World Building Mundus: An Atypical Wizard

If you needed an old Sage with a flowing white beard and tomes of forbidden lore, that was not Leon. If you wanted to see a fabulously dressed courtier working to bring political revolution, that was not him either. 

Leon was the one to call when your magic mirror broke.

From the unpublished novelle The Odd-Job Wizard, Loren D. Selby

 

Unlike Celabramar who grew from a doodle, Leon the Wizard is was inspired by a real person, my late father Dwayne Leon Selby. The character is not a one-to-one translation and has developed his own mannerisms and quirks. However, his core concept, a highly educated man with a knack for a repair, a blue jacket, and odd social blind spots, has my father's fingerprints.

No, Dad did not practice magic or befriend dragons. He just loved learning and developing new skills. He was also well educated, a Bachelors in geology, and only worked in that field a handful of year during my life-time.

Having the skills and certifications doesn't assure you work. Dad also taught me that there is no such thing as a job 'beneath' you. Work doesn't care who does it as long as it gets done.

Leon's repair skills are strongly inspire by Dad's hobby of learning new things - car restoration, bee keeping, sew-machine repair, baking, small part fabrication, and wine-brewing. Dad could fix nearly anything, and what he couldn't he would find a book or manual for future study.

Another thing Leon took from Dad was being aware that you can accidentally scare people just by existing. My father had an intense personality, a booming laugh, and a love of debate. He also stood over six foot tall, with a barrel chest and a thick neck. People regularly thought he was a former high-school jock. Between his physical build, unfortunately shaped eyebrows, and some facial nerve damage, Dad's non-verbal cues were often misread.

Leon isn't physical threatening. However, he knows that it is all to easy for people to come to fear magic-users. He hides his frustration with his co-workers behind a mask of professionalism. He takes a walk to settle his temper. He takes every chance he gets to be honest about his powers and limits. He works hard to not be the typical aloof Wizard.

Ironically, this level of familiarity and permissiveness backfires on Leon. It often did on Dad. In the real world, people would take my father's desire to be liked and abuse his boundaries. When you hide or mask your frustration, people don't realize they are making you uncomfortable.

In The Odd-Job Wizard, the townsfolk become used to Leon's services. Some of this is driven by the situation. They live in a town that's falling apart. However, there's a large gap between expecting someone to led a hand, waking someone up to demand instant repair work. They fixate on “what can Leon do for me?”

The current draft's opening features Leon being woken up by an unpleasant neighbor because the hot-water tank needs work. When Leon finally gets a paying project from Celabramar, the cracks in these toxic relationship widen. There is a difference between being valuable and being appreciated.

All of this makes Dad's middle name, Leon, fits the fictional character well. Leon means 'lion' in many languages. Lions have complicated relationships with humans. One one hand, they are easily demonized as threat to our bodily safety. On the other, we've seem so many videos of them behaving like big goofy cats that we forget to respect their boundaries.

On the journey to publication, I fear that the name, Leon, may be a problem. My own name Loren, has many of the same letters in it. However, I would honestly rather get a pen name than change the character's name.

Leon the wizard is a work of fiction. Dwayne Leon Selby was a father who valued creativity. While he is no longer present to read The Odd-Job Wizard, he read and commented on many of the earlier story lines. He would have loved how the character has developed and laughed himself silly over the idea of a wizard building a hot-air balloon out of patchwork fabric and leftover wallpaper.

Doodling Dragons

 

One of the driving forces in my novelle The Odd-Job Wizard is Celabramar the dragon. He has an intense personality, big appetite, and a quick temper. He has also been living in my head since I was thirteen years old and doodled him during my one year in private education.

I started one class with a pencil sketch of a chess piece. Later that drawing became a tower on a lake. Yet another class later I decided that tower needed a dragon. That dragon would become Celabramar.

Doodle of a Dragon and Tower
Pencil on lined notebook paper
by
A 13-year-old Overthinker with wobbly penmenship and poor spelling skills

Celabramar is fun to write. His wants are simple, a full stomach and a warm quiet place to nap. The conflict comes from the fact his is a large obligate carnivore with no need for human norms. He doesn't have to be malicious to cause problems.

