Benedict Jacka's Blog, page 10

Had been planning to do the Shaping article this week, but I’ve come down with a nasty bug and it’s taking all I’ve got to keep up work on the book.  On the plus side that’s making decent progress (first chapter is about done).  Shaping article should be up next Friday!

In to 2024!  Here’s what to expect for the next few months.

Right at the moment I’m once again busy with edits on An Instruction In Shadow;  specifically, first-round edits from my UK editor.  Usually I do my US and UK edits side by side, but in this case the UK ones arrived a little later, meaning that I’ve had to put Book 3 on hold briefly while I finish this up.  Luckily, just like before, these edits are extremely quick and easy and I’m expecting to have them done by the end of the weekend so that I can get back to my main job.

That job is, of course, writing Book 3 in the Stephen Oakwood series.  I’m currently a few pages in and busy plotting out the first couple of chapters;  it’s got a long way to go but I’m always much happier once the first page is done, so I’m hoping to keep up a decent pace.  This is going to keep me busy for around the first half of the year.

As for this blog, my main project (aside from the usual updates) is going to be more Beginner’s Guide to Drucraft worldbuilding articles.  First on the to-do list is the article on shaping, and after that I’m probably going to go into a mini-series on the six drucraft branches.  That’ll probably keep me busy until well into the spring.

And that’s it!  I’ll post news as and when I get it, but you can probably expect edits on Book 2, a first draft of Book 3, and worldbuilding articles on this blog to be pretty much all of my output for the forseeable future.

So we’re finally coming to the end of the year!

This year has been a very mixed one for me.  Professionally, everything has been great – An Inheritance of Magic was released to good early sales, and I wrote and edited Book 2 in the series, An Instruction in Shadow.  That book is now with my publishers, and I’m gearing up to start Book 3;  if all goes to plan, it should be finished by midsummer of next year.

Outside of my writing, things have been more difficult.  I don’t generally talk about my personal life on this blog, but the short version is that I had some family losses in 2022-2023, and most of the past year and a half has been spent dealing with the consequences.  It’s led to a situation where my professional career is going great, but I haven’t really been in a position to enjoy it.  Unfortunately, this isn’t likely to change any time soon.  Perhaps by this time next year things will have stabilised, but perhaps not.

For those who are wondering, this isn’t likely to slow down my writing – more the opposite, if anything.  I’m the kind of author who tends to use my writing to work through whatever’s currently preoccupying me, with the result that if I’m going through a difficult time, I’m actually likely to end up spend more time working, rather than less.

In any case, I hope you all have had a good Christmas and that your 2023s have gone well.  Next week’s blog post will be some announcements about what I’ve got coming in the next few months, so I’ll see you all in the New Year!

And it’s that time once again.  Merry Christmas to everyone as 2023 comes to an end.  Next week’s post will be a wrap-up/look-back on the year, so see you then!

Some good news for this week – An Inheritance of Magic is getting a French translation!  The publisher is Bayard Editions, and they’re hoping to publish in October 2025.  The German translation has been in production for a long time, so it’s nice to have a second European translation to go with it.

As regards future books, An Instruction in Shadow is sitting with my publishers at the moment, waiting to move on to the next stage of edits.  I’m still working on my plans for Book 3, and hoping to start around the end of the year.

In the eyes of most, channelling is the point at which one becomes a ‘real’ drucrafter. Someone who can only sense is technically a drucrafter, but they’ll never get much respect until they learn to channel as well.

At its core, channelling is just mastery over personal essentia. All living creatures have a personal essentia reserve – the essentia that drifts naturally into their body and attunes to them. This essentia is very limited, but it constantly replenishes itself as more flows in. Attuned essentia has a connection to the person it is attuned to – it can be used to activate sigls, and, with practice, can be controlled.

Learning to control one’s personal essentia is a slow process, but it’s not as hard as sensing. Once a drucrafter has learnt to feel their own personal essentia the toughest part has already been done – they still need to learn to direct it, but the fact that they can get feedback on their efforts and see/sense/feel when something is and isn’t working makes the process much, much easier than it would be if they had to fumble blindly. It’s much like learning how to use a muscle – it takes a long time, but ultimately it’s just a matter of practice, and just as a baby eventually learns to use their hands to grasp and manipulate things, a drucrafter eventually learns to move and control their own personal essentia, clumsily at first but with greater and greater confidence and dexterity the more they practise.

