Absolutely adored your Sapphic Saturnyne Swan Song. Phillips art bringing Gatecrasher, Joyboy, and all those weird little Alan Davis characters to life again brought me back to my childhood and just the jaw dropping joy of picking up a comic book and going, “what on earth is this?” Sequential storytelling at its best and a perfect capstone to an amazing X-Men run! Excalibur and its follow ups will always be my Krakoan go to books.
These are wonderful and I’m glad that you’ve had so much fun lately, Tini! Got any other conventions coming up? PS speaking of Excalibur and fantasy stuff, I wanted to ask if you had any advice on writing magic systems. When asked about the world-building and magic system in The Locked Tomb series, Tamsyn Muir said “I wish I could say I was one of those authors who for five years before publication had this really thick journal where they were like, here’s exactly what goes on. Here’s me developing the entire society and its economics and what coinage it’s using and numismatics. The truth is, everything developed from the story template…I’ve got one single page of notes in the back of an old schoolbook where I’d written down the idea of it about three weeks before I started writing. It’s just a page. It’s large writing. It doesn’t have anything in it of the mythology, which I hope is baroque, which comes later…Everything came from the story template. The RBs, or the Resurrection Beasts, the Lyctors, even the magic system. That all came about precisely because of the storyline I wanted to tell. Hell, to be honest, necromancy comes about because of the type of person Harrow needed to be. Harrow was never going to be the type of character who was an intuitive magician, I think what classic D&D calls the difference between a wizard and sorcerer. She needed to be somebody who really had to work for it. You get a lot of magic systems that are more intuitive and less about scholarship. But I really wanted a magic system that was scholarship-based, that was something that you had to earn. And it’s more about what character beats I wanted to hit, and about what plot beats I wanted to hit, that informed the mythology.”
I have been developing writing guides lately and this is the opening paragraph that I have for the chapter on Magic Systems:
There’s a definite value in soft systems unless the clearly laid out and defined laws of magic are integral to the plot and character arcs. I think it all goes back to whether you’re viewing magic as a tool (sort of goeteian or “witchcraft” that influences perception and will) or as a force (more magia or "ordinary magic" which involves the use of some mechanism). Trying to use soft magic as a tool, in the same way that you would use a hard magic system would indeed be difficult. Its flexibility has become a problem. It’s like the sonic screwdriver from Doctor Who, where it can be used to do pretty much anything, and it sucks some of the air out of the sails of the story. Unpredictability also becomes a negative trait in this use case. If you had a hammer that sometimes hammered nails in, and sometimes opened up dangerous rift in the space time continuum, most folks would switch from a hammer to a nail-gun. Et cetera et cetera. I think soft magic flourishes when it is viewed not as a tool, but as an external force. It’s something users can tap into, can try, and wield in their favor, but it is ultimately not something that can or should be used, in the way that a hard magic system could. Maybe it comes down to language. The very phrase “soft magic system” implies that there must be a system, a level of scrutiny that soft magic simply does not always hold up to. In order to give soft magic its due, I think you have to take it out of the soft/hard binary entirely, and view it by its own merit, as a force or an energy or even a character in itself that defies systemization by definition. You might not intend to present a coherent system of 'magic' and very deliberately leave some things as being mysterious, but you probably have some idea of how it all works in your own mind at least.
Gatecrasher!
Absolutely adored your Sapphic Saturnyne Swan Song. Phillips art bringing Gatecrasher, Joyboy, and all those weird little Alan Davis characters to life again brought me back to my childhood and just the jaw dropping joy of picking up a comic book and going, “what on earth is this?” Sequential storytelling at its best and a perfect capstone to an amazing X-Men run! Excalibur and its follow ups will always be my Krakoan go to books.
Thank you, Cole! That's so incredibly kind, I loved being a part of this era.
The Wedding Special was such a delight! Congrats on everything! Happy we got to catch up in PHX.
Me too! Hope to see you again soon, buddy, and congrats on all your cool stuff in the works!
These are wonderful and I’m glad that you’ve had so much fun lately, Tini! Got any other conventions coming up? PS speaking of Excalibur and fantasy stuff, I wanted to ask if you had any advice on writing magic systems. When asked about the world-building and magic system in The Locked Tomb series, Tamsyn Muir said “I wish I could say I was one of those authors who for five years before publication had this really thick journal where they were like, here’s exactly what goes on. Here’s me developing the entire society and its economics and what coinage it’s using and numismatics. The truth is, everything developed from the story template…I’ve got one single page of notes in the back of an old schoolbook where I’d written down the idea of it about three weeks before I started writing. It’s just a page. It’s large writing. It doesn’t have anything in it of the mythology, which I hope is baroque, which comes later…Everything came from the story template. The RBs, or the Resurrection Beasts, the Lyctors, even the magic system. That all came about precisely because of the storyline I wanted to tell. Hell, to be honest, necromancy comes about because of the type of person Harrow needed to be. Harrow was never going to be the type of character who was an intuitive magician, I think what classic D&D calls the difference between a wizard and sorcerer. She needed to be somebody who really had to work for it. You get a lot of magic systems that are more intuitive and less about scholarship. But I really wanted a magic system that was scholarship-based, that was something that you had to earn. And it’s more about what character beats I wanted to hit, and about what plot beats I wanted to hit, that informed the mythology.”
I have been developing writing guides lately and this is the opening paragraph that I have for the chapter on Magic Systems:
There’s a definite value in soft systems unless the clearly laid out and defined laws of magic are integral to the plot and character arcs. I think it all goes back to whether you’re viewing magic as a tool (sort of goeteian or “witchcraft” that influences perception and will) or as a force (more magia or "ordinary magic" which involves the use of some mechanism). Trying to use soft magic as a tool, in the same way that you would use a hard magic system would indeed be difficult. Its flexibility has become a problem. It’s like the sonic screwdriver from Doctor Who, where it can be used to do pretty much anything, and it sucks some of the air out of the sails of the story. Unpredictability also becomes a negative trait in this use case. If you had a hammer that sometimes hammered nails in, and sometimes opened up dangerous rift in the space time continuum, most folks would switch from a hammer to a nail-gun. Et cetera et cetera. I think soft magic flourishes when it is viewed not as a tool, but as an external force. It’s something users can tap into, can try, and wield in their favor, but it is ultimately not something that can or should be used, in the way that a hard magic system could. Maybe it comes down to language. The very phrase “soft magic system” implies that there must be a system, a level of scrutiny that soft magic simply does not always hold up to. In order to give soft magic its due, I think you have to take it out of the soft/hard binary entirely, and view it by its own merit, as a force or an energy or even a character in itself that defies systemization by definition. You might not intend to present a coherent system of 'magic' and very deliberately leave some things as being mysterious, but you probably have some idea of how it all works in your own mind at least.
How much i wished it was a batcat wedding for a second I got super excited and then when I understood its not theirs I was like 😪
Really wanna see what chip has been cooking with batcat in upcoming arc though