The backstory conflict in The Odd-Job Wizard starts because ranchers settle in his hunting ground. Celabramar still needs to eat. The native prey is gone, so he just eats sheep. This is reasonable in his mind. However, much like in the U.S.A.'s Great Westward Expansion, the settlers freak out about 'marauding savages' threatening their lives and livelihoods.

Thankfully, Mundus is not America. Celabramar is not a human facing the combine forces of colonialism and the federal government. He is a fire-breathing dragon. Young, inexperienced, but still a dragon.

In human terms, he's just moved out from his parents house for a steady job. His 'job' for lack of a better term is managing his hunting territory. Keeping the land stable and reporting problems to his elders. I drew inspiration from interactions with ranchers, wildlife management, and my own education in environmental engineering. Celabramar acts as a key-stone species. He hunts mega-fauna and keeps the dangerous monster population in check – one bite at a time.

Madam Vircroc, the dragon diplomat, and Sage Owdigee, didn't exist before I started writing this novella. Originally, they were just to provide exposition. However, they quickly became an excellent way to contrast Celabramar's maturity and hint at the greater culture of the Dragon Nation.

The Dragon Nation is a, hopefully, polite nod to the First Nations of America. They have a different culture, a different society, and so treat the land differently than their neighbors do. The history of Oklahoma contains repeated clashed over ecological use and management between colonists and indigenous people. My story mentions fencing off water sources and how ranching, farming, and mining changes the land. This are the least horrifying things real people use to hurt each other. Illegal settlements due to misread maps, corporate interests, and misinformed pioneers was endemic.

Homesteaders having to abandon their claims and return to civilization actually happened. Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder ends with the family having to leave the Osage Reservation because Pa Ingalls was too eager to get a choice location for his homestead.

Celabramar, much like the average citizen of the Osage and other First Nations, is in a painful situation Anything he does can spiral into a political disaster. He still needs to hunt and eat. He has random people wandering into his cave hoping to become 'glorious heroes' by picking a fight. It's exhausting.

And so, Celabramar decides to move. I expect some readers to mixed feelings about the message it sends. Traditionally, when the native population gets displaced, they don't get to come back.

However, Celabramar is a dragon, not a human. The Odd-Job Wizard is a fantasy fiction. To dragon, moving a few valleys inland is more like changing your phone number and buying new locks. He's not giving up. He's keeping himself from escalating the problem.

The young dragon with a literally fiery temper wants to be the bigger person. This is the core of his character. Over decades of daydreaming and writing, his mannerism, appearance, and even name have changed. However, the silver scales and lake island remain in honor of that first doodle.

My Second Draft and Internet Search History

 

As an chronic overthinker turned writer, I walk a delicate balance between attention to detail and spending too much time nit-picking things that the readers won't care about.

My brain is such, I need a degree of confidence to add anything into the narrative. This has led to long researchers sessions for my WIP (possible title changed to “The Odd-Job Wizard”). As I wrap up the second draft, my internet serach history had gotten very werid. Here are some of the highlights and an explaination for them.

Historical Building Design

The most notable example in the story are three 'sets' the water channel for the mill, assessors offices, smokehouses. Swindlers Bounty is a frontier colony. I needed a technology level that fit. Also, I had to see if it was possible for the characters to up-cycle the building. Leon's smokehouse was based of one from a Ante-Bellum plantation. They could cure multiple carcasses as once.

An invaluable resource were the illustrated 'If you lived in a __' books that were popular with Usborne and Scholastic in the 90's. The cutaways made it easier to get a sense of scale for the character. This helped with the water mill scenes. It also gave me the technical name for breakable-yet-could-be plausibly-repaired pieces.

How Big Is It?

Animals also required a bit of legwork. Mostly to check size and weight. My problem once again was getting a sense of scale. I ended up writing down numbers and pacing out the size with a tape measure.

