Better than what I imagine the requirements of invoking anti-Dark-God magic are. (Who would want to recite a whole incantation in a different language while pouring your blood on the ground and hoping you have enough magic power to not fail and or die that could very easily be stopped by even a second of hesitation- I'd fail.)
Magic system
How many WIPs
And
Challenges you have faced with your WIPs
Thank you for the ask <333
There's an essay incoming, beware
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I have no less than four novel-intended wips (Flamebearer, A Healing for the Birds, Soulswapped and the Lady's Lament), plus a few shorter works (The Disappearance of Charimone Eschredaine, [Succession of the Underground*] and [The Assassin's Promise*]) and a developing anthology of certain characters' backstories (This Blood-Stained Charcuterie)
*Placeholders; I've no clue what to call them yet
A Healing for the Birds:
The main challenge with this is dealing with all the plot threads. One thing that has remained consistent even after all the changes since the first ever iteration of this wip (it used to be called Seafarer, then Obsidian Sapphires, and now this), is there being loads of plot threads. The difference is now those plot threads are more centred around the Allaitri Chalice and the political chaos of it being unearthed.
Up until recently, I wasn't sure what the core of the story was, but now I know. It centres around familiar ties and the things that people do in the name of love. (Sounds a bit corny out of context, though lol)
Flamebearer
I put this one on hold because I know it's going to be complex due to the heavy political themes in this. Unlike A Healing for the Birds, where the political situation is a little bit lighter and more petty, in a sense, the political scene is very charged here. There's a lot of resentment pointed towards the royal family due to things like Serrantine trying to rejoin Selade or the legacy of the Twenty-Year Winter, leading to unrest, death, grief, a lot more sombre and complex issues to deal with. I hope to be more confident in my writing so I can do Flamebearer justice, I find people seem to really like the premise and starting ideas, its associated Flash Friday pieces do quite well 😅
Soulswapped
Again, another wip put on ice to focus on the bird wip. I do want to get back to this at some stage, I have some vague ideas for how I want it to play out. I don't envision it to be as long as the two above, because its concept (the main character has to fight her way out of jail and the court it's in) is more constrained. There's nowhere near the amount of plot strings here. (The darker intrigue happens around the end/slightly thereafter 👀)
The Lady's Lament
I do not have experience writing contemporary stuff, which I think is what made it hard to start it. The concept's there, easy enough, but it's just actually sitting down and planning it that's the main thing.
Another challenge that is unique for this one to an extent, is the presence of Gaeilge here. The book is intended to be an ode to Irish culture, and if I was to complete it, I do intend for there to be a Gaeilge translation.
This Blood-Stained Charcuterie
One word: timeline. The setting for this collection has thousands of years worth of history, and so the challenge is figuring out who killed who and when. And not to mention all the stuff going on in the background, some of it is more influential than others.
Basically, it's based on the idea of magic being a biological substance present in the world. Most living things have a tolerance for it, but not all living things can actively use it.
Even then, there's two broad categories; faerie creatures, whom rely on simpler magic like moving things or simple tricks, and then the faeries/Carithaikh [start with one fae/one human parent, subsequent generations by any combination that isn't two faeries; these people can also be dubbed as witches], who can perform magic in a wide variety of ways.
Most people are born with an affinity to an element (such as fire, plant, water/ice, air, light, shadow, blood, lightning, dust, rock, metal, etc), which is then honed as the person gets older. It is also possible to learn certain elements, but some are harder than others, going on into near-impossible (e.g, it's hard to learn fire if one doesn't have an affinity for it [the genes of those who do are adapted to prevent burns and manage the heat more efficiently], but water is fairly easy to learn).
Another aspect that some people have but is much less common, are skill-based abilities. Shapeshifting and teleporting are the most common ones, but there's also a select few who can weave souls or see/interact with the domain of the spirits. Those last two are about one or few in a generation. (And interestingly, in Helinda there's no records of anyone who can interact with the spirit world, likely because Helindians burn their dead!)
But sometimes you'll get people with bespoke abilities. Some are merely unusual powers, such as purple fire, wood manipulation, blending with the shadows etc.
