Those Dastardly Magic Thieves!

 Infodump #7: Magic and Those Who Steal It

Something that I don't go into too much detail about in the book is stealing magic, so I'll do so here! Let's say that you have 20 magic, and so does your friend. Your friend uses 5 of their magic and wants to recharge immediately. Instead of waiting for it to refill naturally, they steal 5 from you. Now they have 20 again, and you have 15. They spend 5 of their magic later and find that they can't regenerate to 20, 15 is as high as they can go. They reduced their capacity to cast by taking magic from other people. Now your friend is left with 15 and you have 20. This change is permanent. 

Now, you might be asking what happens if you try to steal more energy than the other person has? If you had 20 and the other person had only 5? Well, for most enchanters, it means that 5 is all you can take. But there is a worse, much worse thing you can do if you're powerful enough, or if you've studied special techniques. You can suck out their unconscious mana, which would zap their physical, mental, and emotional strength, rendering them nearly defenseless and exhausted. It's very easy to get sick like this and with no unconscious mana, your body is doing all the work instead of your body and magic healing in tandem. 

One more step you can take, which is incredibly difficult to do and guarantees death, is to steal someone's core mana. This may come as a shock to you, but many people do not want to die. So this level of magic is essentially an incredibly difficult final boss. No matter if the number of mana it has is 1 or 1,000, core mana is not taken lightly, and you may find yourself not opening your eyes to see tomorrow. 

Not sure if this was all super clear, but if you have any further questions please ask below and I'll be happy to elaborate!

Magic System

   Infodump #6: the magic system!

Ok, sweet baby sun, here it is. The magic system question. How does the magic work in this world? 

Simple! Or not? Maybe?? 

It goes like this: Every enchanter has mana, i.e., a certain predetermined level of magic they can hold at any given time. This is the most well known kind, expressional mana, or magic that you expel from your body. The level/amount of mana that you have is usually based on your parents, their mana levels will combine and pass on to you. So if your mom had 18 mana and your other mom had 12, you would end up having 30 total. 

Now how can you use this mana? Well, there's basically an infinity of ways, it's mostly based in how you're taught and how active your imagination is. You know how people learn and express themselves in different ways? It's the same way with magic. You might only have 15 mana, and while you can't really teleport on your own with that amount, you can certainly find creative ways to utilize it, plus, the less mana you have, the quicker you can charge up. 

Which brings me to my next point, what happens when you use all your mana? You can't cast anymore. I mean you can, but you'll really regret it. I'll elaborate on that in a bit. Now when you use all your mana you need to recharge, you can do this in a multitude of ways. Here's a list of a few (please keep in mind, some of these won't work for some people, just like going to a house party isn't going to recharge an introvert)

• meditating/praying
• art (singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting/etc)
• screaming/breaking things
• being in nature
• exercise (swimming, running, sports, climbing, moving in general)
• sleeping/napping
• daydreaming
• doing nothing
• eating
• cooking
• listen to music
• talk with friends/other people
• read
• alone-time
• and more...

If you use all your energy, you do what you gotta to make yourself feel better, simple as that. Now what did I mean by you can cast but shouldn't if you have no mana? Well there are a few different levels of magic within you. Expressional, as we discussed, is most closely connected to the sun. Action, movement, reaching out and taking what you want, that sort of thing. 

The next level is unconscious, mana that you expend without realizing it, (everyone has gut feelings, but this is where intuition usually originates from), like observations that aren't based on facts but turn out to be true, accidentally affecting other people with your energy/feelings towards them, drawing in things that you want that you might not have even known about, etc.  This energy ties in directly with the moon. 

But that isn't the level you need to worry about, what you do need to worry about is your core mana, see this like the center of the earth but of your body and soul. If you completely run out of this magic then you are dead. like dead dead. This level of mana is dependent on what you've gone through and how you've adjusted to difficulties in your life. Abuse, trauma, significant death, war, starvation, illness, heartbreak, the bad, the worse, and the uglier. Think of it like a snail shell, each time it gets smashed you need to scramble to find a new one or else you'll be vulnerable. The bigger the shell, the more difficulty you can handle. So if you're in such a desperate situation that you push yourself beyond your limits, then you better be damn careful how you use that last reserve, because it will be the last thing you ever use if it's all gone. Side note, this type of mana is associated with the stars.

