DaWaRou Posts: Spellbound-The Origin of my Magnum Opus!

Hey guys, just what I just got?! THE COMPLETE POWERPUFF GIRLS SERIES! Also, I broke my dental filling and need to get it fixed but that's completely beside the point. The point is...I'M BACK TO DOING WEEKLY POSTS! Yes, you may find it hard to believe that with school starting up for me in another week that I'll be able to find the time to do a week by week post but I assure you that I will most definitely do it! But today's a special day! Today's the day I share something very special with all of you. Ladies and Gents, I'm John Cortez and THIS is my twelfth post for...The Broken Infinite.

As I promised in my last post, today I'll be sharing with you all the inner workings and my creative process behind what I hope to be my Magnum Opus, Spellbound. Now, is this incredibly stupid of me? Giving random strangers online who I've never met private information that could literally make or break me as a writer? Well, yes, yes it is but I'm a glass half full kind of person and I'm not stupid so I won't be going into too much detail as to what's going to happen in the story. Just kind of the back story on what it is and how it came to be and how things...are set to work.

Spellbound started off as a writing exercise for me to see if I could write a weak and low powered protagonist. Up until that point, all the protagonists I'd ever written were already at a point that they'd start the story being extremely powerful and fully in tune with their powers and...while I don't want to say boring because even when I first started writing I think I realized how to at least make my readers keep turning the pages...it didn't really lend itself well to growth and development. So I tried and tried but I was never actually able to sit down and write anything for it, instead devoting myself to my other stories as well as community college and of course anime and manga. At the time, I'd just discovered the television show Charmed

the story of three sisters who discovered that they were The Charmed Ones, the most powerful Good Witches the world had or ever would know and I really enjoyed it and I still do and, maybe unsurprisingly, my very first draft of Spellbound began to form. At it's earliest stages, Spellbound was about three friends who, upon turning 13, discovered that they were Mages and had to do their magical training in secret. Each would have their own Grimorie, a textbook for their Magic and each would have their own special power apart from their regular witchcraft and wizardry. One of the big kicks about the series was when I first planned it, none of the characters would know that their best friend happens to be a Mage and the three of them would often engage in misunderstandings of epic proportions and then I changed it so that they did know or that they'd find out all on the same day. From there I also planned that the main antagonist was plotting to take over the world or something like that and so the main characters had to work at their Magic that much harder so as to prevent the world from coming to an end or falling under the thumb of some evil Magically empowered dictator. It wasn't an entirely well thought out story, but then again, as it was only meant to be an exercise, I didn't feel like it needed to be extremely well thought out but the more I thought about it the more potential I saw for an actual story

And from the little information I had down about the story I kept only a few small things those being the name of the main character, the fact that he was a Mage-in-Training, and his Grimorie. I began to tun elsewhere for ideas on a story, on a plot, on supporting characters when my eyes fell on this!

Mahou Sensei Negima! The story of a young Mage who finds himself the English teacher to a class of 31 beautiful Japanese schoolgirls, each special in her own way. This was largely the template I used for Spellbound and many of my characters are directly ripped off from the characters of this series, right down to my main characters homeroom and English class. In that respect, Spellbound became more of an...AU fanfic of Negima wherein the teacher was given an age up and placed in the same position as the students. It was always my intention to tell an epic story, I just never knew what to do with it until Spellbound came into my life. So from there I moved onto my most enjoyed process, character creation. I took the 31 girls of Negi's class, Negi himself, his friends Kotaro and Anya and his sister Nekane and began molding them to suit my needs. Genders were the first thing to change and then came origins since I fully intended to publish this and couldn't do so unless it was completely my own.

From there the story all just started coming at once. I wanted Spellbound to take place in a world that had just discovered the existence of Magic and the Supernatural so as to not have to worry about writing a big world secret story. If I want things to happen, I don't want to have to worry about things like whipping the minds of non magic people. A world where the secret had been exposed made things easier to write as well as gave me a decent reason for conflict within the story itself. And to further that, I decided to make many of the characters in the main class Supernatural. And then came writing in more characters and their origins and personalities and wants and desires and all that good stuff. I find myself not liking tragic backstories for characters so most of mine don't have one. I like giving my characters average and normal back stories and from there their lives will become interesting. And still I wasn't truly ready to really start Spellbound until I watched this again.

Kiki's Delivery Serivce, my favorite Miazaki film, which tells the story of a young Witch trying to find her way in the big city while training to become a real Witch. The idea that my Mages turn 13 and then leave home to train came largely from this movie and at that point I had everything I needed to get started.

So before we bring this to an end, what is Spellbound about? Cole Dryden is a Mage with uncontrollable Magic so he's sent to the big city to try and improve himself. That's it in a single sentence! Thanks all for joining me! DaWaRou~!