Here goes!
Ars Nova Magica
Book One:
The Maiyim Bourne
By
Jonathan Edward Feinstein
Copyright © 2005 by Jonathan E. Feinstein
Author’s Foreword
The start of a new series is the second most exciting part of writing for me. The first, of course, is the conclusion. But where a conclusion is a bittersweet experience, the beginning is pure joy and optimism.
I have a certain fondness for The Maiyim Tetralogy. It was my first attempt at a complex fantasy world that I designed entirely from scratch. World of Water was also my first attempt at a serious fantasy adventure. Previous to that I had only written humorous stories… well aside from assignments way, way back in creative writing classes.
I wasn’t completely happy with my attempts at humor. The other members of my writers’ group liked them well enough, but I always felt they could have been funnier. I just didn’t have the knack of shooting off rapid-fire surreal humor like Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett. I still don’t, but these days I’ve gotten more comfortable with my brand of humor and if my characters aren’t hitching a ride across the galaxy or falling off the edge of Discworld, so be it.
With The Maiyim Tetraology, I discovered that not only could I make up an entire world which turned out to be easier than I expected, but I could use my humorous bent to tell an essentially serious story. By the way, it was also my first attempt at a planned series of novels. For something filled with firsts, I think I managed to pull it off okay.
So when I finally concluded the series with Gods of the Air I was not ready to say goodbye to my first world. I’ve told the story of how I came up with the idea for Ars Nova Magica elsewhere so I won’t repeat it here, but I knew from the start that I did not want to tell more stories about Silverwind and Oceanvine. I mean, I like those characters a lot, but I felt I had pretty much gone as far as I could with them. Their later accomplishments (some of which are mentioned in this story) were impressive, but not particularly conducive to adventure stories, and I also did not want to write the prequel stories of Silverwind and Windchime. Too much of that sort of thing and I could end up writing the penny dreadfuls that were a running gag in the first series.
The Maiyim Tetralogy was set in a world that spanned a period roughly analogous to the late 1890’s and the first decade of theTwentieth Century. Pushing the timeline forward sixty years turned out to be more work than designing Maiyim in the first place.
Some authors use notebooks for their stories, some plot directly on their computers. When I’m planning a story, I practically live on legal pads and ballpoint pens. I drained two new pens dry and lost track of all the legal pads I consumed in the process of bringing Maiyim into the latter half of the Twentieth Century. The world grew as I wrote the first series, but while I knew from the start what I wanted the world to be like in the second series I had to work out how it got to be that way. Then I had two new main characters to develop. One of them was no more difficult to develop than any other I’ve come up with, but the other, by necessity, has a back story three generations long.
It was almost with a sense of relief that I finally started writing. All the planning worked out well for me and I breezed through the writing process of the rough draft in record time. That record was broken when I wrote The Cold, Clear Skies of Midnight, but that is another story… literally. I get nervous when I write that quickly. The process is so exciting that I worry about the story getting away from me, so I put this story through more proofings than I ever have before too. The result is I liked it. I liked it a lot. I liked it so much, I began to think I was keeping it to myself. So, finally here it is. I hope you all like it as much as I do.
By the way, I’m not sure anyone is going to believe me but this story was entirely written before the tsunami of December, 2004 in the Indian Ocean basin. I remember TV news commentators saying most Americans would hear that word and think a tsunami was some sort of Italian sausage. I also remember thinking what morons those commentators must be. I’ve known what a tsunami was since I was in grade school. Admitedly, back then we called them tidal waves, which I learned was an erroneous term in the Weekly Reader roughly forty years ago. Okay, I admit I live on the coast so the possibility of a large destructive wave is more likely here than in, say, Missouri (where river flooding is a greater likelihood), but heck, I live on the East coast. Tsunamis are possible here, but not as likely as around the Pacific basin. Oh well.
