blog My YA Wizard Story

I'm writing a TV show as 8x One-hour episodes totaling 400 pages. Afterward I will then convert into a novel.

3rd draft: Now rejects call on page 12 and crosses the threshold at page 25 if anyone is curious and wants to give it a read/critique.
Edit: Removed as 4th draft is in the works


My estimations are 2-3 months per episode so it will take over a year for me to finish, unless I really speed up with experience.
I'd say the biggest differences between this and harry potter are that it mostly takes place in the human world (not a hidden magic world) and that the wizards are a lot more pragmatic and dangerous, they embrace and use technology. Ain't no spell that matches the destructive force of 10,000 nuclear warheads am i right?
 
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Wouldn't dream of asking any more.
i'm actually really neurotic about stuff like that, which is why it took me so damn long to ask for your help in the first place.

Plus i'm feeling really liberated right now, I expect to get a ton of writing done this month
 
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Spike said:
Would like to read but dont see a link. Waiting for next revision? If not, send me one if you like .
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Thanks I'd love some feedback on the 3rd draft.
I put the link back into original post, it has 25 pages, ending with hero crossing the threshold of heroes journey.

Doing a 3rd draft rewrite on the second half still.
 
Made great progress this month.

Instead of writing episode 2, I figured out the prequel, discovered why we don't see wizards these days, the motivations of wizard society, etc.
That allowed me to fill in the rest of the blanks and I have a complete roadmap of my story for the first time.
Feels like I am at the point where I could write a book report on my story, not surprised that it took me a year to get here but I think I have the tools the tackle this appropriately now.

I was also struggling with the concept of a fatal flaw, since my protagonist doesn't die it was kind of a weird concept, so I like the term Critical Flaw a lot more. It makes much more sense to me personally, anyway, and I've landed on my protagonists Critical Flaw being Fear of Loss.

Opening scene he is afraid of losing his teeth in a fight.
He rejects the call to action because he is afraid of losing his family.
The villain manipulates him by resurrecting his dead father and playing upon the fear of losing his dad again, to coerce his aid.

The only way the villian can be defeated is if the protag accepts that he will have to lose his father, and possibly his own life.
I've also embraced the trope of the chosen one, since that helps so much with story structure.

Now the protags wand is bigger than everyone else at the school, giving him more powerful spells, and opening up a world of dick jokes.
 
So YA meaning Young Adult, which I understand is with teenagers and for teenagers. Is this your audience?
 
I got that from here as I had to google YA lol.
bookidote.wordpress.com

How Do You Define Genres : SciFi, YA, Fantasy, etc.

I have encountered this problem so many times these past few years: no one knows exactly what each genre refers to. We know the general aspects of it: fantasy = wizards, scifi = spaceships ; YA = J…
bookidote.wordpress.com bookidote.wordpress.com
 
indietalk said:
So YA meaning Young Adult, which I understand is with teenagers and for teenagers. Is this your audience?
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Yeah exactly, harry potter was for kids so i want to come at the story with an older audience in mind, like high schoolers instead of kids, with the hope of capturing an adult audience too.
Shrek, Mean Girls, Spiderman, etc have managed to transcend the YA audience into more mainstream acceptance.
 
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Might be cool to set it slightly in the future like 2-3 years and we are officially in another cold war. Tensions high. Tech has advanced (you can make up some cool AI stuff that could actually happen).
 
indietalk said:
Might be cool to set it slightly in the future like 2-3 years and we are officially in another cold war. Tensions high. Tech has advanced (you can make up some cool AI stuff that could actually happen).
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There are kids out there day dreaming about getting their acceptance letter to hogwarts.

The point of these type of stories, like harry potter, is to make people think that is all happening benath our eyes in real the world, beneath the surface, and that its in the same world as them. If you set it in some sci-fi variant you destroy the fantasy that they might become a wizard too just like harry.

The opening line of the story in novel form is

"IF YOU’RE AT THE WRONG time and place—a bolt of lightning will strike you dead. If you’re at the right time and the right place, even the most ordinary person can become a wizard."

That being said, the wizards use magic to augment tech and the teacher does have a robot with AI named Paladin.
 
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Cool! I was actually just trying to escalate some of the tensions in the current world by moving it forward.
 
All 10 episodes are outlined, feels great to have a complete view of the story from beginning to end, even if it took a year to get there.
I'm at a place where all my preprocessing bullshit is completed and I can start ploughing through the writing everyday.

Currently rewriting EP01 fourth draft, and i can finally move on to the next part.
 
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sfoster said:
All 10 episodes are outlined, feels great to have a complete view of the story from beginning to end, even if it took a year to get there.
I'm at a place where all my preprocessing bullshit is completed and I can start ploughing through the writing everyday.

Currently rewriting EP01 fourth draft, and i can finally move on to the next part.
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This is ambitious, but I'm excited to follow and see where it goes
 
Thanks guys, I didn't reply right away because I thought I'd have more of an update by now, but no...
I legit spent an entire day of work to come up with one line of dialogue

My daily output amounted to twenty four words 😄😄😄
I can laugh at myself, I'm not ben affleck, I would have starred in 'stuck on you' with matt damon.

My progress has been so impractical it would be natural to consider giving up, but I'm one stubborn fucker and I've got nothing else going on.


Here's the damn line, protag asking why wizards don't use magic to help society
"You'd draw attention from the entire planet Alex, including the worst kind of wizards. Radicals who'd sooner kill you than see magic helping saps."