For a little more detail/examples of how you can use magic read the upcoming section!

ex 1: You have 20 mana at the beginning of the day, you used 5 of it to speed up your legs to get to school on time, 3 to warm up your lunch, and 2 to grab your notebook off the ground. You have 10 left, and your homework for the day is to make a sculpture using your mana. A few options are...

• If you're good at visualizing, you might choose to mold a piece of wood to make it, though you might need to recharge a few times or use a chisel the rest of the way
• If you're more physically inclined you could just start hacking away at the wood, using your mana to paste pieces of it back on when you've made a mistake. 
• If you prefer to think logically then you could borrow a tutorial booklet from the classroom and use your mana to turn the pages while you work on it. 
• Work better in a group? Get together with classmates or a friend and have them critique and guide you through it! It's not directly magical, but you mix your energies unconsciously and use your own individual mana to create the figures. 
• Advanced technique: this may come more naturally to some than others, but going out in nature is a great way to lessen the amount of mana you need to use! Being around plants, roots, and animals lends to magic regeneration and can put many people into a creative flow. 

There are plenty of other ways you can use your mana, no matter how much or little of it there is. You can join your energy with others, you can use nature/the world around you, or you could get creative with your execution! 

Nothing is Original (And That's Beautiful)

  Infodump #5: Where It All Comes From

I've had a lot of influences when it comes to writing this, the biggest ones however fit into two categories. The first is life experience/upbringing, the second is media I've consumed, (books, youtube videos, movies, shows)

For examples of the first's impact on the story, I'd really rather not go into it at the moment, I'm still recovering from a very controlling and harsh environment, but you can certainly get context clues from the book if you'd like. 

NOW, for the second category, I can go into things that I'm actually excited for people to maybe notice in my writing. (note: these aren't my inspiration, but they might give some context on why I frame things the way I do and/or the message I'm trying to/subconsciously getting across)

Does it look overwhelming? That's because it is! I was exhausted just writing it, please do not feel like you have to slog through this.

1. Shows
1. Steven Universe
2. Adventure Time
3. Teen Titans 
4. Bee and Puppycat
5. Good Omens
2. Anime
1. Princess Tutu
2. Inuyasha
3. Saiki K
4. Mob Psycho
5. Cowboy Bebop
6. Spy x Family
7. Ouran High School Host Club
3. Movies
1. The Cat in the Hat (Mike Myers)
2. The Never Ending Story
3. Marry Poppins
4. Kung Fu Panda (1,2,3)
5. Megamind
6. Secondhand Lions
7. Who Framed Roger Rabbit
8. Robots
9. How to Train Your Dragon (all)
10. Puss In Boots - The Last Wish
11. Wizard of Oz
12. Hotel Transylvania  (ONLY the 1st, and parts of the 2nd and 3rd, the fourth can burn in HELL)
13. Shrek (All)
14. Veggie Tales (All)
15. Coraline
16. Ponyo
17. Howl's Moving Castle
18. Addams Family (both with angelica houston)
19. Everything Everywhere All at Once
20. Barbie (animated)
21. Barbie (margot robbie)
22. Monster's Inc
23. Bug's Life
24. Princess Bride
4. Video Games
1. Ocarina of Time
2. Breath of the Wild
3. Tears of the Kingdom
4. Deltarune
5. Undertale
6. Stardew Valley
7. Danganronpa (1 and 2)
8. Doki Doki Literature Club
9. Minecraft
5. Books
1. Nerfertiti (Michelle Moran)
2. The Second Empress (Michelle Moran)
3. Percy Jackson (All)
4. Heros of Olympus (All)
5. Magic Treehouse
6. Beauty Pop
7. Hunger Games
8. Little Women
9. Nancy Drew (Carolyn Keen)

Why Write a Book in the First Place?

 Infodump #4: Why? For What Reason? Who do you think you are??

((note for this post, I am genderfluid and go by she/her and he/him pronouns, thus I refer to myself with both in this post))

(((double note - Trigger Warning: mentions of suicidal ideation and poor mental heath, and also perhaps cringe writing)))

Now, dear reader, you may wonder why, why would I write this book? Where did it come from? Well, you're in luck, today I will attempt to explain to you the timeline of my book and by proxy, a bit of my creative journey. 

