Benedict Jacka's Blog, page 12

Well, it’s been a long wait, but we’re finally into release week!  An Inheritance of Magic is released in the UK and worldwide next Thursday, on the 5th of October.

Sorry for the relatively sparse content the past few weeks – I haven’t had much mental space for the fun side stuff that I try to put up here on this blog, like worldbuilding articles.  The limited content is likely to continue for another couple of months, but I should gradually ease back into things by November or December.  If it’s any consolation, it’s not going to affect my book release schedule – Book 2 is with my editors, and I should be able to start Book 3 around the end of the year, as planned . . .

. . . at least, assuming the Inheritance series doesn’t flop.  I’ve been reading early reviews and reactions, though, and at this point I’m fairly sure it won’t.  It’s always hard to predict how a new series will do, but by now I’m reasonably confident that the Inheritance of Magic series will be successful.  I don’t know exactly how successful – it’ll be months at least before I have any clear picture of that, and years is more likely.  If I had to guess, I’d say it’ll probably end up somewhere comparable to Alex Verus, but that’s very much a wild guess.  We’ll have to see!

Anyway, UK release is October 5th, US release is October 10th, then after that the next big event will be my Reddit AMA, on October 17th.  I’ll post more details about that closer to the time – hope to see you there!

Another interview for this week, this one with Steve at Page Chewing.  I enjoyed this one, he’s a very easy-going host.

We’re inching closer and closer to the release of An Inheritance of Magic – UK release is less than two weeks away, on October 5th.

Post is a little late this week since I was waiting for the Fantology interview to go up.  It’s now live, and you can listen to it here!  We talk about Alex Verus and An Inheritance of Magic.

For a few months now, Fantology, a podcast focused on fantasy books, has been doing video reviews of the Alex Verus series.  I just did an interview with them where they asked me questions about Alex Verus and Inheritance of Magic – it should go live in a week or two.  In the meantime, here are the links of their Alex Verus reviews for those interested!

Alex Verus #1 – Fated
Alex Verus #2 and #3 – Cursed and Taken
Alex Verus #4 and #5 – Chosen and Hidden
Alex Verus #6 and #7 – Veiled and Burned
Alex Verus #8 and #9 – Bound and Marked
Alex Verus #10 and #11 – Fallen and Forged
Alex Verus #12 – Risen

Each is about an hour.

I’ve got a couple more interviews lined up now that we’re only a month away from An Inheritance of Magic’s release – I’ll let you know once they’re live!

Book #2 in the Inheritance of Magic series is with my publishers.  I sent it off last weekend;  now I just have to wait to hear back.

Unfortunately this is also going to mark the start of a slower period of blog content.  My original plan for September had been to put up a few more Beginner’s Guide to Drucraft pieces covering topics like the drucraft Houses and corporations.  However, some things have happened in my personal life and I’m going to have to take some time off.  It won’t delay Book #1 or Book #2’s release, but posting is going to be light for a few weeks.

I should get back to more detailed blog posts closer to the release of An Inheritance of Magic on 5th/10th October.

Just a brief post today to let you know that we’ve now got a narrator for An Inheritance of Magic, and I’ve been told by my publisher that the US audio edition should be released at the same time as the paper and ebook versions, on October 10th.  I’ve been getting quite a few questions from readers about an audio release date, so hopefully this’ll come as good news to those of you who prefer audiobooks!

The second chapter for An Inheritance of Magic is now online!  You can read it here.

For those of you who missed Chapter 1, here’s the link to that as well.

And the first draft of the sequel to An Inheritance of Magic is complete!  No title yet, though it’ll probably be something in the same vein (An X of Y).  This has been a long one – 7 months from beginning to end.  Over the next week I’ll give the manuscript an edit and then send it off to my publishers, but right now, I really need a break.  Going to take the weekend off.

So we’re now 2 months away from the release of An Inheritance of Magic, and we’ve come to the end of the introductory series of worldbuilding articles (they’ve only scratched the surface of the new setting, with a lot more to go).  In the meantime, quite a backlog of news has built up, so let’s get to it!

First off, An Inheritance of Magic‘s UK cover has been launched!

I really like this one – it’s going to have a gold-foil effect that I think will look very pretty.  This is going to be my first ever English-language hardback release, which I’m quite excited about (I’ve had some hardbacks released in translated editions, but that’s not quite the same).  I’ve also signed what are going to be the title pages for 500 signed copies, which will be released via The Broken Binding – I don’t have a direct pre-order link as yet, but once I do, but I’ll post it up here.

The sequel to An Inheritance of Magic is very close to done.  I’m working on the final chapter as we speak, and just crossed the 90,000 word mark as of yesterday.  First draft should be completed in a week or two at the most.  Once that’s done I’ll send it off to my publishers, take a rest, and then start making plans for Book 3!

I’ve also been in negotiations with my US publisher, Penguin Random House, about an audio narrator for the Inheritance of Magic series.  They’ve involved me in the process this time, so I spent a while last weekend going through audition recordings.  One of the narrators really stood out and I think my publisher’s making an offer at the moment, so hopefully I’ll have some news on that front soon!

And finally, next week I’ll be releasing Chapter 2 of An Inheritance of Magic (Chapter 1 went up five weeks ago).  See you then!

Creating a sigl requires an enormous quantity of essentia, and the only place where so much essentia can naturally be found is at a Well.

