Benedict Jacka

One more year at an end.  Happy New Year’s to everyone reading this – I hope your 2022 was a good one, and that 2023 will go well too!

Next week will be a scheduling post with details on release dates and writing dates for the first two books of the new series, and about my plans for website content for the coming year.  Until then, hope your end of year is a happy one!

Happy Christmas to all of my readers!  Hope it’s been a good year for you all, and that things will go well for you in the year to come.

Well, after months (if not years) I can now finally start to reveal the details of what I’ve been working on.  Thanks for your patience – now here’s an introduction to the new world, and the new series, that I’m planning to keep writing for the rest of the 2020s, and possibly beyond!

The first book in the series is called An Inheritance of Magic, and will be released on October 10th 2023 in the US & Canada, and on October 5th 2023 in the UK and in the rest of the world.  The name for the world it’s set in is the Drucraft setting – in this world, ‘drucraft’ roughly translates to ‘magic’.  (The word is adapted from Old English – the original spelling was ‘drycraft’, but there’s been some linguistic drift.)

Now, I could keep on talking about the new series on its own, but realistically, if you’re reading this, there’s an over-95% chance that you’re here because you read the Alex Verus novels, which means that’s what you’re going to be using as a basis for comparison.  So from this point on, I’m going to describe the new series by using the Verus books as a reference.

Similarities to Alex Verus

• The story starts in London, in an urban fantasy setting.  The world looks identical to ours, but there’s a magical society hidden from view.
• The story is told in the first person and features action, danger, investigation of mysteries, a formalised magic system, and an underdog protagonist who has to outthink enemies that are stronger than him.
• This will be a long-running series where the protagonist will gradually grow in power, knowledge, and influence over the course of the story.  I’ll try to make each book understandable for new readers, but they’re not really meant to be read as standalones.

Differences from Alex Verus

• In the Alex Verus setting, magic is an inherent gift – you’re either a mage, or you’re not.  In the Drucraft setting, magic is mainly used through items known as sigls.  Using sigls to their full potential takes skill, but anyone rich enough and connected enough can gain access to significantly powerful magical abilities – you can literally order them out of a catalogue.  As a result of this, the setting is dominated by wealthy aristocratic families and by large corporations.
• Since money translates into magical power in this world, wealth becomes a lot more important.  In the Alex Verus series, even though Alex ran a shop, buying and selling were never really important parts of the story.  The reason for this was that the magical economy and the normal economy didn’t intersect very much – in the magical world, nothing above a certain level of value could be bought with money.  In the Drucraft setting, the magical and normal economies are integrated, and one of the main things that determines what kinds of magical abilities you can acquire is how much money you have.
• Drucraft is more limited yet also better-understood than the magic of the Alex Verus world.  Drucrafters can’t do things like teleport or see through time, but due to many centuries of research and commercial exploitation, drucraft is a well-developed art.  If something can be done with drucraft, it probably has been done.  In fact, not only has it been done, odds are that it’s been thoroughly researched and there’s a corporation willing to sell you the finished product at whatever price the market will bear.
• The protagonist is younger and less experienced than Alex Verus.  Alex was 28 at the start of Fated, but the protagonist of the new series, Stephen, is only 20 at the start of An Inheritance of Magic.  Additionally, due to his magic type and colourful background, Alex started Fated much more knowledgeable than the average member of magical society, meaning that readers mostly learn about the magical world through Alex.  By contrast, Stephen, while quite skilled at drucraft, starts his story knowing very little about the magical world.  This means that as a reader, you’ll learn about the drucraft world of Houses and corporations as he does.  Also, unlike Alex, Stephen doesn’t start book 1 having already killed people in his backstory, which will change the overall mood of the books a bit.
• While the Alex Verus series focused mostly on Britain, the new series will be more international.  In the Drucraft setting, there’s a lot of variation between countries in how good or bad they are at producing different types of sigls – it works similarly to having access to natural resources, such as gold, gemstones, rare earth metals, or oil.  As a result, countries are highly motivated to gain access to sigl types that they’re naturally weak in, whether by trade or by other means.
• The Alex Verus setting is a sort of fantasy kitchen sink, where you get all kinds of magical creatures out of mythology – dryads, elementals, talking animals, barghests, and so on.  Some (like vampires) aren’t around any more and some (like dragons) are rather different from how you’d expect, but if something exists in mythology, there’s probably an equivalent, even if humans have rendered many of them extinct by now.  The Drucraft setting, on the other hand, has no magical creatures that you’d recognise.  Humans rule alone . . . or so it seems.
• While the Alex Verus series is ‘pure’ urban fantasy, the new series will be urban fantasy with some progression fantasy elements.  In this context, ‘progression’ means that much of the story is driven by the protagonist needing to develop himself and become more capable and skilled.

