers anymore as they can walk up to a computer, enter some prompts, and receive a perfectly tailored story to their tastes and preferences.
- Canny publishers will use AI to increase their output and draw readers’ attention away from my stuff!
There are arguments on both sides. A lot of this appears to be FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) – the fear that the AI assisted texts will make certain writers more productive and take the readers away from discovering other writers! I don’t think it quite works like that. Sure, I’d love it if my favorite authors were more productive, but I’ve also stopped reading a series where the latest volume loses that spark and feels ‘churned out’. And even if everyone flocks to mass-produced texts, there will still be people who prefer hand-crafted stories. Maybe it will become like craft beer—there’ll be always an audience for those who want the more interesting beverages on the side.
What makes a good story? Intriguing characters, pacing, the ability to evoke emotion, perhaps. How do you bottle this and create a reliable, reproducible formula for making engaging stories consistently? People have been to figure this out for years. There’s so many courses out there that tell writers about how to write unputdownable stories, or what the best formulas. I’ve found some stuff useful (structuring and pacing techniques) and others less so.
There’s also been heartwarming stories of people with disabilities who can now express themselves better using AI technology. People with language issues or Long COVID brain fog can now complete stories with AI assistance. This is how I’d like it to be used. I’ve got some issues myself, which makes it hard for me to engage in social media. I have trouble writing random social media posts about blah life stuff without wanting to sit and think deeply about out it for ages, but if I bothered, I could go to the ChatGPT and have it write my social updates for me!
I haven’t mucked around with AI yet. Actually, I tell a lie—I use souped-up grammar checker Pro-Writing Aid to clear up my text. I’m a messy first drafter with lots of dropped words, speling errors that are fixed down the pipeline. I use some of its suggestions, but not all. Lately it’s got this AI feature that rephrases sentences. Some of it sounds better, some of it’s bland. Mostly I ignore it. But the tool is there as an option. Anyway, more options are good.
At this stage, I’m not going to engage AI (apart from PWA’s grammar/reporting checks). I’m still working on my craft, trying to capture that magic of making a great story, or at least, improve of what I’ve done in the past. For example, when I wrote Final Night, it was the best thing I’d written and completed, and now I’m going to improve on that with the next book. When I think I’ve gotten my craft to a certain level, I might check out AI tools more deeply, but for now it’s fingers to keyboard.
-
Updates!
I’m still figuring out social media. I’ve this blog, a Facebook page, a monthly newsletter, and ad hoc accounts on Mastodon, Dreamwidth, tumblr. New authors are told to get on social media and build a following, but I’ve been focused on getting the next book out! I’m terrible with memes and posting ad hoc thoughts. I update Facebook monthly, have slacked off on Mastodon, but have had a good run with the monthly newsletter. After some initial wibbling around content, I’ve settled on some in-character microfics, and links to an ongoing serial.
I’ll probably keep the monthly updates and newsletter going for now, maybe try to do some more in-depth engagement around launch time. I want to prioritise my blog over Facebook, so I’ll give a longer update here than what I gave there. The next Lukie book is in copy editing and line editing: a sharp shift from the creative side to the technical. I’m also working in the first draft of book 3. I have a vague outline, but my first drafts are a discovery process.
The first time I tried doing overlapping book projects, I nearly melted, but now I’m cool with copyediting book A, drafting book B, and doing another chapter of serialised book C. They say writing is like running a marathon—you work at it to build your production stamina. Also, having an office job helps, I guess.
Alpha readers have the new book (those brave enough to work through the pre-copy edited version), and the feedback is good. A few more story tweaks, editing and then I hand the book back to my editor for proofing at the end of the month. Then beta reading, and hopefully tidying up for this release.
So book 2 is on track for this year, and more updates on the other projects later.
I know I should publish to a schedule, but I don’t what that is yet! In my last post, I called the Revenant Records my learn-to-drive series. The idea is to write a solid series, making each book more awesome, and then get some data on how long I take to write a book! It’ll be awhile before I quit the day job, so my current focus is on building a backlist, and reaching new readers and improving my craft. Not very exciting, but that’s the goal. Slow and steady, and all that.
I mentioned a roleplaying game—I keep writing it, taking it apart, and trying new mechanics. I’m trying to get something together, but for a different urban fantasy setting than the one I set my novels in. Trying to develop a system, and an intricate setting at the same time, was tough, but I’ve been making better progress by switching gears. I did that for my novels, as well—the first novel I worked on (which isn’t out yet) stalled for various reasons, but I had Lukie #1 book ready to go, and that’s become my focus for this first series. I hope to visit the other characters later. The idea for the Vestiges of Magic setting is to have several short-ish series set in the same world with different characters rather than one central series.
I’m trying to get back into reading again. To manage a current bout of insomnia, I’ve had to stop writing an hour before bedtime (sniff), and start reading. And there’s a reading challenge I’d like to do. Might try something this year. That’s it for this month! I have ideas for cool blog articles, but don’t want to over-promise on social stuff and under-deliver. (Maybe in the old days of LiveJournal you could get by with blogging as your primary social media, but it’s different nowadays—where do you connect with authors you want to follow?
Or am I over thinking this, and does your store (Kobo, Amazon etc) tell you when something is out that you like?