Freefall Cover Reveal

The countdown to FREEFALL continues. February 5th the book will be out, but: take a look at that cover!

Gorgeous, isn’t it?

You might notice that unlike the first book’s cover, this time Mark’s flying in broad daylight, with only a bit of white blurring around him. That could mean a serious change in magic’s secretive place in the world… or it could just mean he’s got someone to raise a blizzard to hide him. Hmm…

Something you can’t see, because it’s on the cover’s back, is my other tagline:

“Spellkeepers at war – this city’s not big enough for the four of them.”

(Which was why I wrote in a few more.)

My plan with FREEFALL has always been more. THE HIGH ROAD was Mark and Angie being young and barely able to use the magic, and willing to throw themselves at danger because Angie couldn’t see any other choice.

FREEFALL is Mark able to handle the magic, more or less. And he’s seen the cost of this fight, and he has a plan and a set of allies… but he’s still just nineteen, and all too aware of how he’s been more hesitant than Angie all his life.

And now I get to bring in some of the real dangers that the Spellkeeper world can escalate to. Rafe is back, still two steps ahead of Mark at most things, and he’s got another gravity belt (how?) and plans bigger than taking over one gang. There’s some of the history of possession magic, and moments that show just how nasty it can get. There are new characters, like Sasha (you haven’t even met Sasha yet!), who’s the last thing you’d expect in a story like this.

And of course, Olivia Nolan. Now that she’s Mark’s ally—on her own terms—you’ll see her being an experienced spellkeeper (hey, she’s the only one who knows the word!), a businesswoman who rewrites the rules, and a strategist with her own schemes and allies for tracking their mutual enemy. I have to keep reminding myself she’s a few years too young to be called “Grandma Badass,” but she’s not your typical urban fantasy character.

One other thing: I have a guest blog on some of the ways writers can see the world and the people around us. It’s over at Rising Shadow: https://www.risingshadow.net/articles/guest-posts/906-guest-post-a-writer-s-eye-by-ken-hughes

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Freefall in February — Launching

Happy New Year!

It’s the traditional day for reflecting, plannning, and promising… followed by the traditional month of backsliding, of course.

In the spirit of breaking that cycle:

FREEFALL, Book Two of Spellkeeper Flight, will be launched on February 5th. After long months of tweaking, the book is ready, the cover’s being set up (stay tuned!), and I’m looking forward to sharing it with the world.

In fact, I have a total of three things to share for the new year:

First, I will soon be offering THE HIGH ROAD for free, to help new readers find an easy start into the series. (Though I have to say, you’ll find it’s the only thing that’s “easy” for Mark and Angie.)
Second is that news about FREEFALL, complete with a sample below that takes up right after THE HIGH ROAD’s closing excerpt cut off. (I’ve cut out one name, for readers who haven’t discovered who “the killer” is yet.)
But also, there’s another excerpt here and another announcement: Book Three, GROUNDED, will be released this summer as well.

Now: the FREEFALL sample at the end of THE HIGH ROAD had left Mark diving back into his enemy’s building at the moment the police turned away, hoping to seize the computer in the office. So:

Sample from FREEFALL

The power lay behind him. His head twisted around, he saw the cop sitting up, gun swinging up in her still-possessed hands.

Too late. Mark tumbled through the office doorway and bounced off a desk, careening to a stop against the wall. He tottered sideways, trying to find cover, but the room barely gave him a few steps either way. No other doors, and no windows.

He waited, trapped. And yet… the cop didn’t close in. He could hear her shuffling to her feet, and felt the puppetmaster’s magic starting her toward the door, but so slowly. She could have put a bullet in him by now, or called for other cops.

He thought of how fast the killer’s control had jumped between the two police officers before, too quick for either of them to realize what had happened… and, he was always trying to spy out the secrets of the belt’s magic…

“You can’t shoot me, can you?” Mark laughed. The sound came out hoarse, and he still moved aside from the doorway. If he was wrong, if the killer was ready to explain away Mark’s body and find other ways to learn their magic—

He sensed the cop still edging toward the doorway. Mark flexed his fingers, praying he could grab and strike before the enemy jumped through that touch. The smell of paint pressed at his nose.

The lights went out.

A flash of memory came: Nolan outside another of these offices, promising If you need a distraction, I’ll freeze the power lines. He blinked wildly, fighting to push the flood of shadows back and make out where the outlines in the room had been.

Over what had to be the police radio came a sharp “What the hell? Bennie?”

“I’m alright!” the possessed woman answered.

Mark blinked harder. His enemy was giving him a moment to work, not calling in the other cop. But that other cop could decide to rush in at any moment. So… there, that blocky shape sitting beside the table’s leg would be the computer he’d come for.

One quick step and he reached behind the box to rip a handful of cables from its back, then snapped the last wire away, half-expecting to hear sparks popping.

Behind him, the cop moved in.

Mark twisted around to glimpse the woman stepping toward him, her empty hand reaching out—closing in to touch, ready to grab my mind! He flung himself backward, and his arm swung out into a scooping motion and slammed into the table.

Pain shot through his knuckles and his injured shoulder, but his magic surged, and he heard the whoosh and the clamor of flying objects and a great crash as he flung the near-weightless table at the cop and it glanced off her to clatter against the wall.

It did little more than make her flinch back, but that gave him the moment he needed to stumble to his feet and snatch up the desktop computer, lightening it too. She was already turning back toward him, still blocking the doorway.

He raised the computer like a shield and charged.

He slammed into her and flung her back, and burst on through the doorway to finally stretch his steps into a leaping run that swept him away from her across the room and barely aimed low enough to slide his head under the front doorway to dart through and out.

