Second half of Inheritance of Magic #5 is creeping along. I’m focusing pretty hard on it, since I’d still really like to get the book finished by the end of the summer.
Copy-edits on Inheritance of Magic #4 are scheduled to come in at the end of June. They’ll probably take me a couple of weeks or so, but I doubt they’ll be too much of a distraction. Planned release date of Inheritance of Magic #4 remains November.
Went to an Orbit authors-and-booksellers event in London last night, which I think was the first author event I’ve done in two years. I had a very nice time, so thanks to my publishers for organising and to the booksellers and authors I got to talk with!
I’d say that I’m looking forward to the next one, but at the rate I tend to attend these things, I’m due to go to my next one somewhere around 2028-ish. Was still fun though!
Now that the edits on Inheritance of Magic #4 are done, it’s back to work on Inheritance of Magic #5. I’ve started work on the second half, which I’m hoping to finish by the end of the summer. Don’t know if I’ll make that deadline, but it’s the target I’m shooting for; if I average one page a day for the next few months, I’ll make it. We’ll see how it goes!
Heads, feet, and everything else.
The traditional location for any sigl affecting the wielder’s vision. Sigls are usually worn in this location because you have to, not because you want to – if you want something like a darksight sigl that converts incoming radiation into visible light, it basically has to go on the lower forehead or around the bridge of the nose (you can mount it on a ring and hold your hand to your face whenever you need to use it, but it only takes most drucrafters an hour or two of trying this method to realise that they really don’t want to do it long term).
Outside of necessity, a headband is pretty much the worst possible place to mount a sigl – it’s easier to lose than a necklace, it doesn’t have the flexibility of a ring, you can’t see it without a mirror (so mounting more than one brings its own problems), and it’s incredibly obvious to observers and potential thieves. Still, if you have to, you have to.
A relatively recent replacement for the headband/circlet approach that became popular in the twentieth century. A pair of glasses with a sigl set into the bridge is much less eye-catching than a circlet or a headband, and it can be quite subtle – by choosing a suitable material and design for the glasses, the sigl can be camouflaged so well that most observers won’t notice that the drucrafter is wearing a sigl at all.
The only drawback of glasses vs. a headband is that they’re a bit easier to lose – glasses do slip off or get knocked off, and if the lenses get cracked or broken but you still want to use the sigl, it puts you in a bit of a difficult position. Still, most drucrafters consider the benefits worth the trade-off.
A very rare option. While mounting a sigl near the feet might seem to make a kind of sense given that human beings use their feet just as much as their hands, in practice much of the utility of wearing sigls on the hand comes from the fact that people have so much natural dexterity with their fingers. Take that away, and it isn’t very effective.
The only real application for this location is for certain Motion sigls. Some drucrafters have experimented with using jump and other mobility sigls placed on a foot, but this typically makes the drucrafter massively unbalanced. Using a pair of sigls, one on each foot, works much better, but of course doubles the cost. Aside from this and the equally niche mighty blow sigl, this location typically goes unused.
For drucrafters who don’t want to wear their sigls at all, a handset – where the sigl is set into some sort of grip or other hand-held object – is the natural option. The variety of sigl handsets is huge: some look like the handle of a tool or weapon, others more like the grip on a ski pole or walking stick. The exact design doesn’t matter very much, since all a handset really does is make a sigl bigger (and thus easier to hold onto and keep track of).
There are two reasons to use a handset setting. The first is when you’re only planning to use your sigls one at a time in a controlled environment, where you’ve got time to pick up and set down a handset in between uses. So long as you can spare a few seconds to switch between sigls, then whether the sigl is worn or carried doesn’t really matter. The second, less common reason to use a handset is when you have so many sigls that wearing them all just isn’t practical. Given how expensive sigls can be, this is a bit of a luxury problem for most people, but for some medical drucrafters who might have an collection of fifty different Life sigls, all specialised for treating slightly different conditions, carrying them around in handset form is the most convenient solution.
The drawbacks of handsets are obvious – you have to fish out the right handset before you can use it. This is fine for industrial or medical work, but makes them a bad choice in dangerous situations where every second counts. They’re also very easy to steal.
Edits on Inheritance of Magic #4 are nearly done! As of today, I’m up to Chapter 19; the book is 21 chapters long, so I can reasonably expect to be finished by the end of the weekend.
These kind of rewrite-style edits are always quite stressful to do, since I have to hold the whole book in my mind while making any changes, and it’s very common that adding something in one part of the book requires me to both add and subtract bits elsewhere. For example, I might decide to add in a few paragraphs talking about Stephen making a new sigl in chapter 17, then as a result of that have to go forward and add in some references to the newly-expanded sigl in chapter 19, but also go back and delete the (now obsolete) references to that same sigl that I’d originally had back in chapter 15. It always feels to me rather like fiddling with a giant three-dimensional puzzle where moving one part causes knock-on effects to others, and it’s quite demanding on my memory and concentration.
