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Design Notes: Magic and Neurodivergence
I mentioned a while back that magic in the Caretaker Trilogy takes a toll on a person’s free will. The more powerful the magic, or the more frequently it is used, the less freedom the user has.
I came to realize after the fact that at least some of this toll takes the form of tendencies that might be seen as in some way neurodivergent. This realization came through conversations with my neurodivergent daughter about her own experiences and those of her ND friends.
I remember explaining to her that, the more magic Rune uses, the more detached and flighty he becomes. He’ll either become hyper-focused on something or get quickly bored and move on to someone else.
“Oh,” she said. “Like ADHD.”
I think my verbatim response was, “… Yeah.” Then, pressing my luck, I explained that when Rune’s sidekick Brack uses too much magic, he becomes overly controlling, needed everything to be just so.
“So, OCD,” dear daughter said.
I promise you, I had no intention of going down this rabbit hole. I had already worked out most of these effects based on classical alchemy, both Eastern and Western, and how it associated the classical elements with certain traits of temperament. (A lot of my early worldbuilding was based on a nice popular article on the five elements in Chinese acupuncture) But not being one to look a gift horse in the mouth, I’m grateful dear daughter suggested this further line of reflection.
So, if you want to keep score, here are how the various classical elements affect someone who dives too deeply into them:
- Air: ADD/ADHD. Inability to regulate focus.
- Earth: Depression. Loss of passion, failing to see the point.
- Fire: Mania. Restlessly move from one thing to another.
- Metal: OCD. Control every variable to the nth degree.
- Water: Bipolar. Strong, unpredictable emotional ebbs and flows.
- Wood: BPD. Emotionally reactive, prone to rage and aggressive outbursts.
Most of this will never see print, but some of it does in Dead of Night.
The night gets darker on July 1.
Science Marches On—But It Didn’t Step on Me (Yet)
In the Caretaker Trilogy, I have played with the conceit that the dwarves and trolls of world mythology are hominins from a parallel human lineage: Neanderthals, Denisovan hominins, etc. I’ve previously commented on how the prehistoric world has taken on a decidedly “Tolkienesque” tone in recent research. If anything, things are getting even more complex.
So I’ve been excited to learn that a recent scientific study has identified DNA from the Chinese Harbin skull, generally dubbed Homo longi or “Dragon Man” (from the Dragon River where it was found), as a Denisovan. Here is a nice, accessible summary:
What this means is that the Denisovans, formerly only known from a mandible, a finger bone, and a few other tiny fragments, now has a more or less complete skull and even a face.
I have always been careful in my behind-the-scenes resource documents to describe dwarves and trolls as “derived” species or “chronospecies”—not exactly what anthropologists are digging up from the earth, but close enough that I can draw on scientific findings to add flavor and detail. And now I’m glad I did, because this new finding doesn’t introduce any scientific gaffes into the Caretaker Trilogy. Nothing I have written about the physical appearance of trolls, the kindred that I’m basing on Denisovans, is suddenly flatly wrong because of the new information.
This is fascinating! And it doesn’t make me look uninformed to readers in the future! (Yes, I know, that’s an awfully selfish take on this major advance in the understanding of human evolution. But it is what it is.)
Anyway, you can read more about trolls and their cousins in Dead of Night, the second book in the Caretaker Trilogy, which is soon to be released.
The night gets darker on July 1.
PS: Isn’t “Dragon Man” a cool name?
Dead of Night: What’s It All About?
Dead of Night, the second book in the Caretaker Trilogy, debuts on July 1. In the first book, Rune, a defector from Faeryland trying to make a new life on Main Street USA, finds himself in a mess when his old life comes back to bite him. In book two, the threats originate in the supernatural underbelly of what, for lack of a better term, we’ll call the “Real World.” That is to say, he doesn’t have to battle elves, trolls, or other faery creatures. Rather, he has to battle monsters that he grew up believing were only myths, monsters that can only exist among humans, whose overly-complicated souls sometimes splinter and create unspeakable horrors.
But the real threat is more internal and affects nearly every important character in the novel. It is the threat of failing to forgive.
Some of the monsters in Dead of Night are literal vengeance demons. Their anger and thirst for revenge fuel an unnatural life (or unlife) constantly lashing out at those who have offended them. Some characters have been wronged and have to decide whether—and how—to forgive someone who has hurt them.
