Illustration by Mark Zug

Spot Colour by Angie Sage

Sometimes writing is all about wish fulfilment…

I have always wanted a jacket like Beetle’s. Always, I have been on a quest for the perfect jacket that will, naturally, change my life. However, I am still looking. But Beetle got his a while back in SYREN—and Mark drew it exactly as I had imagined it.

I don’t think Septimus approved of Beetle’s jacket at all. It was here that I understood that Septimus was, at times, quite a judgy person. I suppose if you live with Marcia something is going to rub off on you. But right then, at the beginning of SYREN, things were not going how Septimus had hoped. It should have been great. He, Beetle and Jenna had rescued Nicko and Snorri from the Time-whirling nightmare that is The House of Foryx and Septimus wanted to bring Nicko home on Spit Fyre. He had promised his mother, Sarah, that he would do just that and he was longing for the moment when he would land his dragon with his Time-lost brother on board and be a hero for his Mum.

But, as ever, things were not going to plan. While resting up in the Trading Post before the journey home Septimus’s thunder has been stolen by Jenna’s father, Milo. And now Milo, who is a wonderful show-off, has them all staying on his ridiculously bling ship, The Cerys, and is insisting that he brings them all home. And everyone—apart from Septimus of course—is rather taken with the idea. What’s not to like about a voyage in a beautiful, luxurious ship rather than an uncomfortable flight, in relays, on an unpredictable and somewhat smelly dragon?

Exactly. We’d all go for the fancy ship, wouldn’t we?

Septimus is, at heart, a bit of a puritan. He retains his Young Army orderliness and sense of keeping things pared-down and ready for action. Marcia has tried many times to get him to wear a nice pair of lizard green boots from Terry Tarsal but he always refuses. Septimus likes his brown boots. They are good, solid boots and they are brown, which is the colour of boots. And that is that. I suppose Septimus has always assumed—as you do with friends—that tBeetle feels the way he does. So when Beetle turns up on The Cerys wearing his fancy Admiral’s jacket, looking like he belongs on The Cerys, Septimus feels just a little bit betrayed.

“Hello, Beetle – gosh, what are you wearing?” asked Septimus.

Beetle flushed. “Oh,” he said. “You noticed.”

Septimus stared at Beetle’s new acquisition – a short, navy blue jacket adorned with a plethora of gold braid and frogging.

“I could hardly not notice,” he replied. “What is it?”

“It’s a jacket,” said Beetle a little peevishly.

“What, a captain’s jacket?”

“Well, no. Admiral’s, actually. The shop’s got lots of ’em if you want one too.”

“Um, no thanks, Beetle.”

For Beetle this jacket is the first step he takes towards feeling that he is worth something. It’s a statement. It tells him—and others—that Beetle is going places. And after being sacked from his much-loved job in the Manuscriptorium, Beetle needs this.

I think coats and jackets can do this. In fact, here is a snippet from THE HOPEFUL APPRENTICE, where the young Marcia is taken under the wing of Astrid Hathilly, and realises the transforming power of a Good Coat. To set the scene: Astrid Hathilly is the number three Wizard in the Tower, the one on Floor Nineteen who manages the power of the Darke. Marcia has, sadly for her, already encountered way too much of the Darke and some of it—in the form of her dead father’s blood—is stuck on her old snow jacket. Which she has given to Astrid to dispose of in a safe way.

Astrid took Marcia’s arm. “You can’t go out into the snow with no coat. I have just the thing for you. If you don’t mind one of my old coats?”

“Oh, thank you. I’ll bring it back tomorrow,” Marcia said as Astrid ushered her out of the study and back along the corridor.

“No, I insist you keep it. As you will see, I have far too many coats.” Astrid pushed open the door to a small room. A lantern flared into life revealing a brilliant array of coats, jackets and gowns in a stunning variety of velvets, silks, wools, patterns, jacquards and toiles hanging on assorted pegs and rails. Marcia gasped.

Astrid walked over to a corner where a thick dark blue woollen coat hung on a red hanger. She lifted it up and held it up against Marcia. “Perfect fit,” she declared. “I had this when I was about your age.” She smiled. “It is a little foible of mine; I can’t bear to throw away clothes. They are like children to me. I feel responsible for them and I like to know where they are going when they leave home. I shall be very happy indeed to know this will be starting a new life with the daughter of Karminserra Overstrand.”

In awe, Marcia took the long coat from the hanger and let the heavy, soft folds fall into her arms. The red silk lining shimmered in the bright lights of the closet and the silver buttons, dark with tarnish, called out to be polished and come alive once more. Marcia smiled at Astrid. “I love it. Thank you,” she said.

Astrid brushed a tear from her eye. “Thank you for giving it another life. Here, let me help you put it on.”

The coat wrapped itself around Marcia as if it had been made for her. Her hands fitted just right into the deep fur-lined pockets and the heavy hem hung just above her ankles. Full of confidence, Marcia declined Astrid’s offer to call for the duty Apprentice to escort her back down the silver stairs and in a few minutes she found herself turning sedately down through the vastness of the Wizard Tower—the stairs had switched to slow nighttime mode and the lights had dimmed. Marcia could not stop smiling. This, she thought, is where I belong.

Here, in the northern hemisphere, it is not exactly coat weather right now and that is one of the reasons why this Substack is somewhat delayed. In England if we get sunshine we are legally obliged to Go Out And Enjoy It. The problem recently has been that unlike most years when we get three days sunshine and then rain, this year we have had sun every day. This has been most confusing for us and led to a great feeling of discombobulation. Also for a distinct longing for drizzle. We had a three spots of rain last week and everyone was talking about it. So my apologies. I too have been discombobulated. Of course if only I had an Admiral’s jacket, all would be just fine.

Thanks for reading, and it’s nice to be back.

Illustrations by Mark Zug

Spot colour by Angie Sage

“Begin at the beginning” people say. But where is the beginning? Sometimes, it takes a bit of finding.

The scene that opens MAGYK (Septimus Heap Book 1) is not the one I first began the book with. This scene is hidden in the middle of the book, in Chapter 15. It is told by the ghost of Alther Mella who changes his both his voice and form to tell it from the point of view of the Wendron Witch Mother. To my mind now it feels out of place. I actually think that I should have dumped it. But oh, it is so difficult to, as they say, ‘kill your darlings’. And this was a darling scene. It was where the young Alther Mella climbed to the top of the Wizard Tower and fought with his nefarious master, Dom Daniel, sending him plummeting to the ground (or did he?). It was the beginning of the whole saga so of course it had to be at the beginning of the first book. And, I confess, I was already imagining it as the opening to the amazing SEPTIMUS HEAP movie that we were, naturally, going to get… (And so very nearly did.)

So why doesn’t this scene begin the book now? Well, the day that Alther pushed DomDaniel off the roof (or didn’t, depending on who you believe) was also the day that Silas Heap was born. So we have a very long time to wait until the birth of Silas’s own son, our protagonist, Septimus. Of course I could have written a whole series of books about Alther but, lovely as Alther is, I wanted to write a family story about the Heaps. Which meant there would have been a huge gap int time after chapter one before that pivotal moment where Silas Heap finds baby Jenna in the snow.

But, even so, I did not want to let this beginning go. So I put it in as a prologue. But Katherine Tegen (my wonderful editor and publisher at HarperCollins) was not keen on this. She said that with the first book of a series it is best to jump straight in—no messing about with prologues. And so, because clearly Katherine knew what she was talking about (and then some), I took the prologue out. But I still could not let my little darling go. All those lovely words, and what a scene for the movie! So back in it went, into chapter fifteen where we have Alther speaking the words of the old prologue exactly. I’ve just re-read it and it’s not as weird as I remember it. It is nicely atmospheric and does tell us what happened in an interesting way. But even so, I would not do that today.

So there we are, back with that pivotal scene where Silas finds baby Jenna. And we have the beginning of MAGYK.

Or do we?

Because, even after all that, we very nearly didn’t. Because someone very nearly took it over for themselves. I expect you can work out who that was.

Marcia Overstand. For me, Marcia first stormed into MAGYK in Chapter 4, when I discovered her terrorising her mirror. I was so excited to meet Marcia because I was getting a sinking feeling about the Heaps. To be frank they felt just a little too folksy, a little too … smug. They desperately needed someone to come and annoy them. And suddenly, there in front of the mirror, was the perfect person for the task. And I believe she performed it supremely well. I cannot fault Marcia in any way in her ability to annoy the Heap family. She is an absolute genius at it.

In fact, I was so excited to meet Marcia that I began to wonder if this was where I should begin MAGYK—with Marcia yelling at her mirror? Of course she would have carried it off with total confidence. I was very tempted, because I love that scene. It is not often something like that is gifted to you, but it just appeared from nowhere and felt immediately right. But I’m glad I didn’t use it for Chapter One, because the further you go into a story to find your beginning, the more you end up using flashbacks to tell the story that came before, and you really don’t want too many of those. Ideally the reader needs to travel by your side all the way through the book and to be there with the story as it happens, otherwise there is a danger they will not feel so present. So Marcia had to stay where she was, in Chapter Four. Sorry Marcia. (Why do I always apologise to Marcia, I ask myself…)

However, once Marcia had arrived I wanted her there in the beginning, so I went back and added her in. Originally Silas had run home with Jenna, meeting only Gringe on the way. But now, thanks to Marcia Appearing to him, we get a sense of jeopardy and foreboding, of things out of place. And we get to see some real Magyk.

So I am sorry, Marcia, (there I go again) that you didn’t get to be the opening act. But that is because you are The Star.

If you have read the Septimus books that come after MAGYK you will know that I got my prologues! I’m not sure that Katherine was ever very keen on them, but she did not object. The prologues were really useful tools because they provided a scene describing the main issue (or one of them) that would define each book. But, even so, a prologue is not a beginning. A beginning is where the actual story kicks off. Ideally, I like the beginning to be a strong image and also to have something happening in it that intrigues you. Something that, even if you put the book down and go no further, will come back and niggle at you until you really do have to pick the book up and carry on reading to see what is going to happen. This is the job of the beginning: to pull you in, and to make it very hard for you to leave.

Ideally I do like begin at the start of the main action of the story and continue through the story to the end. First one step, and then another. I like to travel the way along with the characters so we all experience things at the same time. I find that way, for me anyway, events have a chance to unfold in a natural way and the people in the book are able to react to them as they happen. Not everyone writes like this. I know some writers pick out pivotal scenes throughout the book and write them and then fill in the gaps. Me, I like to start in what feels like a good place and wander through the book with the reader. And that is what I usually do. The only time I didn’t was with QUESTE.

I initially began QUESTE with Merrin Meredith arriving at The Grateful Turbot. Despite Merrin’s determination to be endlessly annoying and rude, I was fond of the kid and enjoyed writing him. He was a bit of a maverick and just the kind of person to begin a book with. But then I got to wondering how he arrived at The Grateful Turbot. I began imagining how difficult it must have been to get away from Simon, so then I wrote that scene and that became the beginning. But somehow that didn’t feel right and I wasn't sure why.

And then I remembered Nicko.

Nicko. Who was the whole reason for QUESTE. Nicko who was already in the prologues with Snorri, far away in another Time, buying fish. At last I understood why none of the other ‘beginnings’ had worked: I had to begin with something to do with Nicko. And that is how we ended up with one of the saddest scenes I have ever written: Jannit Maarten going to see Sarah Heap in order to cancel Nicko’s Apprentice Indentures. We had to see that Nicko’s absence was causing real grief, and I think it made me understand that Nicko really was in deep trouble—because everyone thought he was, effectively, dead. And that was the right beginning for QUESTE—because the next 550 pages or so were spent trying desperately to bring Nicko back from the dead.

QUESTE made me think about beginnings in a more structural way, made me more confident that I knew where to … begin. After QUESTE I really did begin every book at the beginning.

