Saint Cyprian Academy Of The Magical Art's

Does this sound like a good opening chapter? The two protaganists rope their mundane fathers into coming with them on some weird warlock holiday/family reunion thing and Hilarity Ensues.

edited 24th Aug '10 9:59:34 PM by Zolnier

Maybe the boy could have a god that represents stars and constellations, meaning once in a while the appropriate constellation will become animated and give him advice? Do you know of such a god whose patronage could concievibly grant this gift?

edited 25th Aug '10 4:14:14 AM by Zolnier

Uranus the titan? Ra the one who spoke the stars into being, or Ptah the craftsman who built them if you're that kind of Egyptian, or Thoth who named them? The Zoryas, maybe? I dunno.

I like the reunion/holiday idea thing; gives you a chance to introduce a bunch of concepts all at once without overwhelming the reader.

Anyway, I asked about litigiousness and the parents' likely relationship with Smith because there's the possibility that she could have intimidated/charmed them into playing along with the facade of Anderson still being principal and sane because the school's charter states that the second-in-command at the school is not in the line of succession, to avoid situations exactly like this one.

She should teach magical medicine. Healing charms and cunning work and sympathetic magic have been made lighter and softer year after year since we started seeing witches as sad, misunderstood proto-physicians. It's time to remind readers why medieval folk were petrified of that sort of thing.

Like the idea of her teaching medicinal magic, should come as a shock to the readers. And Australia isn't that litigiousness but if Mistress Smith was real she would have been the subject of vigilante justice faster then you can say peedo! But witchkind is a bit more "Old British" than other Australians, since you know how a lot of us over here have grandparents that still call the United Kingdom home in wistful voices? Well a lot of young sorcerors have grandparents who predate Australian colonization, social change is slow and painful in sorceral socities. And maybe the parents keep her in charge the because the person whose actaully next in line is worse. And does this sound like a good scene? The boy's in trouble and turns to the night skies to ask for guidence. When told about the issues he's facing Scorpio illustratively stabs himself with his stinger. Is there a trope for that?

edited 25th Aug '10 5:26:39 PM by Zolnier

So uhh just followed the link from the Harry Potter thread, skimmed a little. All I have to say, Staves vs Wands, STAVES!!! When ever I read Harry Potter I wondered why there were no staves. It also works as a warlock/shaman tie in(considering were you set this I think it works). Now all you need is some magic that is generated by motion/centrifugal force/staff kung fu and you have a very interesting(and different) way to us magic.

Think this would be fun, contrasting the characters interactions with the sorceral branch of their family with flashbacks to some uh "unfortunate'' incidents with their fathers folks, including Cyril (pretty much certain that's what I'm calling him) preforming a truly epic piece of "accidental" magic in front of his grandparents in order to convience his father of the benefits of him getting some training in sorcerey.

edited 26th Aug '10 4:16:16 AM by Zolnier

Hey, I've had a thought. Since you've got a lot of Cs kickin' around the place already, maybe Cyril is the boy's surname and he's called by his first name at school, or else it's his given name and his schoolmates use his family name. I just happen to agree that you're already pushing the potential for confusion a bit with Crossgates and St. Cyprian's.

Apparently it's quite common in old boarding schools for boys to be reffered to by their last names so that would make sense. Could be an interesting plot point if he used his mother's last name, his way of rebelling against his father.

edited 26th Aug '10 5:13:31 PM by Zolnier

Maybe Uranus and Hecate could be scapegoats for The Chessmaster Baldur Think that would be a shocking enough? Think there's a god people would be even expect to be the Big Bad even less than him? Think there would be a way for Baldur of all gods trying to destroy sorceral society as they know it?

edited 26th Aug '10 9:35:35 PM by Zolnier

You know the old folkloric concept of animal familiars? I wonder how it could be tied into the divine patronage system?

edited 27th Aug '10 2:37:55 AM by Zolnier

Think there's a god people would be even expect to be the Big Bad even less than him?

Trust me, non-Marvel Baldur as someone who actually does stuff besides look pretty and be nice to kids is shocking enough. Him being a villain is a legitimately awesome twist, provided you don't overplay your foreshadowing.