What about Rune? Well, if you know how he feels about his past, maybe you can figure whom he needs to find a way to forgive.
Some of these characters rise to the challenge. Others are doomed to pursue vengeance until it destroys them.
I hope you enjoy their stories.
The night gets darker on July 1.
Design Notes: Building a Better Vampire
Properly speaking, vampires are a phenomenon of Eastern European folklore. But there are lots of other creatures that some writers want to shoehorn into the “vampire” template.
It’s me. I’m “some writers.”
In my defense, I actually started Dead of Night with some of these other creatures in mind. I just realized that “vampire” was a handy, if not entirely accurate, shorthand to group all these creatures into some kind of whole.
What that means is that “vampires” in my story world display great diversity, and the ones that take center stage are not entirely what anybody thinks of when they hear that word. These are creatures that have been described as vampires, vampire-like, an inspiration for later tales of vampires, etc. They exist somewhere in the murky territory between ghost and demon. Though they do, in fact, prey on mortals, they are more often motivated by vengeance than by hunger.
All this to say that, in terms of the story, “vampire” should be taken in its broadest, most generic sense. A vampire is any human-shaped, demonic, cannibalistic monster. It doesn’t have to be undead. It doesn’t even have to drink blood. What it does have to do is terrorize the living.
Some of these creatures are essentially malevolent ghosts who didn’t receive the proper burial rites. Others play into all the ancient tropes of scorned women who’ve turned into monsters to prey on unfaithful men. Others still are grim revenants from the northlands who terrorize the countryside, often accompanied by packs of vicious dogs and can grow to giant size. And, of course, there are the “classic” vampires from the Balkan region.
All of these nightmares make an appearance in Dead of Night. I hope you’ll read it and tell me your favorite!
The night gets darker on July 1, but you can pre-order today from Bookshop (paperback or ebook) or Amazon (ebook).
Worldbuilding: African Elves?
Black History Month seems as good a time as any to write a little about how African mythology intersects with the story world of Shadow of the King.
I’ll begin with a disclaimer: I feel it’s important to make a distinction between the “sacred” and the “spooky,” a piece of wisdom I learned from an excellent book called Iroquois Supernatural. “Spooky” is the realm of folk tales, ghost stories, and such. They’re the things that even a lot of outsiders know if they know anything about the mythology of a different culture.
By contrast, “sacred” has to do with matters of the the deepest cultural significance—either positively or negatively. This is why I won’t be writing about a particular cannibalistic spirit whose name in Algonquian cultures must never be spoken. As an outsider, I strive never to encroach upon the sacred, and I strive to understand where those boundaries lie. So even though I know a little about African spirits such as loa and orishas, I consider them off limits. Even if I knew a considerable amount about these figures from Vodun, Santería, and other religious traditions based on African spirituality, as an outsider to these cultures I place them in the category of Not My Story to Tell.
The spooky is another matter. When it comes to African myths about “little people,” forest spirits, and the like, I feel these creatures need to be in a story set in North America precisely because people of African descent are my neighbors, and they have been telling their stories on this continent for centuries. For them to be absent seems to me the height of colonialist whitewashing.
So, how much African-inspired lore will you find in Shadow of the King? One fairly central item of worldbuilding, and some background stuff that you’re likely to miss.
First, the background stuff. There are, of course, African legends about the kind of creatures that populate Saynim, the “faeryland” from which Rune, my protagonist, hails. There are the Yumboes, diminutive Senegalese creatures who love nothing more than feasting and dance; the Bori of Hausa legend, whose myths early on became intermingled with those of the Muslim Jinn; and the Iwin, a Yoruba word that can be translated “ghost” or “faery,” sprites who live in rocks, forests, and hills.
There are also the Bisimbi, or “Cymbees” as they are called in the South Carolina Low Country. Enslaved Africans in that part of the world believed that their local springs and pools were inhabited by Cymbees just like the ones their forebears believed in across the sea. Cymbees live in rocks, gullies, streams, waterfalls, and pools that they adopt as territorial guardians. For the first African Americans, the presence of these spirits in this new world was culturally significant because it meant that they might also make their way here despite the hardships they faced. An old Kongo proverb states, “Where your ancestors do not live, you cannot build your house.” But the Cymbees were here, they believed, and so there was reason to find courage.
