BHSV – Cullen Seabourne Guest Post + Copy of "Blood Challenge" by Eileen Wilks Giveaway!

 

Hey.  My name’s Cullen Seabourne.  Eileen asked me to do this blog thing for her—something about edits and a deadline, which means her brain isn’t working too well at the moment, and she doesn’t have time.  I said sure, no problem.  I’m only in the middle of a war, trying to find a cheap way to shield tech from magic, newly married  and a new father, so sure, I’ve got plenty of time to blog about summer.

            That’s what this is supposed to be about.  Something to do with summer.  But you already know all about summer.  Right now you’re either complaining about how damn hot it is or how it won’t stop raining or how it hasn’t rained.  You’re wishing you could go to the beach or the mountains or that some guy would call.  Or, if you’re a guy, you’re thinking about how last night went and how—shit, Eileen says I’m not supposed to write about sex.  How do I talk about summer without talking about sex?

            Never mind.  You don’t want to hear about summer anyway.  It’s hot.  It’ll stay hot awhile, then get cooler and we’ll call that fall.

            What you want to hear about is magic.  And I’ve got plenty to say about that.

            Eileen tells me you live in a realm almost exactly like mine, except that it’s really low on magic and there aren’t any lupi.  Big surprise.  Since mine is the only realm with lupi, I kinda knew that. Now, since you live in a low-magic realm, I know something about you.  Either you’re convinced that magic doesn’t exist and people who think it does are Looney Tunes, or you’re convinced it does exist and you can find great spells on the Internet.

            Stop that.  Just stop it.  First, you’re feeding the smug of the magic-isn’t-real crowd.  Second, do you have any idea how much trouble you can cause?  Sure, you live in a low-magic realm, so odds are 99 to 1 that even if you find a halfway decent spell, it won’t do anything.  But say you hit the magic lottery and the spell works,.  The odds of it doing what you—a completely untrained practitioner—want it to do shoot up to around a thousand to one.

            Magic is not electricity.  If you want to change out the light fixture over the sink, you don’t have to get your mind, body, and soul lined up with all the wiring in the house.  You just have to know about ground wires and shit like that.

            Magic is chaos in search of order.  It’s the balancing force to entropy.  Now, if you aren’t a physicist, you don’t have a clue what that means, and maybe you don’t care, but you aren’t going to understand anything about magic if you don’t understand this, so pay attention.  The first two laws of thermodynamics are the key.  First law:  the energy in a closed system remains constant. It may change form, but the amount stays the same.  Second law: energy always seeks equilibrium.  That’s entropy, and basically it means that things tend to go from highly ordered but unstable to disordered and stable.  Which leads, eventually, to the heat death of the universe.

            Or it would, without magic.  Entropy: order slides into disorder.  Magic: disorder slides into order.  See?

            Magic unbalances closed systems.  It starts out as pure chaos and is drawn into order.  Node energy is the most powerful form of magic—the most dangerous--and the most chaotic.  It gets soaked up by everything around it, becoming one of the elemental magics--Earth, Air, Fire, Water—which then becomes further ordered by whatever absorbs them.  Plants, for example, are the mildest, safest, most-ordered spell components around.  They combine minute amounts of all four of the elemental magics because they use earth, air, sun (fire), and water to grow, but they are not elemental magic.  They’ve ordered it beyond what it was before, so that the magic of a lavender blossom is very different from that in sage.  But it’s all so mild that in low-magic systems like yours, people can explain all the properties of herbs in scientific terms.  Or think they can.

            But even in its mildest, most orderly form, magic retains some of its chaotic nature.  Which means that if you don’t know what you’re doing, you are going to get results vastly different from what you want when you pull a damn spell of the damn Internet.  So don’t do that.  Ever.

            Especially quit looking for love spells, love charms, and all that rot.  They don’t exist.  Unless you’re an elf and able to cast a glamour, that is, and a glamour is not a spell.  It’s an innate ability, and it isn’t really love, anyway.  Attraction, infatuation, sexual fixation, sure.  Not love.  And you can’t do it.  You aren’t an elf.  How do I know that?  Because you’re in such a low-magic realm that even an elf can’t get there, or if he did, he couldn’t leave, and he’d probably kill himself if he had to try and live without magic.  So whoever you are, you aren’t sidhe, and you can give up on the damn love spells.

            It may be that you’re smart enough to be wondering how the hell, if your realm is so closed off to other realms, I could be blogging here on your Internet.  I bloody well don’t know, and Eileen won’t tell me.  It has something to do with her being a writer.  She says writers draw on other realms all the time, but she won’t explain what she means, though she claims it isn’t telepathy.  I bloody well hope not, since telepaths are all crazy.  Which, come to think of it, explains a lot.  She may be fooling herself about that part.

            She wants me to finish this up, which is fine, because I do have other things to do.  Oh, and she wants me to remind you to go buy her damn book or books or whatever.  Someone’s supposed to put up a link for that.

            So have a great summer, even if it is too hot or too rainy or whatever.  And don’t believe what you read on the Internet.

Check Out My Review of Blood Challenge!

 

 

For more information about Eileen Wilks and her books, check out her website at

www.eileenwilks.com

 

 

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