Matt the Mage

Matt the Mage First Spells 2004 Post 317

Matt the Mage is the result of my pondering over something I'd often pondered and that is the cultural divide between the stories much of my generation grew up with and the actuality of our country of birth-and-residence. I have always loved fantasy and science fiction and there's no getting away from the fact that when I was young, at least 75% of the books I loved were British. In some ways, mainland Australia was more foreign to me than Britain although I had never (and still have never) been there. Places such as Kent, Devon, Surrey and Sussex, Essex, Cumberland... they were all much more culturally familiar to me than the outback or tropical North Queensland. They had beaches, farms, villages, mountains, lakes and rivers, just like Tasmania. I felt spiritually at home with these books. I loved a lot of Australian books too - Eleanor Spence, Patricia Wrightson, John Gunn, John Kiddell, Mavis Thorpe Clark, but these books felt foreign in a way the Romney Marsh series just didn't.

Another problem was that I loved unicorns, dragons, mers and merrows, piskies, fairies, water hags and so on and they, bless them, just didn't work in Australia. They couldn't. How could they? They needed hundreds of years to merge and blend into their habitats. Roman treasure? No. Druidic lore? Not here. Long Barrows? Um. No. Tunnels/castles/passages/ancient-cities, hell no! Not here. Never here.

I found ways around this, as I matured as a writer. I even began to work out plots and characters that made allowances and managed wrinkles that let me write what I wanted to write. These days, I write a series called A Fairy in the Bed that allows me to have the best of both worlds.

To get to the book of the day, Matt the Mage is the result of a spurt of annoyance. I couldn't do an apprentice mage in Australia. He wouldn't fit. Therefore, I made that the point. Matt, whose real name is Parramatta Wheatslump, is desperate to become a mage, but he soon learns that can't happen for a kid in outback Australia. His ocker parents, Raelene and Merv, aren't even too sure what a mage is. Matt is determined though, and eventually, with the help of a camel who is really a Bertie-Wooster-style human silly ass under a spell, he achieves his goal. Sort of. Kind of. He finds a mentor named Parboil and gets embroiled with a mermaid named Sheila O'Splash and winds up in Yurope, which suggests he's somehow switched worlds. As the title implies, this was meant to be the first of a series. It was accepted by a company which decided not to publish that list. Somehow it got resurrected, and eventually published. Then then list ceased, making Matt the Mage one of my published-then-abruptly-orphaned books. It happens now and then and it's always disappointing. Still, there seem an inordinate number of copies still floating about. 

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Sally is Sally Odgers; author, manuscript assessor, editor, anthologist and reader. She runs http://www.affordablemanuscriptassessments.com and Prints Charming Books. (Sally is me, by the way, and I am lots of other things too, but these are the relevant ones for now.)

The goal for 2017 is to write a post a day profiling the background behind one of my books; how it came to be written, what it's about, and any things of note that happened along the way. If you're an author, an aspiring author, a reader or just someone who enjoys windows into worlds, you might find this fun. The books are not in any special order, but will be assigned approximate dates, and pictures, where they exist. If you enjoyed a post, or want to ask about any of my books or my manuscript assessment service.