Despite its name, a Well is not created in the same way as a human-dug water well – a better analogy would be a natural pond or lake.  When essentia currents converge, the essentia pools and accumulates, like streams feeding a body of water.  The Well continues to ‘fill’ until it reaches its natural capacity, at which point it stabilises.

Wells can be permanent or temporary.  Permanent Wells are those fed by stable, well-established currents of essentia, and when tapped, they immediately begin to replenish themselves.  This process of replenishment is slow, but consistent, and a skilled drucrafter who takes the time to become familiar with a particular Well can generally predict with a fair degree of accuracy how long it will take to refill.  The time for a Well to fully replenish itself varies, but tends to average to about one year.

Permanent Wells can either grow or shrink, depending on how they are treated.  A permanent Well that is carefully nurtured can last for centuries, and can even grow in strength, though such growth is unpredictable and slow.  By contrast, a Well that is fully and repeatedly drained, and given no time to recover between uses, is likely to weaken or dry up entirely.  Unsurprisingly, it’s much easier to harm a permanent Well than it is to nurture one.  Growing a Well is the result of years or decades of slow, patient work, while destroying one takes a fraction of that time.

Temporary Wells are a different story.  If a permanent Well is a natural pond or lake, a temporary Well is like a giant puddle left by a flood.  They accumulate more quickly and more unpredictably than permanent Wells do, and they’re unstable.  A permanent Well that’s left untouched will stay filled practically forever;  a temporary Well will eventually diminish and drain away to nothing.  Taking essentia from one destabilises it, further accelerating this process.  Like blooming flowers, or fruits fallen from a tree, temporary Wells have a very short lifespan, and if not used will wither away.

Wells in Europe are classified according to the Faraday scale, which is a measure of how many sigls the Well can sustainably make in a year (this typically means leaving at least 10% of the Well’s essentia untouched).  A Well with a Faraday rating of 1 can sustainably produce exactly 1 D-class sigl per year.  This is doubled for each half-class above D, as follows:

• A Well with a Faraday rating of 1 can produce 1 D-class sigl per year.
• A Well with a Faraday rating of 2 can produce 1 D+ sigl, or 2 D-class sigls, per year.
• A Well with a Faraday rating of 4 can produce 1 C-class sigl, or 4 D-class sigls, per year.
• A Well with a Faraday rating of 8 can produce 1 C+ sigl, or 8 D-class sigls, per year.
• A Well with a Faraday rating of 16 can produce 1 B-class sigl, or 16 D-class sigls, per year.

. . . and so on.  A-class sigls require a Well with a Faraday rating of 64, and S-class sigls a Well with a Faraday rating of 256.  Such Wells are very rare:  the entire UK contains perhaps twenty Wells capable of producing an S-class sigl, and there are countries in the world with no S-class Wells at all.

Sigls and the effects they create are the ‘finished product’ of drucraft.  Essentia comes first, Wells come second, and drucrafters come third – the creation of sigls is the second-to-last link at the end of a very long chain.  When an observer sees a drucrafter use a sigl, they are witnessing the end result of years of work (if measuring the skill of the drucrafter), decades of work (if measuring the development of the sigl), or millennia of work (if measuring the evolution of drucraft itself).

Sigls look to the untrained eye like gemstones.  They are very small – about a twelfth of an inch in diameter for a D-class sigl, or between a quarter of an inch and a fifth of an inch for a class B.  Their colouration and pattern provide hints as to their branch and type:  for instance, torchlight sigls are typically translucent and a very pale blue.  They are usually set into pieces of jewellery such as rings, necklaces, or brooches, which makes them resemble gemstones even more closely.  To the uninitiated, the only clue that the sparkling stone on someone’s finger might be more than it appears is that, unlike gemstones, sigls are usually formed in the shape of a perfect sphere . . . but very few would ever notice so small a detail.

Sigls are made of aurum:  pure essentia, crystallised into material form.  It is this fact that makes sigls so small;  when shaping a sigl, a drucrafter is essentially creating mass out of pure energy, which consumes a massive amount of energy to produce a very small amount of mass.  As a result, aurum is, pound for pound, among the most valuable substances on Earth.  An A-class sigl with a diameter of one centimetre – about the width of one of your fingernails – is worth millions.

Of course, it’s not the aurum alone that makes sigls so valuable:  what makes a sigl valuable is what it can do.  When activated by the personal essentia of the drucrafter to which it is bound, a sigl pulls in power from the surrounding environment, transforming that essentia’s raw potential into a specific magical effect.  And these effects can be truly formidable.  At higher levels, a sigl can render its bearer invisible to human eyes, make them light enough to jump buildings, accelerate them to superhuman speeds, make them stronger than a bull, or even alter the flow of time.

However, while a sigl can do any of these things, it can’t do all of these things.  While resting in a Well, essentia is pure potential, capable (in theory) of anything.  But once that essentia is shaped into a sigl, its potential is actualised into a fixed form, closing off all other paths.  Sigls only channel essentia in one very specific way and for one very specific purpose, which is chosen at the moment of their creation and cannot thereafter be changed.  If the drucrafter changes their mind later on and wants the sigl to do something different . . . well, they’ll have to get a new sigl.  And if they have the wrong sigls, or no sigls at all, then their drucraft is of very little use.

What this means in practice is that the primary limit on a drucrafter’s abilities is not their level of skill, but the sigls they possess.  As such, in the drucraft world, talent and ability often come second to resources and connections.