Tales from Seacroft is the working title of a project I’ve been thinking about for around a year now. It’s inspired by the work of Tove Jansson and Diana Wynne Jones, and in its ideal form it would be a lightly illustrated children’s chapter book. The story is set in Seacroft, a small town in an unnamed fictional country on the coast of Western Europe. The world is Earth with somewhat of an altered history, primarily impacted by the fact that magic and magical beings exist. The technology and culture of the world is very similar to how ours was in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Some countries are divided differently, as there has been considerably less colonization in their world than ours; Europe and Asia are mostly the same, but the people of Africa, the Americas, the Middle East, and Australia have more sovereignty, so borders of nations in those regions are different. Magic was once more prevalent, but it has fallen out of use as time has gone on and technology and science have advanced. Most of the world is industrializing at the time of the story, so magic and magical beings stay mostly in rural areas. The story takes place over one summer and concerns the adventures of several friends living in Seacroft.