The first draft had Celabramar's politically fraught snacks being cows and the ranchers more like old Western beef barons. This was changed to sheep as they were smaller and easier for a dragon of his size to lift off the ground.

I also fact checked the size of a moose head trophy through a taxidermist website. They are big, but surprisingly light. (Makes sense in hindsight.)

Unit Conversion and Geometry

The biggest time sink was converting units of measurement. I cracked open the old geometry book to figure out the size of Celabramar's horde. I used the length of the dragon as the diameter of a cylinder and figure out the average height of the treasure pile.

From there I made a guesstimate of the value, by creating three equations for treasure piles made of mostly gold coins, mostly silver coins, and most copper coins. For fun, I also looked up the market value of beef cows and calculated how many cows each would buy.

All this work was to figure out how much Celabramar was willing to spend on moving his lair. It also lead to the plot device of his horde having more value as an coin collection than raw metal.

There were also other equations. However, they were before I settled on the idea of hot air balloon travel.

Red Meat or White Meat?

One of the last, and perhaps silliest, bits of research was about meat.

Throughout the story, Celabramar hunts several different prey animals for trade or food. I felt confident writing about deer, goat, sheep, crab – I've eaten them. The two I have not are rabbit, which is expensive if you don't raise or hunt it yourself, and swan.
Swan used to be a commercial meat. However, the bird was granted protected status in the U.S.A. Unlike with rabbit, I had trouble finding repeatable and ethically sources descriptions swan meat.

In my first draft, Celabramar declares that swan is “Good red meat, lots of fats for the brain.”

My editor Meg Dendler was very confused by this. She replaced the the line as white and lean, more in line with a traditional poultry. I can safely say she had never eaten swan either.

However, I have eaten duck. Duck is dark meat, darker than turkey. It's also lean muscle fiber but the skin has a protective layer of fat that keeps it moist when cooked. I assumed, correctly, that swan was as to duck as turkey is to chicken – bigger with darker meat. My researched backed it up.

Nevertheless, the goal of a editor is to help the story make sense to readers. Duck is not a common dish in the U.S.A. However, turkey is a holiday tradition. With this common ground, I reworked the description to

“Nice dark meat, good bit of fat too. Excellent for the brain.”

This one line took about an hour of fact checking and world building. There are more detailed descriptions of swan like 'rich,' 'moist,' 'gamey,' 'fishy mutton,' etc. However, it's mostly for cooked swan and varies by dish. The dragon is describing raw, uncooked swan. He'd cares more about its nutritious value than its optimal wine pairing.

This is why it takes me so long to write anything! My brain overthinks everything.

Overthinking: Dragons, Fingers, and Math

When most people world build fantasy tales, they try to follow in the footsteps of Tolkien, Le Guin, and other great world-builders. They invent landmasses, history, languages, and art.

Meanwhile, there's me. My dragons have math.

All math starts with a counting system. In the real world, this comes from by counting fingers on the hand. We have sets of five, ten, and twenty (for when you add toes). From there you develop digit symbols - 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 0. Through out history, humans have favored ten-digit systems. It appeals on an instinctual level.

In a fantasy story, people use assume that everyone uses the same math. Typically, it's not something that matters in a plot. Nevertheless, I overthink everything.

An elf or even a centaur has the same hand as a human does. They likely use a similar system with different symbols. Meanwhile, dragons are decided not human or human adjacent.
To complicate things, there are multiple types of dragons in Mundus. One of my draft notebooks has a scribble that dragon in Mundus treat gravity and other natural laws as 'suggestions.' Celabramar is a a massive quadruped with wings. Madam Vircroc is biped like a velociraptor with vestigial wings. At the end of the story, yet another dragon uses the knuckles of their wings and short hind legs to walk like a bat.

All this biodiversity means that there isn't a standard set of twenty digits on a dragon. A dragon with wings and two back legs would only have digits on their feet. That number of digits could also vary from dragon to dragon.