This was a really tough line because I wanted something very short that would make sense to the readers, that alex would believe, that is technically true, but it's such a warped misleading version of the truth that I can keep actual reasoning hidden. Sweet setup for a more dramatic reveal later on.
 
This outfit looks pretty cool, I got it from stable diffusion a while back

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drive.google.com drive.google.com

I'm not sure how to describe it though, i don't know enough about what all the different garments are called.
Any ideas? Or someone wants to take a crack at describing this outfit, for starters i'd say the accent color is indigo.

Maybe nate would know this --- is there an AI of some sort I can upload pictures to and it will describe all of the details that are in the pic?

While I'm posting, I might as well add that I decided to start using fake words, so that's a thing. winterland just sounds so nice.

"Alex stepped through the portal to the covert islet, eagerly welcoming the perpetual winterland of the Antarctic. The darkened sky was a serene twlight with dim streaks of orange and red draping the horizon. A shining blanket of white snow illuminated the rocky ground, and the gentle murmur of jet black waves enveloped him from every direction with an air of tranquility."
 
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sfoster said:
I'm not sure how to describe it though, i don't know enough about what all the different garments are called.
Any ideas? Or someone wants to take a crack at describing this outfit,
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You need to hang out on a dress making forum for a bit. 🪡 :)

There's essentially only one "garment" here, made up of a dress and a cape. Each of those has a design-and-build vocabulary all of its own, but it's probably not worth trying to get into too much detail. Limit yourself to describing the major elements - cape, sleeve, bodice, apron, skirt.
 
sfoster said:
Maybe nate would know this --- is there an AI of some sort I can upload pictures to and it will describe all of the details that are in the pic?
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There are some options for this. Some of the better ones take a good bit of time and patience. It's kind of a marathon learning curve getting really good results. I took your image and used it for reference and just ran off a few dozen sketches. I turned it to book cover format so you can experiment with adding text if you want.

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The Classic Look

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Sometimes making a book cover stand out on a bookshelf is preferable to exact topical accuracy

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This one turned out a little superman for some reason
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CelticRambler said:
You need to hang out on a dress making forum for a bit. 🪡 :)

There's essentially only one "garment" here, made up of a dress and a cape. Each of those has a design-and-build vocabulary all of its own, but it's probably not worth trying to get into too much detail. Limit yourself to describing the major elements - cape, sleeve, bodice, apron, skirt.
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If I didn't have all my stupid back problems I'd have gotten more into sewing.
It sucks so much for me to hunch of that damned machine, but I appreciate what you're saying.

Okay here was my 5-minute attempt to produce a description

"Her blond hair, bright as freshly transfigured gold, cascaded down her shoulders in vivid contrast to her dark attire. She wore a fantastical sleeveless black gown, cinched at the waist by an indigo bodice that clung to her slender form, a pair of short cuff black gloves and large platform boots. The indigo bodice affixed a billowing cape to her shoulders with two supporting straps, and tapered downward into a triangular apron. Solid dark-blue ink ran up the length of her arms and blended into a mysterious design of runes and images, including three markings on her face—her right cheek, the right side of her forehead, and her left temple. Her chest was covered in similar tattoos, but with a lighter hue of blue and a thick black line at the top imitating the curved collar of a shirt. Around her neck was a gold pendant on a long gold chain. Alex thought she looked really striking and cool—like a sorceress from a movie—and he hated it"


Nate North said:
There are some options for this. Some of the better ones take a good bit of time and patience. It's kind of a marathon learning curve getting really good results. I took your image and used it for reference and just ran off a few dozen sketches. I turned it to book cover format so you can experiment with adding text if you want.

00003-2853305261.png
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This one really enhanced the original image, thanks!

I've been thinking about your offer to produce a book cover but damn that is a big decision for what the graphic should be, I don't think it's something I can just come up with off the top of my head. I don't even know what the title of the story is yet.
 
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This chatGPT answer 🥰 Love it. Worth the service charge for the premium chatGPT. Fuck yes it is.
I'm writing the chapter right now where my wizards take an airplane to the moon, doing a lot of moon research and finding out some very cool DETAILS

Check it out -- The horizon is literally 2x closer to you on the moon, mathemtically.
I don't want to spoils all the fun details as i'll be taking you to the moon, sans spacesuit, in vivid detail with my story quite soon.

ChatGPT said:
The distance to the horizon on any planet (or moon) is given by the formula:

D = sqrt(2rh)

where:

  • D is the distance to the horizon
  • r is the radius of the planet (or moon)
  • h is the height of the observer's eyes above the surface
We usually make a small simplifying assumption that the surface of the planet (or moon) is perfectly spherical and smooth, which isn't exactly true due to mountains, valleys, etc., but it gets us close for this type of calculation.

The average height of a human eye-level is about 1.7 meters, and the radius of Earth is approximately 6,371 kilometers.

Plugging these values into the equation, we get:

D = sqrt(263710.0017) ≈ 4.7 kilometers, which is roughly 3 miles.

The same calculation can be applied to the moon, but with a different radius value. The radius of the Moon is approximately 1,737 kilometers.

So the equation becomes:

D = sqrt(217370.0017) ≈ 2.4 kilometers, which is roughly 1.5 miles.

Therefore, an observer standing on a smooth lunar surface could see about 1.5 miles until the horizon, compared to about 3 miles on Earth. This assumes a perfect sphere and doesn't take into account obstacles or the local topography, which could drastically change what is visible at the horizon.

Excited Gold GIF
 
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