I’m supposed to write all these things to promote my book, says my boss who lives inside my head. So uh, let me talk about what the heck is going on with The Dageian Puppetmaster series, which is a spin-off of Legacy of the Lost Mage. Both of these series are my “everything but the kitchen sink” projects, which seek to capture a lot of my views on the world and how I process things. Both were started during pivotal moments of my life.
I first wrote Legacy of the Lost Mage, which was previously The Agartes Epilogues, after high school; it was subsequently rewritten and redrafted multiple times over the next eight years. It’s not surprising that it captured much of my journey and struggles as a young adult. These years overlapped with grief as I lost a beloved aunt sometime during these, the sudden weight of responsibilities as a young parent (I was only a few years older than Sume when I had my eldest daughter), and the general sense of trying to keep things together while the outside world fell apart (hello to being a millennial and the 2008 financial crisis!) I was also working my first professional job, trying to figure out how to place myself in a career largely unsuited for me just so I can build my children the life I always dreamt of, while confronting my own deficiencies. All of these is partly why the general premise of that series is simply about a young woman doing what it takes for her family–a sort of epic slice-of-life that seeks to carve some kind of way forward despite all the chaos, with messy, imperfect love as the guiding force through it all.
And yes, that really is what agan, the magical system of the Agos-agan world, is sort of made of. Love and connections and souls. Cheesy, I know. And highly unoriginal. But it’s not supposed to be.
In my head, I see love as the glue, a sort of power that can–with effort, and luck, and the support of others–create webs which cradle individuals, each person, and connect us to the wider universe. Legacy of the Lost Mage is my way of painting that concept into an epic fantasy story.
So The Dageian Puppetmaster, which centres Sume’s mage daughter Rosha, is my continuation of that concept–and I started writing it during the 2020 pandemic, which is a pivotal time in most of our lives. Keep in mind that Chronicles of the Bitch Queen deals with the agan as well, but Talyien mostly only deals with the consequences and has absolutely no clue about how it all works. This is what makes The Dageian Puppetmaster different. With a mage as a character, and one who is–and I say this fondly–an absolute nerd, I really had no choice but to show eactly how agan pulsed through this universe. So the fundamentals of the magic system is closely tied to relationships, to emotions, to ego and what lies beyond it, to the real self and purpose and why we put so much weight on things that don’t really matter; and I wanted to show just how much all of these intertwine and create these forces that are strong enough to be called magic. It’s messy, oh my God, it’s messy, but reading through the final copyedits and polish of SHATTERED MAGE has me in tears. If Legacy of the Lost Mage was my attempt to process young adulthood, The Dageian Puppetmaster was my attempt to process the journey to midlife in a roundabout way–by looking back at what used to drive me and where it led me in turn.
And the end is…well, I’ll let you read it and come to your own conclusions, but ultimately, I did want it to end in hope.
Not going to lie, though, I’m happy to wait for another decade or so to write a series like this again…