Which is the very best place to … begin.

Illustration by Mark Zug

Rabbit Ears or Frog lumps? Or maybe a nice Cabbage Sandwich? All Sep Heap people know who is doing the cooking, so I need to say no more to you guys. But if you’re not a Sep Heap person (yet?) this is for you too. Because these (almost) weekly musings are becoming as much about the alchemy of writing as they are about the Septimus World. That’s what I’m loving about being here. So, for those who have yet to meet her, let me introduce you to Aunt Zelda in her cottage on the Marram Marshes. For it is she who would be offering you the choice of these culinary delights—or possibly even all three at once. Lucky you …

Aunt Zelda is not a great cook, but she does cook with love and this is what stops her food being totally monstrous. She is also very much on trend right now, because all her food is locally sourced from the marshes, from the rabbit warren on her island and from her cabbage patch and the marshes that surround her. I did wonder how she got the bread for the cabbage sandwiches, but I am pretty sure she buys the flour from the Port Market every few months and bakes it herself.

I’ve been looking back over the way I’ve written about food in this series. And generally it is verging on the revolting and often an excuse for humour. More rarely it is comfort food, although very often there is a drawback to it—the way that Sally Mullin’s barley cake sticks to your teeth like glue, for example. I’ve been wondering where this came from, because when I write about awful food the words flow easily. It all feels horribly familiar. And then I understood that this really did come from childhood experiences. When I was little, food was pretty disgusting and the tyranny that adults held over children was forcing them to eat some quite revolting things. I remember a friend of my mother’s who was a truly terrible cook and where I dreaded going to for any kind of food. We had to eat everything she put on the plate, which was always some kind grey stew with gristle and tubes. Awful. So when, in MAGYK, Nicko is faced with frog lumps and manages to hide them under his knife, he is doing exactly what I tried to do, but he has more success than I did.

Aunt Zelda served frog and rabbit casserole with twice-boiled turnip heads followed by cherry and parsnip delight. Boy 412 tucked into it with great enthusiasm, as it was a wonderful improvement on the Young Army food, and he even had second and third helpings, much to Aunt Zelda’s delight. No one had ever asked her for second helpings before, let alone third. Nicko was pleased that Boy 412 was eating so much, as it meant that Aunt Zelda did not notice the frog lumps that he had lined up and hidden under his knife. Or if she did, it didn’t bother her too much. Nicko also managed to feed the complete rabbit ear that he had found on his plate to Maxie, much to his relief and Maxie’s delight.

My other source is school dinners. However, these, in the company of friends, were hilarious. “Dead Rat for lunch today!” was always greeted with great excitement. And indeed Dead Rat, a meatloaf with an oddly rat-like shape and colour (although mercifully minus the tail) looked revolting but was delicious. There was also, I seem to remember, Severed Arm and Boiled Baby, both a kind of steamed pudding. The Severed Arm had a lot of strawberry jam in it. So look no further for the source of my other favourite place food-wise: Wizard Sandwiches.

I would very much like to eat at Wizard Sandwiches. Not only would the company be interesting but their concoctions usually sound delicious. However, they can also be a cause for embarrassment, as Beetle found when he plucked up the courage to ask Jenna out on a kind-of-date.

Jenna picked a tall, triangular stack of small sandwiches called “Edifice”. Beetle chose a large cube-shaped sandwich called “Chemistry”. He took the menu and went up to the counter to order.

‘Edifice! Chemistry!’ A shout came from the counter.

Beetle got up to collect the sandwiches. He returned with a teetering stack of triangles and a huge cube. “Wow,” said Jenna. “Thank you.” She tentatively took the top triangle off the pile and bit into it. It was a delicious mixture of chopped smoked fish and cucumber with Wizard Sandwiches’ famous sandwich sauce.

Beetle regarded his large cube with dismay. It was one solid lump of bread made from half a loaf. In it were drilled nine holes filled with different coloured jams and sauces, and from the centre hole a wisp of smoke was rising. Beetle knew at once he had made a mistake; he just knew that when he tried to eat it, the coloured gloop would run down his face and drip on the table and he would look like a kid. Why hadn’t he chosen something simple? Beetle began sawing at his cube. The multicoloured gloop ran across his plate and swirled into a thick rainbow puddle. Beetle began to turn pink. His sandwich was an utter disaster.

It seems to me that, without realising I was doing it, I have always given Jenna really nice food. I didn’t think I was influenced by the fact she was a Princess, surely I treat all my characters equally? But it seems not. Because who gets the best Charm in the world—a Chocolate Charm? Jenna. And who finds the most wonderful mint chocolates in a drawer?

Jenna was curious to see what was now kept in the little mahogany drawers, so she opened the top drawer. It was full of what looked like thick gold coins, but they smelled like mint chocolates. Jenna picked one up, scraped away some of the thin gold leaf and tentatively licked the dark, bitter chocolate. Unable to resist, she popped the rest of the mint into her mouth. It melted in the most wonderful mix of mint and chocolate that she had ever tasted.

Even when it seems Jenna might have to eat something awful—when she is kidnapped by the Port Witch Coven and taken to Doom Dump—she merely watches in horrified fascination as the witches enjoy their Mouse and Maggot Casserole with salted earwig garnish.

…the bowls of squirming salted earwigs and a large dish of skinned mice covered in a lumpy pale sauce made no effort at disguise. Jenna felt sick. She switched her gaze to the tablecloth which was covered in Darke symbols and old gravy.

So it does seem that I, unconsciously, have one rule for a Princess and another for everyone else. But maybe that reflects the fact that for some reason, and I do not know what it is, Jenna does not invite humour. She is actually quite a serious person, as if weighed down by the responsibility of her impending Queenship. So maybe I didn’t like to challenge her with weird food as I felt she had enough to deal with already? Or maybe I still don’t really know her well enough to do that?

I don’t know the answer to that one. But then I’ve always felt that my characters are very much real people, and that’s the way it goes: some people you become closer to than others. Some people you would like to know better but they keep you at arm’s length. Some people you would happily eat a ridiculously messy sandwich with and laugh about it, and with others you wouldn’t. But that’s okay, that’s life. And books too.

So excuse me while I go and make a lettuce and Marmite sandwich. Yes, really. Absolutely delicious …

Illustration by Mark Zug. Colourisation by Angie Sage.

I do like Nicko. He is the youngest of Septimus’s six older brothers and so is the nearest in age to Sep—two years older. However, they do not get to meet properly until Septimus is ten years old. Because the story really kicks off at this point Septimus and Nicko’s relationship develops at the same pace as the books themselves, just as it would have done in real life. Which meant that I got to know Nicko in the same, slow way as Septimus did.

A few chapters into writing MAGYK, I realised that I’d given myself a LOT of Heap brothers to write about—not to mention all the other characters that kept on appearing and insisting I wrote about them too. Sometimes it felt like they were all clamouring around me saying: ‘Me! Me! What about meeee?’. And so I began to learn the art of character management. First I discovered that it is very difficult to write a conversation between more than four characters. Three is an ideal number (Particularly when one is Marcia and she is getting really irritated about something. That is an absolute joy to write … but I digress). And as for keeping tabs on more than four characters’ internal dialogue, that is impossible.

And so there was no way I could successfully write all six Heap brothers at the same time. In the same place. Although this was not consciously done at the time, I now see that this does explain why I sent five of them: Jo-Jo, Edd, Erik, Sam and Simon off to go feral in the Forest. It kept them on hold and was a way of saving them up until later; it also gave them a different experience which I did not have to write about for a while. I also thought that the experiences that five teenage boys were most likely having in the Forest with a lot of young witches hanging around the place were not suitable material for a book aimed at age 8 years old and upwards. But that’s a whole other story, one I think that some fan fiction has picked up on.

Simon made a break from the Forest quite early but it didn’t do him much good. He still ended up mostly out of the way—chained to a radiator in the old Ladies’ Washroom, making small talk with the Supreme Custodian. So that took care of him. Sorry, Simon. You did rather draw the short straw. But you got your own back later …

So we are left with Nicko, which gave me with the perfect trio to write: Jenna, Septimus and Nicko. At first, of course—spoiler alert—Septimus is known as Boy 412, a child soldier in the Young Army. I had thought it would be Jenna who would be more sympathetic to the scrawny and scared boy soldier that Septimus is at this point. But I soon realised that Nicko was being surprisingly fair to the at times annoying, and possibly dangerous, Boy 412. Jenna was much quicker to anger. When they are being pursued by the deadly Hunter through Marcia’s Magykal fog, Jenna thinks Boy 412 is about to betray them and it is she who reacts.

Jenna, who had not been the only girl in a family of six boys without learning a thing or two, had Boy 412 facedown on the deck in an armlock.

“Let him go, Jen,” said Nicko.

“Why?” demanded Jenna.

“He’s only a silly boy.” Nicko says.

I like to think that even here Nicko has an inkling that Boy 412 is more to him that he understands right then. But who knows? It is still early on in the series and I was so caught up in the plot and that I hadn’t really thought about Septimus’s relationships with his many brothers.

By the end of MAGYK, because I’d spent a lot of time with our trio of Jen, Sep and Nicko, I really liked Nicko. He was an approachable kind of guy. He had a workmanlike approach to MAGYK; he knew a few things and could use them, but he wasn’t particularly interested and that made him feel accessible. What Nicko loved was boats and practical stuff: you need a boat built, then Nicko’s your man. He had become a sensible anchor, someone I knew I could rely on.

And so I found the Nicko became a bigger part of Septimus’s life than I had expected. In Book 2, FLYTE, he is the only person who believes Septimus when he says that Jenna has been abducted.

“What’s up, Sep?” asked Nicko, who could see his younger brother was upset.

“Simon kidnapped Jenna and no one will believe me, not even Marcia,” Septimus gabbled in a rush.

“What?”

“Simon’s kidnapped Jenna and –”

“’S all right, Sep, I heard what you said. Come and sit down and tell me about it.” Nicko climbed ashore and put his arm around Septimus’s shoulder. They sat together with their feet dangling in the Moat while Septimus told Nicko the whole story. As the story progressed Nicko’s expression became increasingly worried.

Finally Septimus came to the end and said, “. . . but I bet you don’t believe me either.”

“’Course I believe you.” Nicko says.

And so Nicko becomes an integral part of Book 2. He listens to Septimus, he supports him refuses to let him go off alone into the Forest. Together they meet their Shape-Shifting Grandpa Benji and do all the things that brothers should do together. I felt it was good for Nicko too, he enjoyed suddenly being a big brother when up until then he’d been the smallest.

Nicko’s story becomes enmeshed in the whole Septimus Heap series. So much so that he causes Book Four, QUESTE, to be written in an attempt to rescue him from oblivion. At the end of PHYSIK, Nicko decides to stay behind in an earlier Time so that his new love, Snorri, is not alone. This was a one of those moments when a character turns around and tells you, No I’m not doing what you want. I’m doing what I want. ARGH. I had expected Nicko to come home with the others to his own Time, but at the very last moment, he refused. Because he is a good and honourable guy. I understand that. But, oh, he caused me a whole ton of trouble.

One of the scenes I felt so sad writing was at the beginning of QUEST, when Jannit Maarten asks Sarah Heap to sign Nicko’s Release from his Apprenticeship Indentures because he had already been gone six months and, as Jannit says, ‘I have heard that he will never return.’ And indeed, how does anyone come back from five hundred years in the past? Thanks Nicko. I don’t know either. And so it was that Nicko made me think about The House of Foryx, which still causes my head to spin, although I do think the logic of it works.

The House of Foryx changed Nicko. I wasn't expecting that and neither were Jenna or Septimus, although I should have expected it. Because how can being trapped for an endless and unknowable amount of time not change someone, however practical and upbeat they may be. And so, after Jen, Sep and Marcia had very bravely got Nicko—and Snorri—back to their own Time, there was a sadness about Nicko, and a heaviness that everyone found hard to deal with. Me included.