Sample from GROUNDED

Mark Petrie took another glance back up the police station corridor, but with all the cops moving about he couldn’t even see the door they’d taken Olivia Nolan and her lawyers through.

He reached out with the magic in his belt again to search for her. The weather energy Nolan carried was a primal force his gravity power could barely feel at the best of times… and using any magic now stretched his frayed nerves and made the dull, shifting roar of the police station’s daily crowd beat against his head. At least he could sense Henry’s own gravity belt up in the room they’d taken him to.

“We should be done with him soon.”

Mark snapped his head forward again. Was that satisfaction in the rail-thin detective’s voice, about how Mark’s cousin had been shaken by all the treacherous power that he had to hush up? Shh, don’t say it.

–That’s as far as I can take Chapter One without veering straight into spoilers. But there’s a reason the chapter is called “Nine Points of the Law.”

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Before Reindeer Could Fly

Did you notice that Santa’s sleigh doesn’t fly?

Or it didn’t, mostly, not in the source we all know. Remember:

To the top of the porch, to the top of the wall,
Now dash away, dash away, dash away all,
As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,
When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky
So up to the house-top…

Yes the poem uses the word “fly” a lot, but so did Gandalf when he told the Fellowship to run out of Moria. What it really describes is the sleigh running at ground level and then jumping up to the roof.

The same idea’s in a Little House on the Prairie book: Laura’s worried that Santa won’t reach their new home across the river.

Because back in 1823, a sleigh being fast and getting by obstacles was the most anyone could believe a man could fly.

Happy Christmas (and many other holidays) to all, and to all a good night!

For Stan Lee

“Stan Lee.”

Two words I thought I’d always be happy to see… until I saw them on the LA Times quick links section, where too many people only appear as obituaries.

Just seven letters. That’s way too few, for someone who wrote more than a hundred Spider-Man comics, another hundred Fantastic Four, a hunded Thor, and created all them plus Iron Man, the X-Men, the Hulk, and practically every other Marvel superhero who’s running the world today. All during the same few dizzying years.

Another short set of words to conjure with are:

“Why don’t you tell the story the way you always wanted? If you don’t like it, you can quit.”

That’s the advice Stan’s wife gave him, that convinced him to give the tired old superhero genre one last try, and put four very real people on a rocket ride.

“The story the way you always wanted”

Stan Lee and his Marvel comics pushed superheroes out of grade school.

There are whole layers of truth in the quip that “Marvel is where humans pretend to be gods. DC is where gods pretend to be human.” But “pretending” is all too accurate for what comics were before the Fantastic Four, and it’s what Stan’s heroes tried to move beyond.

Superman and his imitators said there might be a legend hiding under Clark Kent’s fedora.
Spider-Man said the person who’d gotten a legend’s power still was Peter Parker.

And Peter lived in a world with money problems, a newspaper that called him a menace, and everything a fifteen-year-old should feel about how impossible his life had just become. A kid could dream of being Superman, but Spidey showed us what courage was.

So how much of that was Stan Lee’s work?

Yes, it’s gotten fashionable to argue over how much of those comics were the work of magnificent artists like Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, or say that “With great power comes great responsibility” is just a rephrasing of Franklin Roosevelt or the Bible. Sure, Stan was a master collaborator. But he was the one at the center of those hundreds of comics.

When the Fantastic Four discovered (and got “clobbered” by) the Black Panther, or faced a simply biblical apocalypse in Galactus, that was Stan. When the Green Goblin was revealed as the father of Peter’s best friend Harry, and the memory of his evil self broke free while learning Harry had become a drug addict, that was Stan. (And when the story published even though the Comics Code was afraid to let stories even talk about drugs, that was definitely Stan Lee.)

Stan Lee made it all happen. He created, he wrote, and he guided the essentials of it all. Even the next steps of comic evolution came out of the Marvel shop he led: Frank Miller made Daredevil famous before moving on to The Dark Knight Returns, and Chris Claremont was essentially the next-generation Stan in how his X-Men were a game-changing volume of superhero excitement that added even deeper levels. (Those two and Britain’s Alan Moore at DC would be the key influences in bringing comics from adolescence to their adulthood.) And it was sheer faith in that work that made Marvel, even on the edge of bankruptcy, dare to form its own movie studio and interest the world in some “B-team” hero in an iron suit.

But Stan was always more than his stories to us.

“If you don’t like it, you can quit”

To pick up a Marvel comic was to shake hands with Stan himself. That’s how it felt, from the playful credits on the splash page (Written by: “Smilin’” Stan Lee, Art by “Jazzy” Johnny Romita) to the announcements pages in the middle and the letters at the end where Stan might award the coveted “No-Prize.” (As in, they kept changing their minds about what it was for, so there’s still No real answer about it.)

Stan was a carnival barker, a traffic manager, and a friend to all of us who read it. When the movies began, it was inevitable that he’d have his cameos.

If there’s a publicist on the planet who hasn’t studied how Stan Lee made the community of comics fun, they’re cheating themselves.

And it all worked, because of Stan himself. Over all those hundreds of stories and thousands of hours of columns, interviews, public appearances, and all the rest, one thing always shone through: Stan Lee honestly loved what his stories could be, and he loved the people who shared them. Stan “the Man” was always Stan the Fan.

He might be a model for media people everywhere, but he’s even more of a hero for all of us quiet writers. In this business we spend most of our time holed up trying to create something a little as memorable as Stan has (or at least write as fast). So our most challenging moments can be when we have to look up and reach out to readers—or worse yet, stand in front of them.

Stan made it look easy, in print or live. Simply because he cared. That’s the excitement and the connection we all need, both as fans and when we step forward to share our own take on the same thrills. We’re all here because we care about the story, and that’s all we need to take our turn.

And now he’s gone.

