#magic's servant

Well, for Magic's Servant, Morgana and Myrddin are the characters from Arthurian mythology and a large part of the subplot is that they've never let their old grievances go. A few other characters from that source show up as well, but saying much more would be verging into spoiler territory...

I've been tagged by the ever delightful @ahordeofwasps to find the words grate, grin, groove, and green in my current WIP, Magic's Servant.

Tagging @by-allison-kai, @late-to-the-fandom, @writingwithfolklore and @jay-avian - your words are moon, noon, soon and spoon. Happy hunting!

Grate

“It was the clumsiest bit of magic I’ve done in centuries. You’re welcome.” Talli wasn’t feeling especially grateful. She was tired and hurt and felt inexplicably wrong right down to her core. She stood up, and lurched immediately. She just about regained her balance, clinging to the closest stone wall.

Grin

“To what do I owe the honour of your visit, Lord Mori?” The demon grinned. That baring of teeth felt more like a threat than an expression of humour. “What do you know about the lake born of Owain’s folly?”

Groove

(Not found, surprisingly. I felt sure there must have been a little groove in a stone or something... So a song that Talli might groove to - Sebona Fi by Yws Gwynedd. Give it a listen - very mid 2000's indie vibe)

Green

Welp, given that Magic's Servant takes place in rural Wales and I survived that for 18 years...pretty well, I think? Just stay away from talking cats. My problem is that I would not be able to stay away from cats. I would follow a cat into the jaws of hell. I would fight many things to protect any given cat at any given time.

If I had to deal with the magical elements and/or survive Myrddin's assassination attempts, I might not get out of there unscathed. A lot of his attempts fail because Talli is a young girl - the people he sends to kill her aren't monsters and don't want to kill her. They might not have the same qualms about killing an adult for the greater good, though.

That said, as an adult, I do have access to resources that Talli does not. Money and freedom, mostly. No one is going to question why a grown ass woman is not in school, or out late at night, or travelling on her own in the same way they would question a teenager. If I knew magical forces in Wales were trying to kill me, I can hop on the first train over the border and hope they don't have the power to follow me. I'd be wrong, but they also probably wouldn't be motivated to follow me, since I'd be out of the picture entirely. Talli doesn't have the luxury to escape given her youth and the fact that her family would be in danger if she tried.

Thanks for the ask!

In a very early draft of Magic's Servant, Mori (a demon) is obsessed with a very particular shade of blackish red and a flower not too dissimilar to tulips, so he spends a lot of hyperfixated time on trying to breed the flowers to recreate that shade. He never quite manages to get the colour exactly right. I'm not certain the scenes will make it into the current draft (not quite relevant to the story I'm telling) but the full story could come up in the sequel since that will, by necessity, focus a lot more on the past and how things came to be.

Veritas, his partner, is associated with a wildflower known as Ladies' Smock or Cuckoo Flower. It tends to grow in marshy, boggy conditions. It was the first illusion he ever made, and to demons, early signs of magical prowess often manifest as illusions.

Looking back, what's your writing-related highlight of this year?

So, I've been thinking about this for a while, and I've been in the middle of a writing/redrafting dry spell while real life has tried to pummel me into submission. (Not to make excuses but just for my own reference: in the last three months there's been my mother's wedding, my aunt has had a serious illness diagnosed, we're currently under a lot of stress over my wife's visa renewal and just the general stress of working in a toy shop at Christmas.) So my initial thoughts were a bit pessimistic, and I don't really want to bring that kind of energy to my writing blog. So I thought about it a bit harder.

I (overly optimistically) wanted to finish the rewrite of Magic's Servant this year; I obviously haven't managed that. But I have achieved about 40% of the rewrite this year alone, and that's honestly good going considering that the 'original' draft is a mess (half script, half prose, some of the prose was in first person, some in third, there's some weird tense shenanigans in places, half of my core characters didn't really have a personality, there are at least three different drafts of some scenes that each convey completely contrasting information...). This has been a top to bottom, utter overhaul of everything, from the very name of the project to the shape of the plot and how everything becomes resolved. It's also likely to be the only project I work on that will need these kinds of big overhauls - my first drafts are now much more consistent and only need minor tweaks due to the years of writing practice I've had since. (The very first draft of anything to do with Magic's Servant was written in 2010 if I remember correctly. At the time, I was pantsing a whole movie script based on vibes and very little else. This story has been written and rewritten piecemeal since then and it's only recently that I feel like my writing skills and life experience are ready to actually tell the whole story in a way that does it any kind of justice. Unfortunately, when your co-writer is yourself from 13 years ago, you have to do a lot of work to get it up to your current writing standards!)

