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Updates on the MCHQ move
Hi, Magician!
It’s good to see that you’ve made it over to the new HQ. I appreciate your support.
Today, I set up post notifications. You should only be notified of posts and episodes that you have access to… Hopefully.
I’m looking forward to all the fun things I can add to our new home! Do you have ideas? Let me know in the comments.
Love & light,
Gaius
TAGS: updates -
Building the MCHQ
I’ve been hard at work getting the new MCHQ ready for prime time!
All stories have been migrated over.
The tiers and sign up page are ready.
There are a few small technical issues to resolve, but once that’s done, I should be good to go.
Thanks for your patience as I do my best to make your experience magical!
Love & light,
GaiusTAGS: updates -
Preview of Valentine’s Day Short Story
Twenty authors have gotten together to give you a collection of free short stories featuring LGBTQ protagonists all released on Valentine’s Day!
Here’s a preview of mine: Lake of Promises!
The Lake of Promises is an unremarkable, remote location deep in the Mollarno forest beyond the city of O’er. The forest itself is the subject of many scary stories, but the Lake of Promises is different. Many have traveled to the lake on once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimages, drawn by the promise of meeting their soulmate. And those who didn’t meet the love of their life on their journey still experienced good fortune. However, the terrain is brutal, the mosquitos are no joke, and the area around the lake is home to one of the most deadly venomous snakes in the world.
Viteria wasn’t interested in a soulmate. Ze had graduated with top honors in zir undergraduate degree and in half the time of zir peers in graduate school. Most colleagues described zir as ‘passionate’ and ‘intense’ while zir parents typically went with ‘unabashedly queer’ and ‘lonely.’ These things were true, though being unabashedly queer hadn’t stopped zir from bashing in zir last partner’s nose when ze found out they’d been stealing money from zir.
Despite being junior faculty at the University of O’er’s College of Magic, obtaining a grant for zir research, and publishing three papers in top journals during zir first year as faculty, Viteria’s life felt empty. Every day was the same: wake up, go to work, go home to an empty apartment, scare zirself by leaving a jacket on the coat rack that always looked like a burglar, and go to bed.
The monotony wore zir down. Zir therapist suggested Spelled Hypnotherapy-Induced Change (SHIC), a new therapy where a magic psychiatrist readjusted the brain chemistry of a hypnotized patient. Viteria hoped it would help, but after a month of SHIC therapy, ze saw no difference except in zir bank account. On the day ze ended the therapy, ze broke down crying in zir home after realizing for the thousandth time that the damn coat rack wasn’t a burglar.
Enough was enough.
“What are you going to do?” zir mother asked when ze explained the situation. “I hope you aren’t planning to ruin your career.”
“Don’t say that,” zir father had argued. “Our baby girl — I mean, Viteria — knows better than to do anything that would jeopardize her — I mean, zir — future.”
“Just because I want some time off doesn’t mean I’m going to ruin my career,” ze replied with a grumble. “I have two weeks of vacation time.”
“No one takes their vacation time in academia,” zir mother said.
“It would look better to take a day off here and there, so you don’t look erratic,” zir dad added.
They didn’t understand, just as they hadn’t understood zir pronoun change, and ze didn’t have the patience to argue with them.
Being non-binary in academia was isolating, as ze was reminded of the next day. In the breakroom next door to Viteria’s office, ze heard faculty laughing, asking about each other’s children, and making plans to meet up. No one even made eye contact when they passed by zir office.
Ze tried to focus on the scholarship ze had spearheaded for students returning after one or more gap years. The scholarship committee vote had determined the winner: a transgender man named Henray Asante. It was zir responsibility to contact him, but ze was too stressed. It could wait. The deadline to notify the recipient was still a month away.
When the breakroom emptied, ze entered and started a cup of coffee, propping zir cane on the counter. As ze waited for the dripping coffee to stop, zir eyes passed over the bulletin board at the far wall. The department’s faculty had dressed it up with motifs of skeletons, bats, and ghosts for Samhain, but that’s not what grabbed zir attention.
