You know you’re dedicated to world-building when you find yourself in the process of designing a language from scratch.  My friend Dylan (the artist of the series map) and I have been spending the last month or so working on the language of magic in my series.

Step one was building the basic framework of magic in a more detailed way than Shadow Glyph expresses it.

In the series, magic is the the language of glyphs, the words used by the Maker when he spoke the world in existence.  His gift to humankind: the ability to use glyphs on our own.  Because of this, building the framework of magic involves deciding how the elements of creation relate to one another, similar to the Greek views of fire, earth, air, water.  But as with any fiction world-building, you want something unique, something that is only characteristic of your world.  And so I built the Two Rings of the Great Glyph.

Step two was the actual building of symbols and words.  Each glyph represents an element or more specifically a form of an element.  Similar to the above mentioned Greek view, everything is not fire, but rather a form of fire or a form of air, etc.  So the process of designing words isn’t like making an alphabet.  Each single rune is a word not a letter.

I hope to post some of our work to this site soon, as it will be interesting to check out while reading the book.  As for the book itself, Shadow Glyph is about 90% done.  Unfortunately it won’t be ready to order until Christmas or later, so it won’t be ready as a gift option =( . Stay tuned for more updates!

Also I love feedback, if anyone ever thinks of replies to these posts…