If the feet are built like a bird's for grabbed and perching, there would be three forward and one pointing back. (There could also be just three or just two.) If they are more like a dinosaurs, say a sauropode, there will be five. Some dragons don't even have feet. The dragons of Mundus need a counting system that works for them, not for humans.

My solution was to have them use a base-five system. Four-toed dragons count your claws – 1,2,3,4. Most other dragons will count the longest four fangs. If you have more than four toes, the short extra acts like the zero when you write ten '10.' Short fangs also fill this round. Two long and one short means one group of four plus two, our six. (Base-five, the quinary number system, is a real thing. It used in Astralian First Nation languages like Gumatj.)

The biggest difference is that dragons won't name all the numbers that humans name in a ten digit counting system. For example in English, we have unique names for the first twenty numbers and then name the groups of ten up to hundred – thirty, forty and so on.

My dragons name their numbers up to sixteen and then name groups of eight digits. Numbers five through nine don't have special digit symbols just like our eleven is written as '11.'

So what does this mean from a storytelling angle? Well, in Mundus, it means that some people foolishly think that dragons are stupid because they 'don't know what twenty it.' However, it's really a translation error. Dragons have math, advanced math even. It's a necessity when you are a nation of large carnivores managing wild food sources. Averages, perimeters, rate of change, and probabilities- these aren't just things in a textbook for dragons. Dragons are scary good at math.

In my W.I.P., Celabramar converts volume from square feet to bushels without a reference table or calculator. He also converts pounds of silver to the market price of sheep. He also reads and corrects Leon's math, which was written in human numbers. Celabramar lives in a cave, can't hold a pencil, and can do algebra in his head. 

Leon is a Wizard. He's basically the guy who went to college and finished a Master's Degree. That doesn't stop him from making mistakes because he is tired or focusing on the wrong things. 

I did this on purpose. It's been in my notes for years. I wanted the reminder that technology and culture isn't a sure indicator of education and intellegent. If you judge only the surface level, you miss so much of the world. 

On a lighter not, the story has yet another dragon math Easter-egg. Through out the story, Celabramar uses several techniques to mange his temper – deep breaths, shredding a tree, and self-talk. Celabramar stops himself from yelling at a bigot by counting in his head.

He counts to eight, not ten.

Overthinking: I'm a Writer?

 

In August 2024 , I finished the second draft of Don't Fireball the Neighbors (Title Pending). My next challenge was to figure out how to turn my manuscript into a published novel.
One of the first things I did was met with Janice Buswell, a local novelist. I bribed her with lunch at a Thai resturance to pick her brain. It was a productive meeting.

I didn't walk away with ten step plan to grow a platform or a agency contact. What I got was advise on finding an editor and restructuring my time management. Basically, it was time to stop treating writing as a hobby and take it to the next step.

“Introduce yourself as a writer,” She told me “When you walked over, you mentioned your petsitting business.”

She continued to explain that introducing myself as a writer directs the conversation to my work and writer's platform. It's good advise from a self-promotion stand point. (It's the many reason I use “House and PetSitter” in my intro's. I find new clients and good booking that way.)

As with all good advise, it's easier said than done. Can I call myself a writer?

A large part of my mental block to claiming "Yes, I'm a writer" is that is was never my career focus. In college, I tended to the other half of the brain - WatchMaking and MircoTech and then later Environmental Engineering. 

I also lack the hallmarks of 'serious writers.' My membership in writer's groups has been patchy due to distance and my various side-jobs. 

More damning, I've never published anything. I wrote essays for my humanities electives, made modifications to some Dungeons and Dragons games I hosted, but never submitted anything since a church poetry contest in my late teen.

Writing fiction has never been a professional focus in my life. Why call myself a writer?

After stewing the question over, I used my old stand-by for decisions – A “Why?” and “Why Not?” list

Surprisingly, the Why List was longer and had heavier point values.

The first thing that jump off the page was a counter to my lack of literature background. I've been working on the Lands of Mundus for 2/3^rd of my life, since I was thirteen. I've been writing, rewriting, and looking for feedback constantly. I'm not just throwing words into chat-bot. I practice and try to strengthen my skills.