Across The Hall

A piece like this should end with a memory of meeting Stan himself… but I don’t quite have one.

Instead, there was my one visit to ComiCon. Huge crowds, posters and costumes all around, and me and a couple of friends trying to make some noise in a booth for our books.

Then there’s this ripple through the crowd. Heads turning, people pressing in. I weave through the aisle enough to get a look—

Oh. I know that face. He was walking slowly through the throng, until he settled in at a carefully-prepared booth.

He wasn’t giving a speech, just doing his best to field all the questions that the people threw at him. The crowds were too thick, and I had my own booth to get back to. And I couldn’t think of much I might have said to him except simply “Thank you.”

So I walked away.

That’s where regrets come from.

Image by Jun Chui Illustration

Photo by Gage Skidmore

Lessons on a Flying Road

Yes it’s true: Freefall, the sequel to The High Road, will be out early next year. What’s more, the conclusion of the series is in revision and will follow soon as well.

It’s been too long since I’ve shared my thoughts in this blog. I’ve been getting myself all turned around in revisions, re-envisions, rewrites, and simple stalling. But now, I’ve worked out the whole path to the story’s end.

And since the Spellkeeper Flight books are the first I’ve written in a series since I was an eager kid, the story has introduced me to a few things I didn’t know about my writing.

My mission is still the same: to build storylines that lead into moments that simply maximize a reader’s thrill at “being there” and the drive to know what happens next.

I’ve rediscovered how many ways I can put pressure on poor Mark. He’s had a little time now to practice with gravity magic, but he has everything from trying to hold onto a life to keeping his friends safe, while every night he’s searching the city for his enemies and the magic that could bring back what he’s lost… or that he hopes can.

I’ve found that one villain simply isn’t enough. Toward the end of The High Road, Mark looked around a gathering battlefield and spotted “a gang-banger, a force of nature, an assassin, and an owl” (and then he added “walk into a bar” because he’d been too worn out to avoid the absurd thought). Freefall has even enemies more in play, and it’s been a pleasure watching how their different goals keep clashing with each other, and evolving.

I keep discovering more about Mark’s allies. His cousin Henry (reluctant big brother, never really able to play a father role to him) had been trying to stay just far enough outside Mark’s struggle; that begins to change. Joe Dennard, Angie’s father, is firmly in it but trying to find his own place when Mark and his newer allies rush into most of the danger first. Other characters that couldn’t even appear until the second book bring the story into the phases I’d been planning for… and yet, what had originally been a throwaway thought as part of killing off one character has pulled itself free and created someone completely new and stolen a few scenes.

My Spellkeepers magic… I’ve seen more and more about how many ways these people can use it. The question of what it really is more complicated—Kate is all too aware of how little her parents were able to tell her when they could, and the whole struggle is at heart the search for secrets of power, from finding the enemy’s to preventing discovery to stopping one villain from seizing their own secrets first. (Of course, another villain already has.)

And first and last, I’ve learned about Angie, and how she and Mark keep changing each other. She’s been the biggest inspiration on his life since they were children, long before (he thought) magic blew into their world. Now she’s the one cause he’s risking everything for, and yet he has so much to learn about what she’s become. Simply bringing her into a scene changes everything from Mark’s attitude to the unique sense of a fight that she’s had since her first scene. But that too keeps changing.

It’s been a wild ride with these two. And after more blind alleys than flying characters should have to worry about, I can finally see the whole path to how their story ends. That’s made it all the harder to write my way toward saying goodbye to them, though it’s also been a joy to bring them to life.

(PS: for more of the lessons I’ve been learning about suspense, take a look at my guest post on the RWA’s Fantasy Science Fiction and Paranormal blog: https://ffprwa.com/blog/)

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How Big is a Hydra? Defining a Story’s Action

How strong is strong?

How much power does a hero need, or a villain? It’s a question that I never get tired of looking at, both reading and writing… especially since I think many people look at the wrong side of it.

Hero versus villain! One man bringing the truth to a hostile world, or one woman facing a dragon! The thrilling power of one expose, or one punch, or weapon, or army—it’s easy for a writer to fall in love with a genre and the tools of conflict that it suggests. What we have to remember is:

Power and struggle are only as good as their context. What’s the world scale that conflict’s in? What other challenges could that action center on instead?

The Swamp around the Hydra

Superheroes are famous for their context. Superman launched the whole genre without real “supervillains” at all, just by being more powerful than locomotives. Of course these days the comics can barely describe anything he isn’t strong enough to lift, and that contrasts with Iron Man easily smashing a building and Spider-Man lifting cars but mostly going up walls instead of through them. But at each level, the scale is set by the modern environment—and how for all our pride in building skyscrapers, the newest titans can leap them in that single bound.

Compare that with epic fantasy. A quasi-medieval hero probably travels by horse, and half his quest is shaped by how the mountains slow his travel. He might have a magic sword that smashes through armor, but he’s still likely to sneak through forests trying to choose fights that are smaller than taking on armies. (Friendly eagles might exist, but it’s not often that they’ll show up to give him rides.) Mainly he’s a human (or elf) in a world that isn’t piled so high as today’s cities, and the world feels much bigger than him. –While the dragon or sorcerer at the climax is more powerful than most of that world.

That sense of scale matters, and it’s usually the environment and the characters’ variety of struggles that pin that scale down. Hercules is famous for fighting monsters, but he needed to move rivers and hold up the sky to remind the Greeks he actually had a demigod’s strength. Otherwise the audience would keep asking “He killed the hydra? What’s that mean, how big is a hydra?”