But I guess that’s what happens when you let your characters make their own decisions. They change and you have to get to know them all over again. But that’s OK. Because people do change; it’s one of the things that makes life so interesting.

Just don’t go getting stuck five hundred years in the past, OK?

Illustrations by Mark Zug

I love maps. Maps of all kinds: from our huge Ordnance Survey maps in the UK that you can never fold back the way they are meant to go, to the tiny scribbled maps on the back of beer mats that friends used to draw to show you how to get to their house (that’s in the Ancient Days, before the time of Google Maps and What Three Words). The strangest and most powerful of all maps must be those from many hundreds of years ago where the lines of land just petered out because no one had been there yet, where the sea was populated with sea monsters and sinking ships rendered in perfect detail, and the whole thing finished off with the entirely sensible warning that, at the very edge of the world, here be dragons. Those are maps not only of a different kind of place, but also of a different time and a very different way of looking at the world.

A map at the beginning of a book is a wonderful thing. A map gives you not only a sense of where you are but also a sense of where you—and the book—might be going. Like a menu in a restaurant it lays it all out before you and entices you in, showing you a whole world of possibilities right there on the first page. And with a good map the more you look at it, the more you see. But I do believe that the maps Mark Zug drew for the Septimus World are more than good—they are exquisite.

So how did these maps happen?

Fast. We were on a tight schedule, with the first five Septimus Heap books coming out at the rate of one every year, which does not leave a lot of time for an illustrator, especially one whose work is so beautifully detailed, to get things done. As soon as I had finished the first draft of a Septimus book, Mark would get the manuscript and begin work. I soon realised that Mark had the whole landscape of each book in his head, and so we rarely talked about how the characters or the place should look; he already knew and they were always totally how I had imagined them. But the map took a little more work and I usually sent a very rough sketch—often some almost indecipherable scribbles—from which Mark would create his magic.

One of the most complicated was the Syren map. I wanted to show the tunnel connecting The Isles of Syren to the Castle and across to the Far Countries, which was fairly straightforward. But I had recently been on a navigation course and so I also had this idea of plotting a course for Spit Fyre. My plotting skills are not the best—in my exam my boat ended up somewhere in the middle of Kent—and I don’t think they did Spit Fyre any favours either. Sorry Spit Fyre. So here is my initial sketch for Mark:

And Mark’s sketch of that with his questions and my annotations in red …

And then Mark’s exquisitely beautiful final art:

I love this map. I love the little ship, the sea monsters and the puffs of the north-westerly winds. I also love the way Mark worked out the scale (something I was very vague about) and the compass points and how consequently it all makes complete sense. And it also looks like a real explorer’s map—the kind you would take with you on your voyage. The kind of map that ends up salt-stained and creased from being folded many times, worn from being kept in your pocket, stained from the squashed starfish you sat on by mistake.

So here we are in Book Five, in SYREN, beginning to explore a little further than the confines of The Small Wet Country Across the Sea. We are edging out into the wider Septimus World, which will lead us eventually to the big blue map of the Ancient Ways. And this map—here it is again—is the one that Mark created from scratch.

To get to this, Mark and I talked about how the world might be different in 10,000 years time and decided that sea levels would most probably rise. Mark Googled a sea rise of, I think, 20 metres, and 30 metres in some places. This is the result. I think there was some variation over the map but this would be consistent with other changes like volcanic eruptions and also man-made constructions. Many of the names of the places on this map are also Mark’s own—he discovered the Great Clock—and I love this collaboration that we ended up with. A whole new world that is new even to me.

And to answer a question from last week: the Castle is situated not far from where it says KEEP CELLAR (this is Marcia’s place in the TodHunter Moon series). Apologies to those who find that they will be living near a Snake Nursery or even beneath the fabled Pyramids in SW Australia, but don’t forget, it won’t happen just yet. There is a while still to go. But what I love is that the Great Clock in Nevada—The Clock of The Long Now—really will still be keeping time in Septimus World.

Illustration and research by Mark Zug

It’s been great hearing all the things you’d like to know more about. Marcia, as ever, is tops (when isn’t she?) but the geography of the Septimus World is also a big thing. So I thought you’d like to see Mark Zug’s map of the Ancient Ways as envisaged by Marwick.

I love this map! Not least because when my lovely publisher and editor, Katherine Tegen, sent me my first copy of PathFinder look what she wrapped it in …

The geography for the Septimus world emerged slowly. When I began writing MAGYK I was only thinking about the Castle and its immediate surroundings. The River was the key to it all: connecting the Castle to the Port and of course from there to the rest of the Septimus World. The Port, incidentally, has a lot of Falmouth, (Cornwall, UK) in it as this was near to where I lived at the time. I even met some genuine witches at a book signing in Falmouth, one of whom asked me rather suspiciously where I got my spells from. When I admitted I had made them up (because that’s what writers do) she did not believe me. I took that as a great compliment—but was also a little spooked. I wondered if I had inadvertently stolen some of her spells. And what she was intending to do about it. However, so far, it seems OK. Fingers crossed.

Once I got to writing FLYTE the world expanded to the Badlands which were based on my memories of some slate quarries I went to as a child in Ffestiniog in Wales—I found the atmosphere there really scary at the time. And I thought there were giant Land Wurms living in them for sure.

With PHYSIK we went back in Time so that was a way of getting to know the Castle better and also our jumping off point for QUESTE, where we headed out into the snowy wastelands of what, in our world, is Central Europe and southern parts of Russia. For me QUESTE is one of the most frightening books, the thought of being lost forever in Time with no way home or even, I suspect after so much Time has passed, of being able to trust your memories of home.

By the time I got to SYREN I felt that Jen, Sep and Beetle, and Wolf Boy needed a holiday. Some holiday that turned out to be. But I had just been to one of my favourite places, the Isles of Scilly, and I thought how nice it would be for them, along with their dragon, to spend some time there too. But I hadn’t reckoned on the Syren. The Syren’s lair is based on a small tower I saw on Tresco, called Cromwell’s Castle. It’s an old artillery Tower but I thought it looked as though there was something inside it looking out…

And so the world slowly unfurled itself, with both DARKE and FYRE deepening the existing world around and beneath the Castle.

It was not until I began to write the TodHunter Moon trilogy that I began to think of the wider Septimus world - and the fact that it covered the whole of our planet. That was when I really began to think about The Ancient Ways and where they went. I found myself thinking about how a map of our world might look in the future and, after emails with Mark Zug where we talked about this, he sent me the wonderful map you see at the top. It’s our world, Jim, (apologies to Star Trek), but not as we know it. The coastlines are subtly different. Some islands have vanished. Greenland has a massive lake in the middle. The Netherlands have disappeared …

So what has happened?

More next week.

Illustration by Mark Zug

Thank you lots to everyone who responded to my chat last week when I asked if there was anything in particular you would like me to talk about on these Friday Substacks. I will definitely take a look soon at the geography of the world and also get brave enough to talk about Time, but Marcia—as ever—was popular, and particularly THE HOPEFUL APPRENTICE, the I’ve-nearly-finished-but-not-quite novel about her arrival at the Castle at the age of sixteen.

This got me thinking about Marcia’s story, and how it has not been entirely straightforward to write. Ha! I hear you say, why ever did you expect anything to do with Marcia to be straightforward? Fair point. But this time it is nothing to do with Marcia herself, it is all my own fault. Because I very soon realised that, throughout the Septimus Heap series I had managed to give myself a lot of rules that I was going to have to stick to. Many of which I had, unwittingly, laid down in the very first Septimus Book: MAGYK.

When I began writing MAGYK I had no idea that this main series was going to run to seven books, let alone have three more spin-off books. I had assumed it would be a trilogy, which was what I signed up for with HarperCollins US. Also, as a novice series writer, I did not pay the attention I should have done to unnecessary throwaway remarks about this and that. To things that I did not even need to mention. And one of them—eight little words—caused me a shed-load of headaches later. See if you can spot those pesky words below…

MAGYK: Chapter 9. Sally Mullin’s Cafe.

Marcia was not happy. She had never been in a boat before and she had no intention of ever getting on one again if she could possibly help it. There were no seats for a start. No carpet no cushions even and no roof. Not only was there far too much water outside the boat for her liking, there was a little too much inside too. Did this mean it was sinking? And the smell was unbelievable.

Here they are: SHE HAD NEVER BEEN IN A BOAT BEFORE

Why did I write that? Answer: I have no idea. What did that sentence add to anything? Answer: nothing. Okay, we get that Marcia hates being in a boat, but there is no need elaborate. In fact it might be more dramatic if I had mentioned that she once had been in a terrible storm, or just kept on with why she hated this particular boat—the lovely Muriel—because there are enough reasons already here: Muriel smells of rotting fish, there is no roof, no cushions and no carpet. We hear you Marcia. This is just not your kind of boat. But no. Here I go digging this plot hole and jumping right into it feet first.

Why does this matter? Because Marcia—and I have mentioned this somewhere else in Sep Heap—is not a Castle native. She was born overseas. So now we have a problem: the Castle is on an island. Marcia has never been in a boat before. So how did she get there?

All I can say is I am truly grateful for the Ancient Ways. One of the reasons why I really worked on them in the TODHUNTER MOON series was so that we could get Marcia to the Castle without ever having been in a boat before. (Yes, Marcia’s book has been going for that long.)

Of course when you are writing a world you can always get around problems like this because it is your world. You can fix things. But why give yourself an enormous headache if you don’t have to? And why make things unnecessarily complicated? This taught me to think carefully about throwaway remarks. Don’t store up trouble for future books, don’t constrain your characters anymore than you have to. Because over seven books these little things can stack up until some characters have very little wriggle room.

As it turned out, the constraints this imposed gave me a wonderful although heartbreaking story of how Marcia found her way to the Castle. It allowed me to get to know her in a way that I probably never would have done and so all was well in the end.

Spoiler Alert. Here it is the moment sixteen-year-old Marcia tells her mentor, Esther Hathilly, about the start of her journey to the Castle, which she began with both her parents but finished alone.

“I was with my parents. We were travelling through the forest—not the one here, one in the Far Countries. But we were on our way here. This, the Wizard Tower, is somewhere Papa always wanted to visit and he was so happy that at last we were going.” Marcia stopped. A feeling of what-might-have-been had suddenly come upon her: wandering through the Castle with her father, visiting the Wizard Tower together. Well, that’s not going to happen, Marcia told herself angrily. She gathered her thoughts, took a deep breath and said, “But Mama hated travelling by ship, so we were having to go by a different way.”

Esther Hathilly raised her eyebrows. “Through the Ancient Ways?”

Marcia nodded.

“A dangerous thing to do. They’re pretty much falling apart nowadays.”

“I know. I … I spent three weeks in them.”

Esther looked horrified. “Oh, my dear. You could have been lost forever.” She reached over and took Marcia’s hand. “But we won’t think of that. Because here you are, safe,”

Marcia smiled. It was, she realised true. She felt safe, up here with Esther. Safe in a way she had once felt with her father.

“So,” Esther was saying. “This warrior witch …”

With some reluctance, Marcia took herself back to the nightmare. “She was part of a horde of warrior witches. They had surrounded where we were. It was a fortress …”

Esther nodded. “Horrible place.”

“It was.” Marcia shivered. “This warrior witch, she was young, just little older than me, I think. And her mother was the leader. And I did something bad to her mother.”

Esther sat forward. “What did you do?”

“I used my mother’s cloak in a Darke Transformation. I turned it into a massive raptor-thing with talons and it took her mother away. It flew off with her over the treetops. I … I don’t know what it did to her mother. I don’t know if it dropped her or tore her to pieces or … or what. And now, when I think about it, I feel so awful. Because I probably did kill her mother.” Marcia saw that Esther Hathilly was looking at her with an expression of shock. “It was a terrible thing to do,” Marcia said quietly. “I know it was. But I had no choice. It was us or them.”

