The premise of the book is that an average mid thirties guy rather suddenly finds himself in possesion of a variety of magical abilties from the various fantasy novels he has read throughout his life. None of the magic in the book with be an exact copy of any others work but they will be as similar as legally possible. I am working on that extensively. I am looking for critiques on style, voice, if there are any grammatical errors or spelling that I missed, if it's too derivitive. Hope you enjoy.
Common Man’s Magic
Have you ever read a fantasy book with magic and thought “why don’t they try something else”, or “that’s really unimaginative’, or “I would have done…”. TO BE CLEAR I am talking about the characters in the book with that line of questioning NOT the authors. Have you ever wondered what it would be like to use the force from Star Wars, or the will and the word from The Belgariad, or a wand and spells like from Harry Potter, or even a crazy mashup of occult insanity like that arrogant scouser John Constantine? Are you really a nerd if you haven't? Be honest you and your friends have probably discussed this at length as have I and mine. Here is another opportunity for you to do it again, this time to my friends and I. Believe you me, I’ve done my fair share of Monday morning quarterbacking, but let me tell you the situation is a hell of a lot different when you’re actually in it. At this point you are probably wondering who the hell I am, how I know that it’s different, and what in the world I’m talking about.
Well, my name is Joshua Guillaume and I was, up until recently, a normal nerd. As normal as a nerd can be anyway. I always dreamed of having powers like the ones from the books. To be able to influence the world with nothing more than my will, or words spoken in ancient languages and maybe the odd burning plant. Oh, how I wanted it more than anything else in the world. I never imagined it would actually happen. I had a mundane job that I did every day during the week, my title was security officer, the details aren’t all that important. I even kept my job after I learned about my new powers. In fact, that’s where I discovered my abilities. It was after my thirty fourth birthday, I was back at work dealing with the smells that emanated from the patrons of the office, when I discovered that I could force the smell away from me. Not by waving my hand, that’s too obvious and I have to maintain some pretense of decorum, I can’t be rude. I just concentrated on the smell going away from me and it faded. However, much like when Belgarath told Aldur’s tower door to open and it did, it didn’t even register to me that what I had done was out of the ordinary. Frankly, I was just relieved that the awful smell of body odor and stale beer had disappeared. Now, my second time and moment of enlightenment did not take nearly as long as it took Belgarath, I highly recommend the works of David and Leigh Eddings give them a read at first opportunity. My second time was much more obvious than my first and only a day later, there were a bunch of screaming babies in the waiting area and as anyone would, I wished in my head that they would go to sleep. To my immediate shock they all did. I nearly fell out of my chair from the surprising and suddenly deafening silence. That could still have been a coincidence right? Well, the third time definitely convinced me that something was up. I was laying in bed and the TV remote was out of reach and, as all nerds have done at one point or another, I reached out and attempted to “force pull” the remote to me, thanks George for giving us all a new hope. This time I achieved the astonishing result of success, needless to say I was stupefied. I had to try to repeat the results, being the consummate nerd I had to experiment and see if, I don’t know, it wasn’t a fluke. So I started trying it with other items, and nearly had a real life version of that scene from all the Spiderman movies, you know the one.
As cool as this was it could be simple telekinetic and telepathic abilities right? Not to demean either of those but, making people sleep, smells go away, and pulling objects through the air doesn’t necessarily mean magic, does it? So I decided to try other things. I put the remote in a separate room, concentrated on it being in my hand and sure enough it appeared, now I was getting into the realm of magic!! “What else should I try?”, I thought to myself, “There are so many stories of magic to draw from.” I could try all the different things that I thought the characters in the books I’ve read should have tried. I figured I should take lessons from certain books that seemed rather authoritative on matters. For instance, no trying to destroy things after all I hadn’t been transported to a different universe, I was still beholden to the laws of physics. That meant no trying to create something out of nothing though, pesky conservation of matter. Invisibility perhaps, no better leave that for later, this was only my first week with magic. “Could I possibly create an illusion of something?” I thought, scratching my head. “Yeah, let me try that”, so I focused on as clear a picture of an apple as I could, pictured it on the table, and holy sh*t it worked!! As clear as day there was an apple sitting on the table, but was it solid? I reached out to pick it up and my hand didn’t pass through it, I actually picked up my illusionary apple. That had some fun prospects. I figured I better wait on trying to transfiguration until I learned more about anatomy, again bound by real physical laws I didn’t want to damage my internal organs. I decided to indulge my curiosity further by turning to my rather large collection of action figures. I took some of my favorites and decided to see if I could make them move of their own volition. Not giving them consciousness but more along the lines of making them automatons, like the stone soldiers Professor McGonagall animated in Harry Potter. That was a lot of fun to play with, I could make some of my favorites go toe to toe with each other in ways then never would. Like having Kakashi from Naruto fighting Broly from Dragon Ball Z. Of course there were limitations, I couldn’t have them use any of the special techniques from their respective shows, since they were still only made of plastic and their abilities didn’t exist in the real world. Also, as I said they are some of my favorites, so I didn’t want them to destroy each other and end up looking like a wizard chess set.
