On Art, Story and Calandis
For the last two weeks, I have been in the throes of rebranding… everything. It is a happy and sad time, as I say farewell to LitRPG/Gamelit under RJ Castiglione, and start my new adventure publishing as RJ Casta, dedicating myself to “The Wandering Hearth Chronicles.”
I created this world because I yearned for a peaceful world in which to write my stories, one driven by soft magic, despite a population wholly oblivious to its existence. In this world, there are no advanced weapons. There are no warring nations. There is no extreme poverty. People find that through simple work, they can build lives worth living.
This is not to say that Calandis is a perfect world. It is one where adults pay no mind to child labor, exploitative worker contracts, and lines upon lines upon lines of red tape any time they wish to interact with their government.
The government? It is simple. With no standing armies, charge of the whole of Calandis is bisected: Decision-making power is given to the High Council of Oubliette, a body of ten elected officials, three from Oubliette and the remaining seven from the key cities scattered along the Cardinal Rivers (Kingstep-on-Brey, Madder-Fen, Opal-Reach, Bathgate-Upon-Ought, Glace-on-Sea, Castle Clovelly, and Ought-Knott). The executive power falls to the central government in Oubliette, while each city/town/village has its own form of governance with a lesser council and a mayor. Each city has a constabulary that sees to its city and the surrounding areas.
Calandis also has four remote areas seldom traveled, as they’re not profoundly accessible by water: The Northern Wilds (northwest), The Wastes (northeast), The Needle Mountains (southeast), and The Moss-Mire (southwest). The only power center within one of these four is Madder-Fen in The Moss-Mire, a swampy forest navigable by shallow boats.
Clubs and blades are the most advanced weapons we will ever see in Calandis. As such, we will rarely, if ever, see life-or-death stakes. The most profoundly impactful consequence for actions will be imprisonment vs freedom.
As such, I have scoped out the following initial stories:
Wick and the Wandering Barge
Wick and the Copper Kettle
Wick and the Whispering Woods
Reed and the Ruby Loom
Silt and the Sunset Market
Lark and the Lady’s Locket
Fern and the Golden Flour
Gully’s Grand Adventure (novella)
The Captain’s Heart (novella)
Elana’s Sorrow (novella)
A Guildmaster’s Path (placeholder title)
A plethora of ~3k-word short stories.
That’s not to say this journey will be limited to just what’s above. That’s just what I have outlines for. I can imagine an entire novel told by Lady Clovelly, a character introduced in Wick and the Copper Kettle, or an origin story for Ma and Pa Scurry (brother and sister, and fruit-preserve-loving river pirates with hearts of gold, or even each of Wick’s sisters getting trilogies of their own.
How does this fit with what I have written in the past? Am I still an author of gay fiction? Absolutely. I’m just more subtle about it. Though there will never, ever, ever be romance between Wick and the Captain, both are queer characters. This is hinted at in Wick and the Wandering Barge in a sweet, organic way. Wick shall be, eventually, well on his way to meeting a husband. It just hasn’t been written yet, for Wick is still quite young (twenty-four at the story’s onset).
We shall likely also see an expansion of this world beyond Calandis when the muses strike, but for now, we have a country roughly the size of the United Kingdom and Ireland combined. That is plenty of geography for stories to breathe.
Now you may also find yourself asking… What’s with the cute and cuddly creatures in the image above? Those are Smudges. They are the core of my soft magic system. Without Smudges, Calandis has no magic, for it all is derived from them. The Board of Works, a heartless bureaucracy, uses Smudges to keep Calandis running. There are, however, a few special individuals who are called to protect Smudges. I’ve called them Hearths. Wick is one such character, owing to his unique ability to see the world not for how he wants it to be, but for how it is.
I’ll leave it at that for now. I hope you enjoy the world I’ve created. It means a great deal to me, and has taken years of creative patience to dream up. Good day :-)