Still, it’s worth the effort. I always come away from editing a book with the feeling that it’s a much better book now than it was at the first-draft stage, so even if the work is pretty demanding, I always try to do a thorough job. If I didn’t edit my manuscripts (and didn’t have to wait for my publishers) I’d be able to publish them a full year earlier, but they’d be much worse books as a result.
Next week will be the final part of the Sigl Fashion mini-series, covering all the remaining places that drucrafters wear or carry their sigls. By which point, I’ll hopefully be stuck back in to the second half of book #5!
A look at the ways in which sigls can be worn on the hands and arms.
Traditionally the second-most popular location. Setting sigls into a ring requires a little more work than stringing one on a necklace, but it’s still a very easy job for a jeweller or machinist, and can be done at home by any drucrafter willing to learn the basics of handicrafts.
A very good all-round choice that provides many benefits with few drawbacks. While not quite as secure as a necklace, rings are still difficult to steal without the wearer noticing, and while they can slip off, this doesn’t happen often. Locating a sigl on a finger also gives it a great deal of flexibility; a drucrafter can move a ring around as quickly as they can move their hand, making a ring setting ideal for any sigl which you might need to use either on yourself or someone else. The fact that a ring can be held at arm’s length also makes this a natural choice for offensive sigls that you’d like to discharge at a safe distance from your body.
A final, less obvious advantage of rings is that they allow a drucrafter to naturally separate their essentia flows by channelling their personal essentia down the respective finger, making them ideal for beginner and intermediate channellers who might lack the precise control required to channel essentia into one of two sigls side by side. Even advanced channellers (who do have that kind of control) often appreciate the convenience of this.
Rings do come with some issues. They’re relatively easy to spot, and while a drucraft ring with an inset sigl looks very similar to a regular ring with an inset gemstone, an expert eye can often tell the difference, potentially giving away more information than the wielder might want to. They can also be vulnerable; while it’s not common for a ring to be smashed or crushed, it does happen, and while sigls are tough, they’re not indestructible. In practice, this isn’t usually too big a concern, since if your fingers are being exposed to some impact capable of crushing metal or aurum, you’ve probably got bigger things to worry about than whether your sigl will be okay afterwards.
In practice, though, the most common reason not to put a sigl into a ring is when the sigl type is best activated from somewhere other than the fingers. Any kind of sigl designed to be centred on the wielder (such as an invisibility bubble) wants to be on the torso, not on the limbs. If it were practical or effective to wear an invisibility sigl in ring form, drucrafters would probably do it.
Drucrafters who for whatever reason aren’t comfortable with having their sigls visible in ring form, but who still want the flexibility of being able to move the sigl around on the end of their arm, may opt for a bracelet instead. Since a bracelet has the whole wrist to support it instead of a single finger, it can be made much thicker and heavier than a ring, making it a good deal more secure. Bracelet-mounted sigls are also much easier to conceal, by pulling down one’s sleeve or by twisting the bracelet so that the sigls face inwards.
The main drawback of this location is that the wrist is nowhere near as dextrous as the fingers, making a bracelet-mounted sigl somewhat harder to aim. As such, it tends to be preferred for sigls that affect the drucrafter (such as shields or barriers) or ones that don’t need very precise targeting (such as searchlight-type effects).
Some combat drucrafters eventually start to bump up against the natural limits of carrying their sigls in ring or bracelet form (usually because they’ve reached the point where they’ve got more combat sigls than they have arms or fingers). At this point, they have a choice; cut back on their sigl loadout, or get something bigger.
Sigl gloves or sigl gauntlets are items of protective wear designed to carry a large number of sigls into a dangerous environment, and as such are usually made out of tough materials – thick leather and chain mail are the most common choices, sometimes with metal plates. Wearing a sigl glove is the drucraft equivalent of showing up somewhere dressed in body armour and carrying a gun – it’s effectively announcing that you’re expecting trouble (possibly because you expect to be the one starting it).
Currently taking a break from Inheritance of Magic #5 to work on the edits for Inheritance of Magic #4. I’m actually enjoying it; edits are hard work (significantly harder than a first draft) but they also make an enormous difference. Even relatively small editorial changes (maybe changing 5% or less of the book’s total wordcount) can hugely improve the final result.
For instance, one very common thing to find in first drafts is beginnings of plot threads that don’t go anywhere. Usually this is something that happens organically – while you’re writing the first draft, you include something as a potential plotline that you’re thinking of developing in some way. Then things change – either the story goes in a different direction to the one you were expecting, or you end up replacing that development with something else, or you just realise that the plotline isn’t really working out that well and decide to drop it. In all cases this means that the starting bits of the plotline become redundant and don’t go anywhere. One of the major things you do while editing is to snip out bits like this. So instead of a map with one main path and lots of little offshoots that fade out into a blur, you end up with a map with fewer offshoots, but all of which are fully drawn in. It makes the book much clearer and more satisfying to read.
The result of all this is that editing, while it can be a bit frustrating from time to time, is also quite rewarding. You can very much see the book getting better as you work.
At the moment I’m averaging about one chapter a day, and IoM #4 is about twenty chapters long. So with a bit of luck I should be finished by around the middle of the month. Once that’s done, it’ll be back to work on book #5!
