Welcome to this week’s update on Reincarnated as a Familiar, which features me haphazardly creating a magic system. I enjoyed writing this chapter quite a bit. I think that’s because my inner programmer got to have a little fun as well.
For those of you who read last week’s update, you’ll remember that I’m a software engineer. Why am I bringing this up again? Well, that’s because it had a significant impact on this week’s chapter.
In this week’s chapter, the main character learned more about how magic works in her new world. Which means I also learned more about how magic works in that world. That’s right. I detailed my magic system on the fly, as I was writing the chapter. I’m sure that won’t backfire at all.
So, what ended up happening is that I ended up creating a magic system that behaves a lot like programs do. For those unfamiliar with programming, you basically write a bunch of instructions telling a computer what to do. If you don’t write those instructions correctly, your computer will still run them. They just won’t do what you intended.
That’s a massive oversimplification of programming, but the basic idea is how my magic system ended up working. Another example would be how genies often warp wishes into something the person didn’t intend. Basically, if you aren’t careful with how you word your spell, it may not do what you wanted.
Overall, I’m happy with how the idea turned out. I think it will play well with where I want the story to go. It also leaves me with a lot of room to have my characters innovate. I’m getting excited just thinking about it.
That being said, I’m definitely going to have to go back and review everything again. Since I made up everything on the fly, there’s a good chance that I introduced some glaring holes or problems in the system. I’ll want to know what the flaws are before I try and build on top of the system more.
Despite the extra work I probably created for myself, I enjoyed writing this chapter the most so far. It was so fun that I found myself struggling to stop at the limits that I had set for myself. I managed to stop myself by reading snippets of other writers works.
Thanks to that, I was able to realize some flaws in my writing as I was reading their works. One great example was ‘Do You Want to be Normal?‘ by Koji Kojou. Reading just the look inside for his book on amazon made me realize I wasn’t doing a particularly good job breaking up dialogue in this chapter. I’ll definitely be looking for flaws in my own writing as I read from now on.
Well, I think that’s all I’ve got for this week’s update. I’ll be back next week for another update. Thanks for reading!