Food Can Have a Role In Magical Writing
Mur Lafferty on writing Bookburners Ep 4: “A Sorcerer’s Apprentice”
This article originally appeared on The Back of the Box, the blog of Serial Box Publishing. Serial Box is the premier publisher of serialized fiction. Learn more at SerialBox.com.
I love food. I don’t mean in the gluttonous way and I don’t mean in the foodie way. I just take such delight when fiction will honor one of our most intimate senses. I’m the kind of person who will buy the cook book based off of a novel, and the kind of person whose mouth will water at the description of completely made up recipes in a fantasy novel.
One thing that is (in my opinion) too often ignored is the role food can have in magic. In our world, food is fuel, it is love, it can even be spite or insult. (You wonder what the hell is wrong with someone who makes you a sandwich with the heel of a loaf of bread. Was that really made with love, Mom, or are you mad at me for not cleaning my room? Boyfriend takes me to Taco Bell on my birthday? Are we breaking up?)
Regardless of good or ill, food is power.
In my search for more stories of food magic, I try to throw my own in wherever I can, so when I got the chance to make a magic cookbook for the Bookburners, I jumped. I was able to get Asanti (aka #NotAllMagic) out of her dusty archive and into the field to try to deal with something on her own, which was a lot of fun.
One of my favorite things about this world we’ve created is that magic isn’t inherently evil. It’s just that magic is so incredibly big that humans can hardly understand it, therefore they inevitably mess it up when they try to use it. This was my attempt, that as long as Asanti’s mentor was alive and could control the book, it was beneficial magic. Once he was dead, no one could control it, and we had a sorcerer’s apprentice situation. Only instead of marching brooms we had, well, a kitchen made of meat.
Working with the atmosphere of this team is fun and challenging. We have different voices, so we are able to bring different flavors to the stories. The challenge is keeping up with my talented co authors.
Episode 4 was a lot of fun to write, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
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Originally published at blog.serialbox.com on October 2, 2015.