2014 - 14 year old Maya in the 9th grade, or maybe the 8th? The details are not clear. I wrote a very shitty 13 chapter book entitled, Well, That's Interesting..., a self insert story of me as a knight and and a boy who's look I liked but attitude I found both disgusting and fascinating. It was very bad. Like, astronomically bad. I wrote it on Wattpad. stars help us all

2014-2016 - I write two sequels to this book, the second book I cannot remember the title of for the life of me, but it involved Aethra (At the time named Zinkoff) and Deitra (Called Dupree ((my middle name)) at that time) in a... look I don't even know how to describe it without showing you, but I really don't want to subject your eyes to that kind of horror. Maybe when I start selling a lot of copies of Golden Dawn I'll link you all directly to the OG. Just know it was bad. I went and looked at it to get their old name and? Oh my moon?! So bad! 

2019 - I go to college at Maharishi International University (Then Maharishi University of Management) for an art degree

2020-2023 - covid happens and I go home and do college online, being forced to change my major to bachelors of arts and sciences (the liberal arts degree). Spiral into depression, bad home life, refusing to work bc I will go to the big veggie tale land in the sky if I do, start thinking about that book I wrote in 9th grade and wanting to rewrite it. I make it my senior project and write about 27,000 words worth. My professor is very impressed but does not understand non-binary pronouns, but that's ok bc he's not judging and he's from the cretaceous period, love you old boy

oct 2023 - all moved out as of last month with my sisters in our fabulous new apartment, at my new job (like 4 or 5 months old), 41,000 words so far, feeling less and less like sticking a water gun where the sun don't shine everyday (: very good stuff

So yes, very, very disconnected and not at all completed, but this is just a rough drawing up of the passage of time, I may very well be wrong, but yes, here you are, feel free to ask questions. 

Update: as of 3/13/24 I am now at 71,600 words, so in about 5 months I managed to write 30,000 words more. That's about 6,000 words a month and 1,500 words a week! Very happy with my progress, stay tuned for more.

Another update - 5/23/24 - 78,417 words. A little stuck on how to proceed, but once i connect some dots and add some intrigue we should be good. I pray to Sun I don't leave any plot threads hanging. I'll have to run through this shit with a fine tooth comb. 71 days since the last update, that's about 2.3 months. 6817 words between before and now, which is about 2,963 words per month. Not too shabby! I'm working on formatting it (which i hope won't end up being useless) and changing the chapter names from numbers to titles. I'm also working on the cover, we'll see if that ends up being any good or not. Safe travels through the internet, friend. 

9/17/24 - I'm 24 now! We've reached 91,000 words. Feeling pretty good, very ready to be done and do the finishing touches. I couldn't resist, I had to add a ballroom scene. I'm weak, I know lol. I'm excited (: (4 months - 13,000 words - 3250 words a month, higher than I thought it'd be!)

The World

 Infodump #3: The World

Now, the world as a whole in Golden Dawn is much smaller than ours, there a HUGE amount of open ocean and some scattered islands, but mostly there's one giant landmass that's shaped like a donut. Here's a visual for your viewing pleasure. Please keep in mind this is NOT comprehensive, this is just one of the first actual drawings I've done of it (I literally forgot to draw an entire city lmao)

The cities in order of left to right go Apollon, Bora, Nephele, Aella, Aiolos, Helena, Bronte, Mountain Range, Aura, The Forest of Abel, and right back to Apollon. It would technically be more accurate to call these regions or countries, comsi, comsa. They all have different weather conditions and are loosely based off of countries here in good old earth. I'll try to recall what I assigned to each one, but keep in mind, as always, this is subject to change and I might be wrong, I'm not sure where my original notes are.

Apollon: United States/Mexico

Bora: China/South Africa/Australia

Nephele: South America (Venezuela, Brazil)

Aella: South Asia (Nepal, Bangladesh, Chile)

Aiolos: South Asia/Africa/Mexico (Venezuela, Egypt)

Helena: Egypt/Somalia/Saudi Arabia

Bronte: Maldives/Hawaii/Sri Lanka

Mountain Range: Andes/Rockies/Himalayas

Aura: Russia/Canada/Greenland

Forest of Abel: Just a big ass forest, redwoods and shit