It’s harvest season, and I’m harvesting a book after a long, productive season: Practical Adept. It’s officially out now!
I’m very excited about Practical Adept for a few reasons, so indulge me while I tout the book. It is intended as a bit of a psychological study of Minalan, who has endured war, death, and madness only to find that his most disturbing challenges arise from his own formative experiences. It’s an examination of PTSD in its various manifestations, at one level.
On another level it is an exercise in world-building that I was excited to finally undertake. Farise has been an important element of Minalan’s personal history since the beginning of his journey as the Spellmonger, and my vision of the place has stayed more-or-less consistent, but that left me plenty of room to indulge myself in a few ways when it came to bringing us to Farise for the first time.
First, I wanted to set a fantasy in a semi-tropical environment instead of a cheap copy of the Northern European Plains and attendant islands. You can find magic in nearly every part of Calidore, and the way humans use and adapt it is intriguing on its own. Farise is the very definition of “exotic” to the folk of the Five Duchies, and the Farisian Campaign that Minalan was a part of introduced the culture to thousands. I wanted Practical Adept to reflect that. And I wanted Farise to be something more than “Gondor with palm trees.”
To that end, I invested a lot in the details of the Farisian culture, from the obvious elements like porsago and rierol to the more subtle issues of how the weather affects the society and economy of the place. I wanted to treat it in part like a travelogue as we see Farise through Minalan’s eyes. He grows to appreciate the city not just for its novelty but for how its nature and geography affected the politics of the society and its fundamental culture.
And that is filtered through Farise’s history, from the original settlers to the Sea Lord dominion to the conquest (or liberation) of the place by the Magocracy through the reign of the Doges and the bloody Farisian Campaign. Every era contributed something to the mystique of the place, from its laws and customs to the names of various places to the various strata of politically interested parties. To the folk of the Five Duchies, the Imperial Magocracy is ancient history. To the folk of Farise, it only ended a few years ago.
It's a different place to Min. It had an impact the first time, and his second visit is no less jarring, and perhaps more revealing to him. It’s a project he approaches with a mixture of reluctance, fear, and great interest. He can’t really help himself; he knows something larger is going on, but he won’t know what it is until he unravels the many enigmas of the ancient city-state.
This was a fun book to write even without dragons and hordes of goblins supporting the story. Intrigue is much harder to convey from a writer’s perspective, and hard to do well. We’ll have to see how well I pulled it off.
And you can discuss it with me this weekend. . . .
There will be a video discussion and Q&A livestream on September 28th, at 2pm ET/11am PT/7pm BST to celebrate the release of Spellmonger 17. You can join on the Spellmonger Facebook OR Podium’s YouTube.
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