(Or consider the video games where you build your level from 1 up to 70, but the enemy stats balance out so you’re still fighting ogre-things you beat with three or four hits—not a proper sense that you’re facing demons with whole new levels of powers. And it’s still hitting things, not using your vast healing powers to help the victims of the invasion, or even getting rock-melting gear so you don’t have to explore the later beasts’ tunnels one turn at a time. Games like that feel more like refining your skill in the same basic niche of the world, even if you’re supposed to be becoming the world’s champion.)

For designing a story, that sense ought to be key.

Fight or Flight, and Other Anti-Hydra Tactics

Most genres come with expectations about what conflict will happen. A writer needs to see those clearly, and position the story right at the level—and form—of strength that works for them.

A middle grade story might have kids discovering a smuggler or child abuser, but it won’t have them punching out adult villains. In fact, it needs a sense of the kids’ quiet awe at how the adults drive around town and buy life-changing purchases on what seems like a whim. Of course the police could fix everything… which is why it will take the whole story to find a way to convince them to step in. And in different styles, that might put the focus on making friends with the victim, or snooping through old mansions hoping they aren’t spotted.

Or if the hero is a cop, the clash is gun versus gun and evidence versus coverup, and telling it right means depicting the limits on tactics and forensics. And if the concept expands into the CIA chasing terrorists, the action is similar… but the resources and risks are bigger, and flying across the world or locking down whole towns becomes a lot more likely.

Power defines the story. A werewolf isn’t a dragon, the thing may not be too much stronger and faster than the best human fighter—but it’s more likely to rip down doors or leap to the second-floor window, and of course it shrugs off ordinary bullets. That story could focus on humans just barely able to to fend one off, or were-on-were duels, or it could be a desperate escape or the search for who in town the werewolf is.

And again, which way the story takes that depends on how the writer builds it. Even with that werewolf, a reluctant action hero like my Mark from The High Road would probably center on gravity-powered fights and chases trying to get the jump on the beastie. And a detective—or someone with psychic senses like in Shadowed—would fill more pages trying to identify and trap it before anyone was hurt.

It’s all part of balancing the story out. A hero who can smash walls is really about whatever’s behind the wall that can still challenge him—or else the focus is on whether that smashing causes more trouble than it’s worth. (Even Superman is easy to write in the second mode.) A hacker or telepath will keep trying to pull out secrets that can win the day without any other risks, if the writer lets her.

One sign of a well-built story is that you can quickly sense what form and scale of conflict it’ll focus on. (Or that the twists and changes will use those patterns to surprise you.) If we don’t know how big the hydra is, and why it means they’re fighting or running, nothing else fits.

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Photo by Internet Archive Book Images

Review: Between Two Thorns

How many sides should a story view a conflict from?

I’ve just finished reading one that takes a challenge as simple as winning freedom, and spins out a whole set of different viewpoints—Between Two Thorns by British Fantasy Society Award winner Emma Newman. The book’s had me scratching my head a couple of times, about what it takes to make a single conflict feel like a larger, perilous society.

It starts with a fine hook: a woman in hiding from her family, whose knows her escape is over at just the sight of their fairie patron. When the creature casually mentions that Cathy will have only a few days to impress him or he’ll pull that independent spark out of her head, we know how high the stakes can get.

Then there’s the rest of the ancient families, humans that live between worlds on the whim of those fae. Cathy’s family can’t understand why anyone would want to leave, and they’d beat her if it didn’t leave so many marks before the next ball; her arranged fiance Will seems nice enough but can’t wrap his head around it either. And then there’s the sorcerous Arbiter who’s investigating other mischief the fae-touched have inflicted on us mundanes, and the poor computer programmer who’d be a witness to it if his memory hadn’t been wiped.

All those views do give the story the full sense of being a true hidden world. And Cathy stays an appealing main heroine, trying to save the human boyfriend she stayed too long with, and only sometimes swallowing her regret at all she’s pulled back into. And she plays Mass Effect (would Dragon Age hit too close to home, even though the elves are refugees there?).

And you have to love the world-building in just family names like “Gallica-Rosa” and “Alba-Rosa.” Their fae patron herself is the timeless Lady Rose, but the family keeps the older phrasing “Rosa” and what seems to be the family’s French-based and English-based branches. Elegant.

I have to say there’s one thing I would have liked more of: more sense of the good side, or at least the appeal, of life in the Nether. On the one hand their schemes mean a polite enslavement for Cathy, and murder for some mundanes in their way. But what’s placed beside that is most likely to be only patriarchs and petty sisters sniffing at anything that reduces their social standing—with less sense of what that actually means to them. An Anne Rice would have made these nobles conflicted, compelling figures that are just as dangerous; a Seanan McGuire would have given us moments of the sheer glittery joy of fae-charmed Society that make us all the more leery of its seduction.

Of course to Cathy, all it is is a prison. Will and some of the other nobles do show some kindness to each other, and even to her, but it would be nice to get a more revealing reaction than “you embarrassed us” from someone. What’s behind those barbs that makes people cluster press up against them?

It’s a constant question for any writer: how much to stick to a single viewpoint and the threat to that, and how much more of the world around that peril show—and how to do that larger canvas justice.

So I wonder what I’ll find in the next Split Worlds books.

Photo by Elsie esq.

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Teleportation – the vanishing few ways a writer can control it

A friend of mine is writing a book that features magic for teleportation and dimensional travel. Me being a student of “FantasTactics” (aka a “magic guru”), I couldn’t resist a chance to lay out a few of the ways that kind of power can complicate a story.

And it’s one serious complication. In fact it’s a removal of so many complications we take for granted, it could strip a story down to almost nothing, if we don’t keep a grip on it.

Location Location Location!