If I do give Cyril Uranus as a patron what gifts in your opinion would be bundled with that?

edited 27th Aug '10 10:46:30 PM by Zolnier

Who do you think should be the viewpoint character? Cyril has been exposed to magic less in his upbringing so he would be more likely to notice and explain magical elements in his narration but Mellissa (her Hecate derived gifts make her a prophet in a round about way) homelife was more accommodating of magic so she would would regard it in a more Mundane Fantastic way which could be interesting.

And maybe Cyril could have a rival in the form of a obnoxious kid with Jupiter as a patron, Uranus being a titan and the overthrown father of Jupiter and all.

It's Saturn, actually, who is the overthrown Titan. Uranus is HIS castrated father.

The Greeks and Romans were whacked.

Oh my mistake. Still he was a Titan so I doubt there'll be any love lost.

edited 28th Aug '10 1:18:04 AM by Zolnier

1) He wasn't a Titan. His first six sons and first six daughters were. 2) He and Jupiter never really met. 3) His genitals made Venus, if the Romans kept that bit. 4) He's... much less anthropomorphic than most Greco-Roman gods. Saving his interactions with the Titans, he just sort of IS. The Greeks imagined him as a dome being held in place (or rotated round the Earth) by Atlas, though I'm not sure how the Romans figured things...

Ah. Wikipedia to the rescue.

Apparently, calling him Uranus at all when referring to the others as Jupiter, Saturn, etc, is incorrect. Uranus is the Greek name. The Roman is Caelus. Stupid astronomers.

Caelus is incredibly unimportant (no cults or anything), though much more anthropomorphic. He's the personification of the sky, but Jupiter is the god representing it.

So basically... Caelus is all wrong for patronage, and his Greek equivalent is a dome held in place by his grandson.

Might I recommend switching to Saturn? He's pretty cool. God of agriculture and harvest AND associated with the Winter Solstice (Christmas is in the winter because of the desperation of the church to kill Pagan celebrations!).

edited 28th Aug '10 1:52:36 AM by Star_Kindler

Yeah, in light these revelations I think I will give Cyril Saturn's blessing so what advantageous (and sucky) traits do you think Cyril would gain from having the patronage of the Roman god of agriculture, harvest and (in medieval times) justice and strength. And you know, like Cyril, Saturn also had a strained relationship with their fathers.

edited 28th Aug '10 2:25:06 AM by Zolnier

Mel Mel Mel Mel Mel. Please. We've already had our Naïve Newcomer fix from Harry all these years; time for some Just Another Day In The Life Of Melissa... wait, have you decided on a surname for her yet? Where is their family meant to be from? Do members of this magical society take a matronomic or patronomic? Do famous witches with epithets like 'the Red' and 'Souldiver' get to pass those on to their descendants, taking the place of the former surname (Babette Roux, Aaron Souldiver)?

Cyril might get famine-endurance powers like the ones I told you about for a Sedna-protected witch (I really think you ought to use her, by the way; she's too awesome to be so underexposed), along with the ability to bring forth food at will, plant-manipulation powers, and the touch-of-death (harvest god = death god, when you get right down to it). Saturn/Chronos is also the god of time, you know, which could give you an excuse for anachronic order if you're up for that. Ooh, and a good rival for a Chronos kid is a kid with the power of kairos.

See, the Greeks had two words for time; time in the long-term "one second after the other" sense, which is Chronos, and time in the "it's time!" or "opportune moment" sense, which is kairos. As far as I know there's no Greek god for kairos, but there could be a foreign god or goddess with the power that Saturn could call Kairos - maybe Benten, the Shinto goddess of luck (and beauty if I recall correctly)?

Anyway, drawbacks to having Saturn's power might include an extreme weakness to cold (not a problem in Australia, sure, but if you have a second book where they go somewhere cold - woohoo, canonical student-exchange program! - you could play it up for all it's worth) and the aforementioned touch-of-death when Cyril gets too mad. 'Course the last one is only a liability if you demonstrate that he doesn't have it under control - hey, that could be one of your man-vs.-himself arcs for the series! Cyril overcoming his temper.

Wait, didn't you want Cyril to get advice from stars? Saturn's not a sky god.

I think I could stand to lose the celestial advice thing.

