Magiford Supernatural City!

Update: For a list of all the trilogies in the Magiford Supernatural City world as well as a suggested reading order and pictural timeline check out this other blog post.

As we start to wind down all the Court of Midnight and Deception I thought this was a great time to discuss the future for my urban fantasy world! First of all, I have an exciting announcement–the world is going to have it’s own name, which will make future series in this universe a lot easier to identify. I’m calling it the “Magiford Supernatural City” world/universe. 😀

I already have quite a few plans for this world, but I thought I’d go over what you can expect. As of now (2021) the plan is to release one series per year. Currently I plan to write only trilogies in this world, and most likely they’ll all follow the same launch pattern of approximately two months to get all three books.

There will be an arc that tangentially follows the Paragon and his mysterious quest–which we now know from what he’s told Leila that he’s searching for someone. The Paragon’s search will have four series total, with two of them being Hall of Blood and Mercy and Court of Midnight and Deception. (This means you’ll get two more trilogies to tie up the Paragon’s search.) I’m guessing some of you will assume that means the Paragon will be the hero of one of the two remaining trilogies, but he’s not. The Paragon has a very…strong personality. At this time I have no plans for him to have a trilogy of his own. (I still have other series to work on, after all.)

The next Magiford Supernatural City trilogy–which I’ll release in 2022–will not involve the Paragon’s quest. It’s going to be a spin off of sorts–I’ll get into the specifics of it in the next post!

I do already have plans for a few additional spin off series–besides the trilogy that will launch in 2022. All of them will tackle different kinds of supernaturals and issues, but you’ll always get to see a few old characters in each trilogy. You’ll find that I’ve planted seeds to these spin offs in the four trilogies that make up the Paragon’s quest!

Even better, we’ve seen and heard of the heroine that will fill out the third trilogy of the Paragon’s search! We saw her in a Hall of Blood and Mercy short, and she was discussed in one of the Court of Midnight and Deception books and a short as well. 😉 Can you find her? (I am planning for this heroine’s series to launch in 2023.)

The Journey

Typically, I plot out my books meticulously because I hate rewrites, and my general goal is to avoid them as much as possible. But as I mentioned in my 2020 recap post, this year I listened to Brandon Sanderson’s class via youtube, and I decided to really drill down and focus on shaping my characters by the principals he presents. Unfortunately, that meant I had a couple off scenes and one long false start that I ended up having to redo. I asked the Champions in our Facebook Group if they’d be interested in seeing these deleted scenes and edited snippets, and the overwhelming answer was yes! So let’s take a walk down memory lane and see how I re-shaped parts of CoMaD through out the writing process!

1) The Original beginning: As part of the refining process I ended up having to redo the first 20 pages of Crown of Shadows. The events all stayed the same–even most of the dialog is there, though there is an additional fae character I cut for the sake of keeping things shorter. But in the original ending, Leila’s hatred for the fae came on a little too strong to the point where she was bitter and was pretty much impossible to work with once I got her to the mansion. I ended up having to go back and significantly soften her disdain for fae, which made her about 50% less paranoid (which is saying something) and also made her a lot more likable. (As a character, she wasn’t meshing well with Skye, Indigo, or even the Paragon because of her dislike of fae. That made her extremely unlikable since the Paragon is a pretty popular character.) If you want to see this original, more hate-filled version of Leila, click here for the PDF!

2) An incredibly lazy fight scene: The fight scene you see in Magiford Mid Summer Derby where Leila and the night mares are attacked is actually the second version of the fight. I had an original fight scene that was much shorter….honestly because I was feeling lazy at the time and really needed to just FINISH the book. When I did my first read-through of the book I ended up doing a rehaul of the scene because it was just so…bad. It was too short, the use of magic didn’t make sense, and it felt amateurish. Worse yet, it was supposed to be the climax moment in the book! Yeah, a lot of work had to be done to save it. Click here for the PDF if you’d like to witness this original fight.

3) Leila asks Rigel to be King: In Queen’s Crown, Leila asks Rigel to be King of the Night Court. In the version that got published it’s a close moment between the pair, that shows a bit of Leila’s desperation. In the original version of the scene I hadn’t correctly underlined that Leila lacked a connection with her Court–and when I wrote this scene I already knew that and I knew I’d have to go back and fix it. During my first tread-through I did a better job of underlining the lack of connection–which I actually set up in Crown of Moonlight–but then I knew the somewhat slap-dash/not-at-all-serious way Leila asks Rigel to be King in the first version of this scene wasn’t going to work. Rigel becoming King was a way bigger deal than I originally made it, and it was an important turning point in their relationship.  Click here for the PDF if you’d like to read that part of the original scene!