A hobbyist writer is still a writer.

In a similar vein, I am a storyteller. The written word is my strongest method of telling stories. Spend 2/3^rd of your life practicing something and you will improve, even if the practice was not the most efficient or structured.

My storytelling skills are specialized around writing.

Finally, I selfishly want to be remembered as a writer. Good books enrich people's lives. I want to create something that does that. (Pet-sitting is service, and a valued one. However, after the first two or so bookings, my clients' honeymoon phase is over. I'm enriching their lives the same way a house-keeper or yard service might.)

Weighing all the pro and cons, I realized the many thing stopping me was overly specific standards for 'what a real writer is,' a habit of undervaluing my own efforts, and the social phobia of having to listen to the follow up question “but does it pay?”

I have nothing to lose but false modesty by introducing my as a writer (my social status is non-existent as a disable adult co-habituating with family). What I gain is the chance to talk about my passion – writing stories.

Calling myself a writer is a truthful description. It's not like I'm claiming to be 'future best selling author' or “Newbery Award Winner.”  I write stories. 

Do Mermaids use Wheelchairs?

My least favorite classic fairytale is "The Little Mermaid." I hated the original ending and felt the mermaid had a stupid death. The Disney animated film gave me nightmares.

Despite that, merfolk provide endless fuel for my overthinking imagination. Why make a deal with a sea witch when human have options for getting around without legs?

The Ipswich Mermaid, George Courage, Acrylic on canvas 8"x10".

The idea of merfolk using a wheelchair is not original to just me. In “Roverandom” by J. R.R. Tolkien there is an underseas adventure that ends in a wizard and his merfolk wife getting banished to the surface. The wife becomes a small business owner and very famous swim instructor. She is described to go around in a horse drawn 'bath-chair.'

As charming as that character concept is, I am not Tolkien. He made a living as an English college professor and ploy-linguist. I have an incomplete environmental engineering degree and chronic health issues. My creative approach takes another angle.

Overthinking

When I imagine merfolk in wheelchairs, my first instinct is “I hope wherever they are going is ADA compliant.” While I don't yet need mobility aids, my dodgy joints and low blood pressure make like accessibility toilets, ramps, handrails and rest benches a boon. Unfortunately, many space designers forget or outright sacrifice those features. Smaller bathrooms means more floor space for making money. Ramps and comfortable benches are never seen as 'bold artistic expression.' You can have the best wheelchair in the world, and there are still places you can't go.

If a merfolk uses mobility aids on land, they have to deal with all the accessibility issues that we humans face.

Another thing that comes to my mind with any mobility aid – chair, cane, brace – is long term comfort. I have friends and family who have used all of them at one point or another. Each comes with a unique set of challenges. Chair and braces can cause bruising and circulation issues from long use. Double crutches require training so your wrists and shoulder can take the pressure. Even a walker or a cane requires a degrees of mindfulness.

This is all assuming you're a human whose used to living on land and in the air. Merfolk live in the water. The buoyancy and resistance change is going to be as tricky learning to swim is for us.

Merfolk also have the complication of having *just* a tail. Human do have tails (the tiny bones at the base of our spine). However, we sit on our hip bones. Aquatic mammals like whales, dolphins, and manatee, lack hipbones and the pelvic bone is all but identical to the surrounding spinal vertebral. If a merfolk where to 'sit' upright like a human, all that weight and pressure goes onto a handful of vertebral. (This doesn't begin to touch on if the mer using a lateral tail flick like a shark. That spine isn't going to bend into a chair posture.)

Merfolk would not be able to use a standard mobility aid comfortably. It would take training and modifications.

The last element to consider is cost. Good mobility aids are expensive (especial in the U.S. where making a deal with a sea witch is a less daunting process than dealing with healthcare industry, insurance companies, and out-of-pocket costs.) Even if you use magic to 'cheat,' land mobility aids are going to be more of a tool than a toy. You aren't going to spend all that money and time training unless you are serious about making it part of your life.