The whole idea of teleporting goes against basic drama more than it goes with it. We call stories “the Hero’s Journey” rather than “the Hero’s Instant Arrival” because setting and travel are basic measurements of our lives. Story requires conflict, and each setting contains its own conflicts, so skipping past locations short-circuits what the experience would normally be. That’s triply true for classic fantasy, that wants the medieval feel where a few miles’ travel is a life-changing event. (Like Sam said, “If I take one more step, it’ll be the farthest away from home I’ve ever been.”)

And yet, what if? And reading today, we glance over at the Expedia shortcut on our web browsers (which obsoleted most of travel in itself) and add, why shouldn’t they?

Even Tolkien saw that one coming, being a World War I trench veteran writing around World War II’s mobile war era. He let a flock of helpful eagles into a book he subtitled “There and back again”—and then he kept them grounded until they wouldn’t break the story.

(Lord of the Rings minus Nazgul air supremacy equals two-page book about smug eagles.)

So how does a story keep its suspense from poofing away?

If you don’t know where you’re going, you end up Somewhere Else

Probably the most common words ever spoken about teleportation are: “I can’t go somewhere I haven’t seen.”

It’s a rule of thumb, for how teleporters have to “aim” their travel. Not every convenient corner that’s within their range (we’ll get to range later) is actually open to them—and if they push their luck, things get dangerous.

I’d say the key is: how long does a certain teleporter have to study a location to “find” it again? If he has to see it right then, the magic’s limited to jumping across battlefields (or canyons, or down streets, or through windows…). If it takes minutes of study, he might only need to sneak up nearby and observe, to be ready to slip in any time later. If it requires months, the magic’s only useful for reaching a few well-known “home bases”—and of course for getting out of anywhere else.

But then, aside from those clear points, how much can teleporters “feel” their way to a safe spot? A rough rule some characters use is that a map can let them find an open space outside a city or location, but they can’t risk anything more precise, and so have to go the rest of the way on foot. Meanwhile the cleverest—and most dangerous—casters are the ones who actually do put themselves right at your back, any time they want.

One related point: how well can a teleporter orient himself if he doesn’t know where he’s starting? If they wake up in a strange prison cell, some can simply locate their favorite destination out of the ether; others are lost until they learn where they’ve been moved to, or work out shorter hops relative to where they are now.

The strictest form of this are fixed gates, where someone has to build a portal at the departure point, the arrival, or more often both. These are simple ways to open up just the transits the story wants, and keep it out of anywhere else. (As long as nobody secretly builds an arrival gate on someone’s doorstep, or forces an invasion down through their own favorite gate.)

(As a gamer, I also see gate and magic in most computer games these days, even if it’s just called “fast travel.” Nobody wants to lose play time going back out along roads they’ve already cleared.)

And if a teleporter doesn’t have a clear enough “aim”? In some stories the spell would put them somewhere else, either picked because it was nearby or because it seems similar to the target—or they might be lost somewhere between worlds. In others they’d appear where they actually aimed, and the magic might give anyone standing in that spot a small shove out of the way, or give the teleporter an instant to dodge to a safer spot as they’re taking form. Both problems tend to magnify themselves with an extra cost in magic; what’s the fun in putting the caster off course—or making an emergency landing shift in hostile territory—if he has all his usual power reserves to blink out again?

—That’s not counting the most perilous versions of the magic. In those, you land where your aim actually put you, and if that puts you half an inch below the floor, you lose your feet. These are the teleporters that get very careful what they do.

As you might guess, a teleporter’s best friend is knowledge. Some use scrying powers to get a safe view of a target, others use cunning and thorough descriptions from witnesses, or sneak a “beacon” out onto it. Many teleporters’ enemies find their best defence is not just to hide their home layout but to completely go into hiding, and hope the wizard can’t find them at all.

For a skilled enough teleporter, knowing might be a lot more than half the battle.

Locking the Door

The descriptions above ought to make it clear how powerful teleporting can be. So one extra wrinkle in stories might be designing defenses for it.

This might be an extra limit of the magic itself. Roger Zelazy famously limited Shadowjack to traveling only between shadows, and his Princes of Amber could travel between worlds as long as they could physically travel as well. If you see teleportation as an extension of sailing across the world, it might only work in water; if all magic is drawn from sunlight, there’ll be no teleporting (or anything else) at night.

Or teleportation might be something any fast travel is: conspicuous. It could be the one magic that enemy magicians—or creatures between the worlds—are most likely to sense, something that’s used only to trade certain difficulty for near-certain doom.

(Maybe the strictest limit I’ve seen is in the Basil Broketail series: gates could only be opened into and out of a variation of Hell itself, so the greatest danger was of racing to your exit gate and finding its wardens in the mortal world had not shut it ahead of you. If something primally nasty was on your tail.)

Or even if the magic has no blind spots, other magicians might make some. The more common the magic is, the more obsessed anyone with enemies might be with putting anti-teleport wards on any significant spot… meaning magic can only bring you to the edge of the house or fort or even that whole city that’s important enough to the enemy.

A defender might have other kinds of wards besides barriers. The simplest defenses might only detect a teleporter sneaking in—or they might sense it and then raise barriers to stop him escaping. More powerful wards might pull a teleporter straight into a trap to begin with. Failing that, a defender might be able to trace where someone had teleported from. The movie version of Jumper had one innovation: the villains couldn’t block travel, but their machines did let them open portals to follow the trail of any teleport.

It all depends on how teleporting is positioned in the story’s drama, and in the hierarchy of magic. If it’s an exotic use of higher dimensions of existence, it might be too fundamental a force to ward off, and would have to be controlled through its conspicuousness, or its other limits. Or the more familiar the magic is, the better it might be warded against—at least unless the intruder knows a “deeper route in” or has the power to smash through anyway. (And there’s always good old sabotage from the inside that might lower those wards.)

“People come and go so quickly here!”

We’ve talked about what kinds of places a teleporter could reach, and which might be barred to him. Now, let’s see how he uses those spots.

