Thank You From the Bottom of My Heart

"What inspired you to write Spellmonger in the first place, and did you make a lot of notes?" (Discord Fan Question)

Funny story, that.
 
The original intent of writing Spellmonger was the desire to get some practice in after my first novel came out and hit the NYTBS list.  I was still trying to decide whether I wanted to focus on fantasy or sci-fi, as a genre, and my original goal was to try my hand at fantasy.  The first draft looks nothing like the final – I scrapped virtually everything in it, apart from some names I fancied.  But it was a useful exercise.  It taught me the necessities for fantasy literature through its failure. 
 
But by the time I was ready to begin again, I was working at a seafood restaurant/Oyster Bar on Main Street in Durham, called Fishmonger’s.  I did the double lunch-oyster special shift on Friday nights, which was the best time for tips, and when it was slow I would daydream (sorry, “plot”).  I was reading a lot of fantasy, at that time. 
 
One author’s minor character in a favorite shared-world anthology had caught my attention that day, especially the financial element of how a wizard makes his living.  I mean, who pays Gandalf’s salary?  That’s a pretty essential bit of detail, for most people.  And what kind of regulatory agency polices a wizard’s conduct?  Another intriguing detail.
 
So I started thinking of a character who ran his own shop, and naturally (because I was staring at a menu at the time) I called him a spellmonger.  I played around with other names, but ended up using Minalan as a placeholder until I could think of something better.  I’m still thinking.  So that’s where that came from.
 
It took about six months to struggle through the first draft of the new book, addressing the flaws in the first version as I went.  Most of it was dreamed up at work, at the bar.  I’d scribble some notes on my legal pad, knock out a few rough outlines, but I needed to think this one through more seriously than I had my first attempt.
 
Perhaps I over-addressed, in some cases, but remember, Spellmonger was to be my practice book.  My daydreaming at work was a series of questions I asked and answered for myself as I deconstructed Epic Fantasy.  My criteria was simple, for a practice book: how many stories could I get out of each decision I made?  With the example of every epic fantasy series I’d ever read for a template, I set it up as an intellectual exercise.  Just how many traditional fantasy tropes could I stick into this thing?  This was, after all, a practice book.
 
My main character was a wizard.  A learned man in a rural environment.  A country wizard.  A young man just starting his practice.  Might be a story there.
 
I needed to make him a little more action-oriented, so I made him a veteran, with a fine appreciation for the lousy life of the medieval mercenary at war.  After hanging out with a couple of dudes just back from Afghanistan and trying to hit on my sister-in-law, I gave him the cocky IDGAF attitude some men who have survived war convey.  I needed some institutional villains as motivation, so I decided an Inquisition/FBI-like militant order of wizards with distinctive clothing and a reputation for nastiness would be good – and a good thing for my main character to flee from.  Yeah.  Might be a story, there, too.
 
I didn’t want him to be of noble heritage, because that’s boring – and I was very familiar with bakeries.  Commoners are just more interesting, and even more class-conscious than the nobility, most of the time.  Bourgeois boy makes good?  Maybe on a scholarship?  There was a bit of story there.
 
I needed a local petty noble, because you just do, and a cast of supporting characters as rich and diverse as possible to compliment him.  I credit the wonderful character work of James Herriot’s All Creatures series for that – I read the novels in Middle school and enjoyed them tremendously.  The locals are always good for a few stories.  Maybe give one a dog.
 
Add a plucky but headstrong apprentice as sidekick – check.  Add a love interest.  Check.  Add an ex-girlfriend, just to be interesting.  Also check.  Make her a trusted professional colleague as well.  Check again.  Love triangle?  Maybe?  Easy story, there.
 
Now for the main bad guys . . . goblins, of course. I’m a traditionalist.  Good guys?  Elves, natch.  Magical elves.  Magical goblins.  How does that work?
 
That’s where things got interesting. 
 