At the center of the board, a lone piece of paper held a large picture of a beautiful lake surrounded by a serene forest. Large text said “RESERVE YOUR SPOT TODAY!” in all caps. Ze grabbed zir cane and moved nearer to read the words beneath the image.
“Experience this once-in-a-lifetime journey! Limited spots available for 3-day excursion to internationally treasured vista.”
Viteria turned away when a low ping came from the coffee machine. Ze looked at the flier as ze dropped the cup in a holder. Ze glanced at it as ze snapped a top onto the cup. For the rest of the day, the advertisement lingered in zir mind.
TAGS: updates -
First Post
Welcome to the new home of the Magician’s Club HQ!
As a magician, you’ll find everything you need in the menu to the left.
Please excuse our dust as we work to migrate our content to this new platform!
Love & light,
GaiusTAGS: updates -
Valentine’s Day story coming soon
Hi, Magician!
Just an announcement that I’ll be uploading a special short story for Valentine’s Day soon.
It will be available to followers as well as subscribers.
The story is called Lake of Promises. Two people looking for anything but love travel together to the Lake of Promises, a magic location that grants wishes.
I hope you’ll look forward to it!
Love & light,
Gaius
TAGS: updates -
Behind the Scenes of Mani 2
This is a long one, so if you’re interested in behind the scenes information, you’ll enjoy this. But there’s no news here, so if you’re only interested in updates, you can rest assured that you’re not missing anything.
The first book in the Manifestations Series finished up at the beginning of the year 🎉🎉🎉. I’ve been hard at work trying to get the second story sorted, and I wanted to share a bit about the process because why not? 🤷
Those of you who know me know that I approach my stories in very different ways. Sometimes I’m a total panster and other times I’m a very thorough plotter and still other times I sit somewhere in the middle.
This is the third time that I’m writing this series. The first time was in high school, written as a few short stories. Sometime later, I did a rewrite on the first two, but I was never quite happy with them. There was just a lot of drama and not a lot of actual action happening, which would be fine if that’s the type of story I was aiming to write, but it wasn’t.
The first two times I wrote these, I didn’t do any planning. And it was clear when I decided to start the 3rd version that this story needed more planning than I’d put into it before. So I decided to go full plotter.
It starts with an outline laying out the basic beats of the story. That outline goes through several iterations, usually 3-4 complete rewrites. Once I’m happy with it, I write a more detailed outline that goes through every scene and states every action that happens within that scene. The goal is really to be able to have everything fleshed out so that once I start writing, I’m literally just expanding on what the outline already has defined.
Once I have the detailed outline done but before I start writing, I sent the outline to my developmental editor. I really value her insights on ensuring characters’ motivations are solid and that relationships are well-formed. I do also hope that she’ll catch plot holes, and when she does, it’s absolutely amazing. But finding plot holes in an outline is not the easiest thing to do.
When I take this extreme plotting method, I typically do not start writing until the detailed outline has been fully vetted and I’m 100% confident in it. But this story was writing itself in my mind and keeping me up at night, so I had to get it down. ✍️
So I started writing, and I’ve already got something like 15,000 words written, some of which I’m going to have to rewrite (oops 😬). I knew that going in, and I probably should have waited to start. But even so, I’m already so in love with the story.
Now what’s really getting to me is that ManiProphy (book 1) had an outline that was 46 bullet points. I did expand that during drafting because there was a lull in the story that I hadn’t anticipated. So I ended up adding a subplot (the Dwesdar Dagger) that expanded the story beyond what was in those 46 bullet points. But compare that to Mani 2, where my detailed outline has 90 bullet points.
I knew the second story was going to be a little longer because it has more characters and needs to cover an issue that affects the city (Ar) and the main two realities in the series, Midrealm and Highrealm. But let me tell you, seeing the completed outline and how long it is… it’s a little overwhelming.
