a whole new project in the works
It’s snowing in Chicago, and this means the time has arrived: the time to start working on my new project, which I’ve been sitting on for months. What is this project? A totally new urban fantasy, one that I’m really excited about! I can’t wait to tell you.
my premise, an origin story
Funny story, the original inspiration is the next thing to fanfic, and I’ve been sitting on it for a decade. The vector: FFXIV. In Heavensward, you’re a fugitive. You spend most of the expansion in a society where you’re barely tolerated, and then, only because you have a patron. Your bestest-ever videogame friend Haurchefant convinces his (powerful) father to sponsor you; you live in his house. It occurred to me one day: what if he kicked you out?
There you are, trying to end an ancient blood feud between elves and dragons while of course, in classic videogame style, also solving the comically trivial problems of absolutely freaking everyone. (What’s that you say?! Your garden is being overrun? By all means, let me set aside my career felling tainted demigods so I can do your weeding for you!) But between these two extremes lies actual reality. It’s something that rarely gets addressed in this context: the fact that, heroics notwithstanding, unglamorous stuff is constantly happening in the background. Toilet breaks and bathing. Needing to eat food with some routine and not just every ten levels in a cutscene feast. MONEY.
So here I am imagining the Warrior of Light having to find a place to rent in the midst of everything. Paying bills. Worrying about maintenance and hitting up the Target at Jeweled Crozier to buy linens. And I thought: Gosh, that would be an awesome premise for a story.
my band of screwups
No disrespect to the Warrior of Light, but I wanted a cast from the opposite side of the heroics-spectrum. This is a story about a bunch of people who felt the need to leave home and wind up cohabiting just as a supernatural crisis unfolds. They’re roommates in a large but rundown house in a city where none of them are natives, and saving the day is a priority. But so are groceries.
This is an ensemble cast, which if you know me, you know to expect. My protagonist is one Jendaiar Phos, a driven, high-achieving wizard who discovered a few months ago, at the death of a high-pressure parent, that all of that ambition was coming from his dad and not from him. When you meet him, he’s in the process of blowing up his life both personal and professional. He gets help from his younger brother Hecanthes, who can’t decide between hero-worship and hatred.
When consequences start catching up with them, they get out while they still can. Their destination: the house Jen’s estranged mother left to him. The fact that she owned property in this seedy foreign place is mysterious. Not nearly as pressing, though, as the fact that they can’t possibly afford to keep it. Not unless they get some help with bills.
Spoiler alert, their roommates are the other narrative characters. I’ll tell you more about them if and when I feel good about how the story is progressing.
my delightful hive of scum and villainy
It’s always been fixed in my head that, if the day came that I wrote this story, it would be somewhere snowy and vertiginous. A nod to the source of my inspiration, and also just fun because a hostile environment adds to the list of domestic challenges. I didn’t have a setting, though. Not until I watched an episode of Lost Cities with Albert Lin.
He was up in the Andes surveying the remnants of an Incan settlement, and I can’t understate how 1) epic and 2) terrifying the setting was. My heart was in my throat just watching it on television. Thus was Zimanges born, spread across both faces of a prow-shaped hill in stepped terraces and surrounded on all sides by mountains.
Zimanges is the domain of a bandit-turned-king who discovered he could make more money providing safe haven for merchant caravans and just taxing them as they came through than raiding. The city has prospered under his rule, expanding massively. The rule of law remains negotiable; a civic safety net is nonexistent. It is, though, the perfect destination for people who are trying to get away or need to reinvent themselves.
my magic, in a word
The magic system, I’ll be playing close to the vest for the time being; it’s essential to the plot, so you’ll have to read the book to find out how it works. I can say, though, that I’m finally doing something that I always wanted to do: spoken magic. Look, I like magic systems where people go Hey presto! and magic occurs. I just can’t write them.
It doesn’t make sense to me.
I needed a mechanism.
Well, I finally found one that I find convincing. So here we go! Does this mean I need an entire conlang for what I’d like to make a standalone? Yes, but it’s not as bad as it seems; I had a conlang I invented in college just hanging about, gathering dust, and it should serve. I’m eager to dive in.
my world, in brief
My preliminary map resembles a peace sign with the bottom-central stick removed. The remaining lines are mountains, the circle being ocean-coast (very, very loosely). The southern slice of pie is a cursed desert where people almost never go, being as it is the final resting place of a civilization that vanished to the last individual before anyone now inhabiting the continent was present.
The eastern pie is shared by sebu, a furred human-like people from the far north, and natu or humans, more recent immigrants to the area. You’ll find more of the one to the north, more of the other to the south, but the populations are integrated; those humans who moved into the area adopted sebu culture generations earlier. They both are and aren’t ‘one people’ because their land is divided into independent fiefdoms that share a culture but don’t consider themselves ‘a civilization.’
The pie’s final slice is filled by elves. The Kingfisher (tetzoun) and Goshawk (myasi) share a history as colorful as it is hideous. Up until a few centuries ago, successive dynasties of tetzoun have fought to wipe the myasi out and been massacred as a consequence. Modern society is driven instead by an obsession with stability and amassing wealth, which has many ugly side effects but has reshaped their intraspecies feud from decades-long wars costing lives in the tens of thousands to occasional border-skirmishes killing dozens. As for the myasi, they appear to be doing what they’ve always done: hanging about in the forest, keeping their business to themselves and killing anyone who has a problem with it.
As you can already guess, my cast is going to be a smattering of each of them.
Anyway, time to get back to it. I really hope I can share more with you in the not-so-distant future!
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