Any time I see some kind of ability or resource, my first question is how much power does that need? Which is really two questions:

who’s powerful enough to do it?
how much does it take out of them?

Teleporting seems tailor-made to be a mark of advanced power. A master villain or a helpful but “complicated” mentor can zip in and out in ways the heroes simply can’t. At best a hero might get an occasional ride or access to a fixed gate, and that means every long road and ambush he still has to slog through feels even grimmer by comparison. If a hero masters teleportation or wins the full-time help of someone who has, it can be a sign that the story’s almost over.

But that in itself probably won’t keep a story together. It’s too easy to ask, “Why does that vanishing villain need to build his Ultimate Weapon if he could just appear where the hero’s asleep?”

That second side of the power question might answer that. More precisely, how much of the caster’s fighting and working energy does a teleport use up? If it drains:

very little of it: if you truly make the magic so easy, he’s got a free pass to flit around anytime he wants, at least within the range and other limits he has.
a third of it: he might teleport in on a whim—but limit what he does then so he still has the final third of his strength to duck out again. (And suddenly a lot of villains’ probing, tentative raids make more sense, don’t they?)
most of his power: he’d be less eager to jaunt around, and might resist using enough power on anything else that he’d endanger his escape option. And he’d want to be keep a destination he was sure was safe.
days, or years, of saved up power? choices get all the more careful…
specialized stored power: he has as many teleports as he can store up for, and can still use his full arsenal of fighting magic between those jumps. If you want a combat wizard who includes powerful teleports as part of his assaults, this extra wrinkle might be needed.

You see how the basics change how the power’s used. And there are a few related limits in that:

Distance: How far a teleport does the above apply to? If teleporting actually can cross the world, all its story-breaking risks are multiplied by the number of safe targets and escapable spots within its reach—pretty much infinite, until the other limits set in. Crossing a mile or two is still a massive advantage, but that one transit mostly affects a single battle, or provides an incomplete “we’re not out of the woods yet” escape. Even a five-foot teleport can get a trickster behind an enemy or through a wall, if it’s fast or just well planned.

Passengers: Does a teleporter have to travel alone? That can be a reason for a villain or a meddler to always send other people to do his work. Or the more allies he can take along, the more he can get done—even if reaching his target wipes out all his own strength. And if he can hold a gate open to march an army through—let alone create a permanent portal system—he pretty much remakes the world’s map every time.

Passenger Exhaustion: Besides the purely magical cost to the caster, are he and the people he carries too weakened to function for a while? This limit can keep a teleporter from dropping a strike team into a fight, but let him still pull them out of it or cut down on travel time.

And, are all a person’s teleports at the same cost? How quickly does nearing his maximum range or weight drive it up?

Blink and you’ll miss it

One other issue with teleportation: speed.

No matter how blind or short-range a teleport is, being able to vanish in an instant is still the perfect defense, as long as there’s any landing place that’s safer than where you were. And it doesn’t stop with defense.

Fast-vanishing to even a spot in plain view ten or thirty feet away (say behind an enemy’s back) is all it takes for a fearsome combat advantage. Add enough more power to make five more teleports like it or the control to land safely out of sight in a closet and… if this starts to sound more like a mischievous but unstoppable imp than a character, it’s because that character would be almost unbeatable.

So fast-activated teleportation ought to be the most limited type of all. It could be an emergency escape, so powerful the character only uses it once—and that character might be the one who’s removed from the story soon after. It could be the talent of a powerful but sheltered wizard who has a real struggle choosing his moment in the confusion of a fight, or a scheming villain who always puts his own survival first. And a teleport that takes ten or even sixty seconds to cast still has plenty of chances to turn a crisis on its head, if they plan any time to cast it.

Roughly speaking, a teleporter’s power might be measured as

aim (reduced by warded areas) x range x number of teleports x number of people x speed

but I expect any two factors can do more than simply multiply each other if they aren’t limited. Just which ones the magic is strongest at might define huge parts of your story. For instance:

A master of safely aimed teleporting could be an unstoppable spy or assassin.
A world-ranging teleporter might be a master diplomat, or explorer.
A heavy-lifting teleporter would be drawn to support an elite team of some kind—or be a merchant who ferried in goods by the cartload.
A fast-vanishing “speed demon” would be among the deadliest fighters known, or a fugitive nobody could pin down.

Just which teleporting types and combinations a story’s magic allows are up to each writer. And then all that’s left is to keep up with all the ways different characters are going to use it.

And with that said—

I’m out of here.

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Photo by emiliokuffer

A Jessica Jones Experiment – Take the TMI Test

So Season 2 of Jessica Jones is out. And this time it’s almost perfect.

As a show, Jessica… how do I say this? Her first season was the only series that’s ever made me rethink Buffy The Vampire-Slayer (see my past rave) and remind myself it isn’t fair to anyone to compare Buffy’s seven whopping seasons of frequently-legendary storytelling to one thirteen-episode arc of focused perfection.

It’s also not fair to compare Jessica’s Season 2 to her first, if only because if it were any show but hers you couldn’t compare it to that first storyline without admitting that would be setting an impossible standard. And Season 2 does have pretty much all the things that made the first what it was:

What We’re Jonesing For

Krysten Ritter. Just enough doors ripped off hinges for a PI-slash-superhero story. Trish trying to be the only anchor in Jessica’s life. Krysten Ritter. Bitter monologues, bitter alcohol, and PI dialogue with more bite than the booze our hero swims in. Malcolm the neighbor (now in a new position), sweet and likable with his own issues. Lawyer Jeri being a greater force of self-destruction than Krysten Ritter’s Jessica, and that’s saying plenty. A world aware of superpowers, and with no idea how to deal with a woman who doesn’t wear a mask or want to be a hero. That jazzy, pumped-up theme sequence that any other show would kill for, if it was worthy of it. And always, Krysten Ritter.