And sorceral people tend to take a matronymic as a surname for much the same reason as Judaism is passed down from the mother; doubts can always be raised about paternity, not so much maternity. The main characters hyphenate but usually when in the company of witches and warlocks they introduce themselves using their mothers name, since (aside from the fact that it helps them fit in) sorcerers would be more likely to recognize it; their family are kinda the magical equivalent of upper middle class, well known but not very important. Still I just realized that I don't have a maternal last name for the characters. If you have any suggestions keep in mind that their family emigrated from Ireland in the mid eighteen hundreds and one of their ancestors is known for outwitting and defaming (he ended up being burned alive instead of the warlock's family) a prominent witch-smeller. I've got some paternal names for Melissa and Cyril, Frederickson and Gardner respectively.

Famous magical people who manage to do something spectacular enough to get an appropriate verb attached to their personage usually pass it down to their children in same shape or form.

The Saturn based boons and banes are interesting, certainly going to use them. Just imagine what kind of horrible situation that could've happend when Cyril had just forged his covenant with Saturn and didn't know about his life-snuffing touch. Maybe he and Melissa were playing around with their magic when they had first came into it and some bigger kid threatend to bash them up and the two tried to defend themselves and Cyril threw a punch and... you can guess what happens. Wouldn’t help his father's perception of magic, should I include such an incident in his background or would that do you think that would be to conductive to Wangst? It happend when he was pretty young so he's had plenty of time to get past the tramua. And the vulnability to cold doesn’t have to wait until a sequel, there a quite a few places in Australia where it gets VERY, VERY, VERY, VERY, VERY COLD, the place I call home is one of them and there's always school excursions, don't you call them field trips down there?

And does this sound like a good title? The Education Of Melissa and Cyril. And I like the the idea of Cyril toeing it with a kid who represents a different aspect of time. Funnily enough I laways did imagine Cyril having a temper, coupled with his touch of death we've got ourselves a really good case of Blessed with Suck; thats always fun to write.

edited 29th Aug '10 7:25:20 PM by Zolnier

Do you think there should be biological side-affects associated with sorceral power? What could they be? Maybe the more high level magic a sorceror uses the more their physical appearance begins to resemble that of their patron. And if there is a magical medicine class wouldn’t that make potions class a bit redundant? And on the staffs vs wands issue maybe wands are used for more delicate intricate spell work while staffs are for more "big" dramatic magiks.

edited 30th Aug '10 5:59:04 AM by Zolnier

Bah! You people don't know from cold! Get offa my lawn, you Southern-Hemisphere-surfer-kid!

How about Glick? It's Gaelic for clever or quick-witted. Smart is also an Irish last name, if Roddy Doyle is an authority on such things.

If you want something not directly related to commemorating that ancestor's guile, how about Monahan? Fionn if they're the type of wizards to stick to the traditional spellings? Hey, speaking of Fionn, how about McCullough, and they claim to be distantly related to Finn Mac Cool? I'm inclined to suggest Delmore/Delamare/Dalamar too, even though that's more Norman-Irish or Spanish Black Irish, just 'cause it's one of my family's Irish names; I think I've got a Malloy on my dad's side as well. Kavanagh's one that doesn't see much use in fiction, and Foley's a good ol' Canadian name (which might make it out of place in Australia, I guess).

... man, and I thought Canada had a lot of Irish surnames before I looked those up; I must have gone to school with people with at least half of the names on that list. XD Hell, two of the names I suggested belong to former Kids In The Hall.

I would say no murderin' in childhood unless it's a baby bird or something; you want the first student death at St. Cyp's to be significant. A human dying too early in the chronology would steal the scene's thunder.

I am not lovin' the title. I think even just St. Cyprian's would be better. Definitely needs some work.

If there're any biological side effects to becoming more powerful I say it should be looking more and more like yourself and less like your relatives, if that makes any sense; after all, it's the first step to becoming a patron yourself. Maybe you start to not need to verbalize spells, only at first this sucks because you have to watch your thoughts to make sure you don't get thirsty and blow up a pipe in the wall to get a drink.

Potions is not made redundant by Magical Pre-Med any more than pharmacies are made redundant by doctors.