As with the Alex Verus series, I’ll publish the first chapter of each book online a couple of months or so in advance of the book’s release date.  I’m also planning a series of articles describing the world and magic system, similar to Alex Verus’s Encyclopaedia Arcana, which I’ll put out next year.

The rewrite on my new book is done.  It went off to my publishers this week and, short of them asking for more last-minute rewrites (unlikely at this point) the version that I sent off should be about 90-95% identical to the version you guys will be reading next year.

For those of you who haven’t been closely following the news on this, me telling you that the book’s “done” is probably going to cause a bit of deja vu.  If you’re feeling as though you’ve heard this before . . . don’t worry, it’s not just you!  I finished the first fully completed draft (the one which I’ve labelled version 4) back in January.  Version 5 (a full rewrite that changed a lot of things about the setting and world), was completed in June, and the version that I’ve just finished (the one that incorporates the editorial feedback from my publishers) is version 6.  So, depending on how you count it, this makes the third time I’ve “finished” this book.

This whole thing has been a pretty good example of the difference between traditional publishing and serial fiction/web fiction.  If I’d been an unknown author putting up my stuff on one of the online story sites like Fictionpress or Royal Road or something, this story would have been published early this year.  However, it would have been (a) very different and (b) a lot worse.  This book has changed a LOT over the course of its rewrites – the world and magic system, in particular, got completely redesigned in the v5 change.  If I’d been publishing the chapters as I wrote them, all sorts of things that I’d casually thrown into the early drafts would have become settled parts of the story, whereas now a lot of those early ideas have either been heavily modified or just flat-out deleted because I realised later on, with reflection, that they just weren’t good choices.  The book is also now a lot more consistent and thought-through.  There were quite a few characters in the early drafts who were fairly one-note and were only there for a purpose – to be a friend or a source of information or a sounding board.  The advantage of doing so many rewrites is that I’ve had the time to develop them all in detail, so that now I have a fairly good idea about who all of the Book 1 characters are and where I’m going with them.

Now that I’m at the end of this road and looking back, I have to admit, it’s been pretty exhausting.  Like most authors, I like feeling that a book’s finished.  Realising that I had to go back and extensively rewrite the book in the spring was not much fun.  Having to go back and rewrite it AGAIN in the autumn was even worse.  And this isn’t counting the fact that the book had some fairly extensive editing during its first draft, too – there’s a reason that the version I finished in January is labelled v4 and not v1.  At this point, there are sections of the book that have been written over so many times that if I was doing this with a pencil and eraser instead of with a word processor, I’d have rubbed holes in the paper.

Still, at this point, it really is done.  Unless something totally bizarre happens, this is the mostly-final version.  Which means that I can finally get to work on planning out Book 2!

The fact that I’m done with the rewrites also means that I’m finally at the point where I’m comfortable with revealing some information about the series.  So next week, on December 16th, I’m going to do a major update to the “New Series” page with a lot of material about the new book and the series that it’ll be a part of.  Check back then for more!

I did have a second Ask Luna post lined up for this week, but I’ve been in touch with my editors about marketing/title information for the new book, and found out in the course of the conversation that I’ve hit a milestone.  At some point in the last year or so, between its UK/worldwide edition, its US/Canada edition, and its German edition, the total sales of the Alex Verus series ticked over from 999,999 to 1,000,000.

It’s pretty amazing now that I think about it.  When I wrote the first words of what would eventually become the first book in the Alex Verus series, it was 2008 and my publishing history consisted of a couple of children’s novels that had failed to sell, plus a long string of rejections.  I had absolutely no reason to believe that Fated would even get published, much less be successful.  If you’d told me back then that it would turn into a twelve-book series that would sell a million copies, I would have laughed.

But that’s exactly what’s happened, so thanks to everyone who’s made it happen by supporting me over the years.  I hope you enjoy the new series, too!

As promised, now that Gardens is done with, here’s some news about my new series.