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There were a few more scenes that got some rehauls. In the wedding, I originally had a golem attack Rigel and Leila before I discussed the book with Britta–my beta reader–and she pointed out if I brought the spiders back in it would better draw in the initial attack, something I badly needed since I had to show the original offender hadn’t given up. I also did some rework with Leila in the mansion, and reworked a scene with her fae nobles, but the majority of those changes were minor or slight enough that you probably wouldn’t notice them very much.

But there you have it, Champions: a glimpse of how rough my books can be in the first drafts. Typically what I write in my first draft is very, very close to what you end up getting, it’s just finessed and I typically have to pull out a little more of the romance and underline more of the subplots.

I hope you enjoyed that behind-the-scenes peek! Thanks for reading, Champions, and have a wonderful day!

Character Profiles: Rigel & Leila

This is our last batch of deep dives into characters, and we’re hitting up our main protagonists: Rigel and Leila!

When I first designed this series, I knew Rigel was going to be a challenge. I mean, the guy tries to kill Leila the first times he sees her. Ingratiating him to other characters, much less you Champions, was going to be a difficult task.

Moreover, I needed Rigel to be believably competent to the point where he was almost scary, but then I needed him to believably switch to helping Leila. The tension of the story would be terrible if he easily switched sides, and if he started the series by siding with her that was going to make the whole thing of him trying to kill her totally fake. And Rigel needed to be the one to try to kill Leila because it would make for interesting romance–which is a real fight for me–and he was my best source of clues for hinting at who was ultimately responsible, which I badly needed!

To make it worse, Rigel wasn’t a talkative character! Killian is charismatic and totally willing to carry on a conversation, which makes it easier to show out the different facets of his personality. Rigel–silent with a penchant for looming–was the exact opposite. This meant I had to show more scenes from his point of view so readers knew what he was thinking and, more importantly, I had to make every sentence he spoke and every physical action he took count on about five different levels.

It’s a huge deal when–during their wedding–Rigel steps up to protect Leila. But it took pretty much the entire book to set up for that moment so you’d be able to understand how crucial that change was.

I wanted Rigel to fall in love in a way that was different from my previous male protagonists–particularly Killian and his love story with Hazel. That was partially what inspired me to make him an assassin–the idea of taking this silent assassin and mashing him with loveable Leila and watching the sparks fly made me actually excited–instead of petrified–to write their romance.

Hilariously, the hardships with Rigel became the very thing that made him fun to write: his subtleties.  The way he can tell the glooms and shades apart and will pet them, the fact that he listens and hears Leila when she’s up late at night and fighting an emotional battle–he shows his character and his love in a hundred tiny ways. And while that was daunting at the start of the series, by the end I was having an utter blast dreaming up all of his minute actions.

Plus, I love a good villains-to-lovers romance, so I was destined to like our taciturn hero!

Fierce, blunt, and hilarious Leila is undoubtedly one of my favorite heroines I’ve ever gotten to write. Her sarcasm combined with the general obliviousness of the fae–and their horror at her playfulness–made her a dream to write.

She tumbled onto the scene because I wanted to write a modern day heroine who didn’t want to be queen and was so different from her people she was practically alien to them. I knew it would make for some great laughs, and I also knew that in order for the fae to be “saved” just as Hazel and Killian have begun whipping the vampires and wizards into shape, that the fae needed someone who wouldn’t back down but was also kind enough to listen.

And that is Leila’s true power. Yes, she won’t take death threats sitting down, or let her nobles push her around, but she’s willing to forgive, and she can be kind. That’s why she accepts Chrysanthe’s friendship–and Chrys pays her back tenfold. It’s why she loves the night mares even though they look like something that stepped out of a horror story–and again, they pay back her love tenfold.

While Leila’s sarcasm is the flashiest part of her personality, it’s her kindness that makes reclaiming the Night Realm possible. The Night Court would never have shown up for a queen who only belittled fae and did whatever she wanted. But they would die for Leila because she’s strong enough to stop the infighting, and soft enough to forgive them.

For example, even though she hates socials and does everything she can to decrease spending, she knows those events are important to the fae, so she makes sure they happen. (On a much more reasonable budget, but it’s the thought that counts!) And while she resists tea for almost the entirety of the series, her loyalty to her people is what makes her break and try tea–and she’s rewarded because it turns out her people decided to try coffee because of their loyalty to her.

Leila is all about opposites coming together. She’s human and fae; sarcastic and soft; strong in magic but weak in her own realm; intelligent but ignorant in a lot of fae ways.

There won’t ever be another heroine quite like Leila, but I loved her story, and I can’t wait to watch her keep growing as the Magiford stories continue.

That’s all for today, Champions! I hope you enjoyed our character studies. We still have a few more themed posts to go through–I hope you’re having as much fun as I am! Until next time, have a beautiful day!