Knowing My Audience, a Fantasy Writer's Fantasy

I'm a teacher by day and a writer by later-that-same-day. But today, it's summer As I write this, the sun is out, the temperature outside is 95 degrees, and I am, importantly, not at school.

I love teaching. Anyone who thinks I don't love my job is probably actively working to make it more difficult, but I love what I do. It makes me a better person, and it makes me a better writer (both of those are debatable, but I'm picking my battles). Working with kids is tough, rewarding, and often surreal. As a teacher, I get to work with bright young people about whom I truly care.

As a fantasy writer, I get to know my target audience.

Threads of Aethercode took seven years to complete, and easily half of that time was spent inventing characters, throwing them into Emport, and seeing which of the resulting adventures actually had a real place in the story. In those seven years, I taught about eight hundred kids. That's a lot of kids making me work hard, but while they're getting an education, I'm getting a wealth of creative material. My students are characters---feral, faltering, fantastic characters. Their broken filters, unpredictable energy, incredible talents, and passionate hostility toward whatever displeases them in the moment are an ocean of inspiration.

And did I mention, most if it is a lot of fun?

Two characters in the Aethercode books are named for students. The amount of inspiration I got from these individuals made it impossible not to shape characters around their better traits. They are strong, funny, deeply ambitious, sometimes unhinged, but always sympathetic they were. They have no idea that I named characters after them, but they were incredible models for how these kids might talk to each other and to the adults in their lives.

Shauna isn't named after a student, but over time, a hundred different girls have put little twists and spins on Shauna's character. I've seen Shauna's brilliance, her work ethic, and her imagination in various forms in my classroom year-after-year. I've seen her confident attitude and her ultimate humility. I've heard her humor, her fierce loyalty, and her delicate sense of self. Truthfully, Shauna is a collection of traits that inspire and humble me, and I just hope she is as much fun to read about as she is to write.

When a pandemic temporarily shut down society, I saw a different side of education. It's adaptability and ingenuity came out as solutions to large-scale issues had to be found and put into play. A school building is a miniature society with its own rules, government, roles, and organizations. The way my little corner of education came together to create new infrastructure and adapt to every need within the community was honestly fantastic---stressful, but fantastic. During the pandemic, some of our structures evolved, while others were stretched to the breaking point. Resources changed, and so did the way we interacted with each other, through masks and screens, across socially-distanced spaces, under the pressure of upended routines and new technology, all in the shadow of an uncertain threat to our health and our daily life. It changed the way kids grew up, creating trauma and triumph that none of us will forget.

I want Emport to be a place that adapts and evolves, a place that fosters growth and incorporates the spectrum of human experience into its fabric at a molecular level. I'm fortunate to work in a place that occasionally models these structures and showcases the resilience and grit of the people who shape the society.

We don't have the budget for magic styluses, but maybe someday.

As a teacher, I hope I'm like Branagh, patient and nurturing. I also hope I'm a little like Wendell, challenging students to be better and caring deeply that they rise to that challenge.

I hope I'm not like Daemian. Can you imagine? I suppose his showmanship and grandstanding would be great for Open House night, but beyond that, I can only see him terrifying and demoralizing his students. No, he's more of an expo-guy than a classroom-guy.

Today, it's summer. It's a great time to write, but some of my best inspiration is at school, in the routines and in the chaos, in the academic growth and the social development, in the variety, the absurd TikTok challenges, and the obscene language (theirs, not mine), in the art and in the science. In the magic.

Is that too corny?

Proof that M. J. Rucinski's students are desperate to express themselves---and that he doesn't keep track of his whiteboard markers.