And it took courage not to build another season around the Marvel villain who’s better than Loki—

Yes, I said it. Tom Hiddleston only plays the second-greatest villain in Marvel history.

So it isn’t the new villains themselves where I’d say this season made its one slip. With all the above in play, you can bet this is a show with more than just villainous charisma to offer. (Though of course the last season having all that and Kilgrave’s incredible, Jessica-heart-tearing arc gave it more awesomeness than most storytellers would know what to do with.)

This time: Jess investigating her powers’ history? cool. A connection to our so-reluctant heroine? it delivers one as close as Kilgrave’s ever was, once it becomes clear. Different threads tangling in different ways, so you never know which is going to be driving the story next? that structure works for most other Marvel Netflix shows, even though last time letting Kilgrave be at the root of everything worked so well.

There’s Always Something

Still, I think they missed something. With all due respect to Melissa Rosenberg and the rest of the magnificent people who designed this season, I think there’s a place where I expected them to do better. And I think it’s a lesson worth pointing out to all of us who write or care about quality storytelling.

Readers, you can test this yourself, with a little experiment. And yes, the instructions are completely spoiler-safe… in fact they depend on your not knowing too much too soon.

If you haven’t see Season 2 yet—

(And it really ought to be “yet,” if you’re reading this blog but haven’t seen the story already. Or if you’re not on Netflix, consider some math: Eight dollars for one month, divided by two thirteen-episode seasons of Jessica? At the rate most people tear through those eps once they start, you might have weeks left in that month to look at the other five-and-counting Marvel shows and Netflix’s other offerings, before you have to decide whether to drop another $8. No, Netflix isn’t paying me to present those numbers; they’re just something to think about.)

If you haven’t seen Season 2 yet, the “experiment” is:

See the first six episodes. But instead of watching Episode 7 (called “AKA I Want Your Cray Cray”), skip it until you’ve seen the next one or two. Because all but one obvious minute of that ep is all flashbacks, and it’s there solely to give out Too Much Information, too soon, about the characters and motivations of what we’ve just discovered. Instead, go straight to Ep 8 and maybe 9, and just follow how Jessica has to cope with her situation—without you getting that extra perspective on character that our heroine herself has to build on her own. Then go back and look at Ep 7.

Or if you can’t bring yourself to skip the episode (or you’ve already seen it all), imagine how the show would look without that one filling us in too soon.

It’s a basic belief of mine: the heart of a story is what the characters know and what they can do about it in that moment; their choice in each moment is everything. So any other-viewpoint scenes ought to be used to build suspense, not overshare about someone to the point that the viewer/reader is pushed back from that in-the-trenches challenge that the actual hero is slow-w-w-ly learning to cope with.

Great stories (like Season 1) live within those moments and their pacing. Easy flashbacks or other infodumps cheat us.

For those who have seen the season: I will admit this is a more logical storyline to use those flashbacks in than many tales might be. At the point where the flashes start (with that last word of Ep 6) the story’s just unveiled a huge change of our understanding of the characters, so that stopping to fast-explore it all is easier than working through it normally. I’ll also admit that the truth and the conflict they’re setting up are less about layers above anyone’s Deepest Truth than they’re about facing people’s sheer unpredictability, which means giving us an immediate peak at their contradictions still leaves us with the nitro-volatile questions of what they’ll do next.

But I say the storyline would still have been better if that Ep 7 info had been unpacked and laid out a step at a time, so that we took it in alongside Jessica. She’s the one who needs to deal with it, and we don’t want to jump ahead of her.

Try the season that way, or imagine it, by moving through that point flashback-free. See if you agree.

Too Much Information only swamps what the story’s trying to be. Even a story that’s still as stunning as Jess’s new season.

(One more thing: if you’re trying this, don’t tell Jessica. She’s really not a fan of “experiments” these days, and none of us want her ripping down our doors.)

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What If – Magic-Killers had their own Masquerade?

One writing exercise I’ve used for the longest time is to take fifteen or thirty minutes after every novel I read to cobble together some thoughts on how I’d write something with similar ideas. For instance…

Picture a young witch– a common protagonist in urban fantasy, sure. In this case it would be a world like ours where magicians were rare, not that powerful, and well-hidden among the ordinary humans (aka a “Masquerade” pretending that there is no magic; I wrote about that a while ago). Magic has its uses on a small scale, but not enough to change the world, so they’d rather keep themselves under the radar.

The witch’s mother is dying, of injuries from a nasty, senseless mugging. Our heroine tracks down the muggers, but she finds there’s no point in revenge because the event was just that random. She tries to heal her mother with magic… and only makes her condition worse before it ends. At her lowest ebb, she reveals what she is to her boyfriend, and his pity pushes her to the edge of suicide. Before she decides instead to run.

She fakes her death, and makes her way to a large city to start a new life. It’s an awkward process at first, cutting ties with her past and deciding if magic deserves to be any part of her life at all. Her friends are mostly the ones she makes at work; she avoids what other witches she knows are in the city. Some of them do find her, and see she’s not interested in being a real part of their community.

Then one of the witches dies. Then another.

The first time it’s someone she knows enough to take a look at, and to discover it’s a lover’s quarrel gone bad. The second time it’s an accident… until she sees the connection to the first. There was a moment when both witches used their magic in public, well hidden but still giving some clue of what they’d done. Of course there’s nobody in either victim’s life that actually caused those tragedies… and no way those people knew each other…

Can you call it a conspiracy if there’s only a handful of people at the core? and the people in each witch’s life never realize they’re being sought out and encouraged to fear, and to find some quiet way to remove that witch? Witches can’t fight back if they–and their killers–never know there’s anything more behind it.

