The November plans

The plan was to write double-posts during October so that I could cruise through November without care.

I've failed that pretty severely -- as one week I even forgot to write anything. (I got a post out that day, but it was an "Oops, I forgot." post, so it doesn't really count.)

I think I'm going to accept what many bloggers accept: I'm going on hiatus for the month of November for NaNoWriMo. As this is the last Monday in October, this means my next post will be December 6th.

At this point, my planned story is a YA Fantasy. The basic premise is that magic is a consumable resource that was all used up during the early days of mankind. An eccentric hermit finds a way to replenish magic in the world. He hires a family of four, and madness unfolds. Well, not madness, exactly, but certainly excitement.

It is a variation of the idea that things were somehow more magical in the past and that for some reason all of the magical creatures went elsewhere. It is nice to think that they could just go elsewhere, but it is also possible they all died off.

For the story, it means it can start off like an urban fantasy -- totally real-world with just a promise of something magical -- and as the magic unfolds around them the limits of it are less confined to the "and no one else is the wiser" thing you generally see with urban fantasy.

The core idea is one that is backed up with stories like "Sleeping Beauty" where once the spell is broken the castle itself disappeared. To last that long, it laid waste to the area where the castle once stood. As the magic dried up and disappeared from the region it drew with it the very firmament itself.

While there are fewer restrictions on what magic can do, there are still restrictions. This is a world where magic has near limitless potential, but it can't reach the potential if it gets used up on vulgar affairs. Using magic for cleaning house? It will take longer to restore the magic used than it would to just clean it up by hand. Flashy transformations are extremely ostentatious, as after you transform there may not be any magic in the area to do anything else with.

This means that in the story world, magic needs to cause the least amount of change to produce the desired results. That said, since scrying works without a particular abundance of magic, in an area with more magic it works much better.

The device I'm using to restore magic in the world is essentially an orgone transformer. It takes "orgone energy" and transforms it in to magical energy. Instead of an orgone accumulator shaped like a box and designed to focus the orgone energy inside, we have a board composed of layers of different substances. It gathers the orgone energy, transforms it, and the magical energy exits. I call these boards "magic doors" -- which is also where the (current) title for the book comes from.

So that's what I'll be doing with my November. I'm excited. It will be my first novel, so I'm going in to it as a learning experience -- I know the quality only gets better with practice.