“That is not why I am shocked, Marcia,” Esther said gently. “You were fighting for your life. What else could you do? What I am shocked about is that you tell me you Conjured an actual creature.”

“My father … he had shown me how.”

Esther Hathilly leaned back in her chair. “Your father. I did wonder. Your name is an unusual one. And there is something about you that reminds me of him. Is your father Karminserra Overstrand by any chance?”

Marcia nodded. She did not trust herself to speak.

Karminserra Overstrand: that’s a name to conjure with. Or not, because he was no mere conjuror. He was as you can imagine, a very talented and powerful Enchanter. In fact his name was another thing that caused me some trouble, because I knew I’d named Marcia’s father once in a reply to someone on my old Ask Angie Wordpress page. Another pit so thoughtlessly dug … luckily, when I scrolled through all seven Ask Angie’s, I found it.

So remember, if you are embarking upon a ten book series with the same characters, be careful what you say in the early books, for it will come back to haunt you later. In the most interesting of Ways …

From the moment I put Sir Hereward on guard outside Jenna’s room in the Palace I knew exactly what his name was. I had no idea where it came from but, like so many names and places in SEPTIMUS HEAP, it just felt right. I didn’t even question it. This is probably because by that time I was deep into writing PHYSIK Book 3 and was learning to trust my instinct with names. Also, I was reluctant to do much research into what I felt was a good name, just in case it turned out not to be.

So let me introduce you to Sir Hereward. He is an old and much battered ghost, a knight who has lost much of his armour, wears a severely dented helmet (presumably this is how he met his end) and has only one arm (which can’t have helped). I like Sir H. He is a calm and good humoured presence with a liking for the most atrociously corny jokes, he puts up with a lot of hassle and is fiercely loyal to whichever Princess he may be protecting. Here he is in PHYSIK in a stand-off with Marcia who, frankly, is behaving rather badly.

“If you don’t stand aside, Sir Hereward,” Marcia was telling the ghost angrily, “I shall be forced to Pass Through, make no mistake about it.”

The old knight shook his head regretfully. “I do apologise, Your ExtraOrdinariness, but the Princess specifically instructed me not to let anyone into her room. Which, unfortunately, includes yourself. I only wish it were otherwise, but . . .”

“Oh, do stop dithering, Sir Hereward. I need to speak to her urgently. Now stand aside!”

“Oof!” Sir Hereward gasped as the sharp point of Marcia’s purple python shoe poked through his armour-plated instep.

“Marcia!” said Alther sharply. “Marcia, there is no need for that. No need at all. Sir H does a very good job. Jenna is not in her room, she has taken Septimus to see Aunt Zelda.”

“What?” Marcia stopped, her foot still firmly placed in Sir Hereward’s. The knight pulled his foot away; then he drew his sword, placed it across the door and gave Marcia a withering look.

I need to defend Marcia here. Of course no one should deliberately put their pointy shoes through the instep of a nice old ghost, however much the ghost is in the way. But Marcia is in a panic. She has just found a letter written to her from Septimus which was leaved into a five-hundred year-old book—a book that she knows has not been opened for pretty much that long. Marcia knows what this means, although she is still desperately hoping she is wrong. It means that Septimus has somehow got himself taken back five-hundred years in Time. But she has been told he is with Jenna and she is clinging onto that hope. She absolutely has to find him and to know that he is still in her Time. And is he?

No. He is not.

And Sir Hereward? Well, his job is to guard the Princess. Nothing else. So once Marcia has stomped away he doesn’t give Septimus another thought. Besides, there is only so much an old ghost can think about. So let’s leave him peacefully outside the door to the Princess’s room and take a look at where his name came from …

Once I had finished writing PHYSIK, all the editing was done and there was no going back with anything (always a scary moment) I steeled myself to find out a little more about Sir Hereward’s name. I knew the name from the historical figure, Hereward the Wake, but apart from knowing he was a guerrilla fighter for the Anglo-Saxons against the invading Normans in 1066 England, I knew nothing else. But when I delved deeper into the legends surrounding him—and they are mainly that—it turns out he was also known as a protector of woman. In the chronicle, Gesta Herewardi, he rescues a Cornish princess from a forced marriage to a man known as Rough Scab (clearly not an attractive proposition for any woman, let alone a princess). So how perfect a name is that for someone who guards Princesses? The real Hereward actually rescued a real princess. Not only that but some readings of the word, ‘Wake’ take it to mean a person who is watchful, on guard. When I read this I felt just a little goose-bumpy. I was absolutely not aware of any of this, but it seems I knew it all along. I have no idea how.

This was not the only time in writing the SEPTIMUS HEAP world that this kind of thing happened. There was, at times, a feeling of tapping into deeper things than I was consciously aware of—until there they were in front of me on the page. I do think this can happen with writing when something is working well. I have no idea how it happens. But when it does it is, literally, awesome.

Illustration by Mark Zug

I will always remember when I first met Marcia. I had begun writing something that, at first, I called DRAGON MAGYK. After a few pages in I realised it was not so much about dragons and much more about a family—the Heap family. This was my first venture into writing a full length novel and its development was what you might call … organic. Possibly even a little chaotic like the Heap family themselves. I liked the Heaps a lot and found them intriguing but it felt like the story was becoming just a little too … Happy Families. It was in grave danger of getting cute. They were so thoroughly nice. Silas Heap had, at great risk to himself, rescued a baby from imminent death. Sarah Heap was a wonderful, if a little chaotic Earth Mother and they had pulled themselves out of despair after their seventh-born child had ‘died’. And all their little boys were gorgeous. All very nice, but I felt there was something missing.

The grit in the oyster.

Enter Marcia Overstrand.

I woke up with her name in my head one rainy morning in Cornwall and I had an impression of someone in flowing purple robes striding across a windswept beach. Yes, I know, over a strand. She was just a little bit irritable and seemed impatient with how the book was going. No one else knew I was writing it at the time, apart from my agent, who had immediately forgotten I’d ever, rather tentatively I expect, mentioned it. And so, to have Marcia suddenly present, interested and indeed impatient with how things were going was just what I needed.

She strode into that book—by now called just plain SEPTIMUS HEAP—and shook us all up. She brought in humour too, because most times I wrote Marcia she was annoyed about something at some point. And that always made me smile. The first time we meet her is early one morning when she is being irritable with various inanimate objects. Marcia is clearly not a morning person. She yells at the mirror, who is bad at maths and even worse when stressed about maths (I have so much empathy with that mirror) and then she terrifies the stove, which can’t get itself to light in time before she strides into the kitchen.

Apart from understanding immediately that Marcia is a force to be reckoned with—and then some—we see that clothes and how they form her image are so important to her. In chapter 4 of the US hardback of MAGYK pretty much the first thing we see when we meet Marcia is what she is wearing. We just know she has carefully chosen every piece.

Her purple double silk cloak was lined with the softest indigo-blue angora fur. It fell gracefully from her broad shoulders and gathered itself obediently around her pointy feet. Marcia’s feet were pointy because she liked pointy shoes, and she had them specially made. They were made of snakeskin, shed from the purple python that the shoe shop kept in the backyard just for Marcia’s shoes. Terry Tarsal, the shoemaker, hated snakes and was convinced that Marcia ordered snakeskin on purpose.

Marcia knows how important it is that she looks and feels good. It might look like vanity, but it’s not. It’s about power. Power in the image she chooses to project. We will see (one day, I promise) how she first encountered this at age sixteen with a beautiful coat she was given by a certain Esther Hathilly. But by the time we meet her in MAGYK, Marcia is well versed not only the power of purple, but the power of feeling good. And looking great.

Today she needed to look impressive. Impressive and just a little scary. Well, quite a bit scary if necessary. She just hoped it wouldn’t be necessary.

All this is a roundabout way of saying that when I had message from Eilidh Scheuerl about her student costume project and how she wanted to feature costumes for Marcia in her Performance Costume Show at Edinburgh College of Art, I was thrilled. It’s just wonderful to know that Marcia has inspired a costume designer in the making. And I am wishing Eilidh a fabulous show: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/cc/eca-performance-costume-shows-2026-4831357 and a brilliant career ahead of her. Anyone who can design trousers like this deserves to go far…

Noa. Photographer: Sally Jubb. Costume by @eilidh_scheuerl_art

Illustration by Mark Zug

Spot colour by Angie Sage

Where do we come from? Who are our kin? Where do we belong? We all wonder this at some point in our lives. Some of us don’t pay it much attention, but some do the digging (not literally I hope, that would not be good). We check out our DNA, maybe go onto one of the ancestry sites and see who we can find. But not many of us get our answers by being offered a trip back in time with the ghosts of our mother and grandmother. Unlike Jenna.

If you were offered a trip like this, would you take it? I know I would. But so far there have been no offers.

It is in FYRE (Chapter 31: Jenna’s Journey) that this happens. Jenna is offered the chance to return to the place her family came from and learn about their history. I say ‘offered’ but she has no choice in the matter. It’s a required part of Queen-training. And so she finds herself in a ghostly gondola in an ancient Venice. In the SepHeap world, which is the far future with raised sea levels, Venice is long gone. But its echoes remain, reaching forward through the lives and memories of others, just as we hope to do ourselves one day.

I know that for some readers who find out that the SepHeap world is set in the future (FYRE US Hardback edition, page 682), it can be a bit of a shock. I confess that I am not a great planner of plots (I often leave that to my characters to make happen), but one of the things I had planned from the start was that this world is a possible future. And that we, right now, are their past. So I set it ten thousand years ahead. I thought ten thousand years was enough time to elapse for the collective consciousness of the people living in that future world to remember a jumble of a few key things. It also left enough time for some disaster to have befallen our massive human population to cut it right down and give everyone some space again, but also for a form of recovery to have then taken place. And ten thousand years is possibly enough time for something really weird that right now we do not understand—Magyk—to emerge.

I imagined that we would keep cycling through the future with very similar scenarios, each time with a different twist. Like fashion. Excuse me if I equate the awesome span of time with flares (as in jeans) but hey, why not? So, every time flares come back—and as an original flares wearer I can tell you it’s been a lot of times—they come back with a tiny twist that makes them feel new all over again. And that’s how I saw our future history panning out. Like flares. Same stuff but slightly different. Over and over again. Which is why we have Venice, and of course Hotep-Ra and his new twist on the recurring flares of history, his Dragon Boat.

So what does Jenna take away from her time in Venice? A lot of boredom, a lot of being talked at by her mother and grandmother, but also a sense of wonder and understanding. Jenna also finds a real friendship with someone called Julia who takes her under her wing and goes out with her in disguise. This is a first for Jenna and is probably the most important thing for her. But knowing her history does give Jenna confidence, a sense of her place (weird though it maybe) in the world. It seems to reconcile herself to the fact that she has a job to do—Queening—and there is no getting out of it.

Even though no one has taken us back in a ghost boat to see it, we do each of us have our history. We are all part of the past, it has made us who we are and set us down here in this weirdest of Times. Most of us are related to one another—go back only one thousand years and we will pretty much all have ancestors in common. Human history is, when you stop to think about it, the weirdest thing. It’s like Time. Impossible to understand so many other lives which are not our own. That’s why stories about the past and the future are the strangest things to write. And also the most interesting.

The Castle: Illustration by Mark Zug

Twenty one years ago (plus one week as I forgot last week …) the first book of Septimus Heap: MAGYK was published. And so this week is a heartfelt thank you to all the wonderful readers who I have met over the years. And especially to the people who have written to me to tell me how much the Septimus Heap series has meant to them. I want to say how much their letters have meant to me. It’s a little scary to send a letter out into the ether and never know if the person it’s meant for will ever read it, let alone respond. And yet, even so, people do this. And every time when I receive one, it feels so special. So thank you.