Being able to control one’s personal essentia is necessary for drucrafting because most sigls don’t work on their own. A minority of sigls, known as continuous sigls, activate automatically simply by being worn on the body – they will naturally pull in personal essentia and keep on pulling in more and more of it until they hit their limit. However, this is an extremely crude and mindless way of activating a sigl, and carries significant drawbacks. A sigl can’t think, and has no way of knowing when it’s the “right” time to activate itself, which means continuous sigls will keep on trying to work no matter the situation. Sometimes this is simply annoying, such as a light sigl shining in broad daylight, and sometimes it’s actively harmful, such as a strength sigl amplifying your muscles when you’re trying to do something delicate. On very rare occasions it can even be actively dangerous – draining your personal essentia too far for too long has various negative health effects, particularly if a drucrafter is already sick or injured. In addition to this, many drucraft effects require far too much fine control to work as a continuous sigl – as a rule, anything more complicated than “on or off” is not going to be a good choice for continuous operation.

For these reasons, most sigls are designed instead to work on a trigger. Triggered sigls stay inert until a matching flow of personal essentia is channelled through them, at which point they activate. The essentia flow works as an on/off switch – supplying essentia turns it on, cutting off the flow turns it off. Many sigls also are designed to work with varying levels of power – these sigls, sometimes called “variable sigls”, allow a channeller to achieve a very easy level of control over the sigls’s power by increasing or decreasing the essentia flow.

Many sigls, however, require much more complex inputs than simply increasing or reducing the power. Effects such as optical cloaks, spatial manipulation, jump and flight spells, or healing all require quite precise and varied inputs from the drucrafter – the sigls are typically designed so as to accept slightly different types of essentia, channelled in different ways. Mastering these sorts of sigls requires both broad channelling skill (to reach a certain level of finesse and precision with essentia flows in general) and also specialised knowledge of the sigl in question (which typically can only be achieved with practice). While a competent channeller can figure out how to use a basic triggered or variable sigl in a matter of minutes, the more complex sigls can require weeks or even months to achieve any real mastery.

There is no real cap on the level of skill that can be attained with channelling, and for those who decide to devote themselves to it, mastering it is a lifetime’s journey. This, however, is very rare – the vast majority of channellers learn as much as they need to operate the sigls they have, then stop.

First-round edits on Inheritance of Magic 2 (a.k.a An Instruction in Shadow) are done!  Manuscript was emailed off to my editors as of yesterday.

Finishing the first-round edits is the point at which a book really becomes ‘settled’ in my mind.  The first draft takes much more work, but until the first-round edits are agreed on and completed, the book is still somewhat fluid.  There’s always the possibility that the editor will want big changes, or they’ll point things out that make me decide on big changes.  Once the first-round edits are done, that’s no longer true.  The manuscript will still be revised quite a bit in the copy-edits stage, but the fundamental story won’t be.  The version of An Instruction of Shadow that I sent off yesterday will be >95% the same as the version that you guys will be able to read next year.

Which means that it’s time to get started on number 3!  I’m hoping to start writing the first draft around the end of the year, with the aim of finishing in summer 2024.

Sensing is the ability to feel essentia, and it is the first and most basic discipline of drucraft.  At its most primitive level, sensing gives a drucrafter awareness of their own personal essentia (the essentia that is attuned to a drucrafter as a result of residing within their own body).  This is absolutely essential for anyone who hopes to move on to channelling or shaping, since both of those disciplines revolve around manipulating personal essentia;  trying to learn them without being able to sense one’s own personal essentia first would be like learning to draw while blindfolded.

Unfortunately for aspiring drucrafters, learning to sense is also the point at which most drucrafters fail out.  Sensing does not require any sort of inherent gift, but it is a demanding skill that requires focus and patience.  It is also a very internal and very passive skill which can’t be learned by simple repetition.  A novice drucrafter who doesn’t approach the discipline in the right way can easily train for weeks without making progress.

In the past sensing was traditionally taught in a religious context, with exercises that focused on prayer and meditation.  With the general decline of religious influence in the drucraft world, this is now less often the case, but the fundamentals of the discipline remain the same:  quiet, stillness, and focus.  Various training regimes have been developed over the centuries, but the goal of all of them is to teach the student to perceive another sense beyond the five that they were born with, and this is inherently a very difficult thing.