It would be an interesting slow burn of a book to write. A protagonist trying to immerse herself in her own life, ready to put that ahead of any identity connecting herself with the others. Layers of doubt about what might be going on, who might believe her, and if there’s any way to reach the source. A few questions about how unreliable and dangerous the kind of magic is, to make her wonder if it’s worth defending. Probably a shock or two with the idea that if witches are so well hidden, how many non-witches have been killed for some incident in the news that the silent killers can’t distinguish from real magic. A story of victims and resistance, with real questions about what’s part of the everyday world and what deserves to be.

–No, it’s not the backstory for any character in Shadowed, though the books after that will go into some of the same territory. Magic in The High Road and the rest of the Spellkeeper Flight books has its own “masquerade” issues that are a bit different.

And no, I won’t say which exact book inspired the odd little half-hour it took to tinker that idea together. I’m not sure how Jim Butcher would reply.

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Photo by theilr

Instructions for Control Magic

(Papers left in a hidden location in the city of Lavine)

I’m writing these down because the knowledge needs to last.

Now that you have it, one choice you’ll make is if you’ll share it, arrange for someone else to find it when you die—if you die—or simply leave them to be discovered. That’s up to you.

First: all of this magic is real.

Before you start thinking it’s some joke, pick up one of my talismans or make one of your own, then touch an animal (not a person yet; no witnesses) and try to find the trick of concentration that will let you reach the creature’s mind. If the mental keys don’t come easy to you yet, think about how this power will change every single part of your life, if it does turn out to be true.

It’s also dangerous. If you lose control of the magic, you can miss out on years of your life, and there are worse things it can do. Mastering it takes courage.

Also, if you feel that controlling the power feels like juggling two forces rather than one, that’s because it is. My proudest moment has been finding the secret of a second magic, and learning to join that energy with my own so they reinforce each other. You’ll be learning to grasp one while compensating for the other, until you can switch between them as fast as thought.

(I believe there have to be more forms of magic than these two that have hidden in Lavine. I mean to keep looking.)

Possession is the more flexible magic.

Hold a talisman and learn to move your thoughts into another mind to control it, by touch. You’ll find your control is weak and dangerous to you unless you push your will into theirs far enough to overwhelm them and abandon your own body. (Returning will be easy, if you do it right.)

Once in control, you can move that creature from the inside, view the world through their senses, and then touch another to shift into that body, and so on. Most important, those affected will have no memory of the time you were in control.

–Because of course, the magic’s value completely depends on people never suspecting you can turn anyone and anything against them. You’ll learn to find people who will convince themselves a few lost minutes only mean they were tired. With practice you can move through a crowd by seizing someone for the moment it takes to brush against the person ahead, and keep shifting forward faster than any of them notice. People find it easy to ignore missing moments because they have no reason to believe anything else—and only your carelessness can open their eyes. Disguising the time you take would be easier in the days before clocks were in view everywhere.

The most difficult skill would be to control a person around people who know him, without giving everything away. Every moment can involve more knowledge you don’t have (believe me, you can’t read their memories) and another test of how well you’ve learned to imitate how they speak.

Much easier is to control animals. Since what you most often want is mobile eyes around the city, this usually means birds. –Yes, birds. Now you see my interest in keeping them.

You should see the challenges in making the best use of your control. The other truth is that you can always release your hold on a mind and return to your own body in an instant.

–Practice that skill. Even small injury to a body you’re in will be painful to you. The most likely danger might be as you’re first learning to control animals and avoid the hazards around them. A hawk killed the first pigeon I flew, and I am always grateful I got out before it struck.

Sleep is the deeper magic.

By touch you can also put someone to sleep, for minutes or for much longer.

This works best combined with possession: if you’re leaving a body in a position where they’d notice too much, you can knock it out as you leave. Or as a simple weapon, it’s less trouble than taking control.

But let me be clear: when you send yourself to sleep, you do not age.

Think about that. Which hours of the day are actually worth living in? What days would you have plans you need to check on, and which do not?

Taking full advantage of this means learning to leave your body protected. It means rethinking every moment in your life ahead, and whether it needs to reconnect with the people that have been tied to you, or not. You can learn just how often to visit people to lull their suspicions—you’ll see how often someone expects you to waste the time you have because they have no idea you have better choices. Ordinary people become… ordinary.

I would say I’m older than I look, but you’ll find other factors have been at work.

The key is the talismans.

Magic is an energy that is drawn into talismans we prepare. Each use of it drains some of that power, and needs it to be restored.

When you shift your mind, you carry some of that energy from your talisman with you, but the bulk of it stays on your real body.

There are also ways to use talismans to extend your control beyond your touch.

First, create a talisman from a piece of–

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For Lynn

A friend died last weekend.

Lynn Ward had been a part of our writers group for years. From the beginning she’d been insightful and honest about all of our work, while favoring us with tales ranging from memory implants to a beautifully crafted battle of a wizard’s apprentice and her aging master against a horde of bandits with a cause.

Between the stories, Lynn’s no-nonsense tone for some of the… well, nonsense she dealt with was always a contrast to the kindness she had for us, and her unfailing support for her family.

And then, last week… she was gone. We’re still in shock.

I try to think of a reason, or a lesson, or anything to take from a tragedy like this. What I find is an irony: Lynn was just working her way into a shiny new novel that had what we all thought might be the perfect opening line:

“Beware Lord Barkin,” Ardath’s late mother Sela told her, for the fifth time. “He’s mad now.”

Now… it’s painfully perfect. And all I can think is, like Ardath, I’ll be listening for whenever the wind blows right to bring us a message. And wishing.