Discussion → Behind the Scenes: About Arcana Magi

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    H-M Brown
    Feb 09, 09:47pm

    Greetings fellow readers, welcome to another edition of Behind the Scenes. Today I’m going to talk about Arcana Magi itself.

    It all started back in 2006 when I wrote the first few pages for a novel called Mystic Hunter Mayumi. The story was to follow the adventures of Mayumi Kanzaki, a teenager with magical powers who was able to see auras around people. While at a museum with her mother, a curator, she received a magical pendant from its original owner, Mrs. Mizaki. That was until a fox boy stole it and she chased it through the museum. I stopped short of finishing the first chapter but what was to happen was that the museum and everyone inside would turn to stone. Mayumi and the fox would then go hunting for the artifact that caused it so they could return the people to normal.

    I shelved the story to focus on writing other novels and projects, and I completely forgotten about this one. That wasn’t until 2009, when I signed onto to Fictionaut when I wrote a Short Story simply called Alysia’s Saga. Unaware and subconsciously, I had taken the plot of Mystic Hunter Mayumi and condensed it into a Short Story. Mayumi Kanzaki became Alysia Perez and the fox boy became a fox girl. In the First Draft of Alysia’s Saga, it featured The Orb of Vyndor asking Alysia to help find the source that caused the museum to turn to stone, but I felt for a Short Story there was too many protagonists for those of who read the current incarnation. So, I removed that clutter from the short and rewrote it. During this time, the story grew on me and many people were viewing it, though I don’t know how many account for actually reading it to the end. So I went ahead and wrote the sequel Megumi’s Fable and renamed the shorts Arcana Magi. A few weeks later, I wrote the third Short It’s So Wonderful, It’s So Beautiful.

    I had thought about continuing the shorts as a chapter series and started outlining the plot of the story, the world, and everything. What stopped me from going forward were a few factors. One was that the short stories inadvertently shifted the main character Alysia Perez to Megumi Miyazaki. It wasn’t my intent, but it happened that way. Second were the transformation sequences that I had written for the girls. I felt that it would make me a lazy writer since the paragraphs are very long and would take away the reading time from everyone. I also didn’t like the plot for these two girls in particular because it just didn’t fit right after establishing so much about them. So, I renamed the shorts Arcana Magi Zero to separate them from the main series.

    In January this year, I wrote the main series simply titled Arcana Magi. There were things I had to do to approach the writing in this story. One of those happens to be the word length. My short trilogy word count was between 6100 and 6500. I became aware that there were people who don’t like to sit in front of their computer to read long stories. My Short Stories in Word Document are 12 to 13 pages long but the PDF Format in Fictionaut extended the page numbers from an average of 18 to 28. So, I reduced the number of pages on Word for each chapter I wrote, from the average 12 to 13 pages down to an average of 5 to 7 pages for the main series, which in Fictionaut’s PDF Format is set at 12 to 17 pages. This provided me a new challenge to improve my writing techniques and storytelling. As to whether this paid off or not has yet to be determined.

    My other concern was when to post up. At first I was going to post twice a month, but I feared that people will forget about Arcana Magi and never come back to read. So I decided to try three times a month. I have yet to see what the result will be. See, my concern is that if I post too much whether every week non-stop or everyday, I may wear out my fellow readers and turn them off because they can’t keep up. Also, I would like to take my time with the writing because I don’t have an editor who can cover my mistakes. Everything I write has to be edited by myself and I am sure along the way there have been some grammatical errors that may have turned off some readers. So with the amount of time between postings, I can at least get as many errors as I can corrected so I can provide a good reading experience for everyone.

    And finally my new approach, research. This is a long series. I have so many ideas yet I have no clue how things operated, like energy and concussions. In order for the main series to be good I have to at least make the world plausible and believable. It doesn’t have to realistic; after all, it is fantasy. But, if a door doesn’t open after pulling a knob, then I’m not doing my job as a writer. Yes, I could keep the world very simple, this is true, but I wanted to go for some depth for the plot devices, character development, and world building. Which is why for me, it was very important to post only three times a month.

    I hope you enjoyed how I came to write Arcana Magi. Join me next time for another look Behind the Scenes.


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