My editors have finally gotten back to me with their first-round edits (if you’re curious about what that means, I explain the process here).  It ended up being a fair amount of work, but since then I’ve worked out a plan for the rewrite that my editors are happy with.  Completion date is scheduled for the end of this year, and the good news is that I started the rewrite at the beginning of this month and I’m ahead of schedule – if I can keep up the current pace I should be done sometime in December.

Rewrites are never fun – they’re much harder than writing new material from scratch – and they’re especially unfun when you’re rewriting something that you’ve rewritten already.  In this case my new book is now on version 6, so it probably won’t come as much of a surprise if I tell you that by this point I’ve had more than enough of re-doing this thing.  Still, I know it has to be done.  Every time I’ve had to do a rewrite of one of my books, I haven’t enjoyed it, but every time that I’ve finished one, the book in question has ended up significantly better.  And making this book good is really, really important.  I’m hoping to keep writing this series for the rest of the 2020s, so the first book needs to be as good as I can possibly make it.

Still, at this point, all the big decisions have been made – it’s just a matter of tuning things up and making lots of little improvements.  With luck I should be done by Christmas, at which point Book 1 will go in for copy-edits and I’ll try to get started on Book 2 as soon as possible.  Even assuming I hit my deadline, this book will have taken a total of 18 months from the first page written to the end of the first-round edit, which is much longer than I’m happy with – I usually aim to get out at least one novel per year.  But when you’re building the foundation of a new series, quality’s more important than speed, so although I’ve been frustrated at the delays, it’ll all be worth it if this new series turns out to be as popular as Alex Verus.  Let’s hope that it is!

Well, Gardens is out and is most of the way through its first week of sales.  Numbers have been pretty good so far – it’s already up to about 40% of the sales of Favours, which isn’t bad for something that’s only been out for four days.  Early reviews have been very positive as well, so there’s a decent change that it might end up overtaking Favours in time, despite my earlier novella having a head start.

These novellas have been surprisingly fun to do – they let me try out new things, and since they’re relatively short they’re much less of a slog than a full novel.  I wrote both Favours and Gardens in only a month or so of focused work each, though once you add in editing and planning time both took more like two months than one.  And since I often have a spare month or two in between novels, there’s a good chance I’ll find the time to keep doing more in future.

However, as I said last year, these novellas/short stories are not going to become my focus – my main job is ‘novelist’ and that’s not something I’m planning to change.  On that subject, I think we’re about due for another update on my new series, so now that the novella’s released and the excitement’s over, next week is going to be a catch-up about what’s been happening with that book’s road to publication.

And it’s finally here!  The newest Alex Verus novella, Gardens, is available on Amazon as of today!

While my last novella, Favours, was a “fill-in-the-gaps” piece that acted as character backstory, Gardens is more of a mini-sequel or extra epilogue to the main storyline.  It’s recommended for anyone who’s curious about how things turned out for some of the main characters in the Alex Verus series.  It’s also quite a bit longer than Favours, coming in at more than one and a half times the word count.

Now, the bad news:  since some people have asked, no, this story isn’t currently available in audio or paper format.  My novellas are all self-published and I have to do all of the admin myself, which limits how many formats I can make it available in.  Admin is also the main reason that I’m only releasing it on Amazon this time – I made Favours available on this site, but my total personal sales were dwarfed by my Amazon ones, so this time I’m releasing it only on Amazon in order to take advantage of their Kindle Unlimited promotions.  I know this does limit the options available to my readers, which I’m sorry about, but I only have so many hours in a day, and setting up and maintaining a full set of distribution channels actually takes a fair amount of time away from my writing.  Publishers can do this sort of thing much more easily, but that’s because they have staff who do it as a full-time job.  So for the moment, I’m publishing these novellas in such a way that it takes as little attention away from my novel-writing as possible.

That said, this might change in the future!   The last novella was fairly successful, so if I keep on writing these and they keep on proving reasonably popular, I might eventually collect them into a book, at which point it’d probably be worth it to do an audio and paper edition.  My Alex Verus novels usually come in at 90,000 to 100,000 words, and Favours and Gardens together come to a bit over 50,000, so probably 2-3 more short stories/novellas would add up to a big enough wordcount to justify calling it a book.  That’s still far off in the future, though, and very speculative.

Anyway, I hope you all enjoy Gardens!  I think it’s one of the better-written things I’ve put out so far, and for those of you who are fans of the Alex Verus series, it’ll probably answer some of the lingering questions that you might have had about the state of play at the end of Risen.