What I’ve noticed as time has wandered on, as it insists on doing, is that there is a growing community of people who are now in their late twenties, early thirties, who have never forgotten reading Septimus Heap. People who re-read the books when they feel in need of some comfort maybe or who just want to re-visit old friends. And then, sometimes, they write and tell me. Which is amazing.

So last week, when I was telling myself that I really should write about Merrin—but wondering whether I wanted to be irritated by him all over again—a wonderful message popped in among all the bonkers AI spam I get on my website contact page. It was a thank you letter. It said:

I grew up reading your books and always went back to Magyk for a reread whenever I needed to feel safe. Many moons later I’m now finally rereading them again as an adult, whilst recapturing my favorite pastime of reading in general, and I just had to find a way to thank you. Your writing is one of my absolute favorites, where everything is personified and uniquely celebrates what it means to be alive (even if that life is as a former tennis ball turned detective, or a disgruntled coffee pot, or a dragon that of course is more like a puppy than anything else).

I’m almost 30 now and have been finding myself cackling in coffee shops while I sink back into the lives of the kiddos I identified with, and yearned so badly to be a part of their world. But the benefit of time is realizing just how much you gave to me, and all the other lovers of your series.

I truly can’t think of any book or author I’ve read that has a style quite like yours, one so distinct and fun and intriguing. Every reread is different, but what never changes is it means just as much to me now as it did then. So, thank you thank you THANK YOU!

And I just want to say the same back at you all. To the writers of the letters who have told me about their lives, their struggles, their ambitions, their heartaches and their cackling in coffee shops; I feel so honoured that you write and tell me: thank you thank you THANK YOU!

And to the parents of the girl who wanted to be Snorri Snorrelssen so much that for her entire summer holiday she talked with a Swedish accent, I apologise. But I also wonder if she now runs her own shipping company …

Generally, I feel I know my characters from the moment I meet them. I don’t know why but I suppose it’s like anyone you meet in real life, you get an impression of who they are and usually people turn out to be pretty much what they seem to be. But of course, there are the exceptions. There are people who you trusted to be one thing and then—maybe slowly, maybe quickly—you realise they are not. This is rarely a good thing, in my experience.

There are a couple of times in SEPTIMUS HEAP that this happened with my characters. I suppose that only two (that I can think of right now) is not a bad total out of a cast of what must be over a hundred. But even so, it was just little … discombobulating (I do love that word).

The first was the ghost of Queen Cerys. The second was Merrin Meredith, but this is not his space this week. Sorry Merrin. Another time.

So, back to Cerys. She went from being someone I had a lot of sympathy for to someone who, towards the end of the series, I felt extremely annoyed with. If you recall, it is the tragic murder of the young Queen Cerys that kicks off the whole series. Cerys has just given birth to a daughter and, because this is a matrilineal succession, the daughter must be shown to the bigwigs of the Castle on the very day of her birth. I felt sorry for Cerys, being forced to take her baby out into the world so soon when all she wanted to do was stay safe in bed and cuddle her. But she gets up, does her duty and is then—along with Alther Mella—shot by an assassin. Just awful. The baby princess survives and is spirited away to be adopted by the chaotic Heap family, who name her Jenna. She does not discover her true identity until she is ten years old.

Because in the SepHeap World everyone gets a second chance at existing—by becoming a sentient ghost—I had always assumed that Cerys would, as a bereaved mother, be desperate to meet her daughter again and to offer help and guidance. But I found that she was oddly remote.

When we first meet her after her death, in PHYSIK Chapter 16: The Empty Palace, she seems, not unreasonably, a little mournful. She is holed up in The Queen’s Room, a secret room in a palace turret and does not venture out. Alther, another ghost, tells her:

“You know, Cerys, you should get out more. It’s not good for you being stuck in this turret all the time. And you could think about Appearing to young Jenna.”

“I shall Appear when The Time Is Right, Alther, the Queen said, a little severely. “It is important for a Princess to discover things for herself and to prove herself worthy of becoming Queen—just as I had to.”

Oh dear. It occurs to me now that Cerys is probably depressed. Maybe I am being a bit too judgemental. And in the next chapter, Cerys shows how much she truly does care for her daughter. She protects her against a malevolent ghost of another more ancient Queen, Etheldredda, who is seeking to harm Jenna.

“You may not pass, Cerys told Etheldredda coldly.

Etheldredda pushes Cerys out of the way—in a creepy way that no ghost shoud be able to do. But Cerys is brave:

“I intend to protect my daughter. You shall not stop me,” Cerys declared angrily and Caused the door to slam shut. Then, before Etheldredda could retaliate, Cerys began to spin. Faster and faster like a whirlwind, revolving the air in the turret until, despite herself, Etheldredda was caught up in the currents and whirled around the small circular room like an autumn leaf caught up in a windy corner.

“Go!” yelled Cerys. With that, Queen Etheldredda was hurled from the room, out of the turret and across the lawns where she landed in the middle of one of Billy Pot’s careful arrangements of dragon droppings.

We don’t see much of Cerys until SYREN, Book 5, when we meet her as people go through The Queen’s Room. Here she seems even more remote, in a dream state almost. And, on re-reading I do feel concerned for her well-being. She also very easily accepts Wolf Boy to step into a traditional female role and generally seems not to bother about anything very much. Oh dear. Still depressed.

In DARKE book 6, when Jenna turns 14, the age at which she could become Queen at any time, I remember being bothered about the absence of Cerys. It seemed to me that by now Jenna would have questions about her real mother—or First Mother, as Sarah Heap calls her. Surely now Cerys would Appear to her daughter and provide some advice, if not a bit of motherly love? Well, no.

In Chapter 3, Birthday Eve, Jenna wanders through the Darkened Palace:

In front of her was a deep darkness that seemed to move and shift as she looked at it. It felt as if it were alive. Jenna was confused – part of her was terrified and yet another part of her suddenly felt elated. She had the strangest feeling that if only she stepped up into the darkness, she would see everything she had ever wanted to see, even her real mother, Queen Cerys. And as she thought about meeting her mother, the feeling of terror began to fade and Jenna longed to step into the dark, into the best place to be in the whole world – the place she had always been searching for.

And surely, the best place in the world on her important birthday eve is to be with her mother. I wish now that I had made Jenna’s longing for her birth-mother a little clearer here …

But still Queen Cerys does not make herself known to Jenna, even when the ghastly Bringer of the Book (aka Dolly Bingle from the fish-shop) brings her ‘The Queen Rules’, (a bizarre handbook on How To Be Queen) so that she can prepare herself. You would think that maybe Cerys might have given her daughter some support at that point. Although in FYRE, Cerys does provide an excuse for that, as if she knows what we are all thinking by now. However, in DARKE, I wasn't aware of this and I think that is when I began to feel annoyed with Cerys for her neglect, rather than merely puzzled.

So, it all bubbles over in FYRE. In Chapter 10, Queen Mathilda says to Cerys what we’ve all been thinking:

“You really should make more of an effort with her. Poor child. You know I would happily stay here in your place so that you could go to her. She needs you, Cerys.”

Cerys was fast descending into one of the legendary fights she used to have with her mother. “Mama, you know The Queen Rules perfectly well. We do not Appear until The Time Is Right. How can my daughter become a True Queen if we keep Appearing to her, telling her what to do, preventing her from finding her own true path.”

“Absolute twaddle,” harrumphed Jenna’s grandmother.

Hmm … so maybe Cerys is not being entirely truthful here. Maybe she is just making up excuses? Her mother seems to think so. Or maybe Matthilda is just plain exasperated at this point.

And then, at last, at last, in FYRE Chapter 21, What Is To Be, Jenna and Cerys meet.

But first we hear from Milo (Jenna’s father) that Cerys was pretty edgy during her pregnancy, fearful that her baby would be Cradle-snatched by witches. So it does look like Cerys is a little fragile at times. And then Milo points out to Jenna the ghost of her mother.

“Oh!” Jenna gasped. Standing on the riverbank at the far end of the landing stage was the ghostly figure of a young woman wearing the long red robes of a Queen.

Milo asked softly. “Shall we go and meet her?”

Jenna was lost for words. She nodded. Milo put his arm around Jenna’s shoulders and together they walked towards the ghost. As they drew nearer Jenna saw that her mother was just as she appeared in her dreams. She was surprisingly young, her long dark hair was caught up in a golden circlet, and her large, violet eyes did not leave her daughter for a moment. With every step Jenna took, she felt as though she were walking out of one life and into another.

The ghost of Queen Cerys stretched out a translucent hand and in response Jenna held her hand out to meet it, careful to allow the ghost to make the first touch, if she wished. Cerys did wish. She placed her hand on Jenna’s and Jenna felt something fleeting, like a warm breeze on a winter’s day.

“Daughter . . . dearest. My . . . Jenna.” It was hard for Cerys to say Jenna’s name, because it was not the one she had chosen for her. Milo and Cerys had decided that Jenna would be named after her two grandmothers, but the Naming Day had never happened.

Jenna stood silently. She did not know what to call her mother. “Mother” felt too formal, “Mum” was Sarah Heap and “Cerys” felt too much like a friend. The ghostly Cerys guessed what Jenna was thinking. “Perhaps you would like to call me Mama?” the ghost asked.

Jenna was not sure. Mama sounded kind of babyish. “I . . . I don’t know.”

Cerys withdrew her hand and looked downcast. “Of course. You already have a Mama. For more than fourteen years you have lived your life with another family. A family that I would never, ever have . . .” The ghost’s voice became faint with emotion. Marcia’s selection of Sarah and Silas Heap as adoptive parents had horrified Cerys when she had first found out from the ghost of her own mother – who had wholeheartedly approved. “They will love her as their own,” Queen Matthilda had told her grieving daughter. “And that is the most important thing for a child.” But Cerys did not agree, and the choice of the Heaps still rankled.

Milo could see that Cerys was working herself up into what he used to call one of her ‘states’. “What’s done is done,” he said quietly. “The Heaps are a good family. And it is your time now, Cerys.”

Jenna watched her parents together with a feeling of disbelief. Ever since she had been given ‘The Queen Rules’ on her fourteenth birthday, she had known that one day soon she would meet the ghost of her mother, but she had never expected to see her mother and her father together as a couple. It was a shock. There was none of the easy, happy banter that she was used to between Sarah and Silas. Jenna at first supposed it was because one of them was a ghost, but they seemed to slip into their roles with such ease that she began to suspect that they had always been like this – her mother edgy, and her father conciliatory.

Milo’s soothing words had their intended effect and Cerys calmed down. The ghost held out her hand to Jenna, saying, “Come, daughter, we have a Journey to make.”

And there we have it. And now, I feel bad about feeling annoyed with Queen Cerys. She’s fragile and, at times, is only just about managing to hold it together. She does care about Jenna, but she survives her ghosthood by living in a trance-like state for much of the time and, I suspect, not thinking or feeling anything much at all. So we leave mother and daughter about to embark on an emotional and bonding journey where Jenna will learn all about her heritage in a distant land. But first Jenna goes to find Sarah—aka Mum—and tell her. Sarah is not happy and Milo tries to explain.

“It’s Queen stuff,” he said with a rueful smile. “They do a lot of that, you’ll find.”

Jenna pushed past a stack of washing and hugged Sarah. “Mum, it’s OK. Milo’s right; it is Queen stuff. And that’s what I have to do. You know I do.”

