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@steward-of-the-pen

Nice to meet you. 🙂

The Reckoners series (Steelheart, Firefight, and Calamity) is a really good series (honestly, I like most of Sanderson’s works). If you love fantasy, I’d highly recommend the original Mistborn Trilogy (Books 1 through 3) as a good starting point for Sanderson’s fantasy works (though The Way of Kings is a good starting point as well if you are used to the larger epic books like The Wheel of Time or Lord of the Rings).

I’ve never heard of Wingfeather Saga by Andrew Peterson (until you mentioned it), but after looking it up I put it on my “To read” list. It sounds like fun in almost the way Very Nearly Honorable League of Pirates Trilogy by Caroline Carlson is (albeit they are different types of stories). As a side note, Caroline Carlson does some cool things with mixing in letters to and from individuals between the narrative that I hadn’t seen before.

There is something about Epic Fantasy music and Celtic music that works so well to write to, especially when writing Epic Fantasy (go figure). And I am so glad I found Rend Collective. Their music is just so good.

Here’s kind of my pitch for my current WIP (though the pitch is a WIP itself as well!):

“While searching for a special kind of energy stone used as a resource for her city, a woman finds an ancient seal on a dark prison which holds an evil force.

Thinking it is a new kind of energy stone, she accidentally breaks the seal with an ancient magical sword that belonged to her father, trapping herself in a realm that is in between worlds.

She must now find a way to communicate with her fiance to let him know that she is still alive and work with him to stop the remaining seals from breaking.”

Interesting to note is that my initial “lightning strike” idea for this book was “A woman gets turned into a magical sword in front of her fiance”. I had trouble figuring out a way to give her agency (proactivity) being trapped as a magical sword so the initial idea changed through the planning and writing (and more planning and more writing) process and it developed into she is actually bound to the magical sword as kind of an anchor to her world while being stuck in the “in between” realm between the worlds. This also gives her some interesting access to the magic system (hint: the magical sword she is bound to is something special).

Magic systems as fun to try to build (btw, your magic system sounds pretty cool, too), but it’s hard to make something unique or feels different from other magic systems that we’ve seen before. I definitely don’t want to make a generic magic system. So far the most fun I think I have with worldbuilding is coming up with the backstory for a setting. Like, this place had this happen to it and now that is why this city is in ruins, that kind of thing. Worldbuilding is something I really would like to get better at, while also knowing what aspects of worldbuilding to focus on for the novel I am working on at the time (instead of going too broad and building things that don’t serve the narrative). Part of this is also providing more detailed descriptions which usually happens in revisions for me.

So what is your WIP about (if you don’t mind me asking)? Again, it’s nice to meet you.