When it comes to the essential world-building, I realized that fantasy comes in two flavors: realistic and mythic.  I enjoy the interplay of both of them, of course, but I wanted an element of realism that would transport the reader into a believable culture.  Most mythic fantasy doesn’t do that, although some (GoT, for instance) get close. 
 
When I analyzed which fantasy worlds felt the most believable in my experience, I kept coming back to Anne McAffery’s wonderful Dragonriders of Pern series . . . which isn’t fantasy.  It’s sci-fi, and arguably not a lick of magic in it that isn’t explainable under her basic premise.  In fact, the most fun part of the series, in my opinion, was this feudal civilization that just happened to have a lizardy air force protecting them from an existential threat was descended from a space colony.  Making that discovery and its eventual exploration was one of the highlights of the books for me. 
 
So . . . a sci-fi world that’s masquerading convincingly as an epic fantasy world.  This was a practice novel, after all.  I could experiment a little. 
 
That premise would make elves, dwarves, goblins and halflings all . . . aliens.   And the humans mere colonists.  So . . . what if I took a sci-fi alien/human relations perspective in examining the traditional fantasy tropes?  How would the native aliens react to a thoroughly-nonmagical humanity wanting to muscle in?  Might there be some resentment?  Some good reason?  A little bit of history, there?  And what does that say about the aliens in question?  That’s a story.  That’s a big story.
 
What if the aliens, themselves, were mere colonists?  And why would this world have “magic” when others do not?  Why did the elf-analogues want to come here in the first place?  What makes the magic work here, in this place, but not elsewhere?  Of course, the humans, after generations of decivilization, might forget to treat the aliens as alien, and more like co-inhabitants and neighbors.  Perhaps slotting them into traditional folkloric roles, instead of approaching them as colonial natives.  There’s a lot of good stories, there by definition.
 
I realized that I had to sort out how and why magic worked, from a scientific perspective.  Everything else would flow from that basic premise.  Once you know how magic works, the rest is exploration and discovery.  One deep dive down the astrophysics/quantum physics/paranormal rabbit hole later and I had my answer.  I knew how magic basically worked.  But then I had to come up with more answers for that.  How would aliens use magic, as humans see it?  That’s a story. 
 
Oh, wait – Ent-analogs.  That had to be another wave of alien colonization.  Weave that into the back story.  Not now, but maybe later.  Had to be a few good stories there.
 
Wait, what if the real magical power in the world, the real native species of this strange planet weren’t even on land?  What would a civilization of magical sea creatures look like?  How would they feel about all that sinking island stuff?  Thus, the Sea Folk.  And the Seamagi.  There’s at least a few good stories there.
 
That’s how it sort of snowballed.  I started including every classic fantasy I could reasonably weave into the story, in order to see how it could be explained in terms of a human colonization attempt.  I needed a fallen empire from which the feudal world arose – let’s make them wizards, since I’d decided this would be a very wizardy book, and stole the term Magocracy from the AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide because I always wanted to know what a land ruled by wizards would look like.  Let’s add a sunken island in the mythic past because of fantasy writers’ union industry standards. 
 
In fact, the whole thing could kind of deconstruct the fantasy trope of the wizard as a character.  I mean, why not examine Gandalf’s early years, metaphorically speaking?  That was almost literature.  I could risk that.  This was a practice book. 
 
More, let’s make it a brutally medieval world, really lance-it-up, and If you have a real feudal world, you have to have some sort of religious authority.  I’m a polytheist.  What kind of medieval church would a polytheism produce?  Might be a story there.
 
Hey, if this place has magic, which is a manipulation of energy by conscious means, what happens to deeply spiritual sub-consciousness of humanity?  What if that produced the very entities they purported to worship?  How would that work, exactly?  That might cause problems.  And problems make stories. 
 
And, of course, castles.  If you have knights, you have castles.  It’s in the rules.  What if the castle is under siege?  By goblins?  How would that work out?  That’s a story.
 
Hey, let’s make it a siege at the beginning of an invasion!  Just to keep things interesting!  Veteran warmagi turned spellmonger leads defense of castle as feudal response to crisis proves untenable due to the goblin horde.  Let’s give them a revenge factor, somehow, and a good reason to be fighting. 
 
