Benedict Jacka's Blog, page 11

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.

Drucraft corporations are much less ancient than Drucraft Houses . . . which is to be expected, as they originated from them.

Houses dominated the drucraft world for thousands of years.  While outsiders could and did learn drucraft themselves, the members of Houses always started with an advantage.  A child of a noble House benefited from better and earlier drucraft training, better access to sigls, and (quite often) a handful of extremely powerful sigls inherited from their parents, stronger than anything they would be able to produce themselves.  In a contest between an outsider and a House heir, the heir could usually be expected to come out on top.  This was not always the case – capable outsiders could and did arise – but when this happened the outsider would usually end up joining the ranks of the Houses, either by marrying some opportunistic aristocrat with an eye for talent, or (in some exceptional cases) starting a House of their own.  In this way the House system maintained itself for a long time.

It was social change that upset this equilibrium.  Urbanisation in Europe led to the formation of a new and increasingly influential middle class, one with an interest in commerce and new markets.  It was inevitable that some of them would take an interest in drucraft.  They lacked the expertise of the Houses, but they had a resource to draw upon;  the cast-offs of the Houses themselves.

Succession had always been a problem for Drucraft Houses.  Dividing a House’s holdings was rarely practical;  often a House’s wealth was concentrated in a single estate and Well, and even where this was not the case, splitting its holdings between multiple children would weaken it, perhaps fatally.  As a result, succession among Drucraft Houses was usually all-or-nothing;  only one child could inherit rulership and title.  Extra daughters had a chance of marrying into a different House, but extra sons tended to be an uncomfortable loose end.

With the new arrivals on the drucraft scene, these ‘spares’ suddenly had an alternate career path open to them.  Partnerships were formed;  the urban middle class brought wealth and business experience, while the nobles brought their drucraft expertise and social connections.  This was the birth of drucraft corporations.

Existence for these early corporations was often a struggle.  The Drucraft Houses had long enjoyed a monopoly on sigls, one which they were not inclined to share, and often they would use their political connections to ensure that the corporations would find themselves barred from the purchase or ownership of permanent Wells.  But the corporations adapted, and came to focus instead on a different market;  temporary Wells, which by their nature were much harder to track or tax.  Still, for the 17th and 18th centuries, corporations existed very much in the shadow of their noble predecessors.

It was during the 19th century that things changed.  The legal principle of limited liability suddenly made companies a far more attractive financial prospect, and drucraft corporations began to grow, expanding in reach and power.  The wars and social upheavals of the next hundred years reduced the power of the old Noble Houses, and the corporations were well positioned to expand into the vacuum.  They benefited even more from the economic liberalisation policies of the late 20th century, and by the dawn of the new millennium, drucraft corporations had overtaken Drucraft Houses in both wealth and importance in virtually every country in the world.

By the 2020s, drucraft corporations have become behemoths, global players in their own right.  While they still have associations with their country of origin, the tendency has been towards multinationalism, and the average large drucraft corporation now has offices in a dozen countries or more.  In some cases it’s no longer clear what a company’s home country is, or whether it even has one.  Drucraft companies dominate the temporary Well market, and own a significant fraction of the permanent one.  They are stereotypically viewed as amoral and concerned only with profit, and in practice this prejudice is often correct.

Drucraft Houses are essentially magical aristocracy, and like the regular aristocracy, their origins go back thousands of years.   

Drucraft requires sigls, and sigls require Wells.  Drucrafters with reliable access to Wells have a significant advantage over those who do not.  As such, with the spread of drucraft came competition among its practitioners.  Those drucrafters strong, rich, or lucky enough to gain control of a powerful permanent Well would have had a vested interest in maintaining that control.  But how?  A raider can drain a Well’s essentia in an hour;  perhaps a very few drucrafters might have had the resources to place a standing guard on a Well for 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, but for most, such a solution would have been far out of reach.  All of these drucrafters would thus have been faced with the same problem:  how do you protect something that can’t be moved?

The answer is:  you live on it.  All across the world, drucrafters independently figured out the same solution:  you build a house on top of the Well and move in.  Now, instead of having to protect your home and your Well separately, you can do both at once.  Plus, as a side benefit, living on top of the Well is going to make you extremely familiar with its nature and quirks;  when the time comes to use it shape a sigl, you’re likely to do a much better job, and this advantage will only grow over time.

With reliable access to a powerful Well and with better-quality sigls, these drucrafters naturally prospered.  Their children grew up better-fed, better-protected, and better-taught;  being raised in the presence of a Well and with a drucrafter parent to instruct them, it would be natural for them to learn drucraft skills themselves.  Upon their parents’ death, they would inherit the Well (along with their parents’ property and sigls);  in time, they would have children of their own and the cycle would continue.  As the families grew in wealth and in size, the Well houses grew with them, going from simple one- or two-bedroom shacks to sprawling estates and mansions.

The full story of the development of drucraft Houses is a very long one, but the above paragraphs sketch out the core of it.  The possession of a Well and of the skills to use it evolved into an institution with the family and Well at its core.  Individual Houses would rise and decline;  many were destroyed, either by wars, the schemes of rival Houses, or (most of all), by fratricidal succession conflicts.  But the nature of Wells and of drucraft ensured that whenever one House fell, another would rise to take its place, benefiting from the same feedback loop of generational wealth and knowledge until it would fall and be replaced in turn.

An Inheritance of Magic is now out and gathering reviews.  With the AMA and most of my interviews and publicity done, things are going to start winding down now, so here’s what you can expect for the rest of the year!