All these elements will shape what kind of merfolk can afford or want to spend time on land. Yes, transformation magic is always an option, but that means giving up the sea. Most people are not bubble-brained princesses willing to give up their family, culture, and body over a man they met for a few hours.

One of the core guidelines when I put fantasy beings in my stories is that people are people no matter their shape. People are curious, people are creative, and most of all people find ways to overcome obstacles. Humans want to explore the sky and sea, because it's there. Merfolk want to see what's on the land. Finding other people and sharing ideas is part of how we grow. The land and sea would not be separate worlds. People learn from and inspire each other.

In Mundus

I imagine that merfolk communities do business with the 'terrestrial' neighbors. It's common to see a floating fish market or pods of off duty pilots and divers by a riverbank or city docks. These mers do leave the water for short periods of time, business meetings, trying a meal at a local pub, rolling over to the next stand for a bit of hot gossip. However, tourist merfolk are rare.

Merfolk curious enough to travel on land sort are more akin to people going on a long vacation with curated experience packages. They travel up a water channel and make group trips to see famous on-land sights. The most luxurious trips use magical aids like levitation rings or transformation potion for the live on land experience.

It's expensive, and some foolhardy mers have gotten themselves in debt over those trips. However, the general consensus is that if you want to go have a look at how the people up top live, you can.

My Troubles with Naming Dragons

 

As I continue rewrites on “Don't Fireball the Neighbors,” I've made several tweaks to the plot and characters. One was the dragon's name.

The dragon has lived rent free in my head since I was thirteen and had run out of books with dragons to read aloud to my younger brother. I named him 'Celebramar' because it sounded like a high fantasy name and was easy to write in cursive.

The trouble was they way I write that name and the way I have said that name don't match.

This is not a unique problem in my life. Despite being an early reader, English was the ban of my school day. I had solid grammar and composition skills. My spelling skills on the other hand brought back lots of red ink.

I could read and recognize words. However, if you asked me to write out those same words five minutes later, you'd get back a mess. I passed several tests by single points and would write the lists until it was muscle memory. Spelling orally like you see in competitions was impossible.

I don't know if this is a brain issue or just confusion from growing up in a region were you can hear the word 'pecan' said three different ways in the same town. “Just sound it out” doesn't work for me, not in English.

The Latin classes in grade school and the Spanish classes in highschool complicated my issues. When I saw I word I didn't know, my poor brain would switch phonetic systems.

'Champagne' 'defenestrate' 'legumes' I knew what they all meant and how to use them. However, if I heard them on the street, I would have thought it was a different word with a similar meaning. Like 'cool' and 'cold.'

First time I tried to read out loud to some who was not my brother, I got repeatedly corrected by a child five years younger than me. Cimorene, Kazul, Gollum, Smaug – all the names were wrong.

Needless to say, creating original names runs into the same issue. The way someone reads a name's spelling don't always match how it sounded in my head. 'Leon' was short and safe. The same held for most of the characters name. The troublemakers were the dragons.

The current draft of "Don't Fireball the Neighbors has three dragons, each with a unique name. Madam Vircroc, the diplomatic liaison of the Dragon Nation. Mahgister Wodigee a dragon of few words and a short role in the plot. Finally, Celabramar the co-protagonist who is trying very hard not to start a diplomatic incident for the other two dragons to clean up.

The 'vir' in Vircroc's name was taken from Latin meaning green or living. However, Vir in English reads more like 'Vur' than 'Vear.' I let this be because it makes a fun growling noise.

Wodigee gained an extra 'ee' to avoid confusion on if the 'i' was long or short. Their title 'Mahgister' also gained an 'h' to make the first vowel sound good and breathy.

And of course, there's my dear problem child who started this all, Celabramar. It took listening to recording of myself, checking with my now grown little brother, and a page of scratched out combinations for me settle on the new spelling. 'Cele' to 'Cela.'

Over all, I am happy with these changes. However, one little issue remains.

My muscle memory has had years to program the old spellings. When writing 'Celabramar,' I regularly catch my self typing or moving through the pen loops of that second 'e.'