Hip-Deep in Magic

Posted by Nancy Northcott Jun 30 2012, 11:35 pm in Guardian, Protectors, Renegade

For the first time ever, I find myself working on material I know will be published.  It’s very exciting, doubly so because I’m not working on only one book but on two!  I’m finishing up Guardian, the second book in my fantasy romantic suspense series, to send it to my editor and doing the copy edits on the first book, Renegade, for its November 6 release (Yes, this November–squee!).   

I don’t have time to write much in the way of an update because I’m on deadline, but I love being hip deep in my magical world.  It sure beats being out in the heat currently blasting the Carolinas.  Or the storms that rolled across the Ohio Valley.  Wherever you are, I hope the summer (or the winter if you’re in the southern hemisphere) is treating you kindly.

No Comments

A Magical World View

Posted by Nancy Northcott Jun 21 2012, 12:50 am in Okefenokee Swamp, Protectors, Renegade, worldbuilding

Sven asked me the other day how I decided to use the Okefenokee Swamp as part of my mage series world.  ”Swamps aren’t the first thing most of us think of when someone mentions romance,” he pointed out.

I couldn’t argue with that.  As the comments on my post last month demonstrated, most of us assume swamps smell and are muddy and buggy and generally icky.  Not very romantic, all in all.  But swamps are also dark and mysterious and full of hidden life–spooky if not romantic.  So I figured I’d put spooky with romantic and see how that worked.

Our brainstorming group was meeting, and I explained I was tired of writing books nobody knew what to do with–historicals set in Restoration England (If you didn’t know that was 1660-1685, you have a lot of company!), contemporary romantic suspense written in first person snarky, a medieval with a fair amount of history in it.  Since paranormals seemed to be on the rise, I wanted to meld my love of fantasy with my love of romance and action and see if I could knock a ball over the center field fence instead of hooking it into the left field seats all the time.

I wanted the book to have a dark tone since I was reading a fair number of dark paranormals and liking their mood.  I wanted to set the story in the South because I’m from there, still live there, and I love the small towns and most of the people and our various rapidly disappearing accents.  Also, research would be easier.

“I’d thought of using the Okefenokee Swamp as a backdrop,” I said, envisioning dark and mysterious and spooky rather than smelly and buggy and icky.  ”I haven’t been there since I was little, and I don’t remember much about it except my mom was afraid snakes would fall down on the boat. But it sounds cool.”

“The energy in swamps is very different,” Cassandra said, and she’s right.  A swamp feels different from an open field or a lake. It’s kind of something in between the two.  So we all talked about swamps and dark energy until we had a basic outline.

Sometimes I like to start with the characters, and sometimes I prefer starting with the problem.  This time, I had basic hero/heroine ideas already, so we started with the world because it was to be the broad canvas for what I hoped would become a series.

Any writer using a fantasy world has to figure out how that world works.  What is the magic based on?  What are the rules?  What is the price the user pays for wielding magic?  If there isn’t a price, I find the story pretty hard to believe.  There are various kinds of vampires and shifters on bookstore shelves today.  They share a lot of similarities because of their common folkloric roots, but they also have differences that set them apart.  I wanted my mages and their foes to be different from the others (there weren’t many at the time) in the market.

So I wanted a nature-based magic system, and we kicked ideas around for one that would require recharges.  That was as far as we went, moving on to characters and conflict, though various flying emails refined the concept over the next few months.

Earth, air, fire, and water are traditional fantasy magic components.  Add spirit, and you can find similar concepts in Wicca, which is probably where the fantasists drew inspiration. 

While those are are all components of my system, they aren’t prominent yet.  They will be farther down the road.  The mages draw energy from sunlight and from any life around them, always careful not to draw enough from any one life form to injure it.   That’s a rule.

So is the requirement that they protect Mundanes (people like us) first and foremost.  That’s what gets Val into big trouble and leads to Griff rescuing her.

They like forests and swamps because there’s so much life around that they can recharge safely.  They draw power from the natural world and expend it with every magical feat they perform, some more difficult than others.  That’s how it works.  Draw too much, expend too much without a recharge, and they’re in trouble.  That’s the price part.  

One thing that makes swamps and the landscape near them spooky, at least in the southeast, is Spanish moss (that gray stuff hanging off the tree above right).  It isn’t really either Spanish or moss.  It’s a plant that grows on other plants but makes its own food out of the air and rain.  It can be used for upholstery, packing material, floral arrangements, insulation, and a home for small birds.  All that’s great, but I like it because it’s spooky, even in the daytime.  I’ve also thought of some other uses for it, also down the road in the series.