I’ve written long stories before, though never plotted like this, and I have confidence that I can do it. But it just seems so big right now. I think the outline will really help with that because instead of focusing on 90 bullet points, I can focus on one at a time. And because I know where I’m going, I don’t have to worry as much about whether I’m introducing issues that I’ll need to resolve later and don’t yet know how.
Once the developmental editing is done and I make any revisions to the outline that I need to, I’ll finalize what I’ve written (including rewrites where necessary), and then I’ll have updates for you on when you can expect new episodes to be released. For now, I just wanted to give you a little bit of insight into my process and how I’m feeling about the story so far.
If you have any questions, I’m happy to answer them sans spoilers. But if you want spoilers, I guess I’ll I could give you spoilers, too. 🤣 Let’s just make sure that we mark anything that could be spoilery so that if others are reading they can skip if they want.
If you liked this post and would like to see more, please comment and let me know. I want to create content that you enjoy, and I have no idea what people enjoy. 😅
Thanks for being part of the Magician’s Club HQ! I’m so happy to have you here because otherwise, I’d just be talking to myself.
Love & light,
Gaius
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2023 Recap and 2024 Plans
I’m the type of person who is typically looking ahead, so sometimes I forget to do a retrospective and see how far I’ve come. I decided to take a quick peek at 2023 to see all I accomplished, and then, as an extra bonus, give you a look at what I hope to accomplish in 2024.
Let me know in the comments what you’re looking forward to the most!
2023 Recap
As you can see below, I had an incredible 2023 as an author!
- Wrote over 150,000 words
- Set up my online shop to sell ebooks
- Finished Tales 4 & 5 of Tales of a Vernian Youth
- Finalized ebooks for Tales 1-3 of Tales of a Vernian Youth
- Finished writing Manifestation of Prophecy
- Completed first 10,000 words of book 2 in the Manifestations Series
- Started the Magician’s Club HQ, where readers can get early access to all of my work
2024 Plans
I have so much I want to complete for 2024, but here are my goals. I’ve tried to keep them reasonable.
- Query agents for Manifestation of Prophecy (ManiProphy)
- Prepare ManiProphy for ebook & print (to self-publish if no agents pick it up)
- Query agents for Tales of a Vernian Youth (ToVY), Volume 1. (maybe)
- Prepare ToVY V1 for ebook & print (to self-publish if no agents pick it up). Either way, ebooks of Tales 1-3 are available in my online shop and Tale 4 is coming soon.
- Finish writing Tales 6 & 7 of ToVY.
- Finish writing Manifestations book 2.
- Publish Those Without Wings to ebook & print.
- Publish Devil’s Sanctuary to ebook & print.
I have a few other story ideas I hope I can fit into 2024, but as you can see, my plate is overflowing.
TAGS: updates -
December 2023 Newsletter
Each month, I put out a traditional newsletter. Here’s the link to this month’s.
https://preview.mailerlite.io/preview/16976/emails/105791611434174377
Thanks for being part of this magical community!
TAGS: updates -
National Day of Mourning
Today, I’m holding space to reflect on the atrocities committed by those who came before us in order for us all to have the privileges we are thankful for in the US.
Love & light,
Gaius
TAGS: updates -
Weekly Update
(Image above may not show up in email)
This week, I focused on writing in Tales of a Vernian Youth, though I did spend some time on editing Manifestation of Prophecy.
Tale 5 has been…interesting. It’s a really fun tale full of adventure and laughs, as I hope you expect by now. But it’s also been challenging. It’s a bit more satirical than past tales. Balancing that satire with the story has been harder than I thought.
In fact, I wrote a big battle scene over the past two days, and I’m not sure I can use it. 😅 Today I’ll be going back and trying again with it. This may sound harsh, but I often delete huge portions of my writing and rewrite them. Because if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work.
Anyway, I’m hoping to have the draft of Tale 5 complete by the end of the month, so keep your fingers crossed for me. 🤞
Thanks for being a member of the Magician’s Club HQ! You’re making my dreams a reality.
Love & light,
Gaius
TAGS: updates