“I know, love.” Sarah noisily blew her nose into a large handkerchief and woke Ethel. Since the Darke Domaine the duck was easily frightened, particularly in Sarah’s sitting room. Ethel now launched into full-scale panic. A frantic quacking filled the room and the duck rose up, flapping her little bony wings. She careered across the tiny room, bouncing from Milo’s head to washing pile to flowerpot stack, and shot out of the door, Passing Through the astonished ghost of Queen Cerys. The ghost of the Queen had never been Passed Through before. It is a shocking experience for any ghost the first time it happens, particularly when the Passer-Through is a hysterical duck. Queen Cerys fell out of the room with a groan and Milo rushed after her.

So, there you are. Just as you’ve reunited two people who have needed to be together for far too long, along comes a hysterical duck and ruins the moment. But that’s writing for you.

Illustration by Mark Zug

Colourisation by Angie Sage

I was going to talk about Time today. But I wasn’t sure if I had Time. Not quite yet. So, because that is where I began to tangle with Time, I opened PHYSIK (US Hardback) and got page 288.

And casual sexism.

Oh no.

And sexism from a woman too. From Alice Nettles, chief Customs Officer at the Port, who surely should know better. Here we have it:

“I’d like a word with your skipper,” Alice told Snorri.

This was not a good start to any conversation with Snorri. She glared at Alice and did not deign to reply.

“Do you understand what I’m saying?” demanded Alice, who was sure that Snorri did. “I want to speak to your skipper.”

“I am the skipper,” Snorri told Alice. “You will speak to me.”

“You?” asked Alice, shocked.

Ouch. Alice Nettles should know better than this. She herself has been victim of institutionalised sexism when, under a fascist regime at the Castle, she was fired from her post as a judge for the crime of being female. So really, Alice, this is not on. You don’t pay this stuff forward. But hey, wait. Alice is thinking something different: Surely the girl was not more than fourteen at the most. She was far too young to be skippering a Trader’s barge on her own.

So Alice is actually guilty of … youth-ism. Which, while not being ideal, is understandable. Snorri is very young indeed to be skippering a sixty-foot barge on her own. It’s a dangerous job. You need to know a lot of stuff.

Snorri has had to fight for her right to just be Snorri all her life. Even her name is a boy’s name, meant for a boy. Her father, Olaf, was convinced she would be a boy. While his wife, Alfrun, was still pregnant, before going off to trade at the Castle he made out his letters of Charter, in which passed on his right to be a Trader of the Hanseatic League, to ‘Snorri Snorrelssen’. (And then, unfortunately, he died after drinking too much at the Grateful Turbot. But that is another story.)

When Snorri turns up at the Traders’ Market in the Castle once again, (Chapter 1: Snorri Snorrelssen page 18 US hardback, page UK paperback page 15) she is not taken seriously.

First she is ignored:

Snorri coughed a couple of times, but still the old man did not look up.

Then, when she insists on being recognised, she is talked down to:

He smiled as though she had said something foolish. “Sorry miss. You have to be a member of the League.”

Then when she hands him her paper proving that she is indeed that, she is faced with disbelief:

As his finger moved along the words, his expression changed to one of disbelief. And when he had finished reading, he held up the parchment to the light, searching for signs that it was a forgery.

And then he objects:

“This is most irregular,” he told Snorri.

And then he becomes annoyed:

The old man sighed and rather unwillingly reached under the table and pulled out a stack of licences. “Sigh here,” he said, pushing a pen over to Snorri. Snorri signed her name and the old man stamped the licence as though it had said something extremely personal and rude.

Ha! Sounds familiar?

Reading this again, I see that I have imported common attitudes from our world into the Septimus Heap world. Was this a good idea? Surely, when you write a new world you can import far better attitudes, you can change it for the better. You don’t have to take all the bad old stuff with you. But what I wanted to do with Septimus Heap was to make it relatable. I wanted the people, and the way they responded to one another to be pretty much what we are used to so there were no barriers in understanding to jump over. I didn’t set out to create a perfect world, or change it much. I just wanted to tell a story. To show how people deal with all this imperfect stuff, how they win through and maybe, just every now and then, show what rubbish women and girls have to put up with.

I do particularly like Chapter 28 in PHYSIK. Because Alice Nettles comes good. After doing her job of impounding Snorri’s barge—the Alfrun—she is concerned for her, for Snorri is alone in the Port with just her little orange cat, Ullr, and has nowhere to go.

“Here,” said Alice, pushing a piece of paper into Snorri’s unwilling hand. “This is where I live. Warehouse Number Nine. Top Floor. There is space for you and Ullr to sleep comfortably. You would be very welcome.”

Snorri looked unsure.

“Sometimes,” Alice explained, “I have to do things in my job I do not like. I am sorry about your barge, but it is for the good of the Port. We cannot risk the Sickenesse spreading here. Boats bring rats and rats bring disease.”

And so, after a run-in with the Port Witch Coven, Snorri finds her way to Warehouse number 9. And in Chapter 29—which I also like very much—we see Snorri safe and fast asleep. We also see Alice with the ghost of her old love, Alther, discovering that Snorri’s little orange cat turns into a panther at night.

Well, I guess you have to take people as you find them.

This image here is a rare example of an illustration for Septimus Heap that Mark Zug has not drawn. It’s by Pavel Cech and taken from the Czechoslovakian edition of MAGYK. Most of these illustrations are on coated paper in full colour, leaved in at intervals through the book. Some are very atmospheric, others are kind of… hallucinogenic. When I first looked at some of them and their interpretations of the book I admit I felt quite weirded-out. But even so, I appreciated the time the artist had taken to get into the world. When you write something and it goes out into the big wide world it can be surprising the different interpretations people will put on it.

One thing that posting every week has taught me is to just go with whatever is on my mind – so this week is a bit of a free-flow. The dragon ring got me thinking of what part it played in the narrative, apart from getting Septimus—literally—out of a hole. I realised it had become a symbol of Septimus himself, a shorthand for who he was. It’s a Magykal object, a thing of good intent. It shines light into darkness and makes things generally better. (The only thing it does that Septimus does not do—as far as I am aware—is sing when it gets lost.)

I also realised that many of my characters have their own objects, their own symbols, that describe their place in the SepHeap world. There is Jenna with her circlet of gold and of course Marcia with those purple python boots…

As you see, these are her special fur-topped ones from FYRE. The illustration is, of course, by Mark Zug. Marcia has two symbols—the boots that reflect her own personality and then the Akhu Amulet that is a symbol of her office. But while the Akhu Amulet could belong to anyone, only the boots could belong to Marcia.

Beetle, interestingly, only got something that was personal to him—his wonderful Admiral’s jacket—when he got sacked from his job at the Manuscriptorium and was able to become himself a little more. So symbols are important, and I wonder if, in writing Septimus Heap, my characters only acquired them when I was sure who they really were.

Eventually even Merrin ended up with his own symbol—his curse as it turned out—the horrible Two-Faced ring. And he got that after I finally understood that, however many chances I gave Merrin, he would just throw them away.

Symbols, objects, icons, (whatever you’d like to call them), do say a lot in a very compact space. Each cover for the SepHeap books had an object on the front that summed up the story. Because we were publishing a book a year—which is a lot to get done—I would be asked even before I had finished writing, “What’s the object for the cover?” And then I’d send a description, sometimes a sketch, and Mark would work his magyk. Here’s one of my favourites—apart from Mark’s Dragon Ring—the object for Syren, the bottle that Jim Knee, the jinnee, was imprisoned in.

Come to think of it, this bottle is a pretty apt symbol for the whole art of writing a book. You sit down with a small idea (an unopened bottle) you begin writing (take out the stopper) and you never know what is going to emerge. Will your djinni be good or bad? What will it do? Where will it take you? And, scarily, is it ever going to do what you ask it to?

If it’s going to be an interesting book, then probably not.

This is the story behind it: one day, when I was about halfway through writing MAGYK, I felt quite beleaguered. I knew where I wanted the book to go but I was not sure how to get there. Usually, when I get to an impasse in a book it is a plot problem, and when there is a plot problem I turn to my characters and ask them what to do. So—because I could not stand staring at the laptop screen a moment longer—I wrote all (and I mean all) their names down on a few pieces of card and stared at them for a bit. Nope, nothing doing. Unwilling to put them through the shredder (impossible, think of the screams), I cut each one out into a matchbox size rectangle and put them into a matchbox and stuck label on it. And then I put the matchbox in my pocket and went for a walk to think. You can tell from the state of the matchbox that I went for a lot of walks.

If you look hard you will see somewhere in that jumble of characters The Youngest Kitchen Maid. When I wrote her name all she had done was to appear briefly in Chapter 8, The Rubbish Chute, when our heroes are escaping from the Wizard Tower through the eponymous rubbish chute. The chute passes beneath the Palace kitchens and the youngest Kitchen Maid throws a congealed lump of rice pudding into the chute. This hits Maxie, the Heaps’ Wolfhound, on the nose as he goes scooting by:

The youngest Kitchen Maid who threw the rice pudding caught a glimpse of Maxie and had nightmares about wolves in the rubbish chute for weeks.

When I got to the very end of MAGYK, I realised there were many characters who appeared very briefly and whose stories I had not been able to follow through. I felt this did them a disservice. If they’d allowed me to write about them then surely I owed them a conclusion to their story? And so this is the youngest Kitchen Maid’s moment at the end of MAGYK:

After the youngest Kitchen Maid started having nightmares about wolves, her sleep became so badly disturbed that she often fell asleep at work. One day she dozed off while she was meant to be turning the spit and a whole sheep went up in flames. It was only the prompt action of the chief Potato Peeler that saved her from the same fate as the sheep. The youngest Kitchen Maid was demoted to assistant Potato Peeler, but three weeks later she ran away with the chief Potato Peeler to start a better life in the Port.

And there we might have left them, had I not begun to wonder what they both did once they got to the Port. So in FLYTE, Book 2, we meet the youngest Kitchen Maid again. We now discover that she is called Maureen and things are not going great for her. She has a truly horrible job, working as a skivvy for the ghastly Nurse Meredith (Merrin’s mother and the midwife who stole Septimus as a baby). Nurse Meredith runs The Doll House, a guest house where, believe me, you never ever want to spend a night. Against all odds, Maureen does her best to be nice. At the advent of a potential guest, Nurse Meredith yells:

“Tell him to buzz off, Maureen!”

“Er, sorry Sir. Buzz off please,” Maureen said, apologetically and closed the door firmly.

It’s not looking great for Maureen in The Doll House, and I felt bad leaving her there, so at the end of FLYTE we discover a little more:

Maureen and the Chief Potato Peeler, Kevin, were saving up to buy their own café. When Kevin was taken on as a cook on a large merchant ship on a round-the-world voyage Maureen took the only job she could find at the time, working in The Doll House. It was not ideal but at least living in the cupboard under the stairs meant she did not have to pay for lodgings. She longed for the day that Kevin would return and they would find a little place of their own down by the harbour.

Well, obviously I couldn’t leave it there. So in PHYSIK, book 3 we meet her again. Snorri Snorrelssen and her small orange cat, Ullr, are hungry. They are in the Port and they find the welcoming Harbour and Dock Pie Shop. The pies smell delicious and Snorri buys two.

Maureen—ex kitchen Maid, ex-Doll House skivvy and brand-new owner of The Harbour and Dock Pie Shop—wrapped up the pies and added some scraps from a broken pie. “For your cat,” she said.

Yes! Maureen and Kevin got their shop. And we know it’s successful because we see there is a queue outside, and we can see that Maureen is still being a nice person. We also know that Kevin got home OK because we hear Maureen yell, “Rats! Quick Kevin, Kevin! Get them!”OK, maybe she’s not quite so nice if you happen to be a rat. But even so, it’s good to know that things are going well.

Maureen now begins to become a little more part of the story. We find out in the Things You Might Like To Know About section in PHYSIK that Maureen takes pity on Lucy Gringe, who cold, hungry, and searching for Simon Heap, the love of her life. Maureen gives Lucy free food, somewhere to stay and then a job. And then a chance encounter in the pie shop with a certain rat, Stanley, (clearly Kevin is not very good at catching rats) leads Lucy to her Simon. So all is well. At least for a while.

