[BECAUSE … MAGIC

When I was in school I enjoyed laboratory classes, particularly assignments based on spectroscopy. It was fun imagining what the samples were going through. Picture a few milliliters of liquid being forced into a chamber. The cloud is ionized and the charged molecules are forced through a curved path until they either collide with a wall or reach a detector at the end which initiates a new chain of events. 
But all we see is a line on a page.

That’s the let down of research. The concepts are amazing to think about but most of the work comes down to turning on a machine and waiting for a printer to spit out a graph. That was always an issue for me when taking chemistry courses. In a drug design class I found studying exactly how and why compounds affect people interesting, but the processes of producing them tedious (and mistakes too easy to make).I turned to creative writing as a way of keeping things interesting by only focusing on the fun stuff.
This approach might sound appropriate for writing science fiction novels. For a while I wanted Mystic Rampage to be a sci-fi. In an earlier draft I did a lot of research and tried to explain the fantastic parts to make them more believable. However, putting too much explanation in the middle of a battle distracted from the action, and by the end things became too ridiculous for the word ‘science’ to be related to the story anyway. Flarence has a coil gun powerful enough to be used in self-defense, but it’s small enough to fit in his pocket. Soleil fights by throwing toxins, but he keeps them in palm-sized vials. In real life a coil gun would have to be massive to generate an electromagnetic field strong enough to be used the way it is in the book, and the quantity of compounds Soleil uses would not be enough to impact a roomful of people. I’m aware that nothing in this story is practical, but making it realistic wasn’t my goal. I wanted to take real concepts and exaggerate them to make the fight scenes fun. I hope it’s fun enough for any readers to forgive the creative privileges I’ve taken. I hope that in the end people will mostly remember the conflicts.