A central conceit of Shadow of the King is that European elves, dwarves, and the like have immigrated to their analog of North America just like European humans did in our world. They were here bit a bit earlier, and though their relationship with the Indigenous population was not perfect, the Indigenous mythical creatures fared better than their mortal counterparts. Likewise, African elves and such eventually journeyed across the sea as well and established their own faery kingdoms, mainly in the Southern Lowlands. Rune would have encountered merchants and diplomats from these realms quite regularly while growing up along the Mother of Rivers (i.e., the Mississippi).
Furthermore, it is simply a fact that persons from all over the so-called Old World lived in Europe since before the fall of the Roman Empire. (This YouTube video provides an excellent summary of the evidence.) They lived in England before England existed as a country. And their legends about jinn and peris certainly influenced aspects of European faery mythology. So when Rune’s ancestors sailed to his world’s analog of North America, there’s no reason they weren’t in the company of African or mixed-race compatriots.
All this means that whenever you read about a crowd of Saynim folk, feel free to assume that some of them are of African descent. And although there are no explicitly named “Black elves” in Shadow of the King, that will change in future books. At the same time, there are numerous African Americans from the mortal realm who play important roles in Rune’s story. Some aspects of their stories are also Not Mine to Tell, but they’re there, and they help make Rune the person he is becoming.
Now, about that major piece of worldbuilding. Human souls work differently than the souls of elves, goblins, etc. in Saynim. Most Saynim folk have souls that might be described as “simple.” As embodiments of the elemental forces of nature, their will is not quite as free as ours and their motivations are not quite as conflicted. But humans are different. Their souls are complex. They have “too many moving parts,” as one character notes. This makes humans unpredictable and perhaps dangerous.
There may be other spiritual traditions with similar concepts, but I first learned of it while studying African spiritualities. You may be most familiar with ancient Egyptian conceptualizations of the soul comprising several parts: the ba, the ka, the shadow, the name, etc. In fact, many spiritualities across Africa have similar ideas about humans’ psychic complexity. Some of those parts persist on earth after death, either for good or for ill. Some of them go on to whatever afterlife a given culture believes in. All of them reflect some aspect of that person’s character or essence.
I hope that in Shadow of the King I have pulled back the curtain on a world as big and diverse as the one we live in. I’d be honored if you’d give it a read and, if you have something constructive to add, teach me how I can do better.
Shadow of the King: Building a World (Languages)
I know enough about linguistics to know that time devoted to building a constructed language is time I might better spend on other, more satisfying aspects of worldbuilding…or, you know, writing.
But people, places, and things need names, and I have a strong preference for those names sounding like they fit. So I usually end up doing at least a little bit of work fleshing out the languages my characters speak. Call me a reluctant conlanger.
In Shadow of the King, some of the conceits of my premise shaped the direction my languages took. For one thing, the contours of my protagonist’s Otherworld home arose from the myths and legends of real-world cultures. And those real-world cultures had languages from which to draw.
But not only is Rune’s world inspired by real-world cultures, the world itself is a close analog to our own. It is an alternate earth where magic is real and humans share the world with elves, merfolk, water panthers, and other fantastical creatures. You can think of Saynim as our world but in a different key. The continents and landmasses are similar—a mountain might be taller or shorter, a river might run a few miles to the east or to the west of where it would be on our maps, but everything is mostly where readers would expect to find it.
In this world, European settlement began quite a bit earlier than in ours but proceeded more slowly and, for the most part, more peaceably. The mound-building cultures of the Lower Mississippi remained intact, and the “Five Civilized Tribes” of the Southeast continue their traditional ways of life. Though there has been much warfare and conquest, the newcomers from the east (“Easterlings”) have largely been forced to live alongside the Indigenous population as equals, and largely only east of the Mother of Rivers (i.e., the Mississippi) and north of the Southern Lowlands (i.e., the Deep South).
In Rune’s part of the world, there are three important languages.
Miskoese, Rune’s native language, is Germanic. It is mainly Scandinavian but with a fair bit of Old English influence as well as a fair number of loanwords not only from Gaelic but from Algonquian and Iroquoian languages. The word Miskoese itself comes from the Ojibwe word misko’o, “he wears red,” a reference to the “Redcloaks,” the earliest Easterling settlers.