I say staves for combat and large undertakings, hand motions for delicate work; I know this book is an affectionate parody of the Potterverse, but you want kids to like it on its own merits as well, surely? The best way to do that is to tone down the similarity in trappings - making a girl with a magical childhood the lead rather than a boy with a normal childhood, making the tough-but-fair female teacher a psycho instead, replacing wands with staves, substituting outright Imperialist racism and bigotry for 'pureblood superiority complex'... the sort of thing you're already doing.

In roughly the same order

• Try visiting Bunbury sometime, or Melbourne, then you wont scoff at us! Funny fact, you can't surf where I live, too many crocodiles.

• Glick sounds weird, but in a good way; it's not completely ludicrous but has a funny ring to it that makes it pretty hilarious to hear a person take such pride in the name.

• You sure have given me a wide selection, it's like a Smorgasbord board of Irish, though I've got to say my favourites is (including Glick) Mc Cullough or Fionn because of the mythological connections. I actaully knew a kid with the last name Foley at my old school, weird.

• Make the baby bird a kitten he was given in celebration of him finally forming a pact with someting and we've got a Newbery Medal, ahahahah!!!

• Yeah I was getting kinda desperate to name the thing when I though it up

• Your wording is a bit vauge, I assume you mean that inherited traits fade while the witch or warlock's unique traits that don't seem to be from either parent become more pronounced, if thats what you mean cool idea. Could be the magic equivalent of baby teeth falling out, and I bet that authors in the magical literature scene (we never hear of fiction writers in Harry Potter, unless you count Gilderoy Lockhart) would use it as a potent allusion to Growing Up Sucks.

• And the staffs alongside gestures idea is a good one and I think I'll use it.

edited 30th Aug '10 10:48:23 PM by Zolnier

About Cyril and Mel, how long should they have known each other? Should they be Like Brother and Sister, each having known the overall their life; plus there's the fact that they would share a certain perspective due to similar upbringing. Or should they have not really have known each other before coming to Saint Cyprian and start the story as strangers? They could have just been on Christmas card terms until then and just thought "He/she's family and I guess they could relate, might as well stick with him/her"

And I don't think that Cyril entirely fits the Naïve Newcomer trope, he knows perfectly well what he is and isn't that ignorant about the finer points of sorceral society, although he does have a few laspes in knowledge because magic just wasn't talked about much in his home. It's more that all through his childhood magic has in his home been associated with being "naughty" so he finds it more well for lack of a better term magical than most other sorcerers. Still your right, it would be more original to use a more down to earth narration.

And here's a reason for the parents to tolerate Justina Smith no matter how tyrannical she gets. You see the school doesn't really have a chain of command, instead if the principal is removed for any reason the longest serving teacher takes over... and Mistress Smith isn't the most senior teacher. There was a teacher who was hired two years before she become employed at St Cyprian's, Achilles Smith (yes there brother and sister) professor of potions and "Disappointment" And since no respectible respectable magical family would let their progeny go to a school administrated by such scum, they maintain the lie that Anderson is still principal. Sad really Achillies is one of the only teachers at the school who doesn't fall neatly under a certain trope, partly because he was bullied by school staff immensley as a child, mostly because he knows that his students could kill him in a second if it struck their fancy.

What length of the duo's school carrer, whole thing, just the first year, first two or three years?

Tell you what; you come to Quebec City for Carnavale in the middle of February, and then you can see why I scoff, crocboy (way to deflect one stereotype with another, kid ).

I love the explanation for Justina's long reign; perfectly reasonable and in keeping with the tone of the series.

The extent of Mel and Cyril's childhood acquaintanceship really depends on what kind of story you're going to tell; would anything be made easier by the two of them knowing stuff about each other? Are you going to have them hook up later (I mean, cousincest is only squicky in the broader cultural sense; there's really nothing wrong with it biologically-speaking)? Do you need the two of them to get into a fight and stop talking at some point?

As far as the series-or-single-book question goes, lemme ask you this; do you have any story ideas for a second book, let alone a third or fourth? I'd say focus on the book at hand, then consider where things could go. Personally I think you should blow up the school in the last book - before Mel and Cyril have a chance to finish their education. You know, when they're in their fourth year or something, just to shake up the graduation-last-chapter trope.