<Physical /><Digital /> — A Summary
It took me a while to find this world. In fact, I have an entire Google Drive folder of false starts.
I could recognize when a world didn’t resonate with me. I would be sluggish in my writing, finding difficulty in even churning out a few hundred words. Characters seemed like stilted puppets and story threads often led to dead ends. That’s usually the point where I have to face the hard facts and leave that world, saying to myself “not now, maybe later.”
Enough though, about what didn’t work for me.
I returned to the old writer’s adage “write what you know.”. For me, that came to combining my love for the fantasy genre (which I’ve been an avid reader of since I learned English in Grade 2), with my computer science background. So I settled comfortably in the genre of Magitek.
And now on to the actual summary!
Magic has always been used since the dawn of time. Through methods of chants, prayers, ritual and other similar mechanisms, magical energies were channeled to manifest desires. Only those that were magically-inclined or “talented” could take advantage of this semi-precious commodity and as a result, technology continued to advance for its wider market appeal and for the masses consumption.
All that changed when a man by the name of Clarke Dalton invented the Infusion Process. Through the means of a Dalton pad, a device that could be plugged into any computer, magically-talented developers, also known as technomancers, could fix magic to code and in effect, prolong the effects of magic for any user. This allowed anyone, magically-talented or otherwise, to take advantage of magic through technology and with that, magic was commercialized.
This also caused a great change in the supernatural world as the Unseen who occupied the Physical world began to migrate into the Digital. Enough magic had been infused by then to sustain them there. And so, just as sometimes human would wonder where a missing sock went, sometimes too, a developer would wonder where a piece of code may wander off to.
I am currently in the process of writing a series of short stories set in this, for a lack of a better name, parallel world. Some will be about and from the point of view of the Unseen, others will be about the humans and how they interact with magic and technology. I know of one technomancer already who really wants her story to be told. I am currently publishing each story on Medium but usually, I have them unlisted for beta-readers first. If anyone is interested in being a beta reader for me, that would be much much appreciated. I’d love to do a favour in return as well.
My goal is eventually to pulls all these stories into a book of short stories and to establish a cast of recurring characters to write stories about. I’ve also been toying the idea of putting the stories into audio and have them each as an episodic experience. Would love any thoughts on that front.