Essentia channelling is very short-ranged. To channel through a sigl, a drucrafter needs that sigl to be very close – preferably, touching their skin. This means that if you plan to make a habit of using sigls, you’re either going to have to hold them, or you’re going to have to wear them.
The ‘hold them’ option is not recommended. Using a sigl freehand is not usually dangerous (except in the case of particularly aggressive combat sigls) but it’s a great way for it to get lost. Sigls are tiny – a regular C-class sigl is only a third of a centimetre across – and if you try to carry one in your pocket, then you’re likely to either drop it somewhere really inconvenient, have it get lost under a bunch of other, bigger things, or both. This is especially the case if you have to use the sigl under pressure – if you’re in a rush or in danger, trying to fish out something barely bigger than a match head and use it without fumbling and dropping it is a recipe for disaster.
For this reason, if you’re a drucrafter, it’s convenient to find some way of wearing your sigls on your body in such a way they’re both secure and conveniently accessible. It should come as no surprise that – after thousands of years of practice – drucrafters have come up with many, many ways to do this.
Here are a few of the more popular methods.
Probably the oldest and simplest way to wear a sigl; just loop a cord, string, or thread around your neck and hang the sigl from it. You still need to figure out some way to fix the sigl to the cord, but this isn’t usually too hard.
The biggest advantage of this method is security. It’s really, really hard to steal something that’s hanging from someone’s neck and under their clothes – in fact, unless they’re in beachwear or a low-cut top, you probably won’t be able to tell that they’re wearing a sigl at all. Items worn on a necklace also conveniently tend to hang around the middle of the wearer’s chest, which is an ideal location for many Life and Matter enhancement effects.
The main drawback of the necklace method is that, while potential thieves can’t see a sigl worn on a necklace under your clothes, neither can you. This isn’t usually an issue if you’re only wearing one, but once you start stringing more than one together, you can start running into issues where you lose track of which sigl is which, meaning that you could channel essentia into one sigl when it was meant for another (quite embarrassing if you’ve got a combat sigl mixed in with several others). This also makes this location less than ideal for most Light sigls, which tend to need to be uncovered to work – you can get around this by having windows cut out of your clothing, but that tends to negate any benefit from wearing the sigl under your clothing in the first place.
This location is also a bad choice for any sigls designed to produce harmful effects, for fairly obvious reasons.
A somewhat less common variant of the necklace approach, where the sigl is set into a belt buckle or worn on a band or chain around the waist. Not as secure as a necklace, but has the advantage of being closer to the wielder’s centre of mass, which can matter for sigls that project a field – these often have a sharply limited range, so wearing them at the chest can mean the sigl doesn’t reach down to the drucrafter’s ankles and feet. The question of whether certain Light or Matter sigls are best worn high on the waist vs. low on the abdomen is a perennial argument amongst drucrafters.
Well, the edits for Book #4 in the Inheritance of Magic series are finally in! I read through them on Wednesday and started work on them on Thursday.
The good news is that none of the suggested changes are all that major, and most don’t seem as though they’ll take a gigantic amount of time or effort. That said, the delays have impacted things a bit. There are some suggested changes (mostly along the lines of “can you rewrite this scene?”) which I might have been willing to do back around December in the immediate aftermath of the book, but which I don’t really want to do now. The longer the gap between first draft and edits, the more a story tends to ‘set’ in your mind, and the more work it takes to make significant changes. So I’m probably going to make fewer editorial changes than I would have done otherwise.
Even so, I doubt getting through these edits will be fast – in all likelihood it’ll keep me busy for the next few weeks – which means that Book #5 is going to have to be set aside for a little while. Luckily, since I just reached the halfway mark, I’m at a natural break point, so this is a fairly convenient place to take a pause. So my current plan is to do the edits, then get back to Book #5. Hopefully I should be able to get started on the second half of that by early next month/middle of next month, with the aim of finishing Book #5 by around end of summer.
In the meantime, on this blog, I’ll be starting a new mini-series of worldbuilding articles on Sigl Fashion, covering the ways drucrafters in this setting wear, bear, or carry sigls. This’ll be three parts long, and will run from the beginning to the end of May. Hope you find it interesting!
Inheritance of Magic #5 is halfway done! I usually divide my books up into six sections, each of around 15,000 words or a little more. As of this week, the third section of Book #5 is now finished, and the first draft of the manuscript is sitting at 47,000 words. My books usually run to around 90-100k words in total, so if the pattern holds, we should be about 50% of the way through.
I’m very happy about this, since my last couple of books took much longer to finish than I’d hoped, to the point that I was starting to feel that I wouldn’t be able to keep to my one-a-year schedule any more. But in this case, I’ve finished 50% of book #5 in only three and a half months, which gives me good reason to hope that I’ll be able to keep to the old schedule after all!
In other news, I’ve finally heard back from my publishers, and they’ve promised to get the edits of book #4 to me by today. We’ll see whether that actually happens or not, but at least things are moving. In the meantime, I’ve started working on a couple more Beginner’s Guide to Drucraft worldbuilding articles.