We don’t go to the Port in QUESTE so the next time we meet Maureen is in SYREN, book 5. We meet up with Maureen in Chapter 7, The Pie Shop. Maureen has put on a little weight (she was painfully thin in The Doll House) and is clearly happy. She is also much more confident. So much so that she has become a confidante of Simon Heap, who is at his lowest ebb. It is now Simon’s turn to desperately search for Lucy—who we know has been abducted on a ship—and Maureen is consoling him.

“Now you can’t go blaming yourself, Simon,” she said. “Lucy has a temper on her. We both know that.” She smiled. “She’s probably just gone off in a huff. You’ll see. She did that for a whole week once when she was here.”

And that’s where I’m going to finish spying on Maureen and Kevin. I seem to remember we glimpse them again but I can’t remember where. Rohan will know …

And so, what is the point of Maureen and Kevin?

I think it’s because it’s the little details that make a world feel real. Sometimes people like Maureen and Kevin move into the centre of the narrative and make something pivotal happen, but very often they don’t. But we know they are still there, living their life in a good way. They make a world feel comfortable, a place where we can all imagine living. In our own lives if we’re lucky we too have people who weave in and out of our own story; friends you may not see much but make your feel good because you know they are just … there. People like Maureen and Kevin become part of a world’s infrastructure, they give it heft. When characters we know, like Lucy and Simon, randomly walk into Maureen’s life it gives us a feeling of connection, a feeling that things are working out right.

So here’s to connections, wherever they may be.

Illustrations by Mark Zug

Spot Colour by Angie Sage

Over here in rainy ole England, just to be different, we have World Book Day on the first Thursday in March. Until now I had assumed (because of that giveaway word, ‘World’) that this was the day the rest of the world had their book day too. But no. I just Googled it and it turns out the UNESCO World Book Day is on April 23^rd. Who knew? Well, not me, obviously. Although clearly a whole lot of other people did.

I wonder did we here, in the UK, change this date because for us April 23rd is a little crowded already? What with April 23^rd being St George’s Day (this is England’s patron saint, possibly a Roman soldier from the 200s. Or not.) And also April 23^rd is, supposedly, both the birth and death day of a certain William of Stratford, a wool merchant and money lender who ran some playhouses in London in the late 1500s and early 1600s. Check out the DVS Substack for more on this…

Shakespeare Identified

The Making of a Myth: How Garrick, the 1740 Statue, and the Shakespeare Ladies Club Created a National Icon

In the quiet of Poets’ Corner, surrounded by the marble likenesses of Britain’s literary greats, one monument has always stood out to me — Shakespeare’s. Not for what it reveals, but for what it quietly conceals…

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10 months ago · 13 likes · 17 comments · Shakespeare Identified

So, that’s a little detour. Now for World Book Day (WBD) UK style and Strange Creatures.

Last week I remembered that I had agreed to do a WDB thing for a lovely little Primary (elementary) School here in the UK in Saltash, near Plymouth. WBD in a school is a lot of fun. The kids all dress as their favourite characters and for one fun day, the magic of books comes alive and is celebrated in style.

Sometimes a school will find a tame author to go along and talk about how this magic happens. Which is what I’m planning to do Thursday next. It’s always good to give your audience something to take away, something that they can do themselves, so I thought I’d suggest that they could create their own hybrid creature. And that got me thinking about how I created some of the slightly strange creatures in Septimus.

There are two in particular in the SepHeap world who I think of as hybrid creatures—or chimeras (I think this is the scientific term), which are creatures with two different genetic material woven into one. There is the lovely Ephaniah Grebe, half man, half rat and there is Miarr, keeper of the Catt Rock Light, who is more cat than human but still a mixture of both. Miarr is less troubled by his mix because he was born that way, unlike Ephaniah.

Ephaniah has a shocking backstory. He had the misfortune, at the age of 14, to have been ambushed in the Wild Book Store of the Manuscriptorium by a Darke Hex Diary and a Rat Rebus. You can meet him in QUESTE in Chapter 19 where he appears as the Chief Conservation Scribe in the basement of the Manuscriptorium. I like Ephaniah so much; he’s had a lot to deal with and clearly has not found it easy. When I was writing QUESTE I wanted to explore how things were for him a little more, but the story was moving on very fast and there was not the time or space. And so, when I began writing THE HOPEFUL APPRENTICE I decided that we would be there—along with the 16 year old Marcia Overstrand—when this awful event happens.

Here is the moment when Marcia, accompanied by her mentor, Astrid Hathilly—first sees Ephaniah as a rat:

A barrage of high, distressed squeaks and the muted sound of sobbing greeted Marcia and Astrid as they walked into the front office. The sobbing came from Eldred Otter who was sitting on the floor by a pile of books, his knees hugged to his chest. The distressed squeaks were coming from a rusty old bird cage placed on the big desk at the far end of the narrow office. Inside the cage a small rat was standing on its hind legs, clinging onto the bars. Marcia could see its delicate little pink tongue and its two tiny white teeth showing as it opened its mouth to cry out. Remembering what her father had told her about forced Transformations—the first thing to do for the victim is to tell them that you know who they are—she ran to the desk, knelt down beside the cage and looked into the rat’s eyes. They were, to her relief, green. Ephaniah was still there. “Ephaniah,” she said. “We see you. We know you are here.”

The rat stopped squeaking and looked at Marcia, its eyes brimming with terror. Marcia gently stroked the bony little claws hanging onto the bars, they unwound and a moment later she found Ephaniah’s right paw was clinging onto her finger like a newborn baby, its sharp nails digging into her skin. Tears sprung into Marcia’s eyes. She could not imagine what Ephaniah must be feeling right then. “I won’t leave you, Ephaniah,” she whispered. “Not for a moment.”

Marcia keeps her promise to Ephaniah and, as we would expect her to, she does her best to help Ephaniah. She succeeds in that she helps him to stay essentially human within himself, and also to regain human size. But as we can tell from Mark’s drawing (which I love—he has captured Ephaniah’s wariness so perfectly) all did not go as well as she hoped. Astrid Hathilly was no help at all unfortunately but that, as they say, is another story.

And then there is Miarr as we meet him in SYREN in Chapter 20.

Miarr, lighthouse keeper for the Catt Rock Light, considers himself to be essentially human, but “Cat-Connected” many generations back. Who knows how this happened? There do seem to be a lot of thunderstorms around Catt Rock Light (violent enough to cause a dragon to crash land) and I wonder if during a particularly wild storm the DNA from a lighthouse cat was somehow fused with that of the lighthouse keeper? Or maybe with one of her children? Who knows. Strange things can happen in thunderstorms.

However, we do not find out for sure how Miarr became as he is. What we do know is that he is the last in a long line of lighthouse keepers and is fighting for his very existence. One day I will come back to Miarr and we’ll discover more about him and his ancestors. And also his very interesting steam-punk form of transport called the Red Tube.

I wonder why I didn’t write more of these chimeras? Maybe because of the sadness at the heart of them—Ephaniah’s grief for what he has lost is hard to confront. We see him waking alone along the castle walls at night when no one can see him. Limping because of his bumblefoot, an affliction affecting the feet of rats. It just feels so very … sad. And I do wonder if Ephaniah is perhaps a symbol of how, in our teens, catastrophic things can happen to us that affect the rest of our lives. Not everything can be fixed. Sorry, maybe that’s a little heavy going. But that’s the thing with characters, sometimes you have to allow them their grief.

Oops. I didn’t mean to end on such a downbeat note. So I’m not going to. I’m going to wish everyone here in the UK a happy World Book Day, and I’m going to suggest we all of us dress up as who we’d like to be for one day. Who would you be?

Me? Well, I’ll just get out my Piglet suit. As usual.

Illustration by Mark Zug

Spot colour by Angie Sage

This wonderful illustration is from the first book – PATHFINDER – in the follow-on series to Septimus Heap. This is when I really got the transport system for the whole world fixed. Not many people can say that, I think 😉… The only problem was that by the time I was writing about it, the network was so old that it was falling to bits (sounds familiar?). Which is why it is called the Ancient Ways.

As you can see from Mark’s drawing, this is how you can travel with a lot of people and yes, even with a horse—when it works. The Ancient Ways are a complex system and evolved from my earlier, more simple, methods of moving people around. I now realise that there is so much to talk about with the Ancient Ways that it needs a whole piece on its own. But maybe not yet. So why this drawing today? Well I love this image so much that I just had to share it. Here are our travellers emerging into a totally strange place, they have no idea where it is, what might happen there and suddenly, somehow, they need to make sense of it.

A bit like writing a book, really.

In the Septimus Heap World places are often linked by tunnels. Some of these have some kind of enchantment to them, some do not. Some are old and forgotten, some are still being used. I’ve used ordinary, un-enchanted tunnels in MAGYK—the rubbish chute from the Wizard Tower to the Municipal Rubbish dump and then the tunnel on Aunt Zelda’s Draggen Island that Septimus falls into. They often lead to a new development in the story, and they sometimes are, literally, a short cut to a new and exciting development.

Useful though these tunnels are, we do need something a little more immediate. In a fast-moving story it’s no good spending days slogging through a dark, damp tunnel to get to somewhere. That’s far too boring. We need it to happen fast, ideally instantly. And for this to happen there needs to be some kind of Enchantment involved. The first time I did this was with the Queen’s Way. This is an enchanted Way, but without the huge amount of lapis lazuli present in the Ancient Ways. We discover the Queen’s Way in detail in PHYSIK. It links two specific places: two cupboards (closets) to be precise, both labelled UNSTABLE POTIONS AND PARTIKULAR POISONS (sic). One cupboard is in Aunt Zelda’s cottage and the other, identical cupboard is only accessible through a hidden door into the Queen’s Room in the Palace. Using them is simple (providing you can get in and out of the Queen’s Room of course). You step into one cupboard and pretty much instantly you emerge in the other. Easy. There are of course some rules to this. You have to close the cupboard door for the system to be activated, and so you can only travel with as many people as will fit into the cupboard, which is not big. Also, it only goes between two specific points, so it’s not the great web of a system that we get to see with the Ancient Ways. But it’s a start.

And then, in QUESTE, we move on to something a little more complex—the Forest Ways. So here we are, back again, looking at those weird charcoal burners’ kilns (Page 397 in US Hardback). At this point in the story I need to get Jenna, Septimus and Beetle—plus Ullr, a cat/panther, from one forest to another. There are a few problems to overcome with this. The first being that no one (including me) knows where our destination forest actually is. The second problem is having no idea at all how to get there. This is where, as a writer, you sometimes wish you didn’t set up impossible situations just for the fun of it. Why, you wonder one wet Monday morning when you have yet another 1000 words to write, didn’t I think this through properly?

Well, tough. You didn’t. And now you’re going to have to ask for help. But who do you ask? Your characters of course. You have to ask nicely and then do what they tell you and trust them to get you to where you need to be. So I ask the lovely Sam Heap, a Forest Man to his bones, to help me sort it out. And he does. I have learnt this in writing—the more you trust your characters, the more they will help you. And that’s what Sam does. He offers to take to take Jen, Sep and Beetle to the hidden Forest Ways.

The idea for the Forest Ways is that, like the Queen’s Way, you are travelling down a tunnel linking two places. You go into one entrance, step through into some kind of enchanted space and then immediately find yourself at the other end. In QUESTE with the Forest Ways, Sam takes Jen, Sep and Beetle (and Ullr) to three charcoal burners’ kilns: large and unruly heaps of wood partly covered with turf, each with a ramshackle door in it. These are, Sam tells them, the entrance to the old Forest Ways which, in olden times, people used to use to travel between forests. But how do they know which one to choose? Let’s ask Sam.