I've also written a lot more non-fiction this year - blog posts, writing advice, Ko-fi updates and a few essays, some of which I haven't shared anywhere yet.

In fandom, I have just finished posting a long-form fanfic (which, admittedly, I've been sitting on for a couple of years in the hopes that I would finish the whole series before posting. Then I realised I keep adding more WIPs to the series and it might never actually be 'done') - it's not fresh writing but it is a great way for me to practice my editing skills and also weed out my worst habits ("really" for emphasis outside of dialogue is now in my sin bin...and now I realise I've used it in this very post already. I am nothing if not consistent!)

And of course, I've managed to keep this blog active and managed to stay at least vaguely connected to this little corner of the Writblr community. Seeing everyone's WIPs develop over time and getting involved in tag and ask games has definitely been a writing highlight of my year, and so very helpful in keeping me motivated.

Everyone has a breaking point. What could turn your hero/heroine evil?

For Talli, the obvious thing is her family and/or friends. If you leveraged them against her morals, they come out on top every time. She would do a lot to keep her favorite people safe, and if you really pushed her on that, she would do things she wouldn't have even thought she was capable of.

Tagged by @sam-glade, @winterandwords and @tailoroffates so combining them into one.

Rules: post 7 lines you've written recently and tag 7 people/post 9 lines you've written and tag 9 people

Here's an extract from Magic's Servant: Talli at her part time job in her Grandfather's antique store:

After the first four books were thoroughly rejected, Talli happened upon something a bit more unusual. It was bound in a rather fine, butter-soft leather, thinner than most of the volumes that came into the shop. But the thick paper looked untouched by age. No mold or damp or discoloration could be seen - any passing inspection would assume that this was merely a reproduction intended to look older than it was. But inside, it was entirely hand-written, in a neat, sloping script with entries dated. According to those dates, the book was almost two hundred years old, yet it appeared as pristine as if it were made yesterday. It took Talli a few pages of skimming to realise that she felt almost itchy holding the book. She put it down on the counter and looked at her hands. They trembled for a moment, then stopped. She lightly brushed the cover of the journal with a fingertip. She could feel something that wasn’t really a feeling, more like how she could still feel the wounded pulse of her soul. Was the book itself magic, or was there magic on the book? Talli withdrew her hand as if scalded. What if this was another one of Myrddin’s assassination attempts?

For those unaware, the trolley problem is: a series of thought experiments in ethics and psychology, involving stylized ethical dilemmas of whether to sacrifice one person to save a larger number. It's usually represented as a trolley/tram/train on a track approaching a junction, and on each branch of the junction there are a number of people who would be hurt or killed by the trolley. The dilemma is whether or not to change the course of the trolley and change who would be hurt by the trolley. And of course, you can play with the specifics: how many people on track 'a' and how many people on track 'b', or someone on one of the tracks is morally 'worse' than the other track, if a person on one track is an organ donor so would actually be saving more lives with their death...etc. But essentially, the moral quandary is 'do nothing and let a lot of people die and it isn't really your fault' or 'do something and definitely kill one person by your own actions'.

Talli

Talli wants to know what a trolley is, first of all. (There used to be a tram service in Swansea, which stopped operating in 1937.) Once you explained that, she would want to know who the hell is trapping people on the lines and why. And whether they can be stopped. If you really pushed her for an answer, she would eventually reason out to hurt the fewest amount of people she could, even if she didn't like it much, because that just makes more sense, doesn't it?

Cerberus

Cerberus would need a little clarification that this is absolutely hypothetical, there isn't an actual trolley and actual people getting hurt. That it's just an ethics thought experiment. And he would hem and haw and avoid the question for as long as possible because deep down, he knows he would do nothing, close his eyes and try to tell himself there was never anything he could have done differently.

Eira

If Eira is asked, she'll simply sigh and respond: "Dychwelaf at fy nghoed." and she will fly off. No one knows if she means it literally or not. (Welsh note: There is a turn of phrase 'Dod yn ôl at fy nghoed' which is literally 'return to my trees' but figuratively means to relax/reflect and calm down - similar to how 'return to nature' in English carrying the intention of destressing and relaxing in addition to being in a natural space. Being a dove, Eira could mean either, or both.) (Additional Welsh note: I'm a rusty second language speaker, so my grammar definitely isn't perfect, please be kind about mistakes but I do welcome them being pointed out.)

Morgana

Morgana simply wouldn't care. In the grand scheme of things, they will all die eventually anyway, so why bother worrying if you hasten their deaths a little?

Myrddin