Sensing progress typically comes in fits and starts.  Most novice drucrafters (at least those with any talent) are not totally blind to essentia – they can pick it up in occasional flashes of awareness.  However, training that ability to the point where it works consistently, quickly, and reliably takes a long time.  Most drucraft teachers expect their pupils to take at least a year to become capable at sensing, and even then, different teachers have very different definitions of ‘capable’.  In theory, a qualified drucrafter is supposed to be able to reliably sense their own personal essentia, measure the ambient levels of free essentia in their surrounding environment, identify the type of essentia being used in an active sigl, and distinguish someone else’s personal essentia from ambient essentia and from that of a Well.  In practice, it’s quite rare for a drucrafter to really master all four of those skills.  Learning sensing is hard, slow, and often boring, and most drucrafters are keen to leave it behind to get to the more exciting (and prestigious) stuff.

It’s generally accepted among modern drucrafters that the overall level of sensing skill in the drucraft population today is lower than in previous centuries.  In the past, sensing was a necessary gateway skill for locating Wells and shaping sigls, but with the increasing use of finder’s stones and limiters in the modern age, this is no longer the case.  In the modern day, the only ones who really need to be good at sensing are manifesters;  everyone else can generally get by without it.  That being said, sensing still provides insights that can’t be obtained any other way, and many Drucraft Houses and corporate dynasties still make a point of training their heirs to a high level of sensing skill.

Once a drucrafter has mastered the basics of sensing, the hardest part is behind them.  Some will end up as channellers, others as shapers or even manifesters, but statistically it’s quite rare for them to fail completely.  The vast majority of drucrafters who master sensing go on to achieve at least a basic level of competence at channelling as well.

I’ve got a few more Beginner’s Guide to Drucraft articles planned, but in the meantime, An Inheritance of Magic has been out for a month or so, so here’s some news on how it’s doing.

Short version:  it’s doing pretty well!  Early reviews have been generally positive, and the book’s Amazon and Goodreads ratings are very high – certainly a lot higher than the ratings of the early Alex Verus books.  There have been a couple of common criticisms, but on the whole the book’s gotten far more praise than dislike, and even when people have criticised it it’s generally been on grounds of “this part made me annoyed/upset/angry”, which as far as complaints go is one of the better ones to get.  (Annoyed and upset reactions are something you can work with – it’s apathy and boredom that are the real killers.)

The really important metric isn’t reviews, though, but sales, and as far as that goes the news is also good.  Early sales of Inheritance of Magic have been very good for a new series – much, much better than the early sales of Fated.  Fated’s early sales in 2012 were measured in the hundreds, which is to be expected for a debut author but definitely not something publishers are willing to sustain in the long term.  If the sales of Alex Verus 1, 2 and 3 hadn’t crept upwards over 2012/2013, my publishers would have dropped the series – luckily for me, they didn’t.

That said, while Inheritance of Magic’s first-month sales are much better than Alex Verus 1, they’re a fair bit behind Alex Verus 12.  This is unfortunately the price you pay for starting a new series.  While lots of the Alex Verus fanbase are going to follow me over to the Inheritance series, others won’t, and in the early days of a new series it’s very hard to know what the percentage will be.  The sad truth is that in the short term, dragging out an existing series is usually a much better financial deal for the creator than trying something new.  A new series is a gamble, but an established one is a sure thing, and that’s why so many book, TV, and film series are stretched out way, way beyond their expiration date even long after it’s become obvious that they’ve run out of interesting directions to go.

So I’m expecting the sales of the Inheritance of Magic series to be well under that of the Alex Verus series for a very long time . . . quite possibly forever, given Alex Verus’s eleven-year head start.  That said, I’m still very glad I made the switch.  I’m really enjoying the new series and getting to try something different and build something new.  If I was still writing Alex Verus books, I’d probably be making a little more money, but I’d be enjoying myself much less (and the quality of the books would suffer, too).

For now, only time will tell how well things go.  Books typically grow their readership in a very slow, viral way, where one reader reads it and recommends it to someone else, who recommends it to someone else in turn, and so on.  I expect I’ll have to wait a good 1-2 years to have any sort of clear idea of how well An Inheritance of Magic is likely to do.  In the meantime, I’ll keep writing the rest of the series!

The sequel to An Inheritance of Magic (current working title:  An Instruction in Shadow) is coming along well.  I’m currently midway through the first-round edits, working through them at a rate of about chapter a day.

One chapter per day is actually really, really fast for a first-round edit – if you’re interested in learning about it in more detail, I’ve written about the different editorial stages here, but short version:  the first-round edits are the big ones, and they can cover anything up to and including full-scale rewrites (which can take months).  So I’m very happy that this time around they’re so easy.  Apparently my editors really liked the first draft as it was!

At the current rate I should be done with the first-round edits in a couple of weeks, at which point I’ll be free to start work on Book 3.