There’s a popular archetype of the loner hero, an outcast from society, seeking justice.  The hero of Renegade, Griffin Dare, is hiding out, seeking to unmask a traitor and prove his innocence.  So I gave him a place out from town, on the outskirts of the Okefenokee Swamp.  The isolated location is a perfect place to take Valeria Banning, the mage sheriff (or Shire Reeve) and try to win her trust after he rescues her.

But I also wanted Griff to have a life, not to be isolated, even though he’s the mages’ most wanted criminal and keeps dangerous secrets.  So I gave him some mage allies and a small, eccentric town where he could move freely under an alias.  I grew up in a small college town, with my grandfather telling me stories about quirky people who lived there before I was born.  I treasure the memories of walking around with him and listening to those stories.

People in Wayfarer tend to be into metaphysical or New Age ideas and to accept each other’s oddities, including Griff’s tendency to be secretive.  In Renegade and throughout the series, we’ll see how important the town is to him and his friends.

Yes, I know most small town settings are cozy and generally peaceful.  I did hook that one a bit left.

Of course the mages need their own social structure, so I gave them a gathering place that’s also a base of operations, the seat of their regional government, and a school, and called the complex The Collegium.  The officials there grow suspicious of Val after her encounter with Griff and generally complicate their lives.

Every suspense/action story has to have a villain.  This one does, too, with an ongoing trouble caused by humanoids kind of based on the things we used to envision hiding in the closet on a stormy night.  They’re called ghouls, and we’ll talk more about them later.

And there, pretty much, is the world.  I thank Donna, Jeanne, Cassondra, and Joan for their input.  The swamp is mostly backdrop.  Some of the story takes place near it, but not actually in it.  Some of the action is set in a forested state park, some of it’s at the Collegium, and much of it’s in and around Wayfarer.

If you missed the blurb about the book last month, you can find it on my website. 

Are you from a farm, a small town, or a big city?  Which of those do you prefer?  Would you prefer escaping into wild lands or staying in civilized places with shopping centers or coffee shops?  Do you prefer sunny or spooky settings, or a mix?  

57 Comments

Sold!

Posted by Nancy Northcott May 26 2012, 12:35 am in debut, fantasy romance, Guardian, Nancy Northcott, Protectors, Renegade

Isn’t that a great word, “sold?”  I haven’t been all that fond of it for a while.  It always applied to someone else’s book, never mine, so hearing it generated a little envy and a lot of longing.  There was also a degree of fear that it would never apply to a book of mine.

Well, now it does, and I think it’s a fabulous word, a splendid word, an amazing word!    

Yeah, okay, stopping now. *g*

My agent has sold the first two books in my contemporary mage series, The Protectors, to Grand Central’s new electronic and PoD line, Forever Yours.  Book one, Renegade, is currently scheduled for release on November 6.  Guardian, the second book, is slotted for sometime in the spring, maybe March.

In honor of the occasion, I got a new head shot, which I’ve been needing anyway.  I figured I had until late summer, maybe even September, to experiment with different hairstyles and maybe lose some weight before actually having to get a photo.

Uh, no.  The publisher needed my head shot by late April.  Urk!  I really, truly loathe having my picture taken.  I’m seldom happy with the result, often secretly hoping it doesn’t look like me.  So I stuck with the one for the 2006 GH, which I thought was okay, for six years.  I like this new one, though.  

I didn’t have the money to pay a photographer to come take a lot of shots, and I wanted an outdoor setting because my magic system is nature-based.  After I bemoaned situation this to Cassondra, she volunteered to take the photo for me.  ”I’m visiting Jeanne after this conference,” she said.   “Come meet us, and I’ll take your new photo.”

Yay!  Saved!

“Bring a white top and a black one,” she said.

Uh-oh.  ”I don’t wear a lot of black or white.  I like jewel colors.”

A brief silence, probably while she sighed.  ”We need it to look right in both color and black and white.”

“Oh, iPhoto can change it over,” I assured her, proud of this tiny bit of technical knowledge.

“Uh-huh.  How many people in this conversation have a degree in photojournalism?”

“Um . . . I took an art class once.”