That brings us to the Big Bad, the Evil Dark Lord du joure.  Hey, how about an uber-powerful undead?  I’d seen Mystery Men at the time, and the Baby Bowler’s unique bowling ball was suggestive.  I cold stole that, and gave it a different back story.  But a glass-encased head just didn’t make sense, and was visually derivative. 
 
But what if I made it out of amber?  Magical amber?  From magical trees?  The kind of shit the elves would make for Yule?
 
Undead decomposing goblin head in a sphere of magical amber.  Really creepy.  It floats.  It’s got a traumatic brain injury because it was stuck on a pike and the parts of its brain that allowed it empathy and compassion were torn out in the process.  Soaked in a vat of tree sap while goblin shamans chanted around it for a hundred years.  Make that much magical amber stupid-powerful.
 
Let’s turn it green.  It looks cooler.
 
Evil dark lord has to have a reason to want to take the castle.  What could be so important about this place?  That’s a story. 
 
How do I run the climax of the book?  Desperate siege, impossible odds, unbeatable foe, mysterious magical thingy in the dungeon . . . how do they get out?  How do I manage the climax?
 
Oh.  Well, I could do that.  This is a practice book, after all.  No one is going to take it seriously, and it is a fun concept, if you like that sort of thing.  I like that sort of thing.  Oh, and let’s ramp up the tension of the moment – let’s knock up the main character’s girlfriend!  Sex has consequences, after all.  No one talks about the bastards Aragorn left here and there around Middle Earth after eighty years of rangering.  It gets lonely in the woods.  We all know it happened.  No one wants to talk about it.
 
Besides, being a new daddy has a special effect on a man.  It gives some a powerful motivation.  Might be a story, there.
 
As I was finishing the first draft, I could not help but consider where I could go with this temporary, off-the-shelf practice science fiction novel pretending to be a fantasy novel.  Mostly, I was interested in how I could spin the complicated backstory of how it went from Buck Rogers to Prince Valiant in just a few centuries.  There had to be good reasons for the way my pretend-culture got to be the way it was.  There had to be many tales, there.
 
Hey, what if in some future book my main character got married?  And got the attention of a god?  All good wizards have a brush with the divine, from time to time.  That’s a good story.  Especially if the god in question has a snarky sense of humor.  Hilarity.
 
Oh, yeah, this could get interesting.  For a practice book.
 
Spellmonger got rejected by most of the big publishers at the time with varying degrees of personal comment, and they were right to do so.  The economics of the time made it impractical, especially with a new writer.  Yes, the NYTBS got me a little more attention, but most publishers were too tied up with existing talent to take a shot on someone with a novel that derivative and mediocre.  Yes, it was witty.  Yes, it had merit.  But did it have a market in the age of evolving fantasy?  We hope you find a place for this, but it is inadequate for our needs at this time.
 
I kept every rejection letter.  They’re inspirational and motivational.  By the time I made it through the big guys, Publish On Demand was starting to be a thing, so I slapped it up on Lulu and more or less forgot about it for years.  I went on to other projects.  I struggled with writer’s block for a while.  But I’d written my second novel, and that was what was important.
 
Then Kindle happened.  I stuck it up there, hoping to catch a little attention.  I did.  A couple of insightful reviews, some hate because of prudes, and some recommendations to get an editor.  I gave it a relatively low price and let it cook.  And then it started to sell.
 
And sell.  And sell.  I joked with my wife that if I sold a thousand copies, I’d have to consider a sequel for my mediocre practice fantasy novel.  The first Amazon check I got was mere beer money.  The next was rent money.  Perhaps there’s something to this writing business, after all.  I hit a thousand sales.  People kind of liked it.  Other people hated it.  But I figured that all the tropes I put together for the background were enough for a sequel.  Maybe even a trilogy.
 
Yeah, a trilogy.  Well, only if the second novel doesn’t suck. 
 
And that’s where my inspiration for Spellmonger came from.