“Well, I suppose we could open the doors and take a look,” said Sam.

“Really?” asked Jenna. “We don’t have to go in?”

“No, why should you? There are no rules in the Forest, you know.” Sam says.

Thank you, Sam. I confess that I was a little worried there. But the thing is, we’ve not come across a Forest Way before, so we don’t know the rules. And even though Sam says there aren’t any, we do need some rules and they need to be based on some kind of logic. So let’s see…

They open the door of the middle kiln and a blast of hot air comes out along with a swirl of sand. “Desert” Sam tells us.

‘“But I thought they were forests,” said Jenna.’

So did I. Thanks, Jen, for asking. So, over to you Sam.

‘“These are Ancient Ways and what was once a forest may become a desert.”’

Ah. I get it now. Thanks again, Sam. You’re a star.

Now, we already know that the forest that Jen, Sep and Beetle need to get to is a cold one. So we know the middle kiln is no good. And then the kiln on the left turns out to lead to a humid jungle.

So that leaves the one on the right. They open the door and, sure enough, a drift of snow blows out. “That’s it,” Jenna says.

Sam is a little uncertain now. “You sure?” he asks.

‘Suddenly Sam no longer seemed his confident self. It was one thing for Sam to guide the occasional lost stranger from a desert caravan or a capsized jungle canoe back to their own forest, but quite another to send his young brother and sister off into the unknown. “Let me come with you,” he said.

Septimus shook his head. This was something he wanted to do without his older brother telling him how to do it. “No Sam. We’ll be fine.”’

Thanks, Sep. I’m glad you said that, because writing a scene with three people in is so much easier than writing a scene with four. And maybe, just maybe, this is why he said that.

So off they go, Jen, Sep, Beetle and Ullr the cat, into the charcoal burners’ kiln and out into a snowy, eerie forest. Job done.

It’s been fun. More next week.

Illustrations by Mark Zug

One of the many good things about making up a new world and then writing about it is that you can fix the transport system. To get from one place to another in your new world you do not have to wait for a bus. Or drive a car and spend hours stuck in traffic. Or get on a train only to discover you have to get off again and take the horse-and-cart rail replacement service. And airport security queues? No thank you. In your new world you can just step into a charcoal burner’s kiln (when not being used, obvs) and … whoosh … you are somewhere else entirely.

When I began to write SEPTIMUS HEAP, ways of moving from place to place were not particularly on my mind. If people did go anywhere they used the old, almost medieval, ways of transport: boats, horses, feet. But the thing about writing a new world—which soon becomes somewhere you get to know very well indeed—is that eventually your characters need to travel somewhere far away. Or maybe get somewhere very fast.

So, my first departure from ‘normal’ transport was something called a … Transport. Okay, not the most original name, I admit. But it did the job, described what the thing actually did. And, because this Transport was a magical event, the word began with a capital letter (and in some versions of the book was also in bold). The first time we saw a Transport was in the very beginning of MAGYK where Marcia appeared in front of Silas in a kind of purple mist. I didn’t name what she was doing then because at that time I’d not really thought it needed a name. This is Marcia Overstrand after all, Marcia does powerful Magyk and she’s rocking up where she wants to be. And that, surely, is enough?

Enough one time maybe, but not if you find you need it to keep happening and not just with Marcia. Because this is the thing with making up your own world, if it’s going to feel true—and especially if you’re going to explore it over several books—things like that need rules. The reader needs to see that there is an underlying logic to even the strangest of things, otherwise they won’t ring true. And once that happens, you’ve lost your readers.

I had already begun writing FLYTE (book 2) when I began to understand this. So first, I named the process. And then I gave it some thought. I realised that moving from place to place without physically travelling the actual space between the two places should not be easy—this is a big deal. Also, this way of travelling cannot be something that everyone does on a whim, otherwise your whole world will descend into chaos. You will never know where to find anyone, a character can get out of any tricky situation you care to throw at them and no one is ever going to get lost. And what is that going to do to the plot?

No, that is not going to happen. We need rules. Rules of Transport.

The first rule is that you have to learn how to do this weird travelling thing. And it needs to be difficult. So, in FLYTE when Septimus attempts a Transport in an effort to stop Simon abducting Jenna, it doesn’t work fast enough. This is what happens:

Septimus’s Transport was taking some time to wear off. He still looked a bit misty …

“Dad, Dad!” yelled Septimus, “It’s Jenna! Simon took Jenna.”

“What?” Silas could see Septimus’s lips moving but he could hear nothing.

“Raise the drawbridge Dad!”

Septimus’s voice came back on the last word.

“Yes, what is it?” Silas said. “No need to shout.”

And then—oh no!—Simon canters past on Thunder, his horse, and escapes with Jenna. So even though Septimus’s Transport worked, he had not quite perfected it. He needed more practice, because Transports are difficult.

Later, with the help of Marcia, I worked out the Rules of a Transport.

Marcia says:

· You must know exactly where you are going and you must be able to visualise your destination in great detail. If you can’t, then don’t even think of doing it.

· A Transport is a personal spell and you cannot take anyone else with you. Please do not ever try.

· And do not bring your pet mouse with you. Not even in your pocket.

· A Transport is dangerous, requires complete concentration, and uses a huge amount of energy. If you have a bad cold, are feeling nauseous, or even just a bit grumpy, do not attempt. It will not go well.

NB Marcia recommends doing no more than one Transport a week. (Personally I’ve not managed to do even one yet. Although—and this is good—I am doing one Substack a week.)

So that is personal transport sorted in Septimus World. But how do we get around if there are lots of us wanting to travel together? Possibly even with a horse? Well, that is for next week.

And you may wonder what happened to the charcoal burners’ kilns? They too are for next week. But I will leave you with what Beetle says in QUESTE after he has just walked through one:

“Not what you expect from a heap of charcoal, even though my old art teacher used to say, ‘Charcoal can take you to into a whole new world, Beetle’.”

See you next week!

Driffa

Illustration by Mark Zug

Spot colour by Angie Sage

SNOW

First, I need to introduce you to Snow Princess Driffa, The Most High and Bountiful.

I hope, having seen the amazing drawing of her above, you will understand why SP Driffa (TMH&B) had to be first. Even though that was not at all what I intended. Driffa (enough of the honorifics) actually appears in the TodHunter Moon trilogy, which follows on from the main Septimus Heap series, but you will have met her great-great-great grandmother in QUESTE, sitting on the carved dragon chair in the entrance hall in the House of Foryx.

Driffa to me embodies the power of snow and how it can gallop into your story, shake it up and change it completely. Sometimes, if one is completely stuck in the narrative, there is no better way of getting out of it than brewing up a snowstorm—a kind of meteorological tantrum—and then seeing how things change.

I live in the warm, wet southwest of England—Cornwall—which is a wonderful place, but we just don’t have snow here. I miss it. When I was growing up in Kent it snowed every winter. I remember one winter when it was very deep with such a thick coating of ice on the top that I could run over the top of it. And we used to skate on frozen ponds. Outside! So I guess my feeling for snow is a little bit nostalgic. Everything to do with snow feels heightened to me, and I understand now that adding snow to a scene really does help me get ideas.

Snow was, in fact, how the whole Septimus Heap series began. I’d been quite haunted by an image in my mind of a baby being found in the snow. I wasn’t at all sure why she was there, but I knew the only way to discover the reason was to begin writing it. And that turned into ten books. So writers beware, you never do know where snow will lead you …

The snow I’m looking at today is in QUESTE, in Chapter 35 called—you guessed it—Snow. Having walked through an old charcoal-burner’s kiln, we—along with Jenna, Septimus and Beetle—find ourselves thousands of miles away in a snow-blanketed forest, heavy with silence. Here snow becomes a more menacing player. No footsteps lead to where we suddenly find ourselves. We stand there transported to a featureless flat wilderness of trees radiating in all directions, wondering which way to go. As we walk through the trees, Septimus keeps glancing back: every now and then Septimus thought he saw something—a movement just on the edge of his vision. He is sure we are being followed. And then the sun sets unexpectedly early and we are plunged into darkness.

But I’ve not completely dumped us in it. Jenna has in her pocket a compass and she also has a map—which unfortunately is not much use because we have no idea where we are on it. So, what to do?

Well, it’s back to what I learnt in the Marram Marshes in MAGYK. We need to stop, to be safe for a while. We need a break from the tension (so that later we can really ramp it up—fiendish, yes?). Luckily, we find a refuge hut lit by a magically glowing lantern shining onto the snow; because this forest is just a little bit, and rather creepily, enchanted.

The combination of snow and lanterns made all three feel happy. For Jenna and Septimus it reminded them of the time they had spent in the Big Freeze together at Aunt Zelda’s—a time they both looked back on with happiness. For Beetle it recalled Snow Days when he didn’t have to go to school—days full of possibilities when he would wake up to find that snow had completely covered the windows and his mother had lit the lantern and was cooking bacon and eggs over the fire.

Lovely. So now we can all relax … can’t we?

A few moments later they were pushing open the door to the hut. As they stepped inside a strange, unearthly howl ululated in the distance.

Beetle slammed the door shut and Jenna shot the bolts—all three of them.

“Big bolts,” said Septimus. “I wonder why.”

“Don’t,” said Beetle. “Just don’t.”

Oh. So maybe we can’t.

So how did Jen, Sep and Beetle get to be in that snowy forest, in a different time zone, with no idea where they were? Next time I’m going to talk about transport systems and the rules that govern them. In an interesting way, I promise.

Jenna - drawing by Mark Zug.

Coloured by Angie Sage.

Let’s take a dip into Magyk this week. This is where my book fell open, on (I guess this is not surprising) one of my fave pages. Page 189 in the USA hardback edition. Page 142 in the UK paperback.

Jenna slipped quietly outside and sat on the doorstep with her quilt wrapped around her and her warm breath turning to clouds in the chill dawn air. The marsh mist was heavy and low. It hugged the ground and swirled over the surface of the water and around the small wooden bridge that crossed the broad channel to the marsh on the other side…

I love this scene: a moment of stillness when Jenna, after the craziness of the previous 24 hours, gets a little bit of time to catch her breath. And to think. And to maybe stop feeling quite so terrified.

Jenna has woken early, before everyone else, in Aunt Zelda’s cottage in the middle of the Marram Marshes. She has never been here before—never in fact been anywhere before—and I could not help but think how very different it must feel to her, and how unreal. And of course it is quiet with the stillness of a sea mist and Jenna is not used to quietness. She has lived in one room with six brothers for her whole life (apart from that very first day in the Palace, of course…)

Magyk was the very first full length novel I wrote and I was finding my writing feet just a little. I was not very confident about that elusive thing, pace. I felt that everything had to happen fast, bang-bang-bang, one thing after another. So I was not at all sure that stopping the frantic chase to the Marshes and letting the kids take a well-earned break was going to work. But something told me that they needed to rest. To recover and work a few things out. Important things, like who they really were … So that’s what we did.

One of the lovely things about writing a book is you can fix the weather. Yes, I live in England, UK and we all long to fix the weather here. We talk about it a lot. So far no one has managed to … So in order to add to the sense of stasis, first I gave them a very heavy sea mist (a haar, one of my favourite words) and then, so that they had no choice but to stay put, I gave them snow. And then I froze it. Job done. And now we’re all stuck and we’re going to have to just chill. Literally I guess…

And so I allowed myself, as the writer, time to draw my breath too. Time to think where this book was going and time for us all—readers, writer and characters—to stop running for a while and to get to know one another.

I think it worked. A lot of readers tell me this is their favourite part of Magyk. It was certainly the one I enjoyed writing the most, partly because I also very much enjoy writing about snow. In fact, I think snow deserves at least a whole post to itself. So watch out for SNOW next Friday.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this. I’m loving getting back to the Septiverse—and I hope you are too. SO much to talk about!