Interview by Sebastian de Castell
The Spellmaker is the first in an exciting new fantasy series full of tricks, traps and a talking squirrel cat.
Sebastian de Castell has been in fantasy for a long time, but with The Spellmaker he turned to Young Adult for the first time. Although it didn't start out like Young Adult at all: “As an author, there's a part of me that says I'm just writing a story, genres and categories be damned, but with the first draft I found myself creating a hyper-cynical character, and actually it was an adult looking back and remembering what happened, but it didn't work. So I went back and thought about what it would look like when he was at that moment.'
Thus came the story of Kellen, a fifteen-year-old jan-tep in which your worth is confirmed by your magical abilities Each jan-tep has a tattoo with ribbons symbolizing the six sources of magic; iron, coal, silk, sand, blood and breath, but not everyone can use them all, and when teenagers are about to turn sixteen, they are expected to "light" their ribbons, demonstrating their ability to wield this type of magic. If you don't wield any magic, you're considered a lower class citizen, and Kellen, who is dangerously close until his sixteenth birthday, did not produce a single spark. To make matters worse, his younger sister Shalla had already started her journey early. When Kellen tries to show himself under during his first mage trial, things start to go awry… and the stage is set for adventure.
"You have to figure out how to make yourself special, and that's kind of the ultimate quest for every teenager."
De Castell describes The Maker of Spells as “Harry Potter in reverse.” He explains, “When you think of Harry Potter, you're thinking of a guy who thinks he's mediocre, but at the same time he realizes that he's the most powerful wizard, that his parents loved him more than anyone's parents, and that he was incredibly rich, secretly of course. At Kellen's everything is unfortunate - he thought that everything was fine with him, but everything turns out to be nonsense." De Castell is a big fan of Harry Potter and he likes a well-executed "chosen one" story. but he wanted to try to undermine that idea with Kellen, who is aggressively normal in many ways: “I distinctly remember going to high school and looking around and realizing that I wasn't the strongest, or the smartest, or the best looking and thought what should I do?You're raised to think you're special, but you have to be to work on how to make yourself special, and this seems to be the main quest of every teenager growing up."
Although de Castell had such a universal teenage experience, much of his upbringing was more so unusual: "My father died when I was nine, and my mother was 44 when I was born, and she had diffuse multiple sclerosis, so it was a real struggle. So during the key teenage years, I was really raised by my sister, who is a feminist, and her partner, a wonderful woman who was also a feminist. These were the people who took me aside and pointed out things I didn't see when I was a teenager." Much of this was directed at the character of Ferius Parfax, a mysterious woman who appears just as Kellen's trial begins to go awry."She doesn't say it is, that's who you are, she's asking him the right questions, and she's truly an amalgamation of all the amazing women out there i grew up She's my favorite character in many ways."
After an unusual childhood, de Castell also had an unusual career that spanned archaeology, music, teaching, acting and fight choreography before he started writing. It is the latter, in his opinion, had the greatest influence on his books: "When you write a sword fight for the stage, you learn that every movement has to reveal character, and the battle itself should tell the story. Every choice reveals character." De Castell repeatedly emphasizes ideas on this topic: "I'm not trying to be a great writer, I try to write great books. As a collaborative writer, I'm glad the editor tells me it's bad, and what needs to be improved. I guess for me every book is to some extent a journey or a marathon - you can run 26.2 miles, but the same distance can be covered by walking or crawling. So sometimes I crawl and sometimes I run."
Anna James