Others, are actual divine elements. They manifest as fire, light or water, and usage of then can have catastrophic effects. If the user doesn't die after using divine magic, it can cause things such as blindness, burns, nerve damage/neuropathy, constant dehydration, reduced magical abilities/stamina, chronic fatigue and/or other symptoms.
If the user has a part of a deity's soul entwined with them, then the effects are mitigated to an extent. (It occurs frequently with Fate's reprisals [her element is blue fire])
And then, there's also the external systems. These rely on the magic of the world instead of/as well as the user's. Things like runes, languages, diagrams, items, gestures and/or other tangible things are used for them.
These systems vary from place to place and between cultures, they're like programming languages in a sense. Each system has strengths and weaknesses.
For instance, Helinda's five-pointed star is great if you are a) in Helinda [or Morilaste]** b) looking to do things like a locating or summoning* spell, as well as anything relating to Helindian geography. It's great with maps!
However, it's not great for highly complex spells with lots of rules. That's where Seldaika's system shines. It has a four-pointed star, but the main mode of it is its language. It's a spell language, the grammar and vocabularly are tailor-made to support spells. Intention is also important, which is an aid in differentiating normal speech from a spell. Gestures also come into play, as do wands (syrchels), which are used as social indicators and statements of magical intent as well as to apply runes.
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*summoning items is perfectly fine, as long as it's not someone else's item. Summoning people/spirits is illegal under Helindian law
**there's a decent amount of lore underpinning the reason for this phenomenon
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I'm going to end it here, I hope you enjoyed it :D
From the behind the scenes game:
❗"how many WIPs do you have?"
🖊️"how does your magic system work?"
Thanks for the ask!
Currently, I have one primary WIP (Temporarily titled Stars Of The Sky) and in the upper end of twenty that I sometimes return to and add on to, but those are primarily fanfiction, aside from one.
I do have a secondary WIP that I return to, which has more of a magic system than my current primary, which is the one that I will talk about for the magic system.
In the world of Sightless, the WIP that I have a planned magic system for, people are born with a set amount of magic power. Everyone has some amount of it, but not everyone is given the same amount, and no one can increase the amount. Most people barely have enough to enchant an item, which is the majority of the populace. The next level are those who can enchant items but can't cast a spell. Then are those who can cast spells.
One can increase how efficient they are with their magic power through repeated use, but for those who cannot use it at all, as in, those who can't even enchant items, this route is not possible. Of course, there are limits to the use.
The first stage of magic overuse is blindness. For those with higher healing factors, this goes away, but for most mages, this is the end of their vision. This doesn't mean the permanently blind cannot cast magic at all, but they would be relegated to being healers and farming spells. The stage beyond blindness, if a mage ignores the blindness, is heart attacks. For the more resilient mages, or those with healers nearby, they live. For most, they don't.
The main character, for example, wasn't born in the world with this magic system, but she has quite the large magic power pool. She is also fairly resistant to the drawbacks of magic overuse due to having quite the fast healing rate without magic. She's also one of few whose occupation doesn't match her magic pool, as she's a guard/blacksmith, not a mage. Guards and blacksmiths tend to fall in the enchant but not cast spell range, and she can fairly easily cast spells without giving it much thought.
Her twin brother, Astro, works as a merchant, but he has a relatively good magic pool, falling in the enchant but no spells range, and he has less reason to use magic than his sister.
Their adoptive brother completely lacks magic power. Which is unheard of.
As for magic types, there are quite a few. Enchants and spells have the same types, but the range of effect is limited for enchants.
There are
Cultivation spells, which increase yield in harvest and mining
Fire, which has everything to do with fire (including fireballs)
Water, which is everything to do with water, but not ice
Steam, which occurs when mages or enchanters use both fire and water spells/enchants at the same time
Ice, which is everything to do with ice, including different shapes and temperatures
Holy, which includes healing, undo curses, and light
Dark, which includes poison, curses, and darkness
Holy and dark also include incantations for either banishing the presence of dark gods or evoking a dark god
Earth, which works with rock and soil
Location, which involves teleportation, locating, and gravity related things.
