Anonymous asked: I love your writing a lot, esp your original writing. Could you tell us about your current novel? The 'earth is where trouble comes from' one? Pretty pretty please?
OH MY GOD ANON YES I WILL.
Okay, so you might know how at the end of every third YA book where there’s a trip to another world and a prophecy and magic and world-saving, the protagonist gets popped back into their life on Earth all “Welp, good to have you here, kid, have fun with your nice Life Lessons and PTSD and what-not, about your business.” Like, Narnia, for example. I had a lot of issues with Narnia and the whole “You’re too old now, you can never come back, leave and go live out your life and forget about magic and wonder and miracles” shtick when I read it as a little kid. Yeah, this novel is the product of maybe twelve years of stewing over that kind of ending.
So, this book, which I’m currently just calling Alleirat, is about the hero of one of those novels and the villain of one of those novels, once they’ve grown up to twenty-somethings.
The general plot of the YA novel (which won’t be written, it’s the backstory) was that a ten-year-old girl and boy both fell through a thin spot between worlds to Alleirat, where magic is the norm and there’s a standing prophecy someone got off a ghost a long time ago about a worldwalker who will save them from a great evil. Since they manage to fall through to a time where sexism is kind of A Thing, they leave the girl, who takes the name Brenneth and has an ability for fire magic, to be raised as a blacksmith, and take the boy, Crispin, with an ability for weather magic, to be trained as a hero–and spend the next ten years telling Crispin that it’s his destiny to save them all. Crispin, unsurprisingly, snaps, when he’s twenty years old. He suffers a nervous breakdown, and the logic he follows is that, in order to save everyone, he needs to be in control, and he consequently sets out to take over the world. Which goes over great–so great, in fact, that he’s given the nickname the White Wolf (their society associates white with death and wolves with evil/hunger/rage). Increasingly desperate to stop him, the Alleirai leaders call on Crispin’s oldest friend Brenneth to fight for them, and she agrees. About four years (and one sword through the chest very narrowly survived Because Magic) later she manages to stop Crispin (and also cuts off his arm, which he understandably takes personally).
And then…they get popped back into their ten-year-old, perfectly intact bodies on Earth. No destiny. No magic. No one who understands why these two kids who were perfectly normal an hour ago suddenly act like soldiers fresh off the battlefield, jumping at every loud noise and picking fights and waking up from screaming nightmares. Except each other.
Fast forward fourteen years (take two, On Earth Version) and we’re at the start of the novel. Brenneth and Crispin have a very strange relationship, the sort of relationship you might expect from two people who have transitioned from friends, to close friends, to mortal enemies, to calling each other just to listen to someone scream at them in Alleirai, to drinking weekly and talking about how much they hate being stuck on Earth. They have Issues, is the point here, and the primary life lesson they took away from their time in Alleirat is “magic is great, and just because you were born on one planet doesn’t make it your home.” So, naturally, they fall through to Alleirat again.
Which is great.
Except for the fact that, in order:
- Crispin is probably going to be executed for his crimes, which he understands but Brenneth is Not Okay with (and willing to take a stand against)
- It’s been four centuries since they left
- Brenneth is highly uneasy with having gone down in history as a hero of legend
- It’s been four centuries and everyone they knew is consequently dead
- They’ve come back just in time to deal with another worldwalker fucking shit up, this time with death magic (necromancy, woo! *throws flowers*)
- It’s been FOUR CENTURIES and they’re officially in history books and constellations
Now, the reason that Earth Is The Problem Planet, is that, basically, there are hundreds or thousands of worlds (the Alleirai know this for sure) and they all intersect at Earth. The problems with this are that, A, Earth is the only world without magic (since all the other worlds basically cancel it out) and therefore a lot of people on Earth have truly massive magical potential built up over the millennia, which turns terrifying once they can actually use it (Crispin figured out how to fly using weather magic, and Brenneth can cast unquenchable dragon fire), and, B, people from Earth keep falling through the cracks. Since they’re distributed across all these worlds, Alleirat can and has gone several centuries without one, but they’re also common enough that Alleirat does have a word specifically for them. And they usually cause trouble, because it’s always the ones with strong magic who fall through.
So yeah, that’s basically the novel.
Some other things I find to be highlights:
- Alleirat has actual high fantasy diversity! The mountainous Northern part of the continent has fair-skinned folk, whereas Brenneth (whose family is from southern India) looks more like the people from the fertile Southern plains, closer to the equator of the planet. The Outrigger Islands scattered around the south and east/west tend to have skin tones ranging between maybe Morocco and Nubia, depending on how far from the midline of the planet they are.
- Alleirat, having been schooled by Brenneth last time, now has a warrior/civilian divide rather than our masculine/feminine divide (it looks similar, though, because Humans Are Problematic). This manifests itself most intensely in a distinction in dress. Civilians are expected to dress more modestly, whereas any gender of warrior is accepted to be shirtless pretty much whenever. Hair length is also considered to be more of a marker of social rank than skin tone–long hair equates to higher status, shorter hair means you work as a laborer or another low-status job (this has been a thing for a long while, though, since before Crispin and Brenneth).
- Alleirat has dragons (crafted and blessed by the god of fire, battle, and lies, of whom Brenneth is a devotee) and griffins (crafted and blessed by the goddess of stars, storms, and fallen things, of whom Crispin is a devotee). Dragons breathe unquenchable magical fire, and griffins can send lightning along their wings. I think they’re pretty cool.
- Alleirat has an arrangement called amuniasa, which is an unrequited or courtly love arrangement, as an accepted part of society. The amdri, or the lover, tells the object of their feelings how they feel, and that person can either accept a romantic/sexual relationship or proclaim themselves amiasa, or the beloved, indicating that they don’t return the feelings, but recognize the honor they are being given. It’s very poor form to pressure your amiasa into returning your feelings, and likewise it’s very poor form to lead your amdri on–your window to change your mind is limited. Amuniasa is generally considered to be about as binding as marriage, although plenty of amdri also have a spouse whom they love sincerely–basically, polyamory. Example: Brenneth’s right-hand woman last time around was her amdri, although her feelings were completely committed to Brenneth and she never took a spouse. Also, she has a daughter that joins Crispin and Brenneth this time (their specific race is incredibly long-lived) whose coloring suggests that she specifically took a lover who looked like Brenneth.
- Brenneth is pretty much the beauty standard these days (they take their heroes of legend seriously in Alleirat), meaning that they revere women with lush black hair, broad shoulders, and dark skin. I dunno, it felt right at the time that I made that decision.
- The primary port city on the East, Dase, has a port that is literally carved straight into a four-hundred-foot cliff face. Like. The city is on top of the harbor. I stole this from the D&D campaign I ran last semester, but I did invent it in the first place for a completely different novel that will never be finished, so. It’s not plagarism because I wrote it, basically.
- I am literally creating a language for this bullshit universe that has taken over my life. I am ilala–an idiot.