Teilic is derived from Medieval Welsh with loanwords from the Indigenous languages of the lower Mississippi, mainly Choctaw.
Aavish, commonly called Trade Jargon, is an English creole with borrowings from a host of languages both European and Indigenous. Of all the languages of this part of Saynim, Aavish is so far the only one to appear in print.
All this, plus some cursory investigations into personal names in a few of the Indigenous languages of the region, helped me name people and things in ways that fit the setting without stressing overmuch about, say, noun declensions and subject-verb agreement. Which is good, because I’d still be writing the book if I’d stopped to do that!
The shadow falls on October 1.
Shadow of the King: Building a World (More Ingredients)
(Last time, I shared a little about the world from which my protagonist came. Here are a couple of thoughts about the world to which he goes.)
5. Louisville, Kentucky. A few months back, I came across a new story where Louisville was voted the most ordinary city in America. So obviously, setting a contemporary fantasy story there meets a clear need! I went to graduate school in Louisville. I met my wife there. I have many fond memories of the city. But yeah, if you’re not a big fan of bourbon or horse racing, it’s pretty ordinary.
And yet, there is potential here. Geographically and culturally, Louisville is in the middle of everything, with the Midwest to the north, the Upland South to the south, the Appalachian Mountains to the east, and the Mississippi River to the west. It’s a macro-scale version of the sort of crossroads where you might expect a shadowy figure to offer to make you a deal.
And oddly enough, Louisville is apparently at the midpoint of an important ley line between Yellowstone National Park and Bermuda. So maybe it’s appropriate for it to be some kind of nexus of mystical energy, if only people were attentive enough to see it….
6. Religion. When the literal forces of creation course through your mind and body and you can bend them to your will, concepts of Ultimate Reality and the true nature of things are bound to get a little problematic. Rune’s people don’t have “religion” as most Westerners understand the term. This is my nod to the mythology that says the Fair Folk are averse to human religions. Some despise or denigrate them; most just don’t understand them.
So of course, I made Rune’s landlord in the mortal realm a preacher.
The shadow falls on October 1
Shadow of the King: Building a World (Ingredients)
In no particular order, here are the building blocks from which my story world is constructed.
1. Paraclesus. Published posthumously in 1566, Paracelsus’s De nymphis, sylvanis, pygmaeis, salamandris et gigantibus, etc. (“On Nymphs, Sylphs, Pygmies, Salamanders, and Giants, etc.”) explained mythological creatures in terms of the latest scientific and philosophical speculations.
Yes, I know that Paracelsus made a lot of stuff up, and a lot of the rest he imported from Classical mythology whether it fit or not. I know that he tried to shoehorn a lot of folklore into an airtight system where it really didn’t fit. But from 30,000 feet, I simply note that he tried to link these otherworldly beings to the four classical elements: nymphs with water, sylphs with air, etc. And since I was already building a magic system around the classical elements, offering a nod to Paracelcus was a no-brainer.
One other thing thing: Paracelsus apparently coined the word sagani to describe these beings collectively, though I have not yet found a convincing etymology. I suspect it is related to “sage” in the sense of “wise” or “skillful.” At any rate, this curious word gave me Saynim as the name of my protagonist’s magical homeland, analogous to how pagani (“pagans”) and paganismus (“paganism”) gave us the archaic English word Paynim (“pagandom”).
2. Renaissance magic. Paracelsus led me to other philosophers, alchemists, and arcanists of the same approximate era: Johannes Trithemius, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, John Dee, etc. These thinkers straddled the line between “science” and “magic” as we usually understand those terms. This was, after all, the time when “chemistry” and “alchemy” had only begun to diverge. Trithemius and the rest drew from arcane traditions that can be traced through the Middle Ages and all the way to ancient Egypt.
While most magic in my story world is an innate property of creatures attuned to one of the classical elements, humans in the mundane world might tap into these arcane magical traditions.
3. Elizabethan fairy lore. In the British Isles, the last decades of the sixteenth century represent a high point in theorizing about the fairy folk. This was the era of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and King James VI of Scotland’s Daemonologie, where he argued that elves and fairies were in fact evil spirits. In general, the Fair Folk were still a real and terrifying figures in the imaginations of the country folk, though more so-called enlightened Londoners were increasingly skeptical.