Common Man’s Magic
Have you ever read a fantasy book with magic and thought “why don’t they try something else”, or “that’s really unimaginative’, or “I would have done…”. TO BE CLEAR I am talking about the characters in the book with that line of questioning NOT the authors. Have you ever wondered what it would be like to use the force from Star Wars, or the will and the word from The Belgariad, or a wand and spells like from Harry Potter, or even a crazy mashup of occult insanity like that arrogant scouser John Constantine? Are you really a nerd if you haven't? Be honest you and your friends have probably discussed this at length as have I and mine. Here is another opportunity for you to do it again, this time to my friends and I. Believe you me, I’ve done my fair share of Monday morning quarterbacking, but let me tell you the situation is a hell of a lot different when you’re actually in it. At this point you are probably wondering who the hell I am, how I know that it’s different, and what in the world I’m talking about.
Well, my name is Joshua Guillaume and I was, up until recently, a normal nerd. As normal as a nerd can be anyway. I always dreamed of having powers like the ones from the books. To be able to influence the world with nothing more than my will, or words spoken in ancient languages and maybe the odd burning plant. Oh, how I wanted it more than anything else in the world. I never imagined it would actually happen. I had a mundane job that I did every day during the week, my title was security officer, the details aren’t all that important. I even kept my job after I learned about my new powers. In fact, that’s where I discovered my abilities. It was after my thirty fourth birthday, I was back at work dealing with the smells that emanated from the patrons of the office, when I discovered that I could force the smell away from me. Not by waving my hand, that’s too obvious and I have to maintain some pretense of decorum, I can’t be rude. I just concentrated on the smell going away from me and it faded. However, much like when Belgarath told Aldur’s tower door to open and it did, it didn’t even register to me that what I had done was out of the ordinary. Frankly, I was just relieved that the awful smell of body odor and stale beer had disappeared. Now, my second time and moment of enlightenment did not take nearly as long as it took Belgarath, I highly recommend the works of David and Leigh Eddings give them a read at first opportunity. My second time was much more obvious than my first and only a day later, there were a bunch of screaming babies in the waiting area and as anyone would, I wished in my head that they would go to sleep. To my immediate shock they all did. I nearly fell out of my chair from the surprising and suddenly deafening silence. That could still have been a coincidence right? Well, the third time definitely convinced me that something was up. I was laying in bed and the TV remote was out of reach and, as all nerds have done at one point or another, I reached out and attempted to “force pull” the remote to me, thanks George for giving us all a new hope. This time I achieved the astonishing result of success, needless to say I was stupefied. I had to try to repeat the results, being the consummate nerd I had to experiment and see if, I don’t know, it wasn’t a fluke. So I started trying it with other items, and nearly had a real life version of that scene from all the Spiderman movies, you know the one.
As cool as this was it could be simple telekinetic and telepathic abilities right? Not to demean either of those but, making people sleep, smells go away, and pulling objects through the air doesn’t necessarily mean magic, does it? So I decided to try other things. I put the remote in a separate room, concentrated on it being in my hand and sure enough it appeared, now I was getting into the realm of magic!! “What else should I try?”, I thought to myself, “There are so many stories of magic to draw from.” I could try all the different things that I thought the characters in the books I’ve read should have tried. I figured I should take lessons from certain books that seemed rather authoritative on matters. For instance, no trying to destroy things after all I hadn’t been transported to a different universe, I was still beholden to the laws of physics. That meant no trying to create something out of nothing though, pesky conservation of matter. Invisibility perhaps, no better leave that for later, this was only my first week with magic. “Could I possibly create an illusion of something?” I thought, scratching my head. “Yeah, let me try that”, so I focused on as clear a picture of an apple as I could, pictured it on the table, and holy sh*t it worked!! As clear as day there was an apple sitting on the table, but was it solid? I reached out to pick it up and my hand didn’t pass through it, I actually picked up my illusionary apple. That had some fun prospects. I figured I better wait on trying to transfiguration until I learned more about anatomy, again bound by real physical laws I didn’t want to damage my internal organs. I decided to indulge my curiosity further by turning to my rather large collection of action figures. I took some of my favorites and decided to see if I could make them move of their own volition. Not giving them consciousness but more along the lines of making them automatons, like the stone soldiers Professor McGonagall animated in Harry Potter. That was a lot of fun to play with, I could make some of my favorites go toe to toe with each other in ways then never would. Like having Kakashi from Naruto fighting Broly from Dragon Ball Z. Of course there were limitations, I couldn’t have them use any of the special techniques from their respective shows, since they were still only made of plastic and their abilities didn’t exist in the real world. Also, as I said they are some of my favorites, so I didn’t want them to destroy each other and end up looking like a wizard chess set.
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