First on my to-do list is the first-round edits for Book 2 in the Inheritance of Magic series, provisionally titled An Instruction in Shadow.  I heard back from my editors earlier in the month, and luckily they seem to really like the book as it is, meaning that the edits to be done are all very minor.  I should be able to get them done in only two or three weeks, after which I’ll be free to start work on Book 3 (I’m hoping to get properly started on that before the end of the year).  Ideally I’d like to finish Book 3 by summer of next year so that it can be published around the autumn of 2025.

As for the blog, my original plans were to write a bunch more of the “Beginner’s Guide to Drucraft” worldbuilding articles by September.  Personal events have put me behind track on that one, but I’m still intending to do it, so hopefully that’ll fill up most of my blog content for November and early December.

Finally, there’s the big question of how Inheritance of Magic is doing.  I’ve been watching the numbers over the past few weeks, and I’m happy to say that so far, it seems to be doing pretty well!  Goodreads ratings are hovering around 4.3 and according to my UK editor, early sales are great.  It’s always tricky to launch a new series when you’re mainly known for another one, but for now it seems that Inheritance is off to a good start.  Now the wait begins – in the long term, the success or failure of the series will depend on how widely it spreads and attracts interest over the next few years.  Right now, there’s no way to predict how that will turn out, but for the moment, things look good.

And that’s it for the moment.  I’m going to be away for much of November, but I’ll try to get a few more Beginner’s Guide to Drucraft pieces done and set them to upload automatically while I’m gone.

And it’s about time to wrap this up.  Thanks to everyone who took part, this year’s AMA was super busy with lots of really nice messages from you guys.  See you next year!

My Ask Me Anything to celebrate the launch of An Inheritance of Magic is now live on r/fantasy!

Link to the AMA thread is here.

Drop by to ask about about Inheritance of Magic, Alex Verus, or my writing in general.  I’ll keep answering questions over the next 24 hours or so before wrapping things up.

My Reddit AMA on r/fantasy will start tomorrow, at noon GMT!  (That’s about 24 hours from now.)  Come by if you have any questions about Inheritance of Magic, Alex Verus, or my writing in general.

I’ll put up a direct link to the thread when it goes live tomorrow.  Once it’s up, I’ll answer questions for about 24 hours before bringing things to a close.

My Reddit AMA is in four days!  This’ll be the first one I’ve done in two years, so I’m looking forward to getting back into the swing of things.

For those who haven’t been around for one of these before (given that the last one was in 2021) AMA stands for “Ask Me Anything” and is a question-and-answer session where readers get to ask me anything they like about my books.  Here’s the last one I did, after the release of Risen.  I generally spread my AMAs out over 24 hours, so that everyone gets a chance to ask questions no matter their time zone, and I try to answer every question that gets asked.

We’ve also got a lot more Inheritance of Magic reviews coming in!  Here are some of my favourites from:

The Irresponsible Reader
Runalong the Shelves
Books Of My Heart
Brainfluff

That’s all for now!  Just a reminder that the AMA will begin on noon GMT on Tuesday 17th October, and will end on Wednesday 18th October at the same time.  After that, next Friday’s blog post will be a round-up and roadmap as to what’s coming next.

And five days later than the UK, An Inheritance of Magic is out in North America as of today!

You can buy it here in paper, ebook, and audio format.  Or if you just want to see what it’s like first, you can read the first chapters here.

Next week, on Tuesday 17th, I’ll be doing my traditional post-release question and answer session on r/fantasy.  Drop by to ask me about Inheritance of Magic, Alex Verus, or just about anything else.  Hopefully the one-week gap will have given a decent number of people enough time to have read the book!

For those who missed it, An Inheritance of Magic released yesterday in the UK and worldwide!  Here are a couple of the more high-profile reviews, lightly edited to avoid major spoilers.

Publisher’s Weekly:

A world of magic usually known only to the rich and powerful is put to the test in the page-turning urban fantasy that launches an intriguing new series from Jacka (the Alex Verus series). Twenty-year-old Stephen Oakwood ekes out a life in modern-day London by working low-wage jobs and renting a room in his aunt’s house. The only thing that really matters to him is fulfilling the promise he made to his father just before the man disappeared two years ago: namely, to keep practicing his drucraft, or magic. Stephen’s growing skill draws the wrong kind of attention, however . . . when people start trying to murder him, Stephen realizes he’s got much more to learn about the elite world of drucraft, its internal power struggles, and what his family has to do with all of it. Jacka provides immense detail about the ins and outs of drucraft, which will please fans of hard magic systems but occasionally slows down the story. Still, there’s lots of promise to this eat-the-rich world. Readers will be eager to see where things go next.

The Wall Street Journal:

Young men living alone with their cats seem to be trending literarily. Benedict Jacka, the prolific author of the Alex Verus series, joins in with an appealing vision of contemporary fantasy in “An Inheritance of Magic.”

Stephen Oakwood is a young Londoner in a dead-end job; his mother left when he was a baby, and his father has mysteriously vanished. He has little going for him besides a few close friends, his pet cat, Hobbes, and a secret: Behind his closed bedroom door, Stephen practices magic, or “drucraft.” It is vaguely known in the wider world but dismissed by many as a weird hobby, while others hoard its secrets: In fact, the most powerful families, corporations and governments control it.

Stephen comes to understand the full truth about the commodification of drucraft when his distant cousin Lucella visits him as part of her plan to become heir of the Ashford family, a wealthy clan who wield both magic and wealth. The internecine battle she drags Stephen into imperils the life of the one thing in the world he has to care for: his beloved cat . . . Stephen’s tale makes for one of the most satisfying contemporary fantasies I have read in a long time; cozy and human, with some good fight scenes to boot. The succinctly explained treatment of magic even makes sense.

“An Inheritance of Magic” is an enchanting journey into a world where sorcery may be for sale, but agency is beyond price.

And as usual, there are plenty of reviews on the book’s Goodreads page.

For those of you in the US and Canada, the book gets its North American release on October 10th.