4. Hominin evolution. Fifty thousand to 100,000 years ago, planet earth was a Tolkienesque landscape populated by several related human species interacting with each other in friendly or not so friendly ways. Just as Tolkien and most epic fantasy that followed him describes interactions among elves, dwarves, orcs, and the rest, Homo sapiens, Neanderthals, Denisovans, Homo floresiensis, and probably others once coexisted in our own world.
To me, this fact is the perfect setup for explaining the various fantasy “races” (as much as I despise that term) in a quasi-scientific way.
The shadow falls on October 1
Shadow of the King: Telling a Story (Setting)
Here are two random ideas that have been bouncing around in my mind for a while.
First, a handful of years ago, dungeon master and game designer Matthew Colville made a video where he asked, in effect, “If your D&D world is not at war, why not?” (No, I haven’t been working on Shadow of the King for quite seven years; it only feels like it!) The video drove home for me the fact that war is basically the default state in world history. Whatever I might think about it as a human being (spoiler: I hate it!), as a storyteller, this is a gold mine of plot ideas.
Second, Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn series begins with a world where the Big Bad Evil Guy (BBEG) won, and now the characters are living with the aftermath. The Lord Ruler has only gotten more powerful, but a plucky band of misfits have a plan…
These factors, marinating over several years, shape the backdrop to Rune’s story in Shadow of the King. The takeaways for me are (1) everything has a consequence and (2) maintaining the peace take hard work.
In Mistborn, the BBEG won, and now everyone has to deal with that. But what if the good guys had won? What if they had been able to take down the BBEG? A rebel victory would upset the status quo, but then what? Especially if some of the victorious good guys aren’t all that good.
In Shadow of the King, the protagonist, Rune, was born into a world where the BBEG had been defeated…but now the petty kings who carved up his kingdom had been jockeying for position in a decades-long cold war that just needed the right spark to turn hot.
So what’s a writer to do but light a match and see what happens?
The shadow falls on October 1.
Shadow of the King: Building a World (Magic)
For about fifteen seconds, I considered setting Shadow of the King in the same story world as the Into the Wonder series. Thankfully, I managed to talk myself out of it.
First, I already knew Shadow of the King was going to skew more “adult” in themes and presentation, so some of the rule-of-funny handwavery in my previous novels just wasn’t going to fly. This story was going to be serious, dammit!
Second, the story that was hatching in my mind needed a different set of political circumstances in the magical realm. There’s a story here involving Brandon Sanderson and a popular D&D YouTuber that I’ll get to eventually.
But third and most important, I wanted a magic system with teeth. Taylor Smart, the protagonist in Into the Wonder, was just beginning her magical journey, so she had one—by the end, two—big magical stunts she could pull off. But Rune is a somewhat seasoned practitioner. I needed to enforce some hard limits on what he could do, or he’d curb stomp all the terrible beasties I was planning on throwing at him!
So here’s what I came up with:
1. Magic is tied to the classical elements—with a bit of wiggle room. Beyond the four elements of Western alchemy (air, earth, water, and fire), I wanted to include the Chinese five-element system where wood replaces air and metal is considered distinct from earth. I also wanted to at least leave the door open for a few other basic forces or energies as the story might require.
This means that Rune can perform magic related air, period. That is his one and only one talent. It doesn’t matter if he can ride the wind or summon a whirlwind, he couldn’t shake the earth or lob a fireball save his life.
2. There is a tradeoff between magic use and free will. Classical alchemy, both East and West, associates the elements with certain traits of temperament and, if you lean too heavily into one or the other of them, certain character flaws.
I thought it would be interesting if, the more magic you used, the deeper into these patterns of behavior you fell, to the point that eventually you literally had no choice but to be the stereotypical temperament associated with your element. In conversations with my neurodivergent daughter, I came to realize after the fact that a lot of these tendencies might even approximate things she and her ND friends experience. For example, when air-weavers overdo it, they become detached and flighty. In other words, they demonstrate an ADD/ADHD-like tendency to have trouble with focus, either becoming hyper-focused on something or unable to focus at all.
I think these parameters let me develop not just my protagonist but a diverse cast of sidekicks and villains. It also led me down interesting yet labyrinthine rabbit holes related to medieval humorism, neo-Pagan witchcraft, and the Hermetic magic systems of the Renaissance, but that’s another story.
The shadow falls on October 1.
Darrell J. Pursiful 