New Novel: The Disgraced Mage
It’s been too long, which makes saying it all the sweeter: I have a new novel published. The Disgraced Mage is a fantasy that follows a young girl who unfortunately finds out she lacks an aptitude for magic in a world thriving on magic and is—wait for it—disgraced. I won’t bore you with more details of the story you can already check out in its synopsis on the Amazon page or in its Kirkus Review or in the book itself (go buy it—I dare you).
To briefly comment on that Kirkus Review, I balked at its initial sentence summary similarly as I did when receiving college rejection letters back in the day. Although, I was pleasantly surprised to see it wasn’t all bad. It’s natural for a story to not work for everyone, and it’s somehow more flattering that, despite the criticisms, the reviewer enjoyed the main character and magic system. Those were the things the story was about, so that’s great. And I got a rather positive review from the San Francisco Book Review:
“Torion Oey’s The Disgraced Mage transports readers into a skillfully built fantasy world that blends sophisticated magic, suspenseful competitions, and juicy high school drama. Readers will be hopeful to see the protagonist win amidst the condescending glares and unfair political schemes. The competitive games involving magic and special weapons are reminiscent of young adult classics such as Harry Potter and The Hunger Games. This book deserves its own movie too!”
This story had a kind of strange conceptualization. In the month of August 2022 I began writing with the vague notion of wanting something to do with revenge and redemption. It started with a general label for the genre and intended audience, then an outline of the magic system, then the plot, and then several character profiles, all of which I hadn’t solidly done prior to writing a story before—typically all of that remains as ideas in my head or details to be decided while writing. The ideas were inspiring enough that in that same month I unintentionally cranked out the entire first draft of the story from start to end. The first draft being ~88,000 words or 351 pages was not what I expected. That’s like almost doing two NaNoWriMos… in addition to doing NaNoWriMo that November. Comparing the actual time writing the story versus the editing time is also weird. It’s less than a month of writing and over a year of editing. Of course, the editing process was on-and-off, but still.
Unsurprisingly, my story deviated from the general outlines I’d made, and that’s the way it goes. Something I sort of attribute my wild inspiration for writing the story is that I’d picked up watching isekai that summer which I’ve since become a connoisseur of watching. Each had typical tropes of a conveniently overpowered main character (usually male), a harem, RPG-type levels, skills, and magic, a dungeon-, guild-, or school-based setting, and an incompetent or irrational ruler (usually a king) among other tropes. Each did a twist on these tropes in some way, and I figured I wanted to have a go as well without necessarily diving head-first into writing something in the genre of isekai (i.e., there’s no portals or “other world” in The Disgraced Mage). Fun fact: the working title I had for it was “A Renaissance of Magic.”
I suppose the last thing I have to say about it is the reason why I wrote it. The “why” is a weird question for me, in that it has a very obvious answer. Asking myself “Why?” before I write anything or as I’m writing is much less obvious and far more interesting and worthwhile, in my opinion. Answering it now just feels silly. But, to address it here if it’s something people want to know, the answer to the reason why is given in the story.
With this story published, it’s natural to look ahead and ask, “What’s next?” While I do have a sequel to a particular story I started a while back lined up, it’s good to curb that insatiability and revel a bit.
