An introduction to Heart and Crown

This is a book I wrote on a dare.

Heart and Crown is a book I wrote on a dare.

A friend and I had come into contact with a small press, and we liked the editor. We dared each other to write a book and get it published with this press. So I wrote this sprawling epic fantasy romance scifi ... thing. My friend is still working on hers. Then I sat and read a bunch of books published through this press, and all of them were far more steamy than I'm comfortable with. (For one thing, it's in your contract that you promote everything the press releases!) Also, Heart and Crown isn't steamy. It's more occupied with slaying demons. So ... I decided not to submit it.

So now I have this book that I don't know what to do with. It's a lovely standalone, it bashes genres together like nobody's business, and the characters are near and dear to my heart. It needs a few extra scenes toward the end, but I haven't had much motivation to write them.

Then I got on Substack and went ... you know, I could publish it here as a serial! So that's what I'm going to do.

A couple of notes about Heart and Crown:

The chakra-based magic system came from my research into both chakras and chiropractic. In fact, there's a lot of crossover between the two. The various chakra points correspond to nerve points in the spine to an eerily accurate degree. It made me wonder if the whole chakra thing wasn't actually ancient chiropractic knowledge that passed into mysticism when the original medical knowledge was lost. I think a guru in the chakrams could converse quite intelligently with a chiropractor, though I think they would greatly annoy each other.

So, in Heart and Crown, the kind of magic you can do depends on how good you are at drawing magic up through your spine and casting it through the various chakras. The higher you can get it, the stronger the magic and the better you can control it. However, you can only work magic sitting down ... unless you have the mechanical mage wings wired into your spine.

Second note:

The rest of the magic system came from musing on Jupiter's magnetic field. I already messed with it in In a Mirror, Darkly, but I couldn't leave it alone. No human has ever been outside of Earth's magnetic field, which encompasses the moon. Jupiter's magnetic field is so strong that it destroys probes we send to orbit it, unless we give them huge amounts of shielding. What would happen to a human being sent into that field? Humans have magnetite in our brains, the same as animals and migratory birds. They don't know exactly what it does. Probably, spending any time in Jupiter's field would send humans insane, because that's always what seems to happen.

But what if it gave humans superpowers instead? Especially if a few generations were born in the field? Or maybe humans could wield the field like magic, until it just became known as magic?

So, combine this idea about a planet emitting a magical magnetic field that humans control via their chakras, and you have Heart and Crown. It actually refers directly to what chakras the characters learn to control, even though it SOUNDS like a romance. Hee hee! I love hiding the worldbuilding in plain sight.

Anyway, the chapters will be going up weekly on Substack if you'd like to take a look. Once it's all posted and finished and polished, I'll publish it as a proper book.