And many others.
There can be blending, as noted with steam, but one has to be careful not to mix the wrong elements because things can go wrong. Extremely wrong.
Yeah, Sightless has a lot just in the magic. That is ignoring the possible classification of powers as magic, in which case... That would be too much to get into.
Hope that satisfies any curiosity. Might add a magic system to my current WIP, but I haven't yet.
My main oc has me bsing my way through blacksmithing...
Anyway, she is a lovely, tall young woman who finds a passion in being aggressively protective of things, like her family or a village/community. Her narration reveals that she sees herself as disposable, which is also why I make a certain narration choice with her that becomes quite apparent initially. As her view of herself shifts from negative to positive, she starts seeing herself as a main character, which shows in the narration style.
She has a power she despises despite using it when she needs to--on animals, not people. She got traumatized the one time that happened. She covers her eyes due to her power, although she can still see. It's just that a thin cloth prevents her power from harming others. Anyway, her senses are extremely enhanced because of her power, leading to her narration mentioning her hearing sounds and such more often than not.
She got used by her birth world, which led to her fleeing and living in the woods for a year (which, in her world, is equivalent to two of our years). After which, she is brought to her chosen world. She's my little baby.
Well she is named after her universe's God of Death, and thus is influenced by his tenets--such as the undead should not exist and therefore should be destroyed because they upset the natural order (Which you think her ability to keep someone alive when they should be dying breaks this, but if they haven't died yet, they aren't undead in the state she puts them in)--so she's bound to understand that her parents have to die eventually and that she can't hold onto them forever. A few days longer, however, doesn't break anything, in her mother's case. Her father's just dead anyway because she was too young to fight when he died and he got... Let's just say he died very painfully and with blades poking out of him like he was a porcupine. He was very stubborn. She can't give him more time.
Unless the time travel doesn't revert her age, in which case she could easily give him more time. Depends on the rules of the time travel.
⛲️ - Is there anything [character] would be tempted to change if they went back in time?
Hades wouldn't want to go back in time initially. Time happens and all that. But after she discovers her abilities as a God-named of Hades, she'd probably try to use her powers to give her mother a bit more time. She respects that people die and all that, and that death has to happen, but she was quite close to her mother and so would try to give herself a few more days with her mother alive. She would not change how she lost her father, since he died in battle, which is more honorable than dying to a disease that, in universe, doesn't have a name, just symptoms.
I will read at least 90 percent of it.
Listen to? It will reach my ears ig.
that "OKAY SO" before someone u love starts infodumping........ most blessed feeling in the world
Who would enjoy reading a potentially crappy poem that would absolutely be a spoiler to my original story? Or, at the very least, who would want to read a poem that my classmates have told me is too narrative? Because I have written a poem that has so many interpretations even without knowing the story behind the poem's background and it is beautiful.
For those who want to know the context, I've written a blurb below.
For context, this is right after the protagonist's power develops, and she unalives her father on her sixteenth birthday. This reaction scene hasn't been written in any capacity. I just imagined how she would react to it and... boom, peom.
I love writing one story, going to another story--which is inevitably in the middle of a scene with an entirely different vibe--and bouncing between the two like a ping pong ball until my brain settles on a third, completely unrelated story.
reblog if you have skilled writer friends and you're damn proud of them
Reblog if you're a writer who re-reads their own work for funsies.
I've lost so much sleep over this thing. Three days straight of going to bed after eleven.
Though the cutest part might be the hole in the tree
Hello!
Hello! What brings you to my asks?
My current story is being rewritten for the... I have no idea what number it is. My favorite part of writing this story is when the main character is just pronouns. Her original version took many, many paragraphs to get her name in. I have personal symbolism for doing this, and I can explain this later if anyone is curious.
For example, if I rewrite this story how it currently is, it takes two whole chapters to get her name. If it were up to me, she'd never be named. She'd just exist as pronouns. This would be intentionally done. Not because she doesn't have a name, but because that is how her narration is.