I could hear her smiling in triumph.  ”Good for you.  Wear what I tell you.”

So I did.  She chose the blue top and necklace shown at right from the assortment I’d packed.  I could not get iPhoto to save it in the right size for our website, even though it told me it would, so Tawny fixed it.  Clearly, my tiny bit of knowledge of iPhoto is a bit too tiny.  

Jeanne did my makeup.  She came in the bathroom while I was drying my hair and said, “Use this big, round brush to give it some lift.”

“I don’t really like a lot of height in my hair,” I said.

“It won’t stay pouffy,” she assured me.  ”This is just to give it some fullness.”

Probably looking as doubtful as I felt, I changed out the hair brushes.

But Jeanne hadn’t finished.  “Did you bring your makeup, like I asked you to?”

“Yeah, but I figured I’d just put on some blush and lipstick, as usual.”

She didn’t roll her eyes, but I think she came close.  “You don’t want usual for this.  You want enhanced.”

When she and Cassondra were working on highlights and colors, I said, “You know, if we’re going to get me all tarted up, I won’t look like me.”

“Trust us,” Cassondra said.  “You won’t look ‘tarted up.  You’ll look professional.’”

This is what happens when someone who is a control freak and uncomfortable with makeup puts herself in other people’s hands.  It’s a good thing they’re my friends, or they might’ve killed me.  Instead, they made me look really good. 

(Cassondra said I had to tell that part, or she would.  )

Then Jeanne hung around and made me smile while Cassondra took a great many shots.  Cassondra and Tawny retouched our favorite, and voila!  I love it.

So now I have a brand new, official author head shot and, before Thanksgiving, will have on my iPad a brand new, official ebook of a story I actually wrote with my actual name on the actual cover.  Squee!

I think of this series as contemporary fantasy romance with a lot of boom.  Mayhem, if you will.  :-)  Here’s the official description for Renegade:

SHE FOLLOWS THE RULES

As the Collegium council’s top sheriff of the southeastern United States, Valeria Banning doesn’t just take her job seriously, she takes it personally. So when a notorious traitor wanted by the authorities suddenly risks his life to save hers, she has to wonder why.

HE BREAKS EVERY ONE OF THEM

As a mage, Griffin is sworn to protect innocents from dark magic, which is how he finds himself fighting side by side with the beautiful Valeria Banning. But when the council finds out the two have been working together, they’re both left running for their lives—from the law, the threat of a ghoul takeover, and a possible Collegium mole.

I love this blurb, too! 

I don’t write with actors in mind for my characters.  I’ve tried, but that makes them feel less mine somehow.  I do like, later, figuring out which actors the characters most resemble so I can describe them to other people.  I think Val is a similar type to Mary McCormack, attractive, even beautiful but in a girl-next-door way.  Griff (whose last name is Dare) is more like a young Christopher Reeve without the Superman hair, handsome with strong, clean-cut features.

I’m headed home today from touring Georgia’s Okefenokee Swamp, which figures heavily in the overall story arc, though not so much in this particular book.  I’m including three of my favorite pictures from yesterday’s boat trip.  See how reflective the water is.  It looks black but is actually the color of weak iced tea and is as clear as what comes out of the faucet.

That gray stuff hanging off the trees is called Spanish moss but is neither Spanish nor moss.  More about that next month.  I traded my regular day, the 26th, to another bandita and am taking the 21st instead.  We’ll talk more about about Renegade and the Okefenokee.

Meanwhile, thanks to Cassondra, Jeanne, and Tawny for their help with the author photo, to Tawny for getting the website to accept my photo and to Jeanne for hanging out to chat with everyone while I’m on the road.  And to all the banditas for their support along the way!

I’ll answer comments before I get on the road and again if I stop along the way at  any place with Wifi.   I’ll catch up when I get home late this afternoon.

Assuming today’s blog prize survives its night in the trunk of the car, I’m giving one commenter a small glass figurine of Cinderella’s slipper on a pillow.

That slipper, to me, is a symbol of a difficult quest that turned out extremely well. I sort of feel like Cinderella lately.

(If the slipper doesn’t survive, I’ll think of something else, of course, but the figurine should be okay.  I’m just hedging my bets in case something weird goes wrong.)

So tell me, have you ever visited a swamp?   Do you read paranormal or fantasy romance?  If so, what kind do you particularly like, and why?  Have you ever read a book with mages?  If so, what did you like about it?

201 Comments