Afterword and Next Stories

Paranoid Mage has been a wild ride from start to finish. The huge success, the attention – good and bad – that it attracted. I’m glad so many people liked it and found it a fun read. It’s definitely not perfect though, and I think one of the biggest problems is with mismatched expectations.

I knew when I started that Callum would have to remove the mage governmental structure, and to do that in a moral way would mean he couldn’t just murder his way through it. But the first book didn’t really hint at any of that so the entire vibe of Book 1 and even Book 2 was entirely different.

Then there was letting Callum become a drone operator. While it made perfect sense within the ruleset I put forth for magic, Callum’s mini-portal chaining that let him do everything remotely really stymied a lot of the fun action from 1 and 2. It wasn’t obvious at the time how badly that’d affect things, and of course given Callum’s personality he wouldn’t dare approach things any other way.

There was also a somewhat smaller niggle that was still definitely an issue, and that was how my attempt to keep everything condensed and on point meant that the pacing was very pedestrian over the books. It all felt the same, more or less. Coupled with my struggles to move the story into the final act at the beginning of Book 4 it made things slog a bit.

Still and all, it turned out well. It was definitely a fresh take in a lot of ways, and did some really fun things — like Ray and Felicia being the background “normal urban fantasy protagonist” characters. I don’t know that I’ll be returning to the world of Paranoid Mage any time soon — if anything, setting some far future sci-fantasy there would make more sense, since I had to do quite a bit of dancing around to keep it from being pinned to any specific date or include any specific political developments.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

For now, I’ll be moving onto a completely different story – and I hope you all will join me.