Lucy is a sixteen year old who has swapped GCSEs for learning what it means to be a witch. Moving away from her family to the coastal town of Barkmouth, she and her best friends – a talking bird and dead 1920s wannabe gangster – negotiate Fae incursions, magical rainstorms, messy bedrooms and having a really annoying smug fellow teenage witch… Read Lucy’s first letter.
Genevieve Olive Framley-Waters has horrified her family by leaving the family estate to live in a cottage in some unknown town by the sea. It’s not even a resort! Luckily, she and her Chinese Water Dragon, Firenze, find they can live comfortably from telling fortunes and being very impressive. This is going to be easy… isn’t it?! Read Olive’s first letter.
More information on the reading guide.
Where it came from
I wrote the letters using prompts from Sky Latshaw’s RPG The Magical Year of a Teenage Witch.
Please check it out here and buy it if you are interested.
https://swashtalk.itch.io/the-magical-year-of-a-teenage-witch
The Magical Year of a Teenage Witch is a GM-less journaling/storytelling game that can be played solo or with a group.
The Magical Year uses the Thousand Year Old Vampire system by Tim Hutchings. By answering prompts ordered in sets of three, you will string together vignettes that relate to each other and call back to your previous experiences. You may meet a character in your first prompt, then three prompts later discover they have a secret they’re keeping about a place you visited in your second prompt.
What I have created
The characters and settings I use in the letters are my own – Lucy and Olive and their friends exist in a Britain that exists slightly sideways to ours, one that still has trains (yay), and GCSEs (boo) but where magic is more of an accepted fact. At this time, the choice to become a witch is becoming a rare one – many people let their power fade or simply ignore it. Technology has taken over from many of the old ways, and people have becoming better at tuning out pesky magical problems.
Which doesn’t mean they don’t exist, and don’t need to be solved.
Every letter is a response to a prompt from the book. For example, Lucy’s meeting with Bea Furness came from a prompt reading:
While caught in a downpour running an errand, you get stuck with a Magical Character as you both wait out the storm somewhere.
Add a Magical Character and a Location. What shared interest do you bond over? Add a Skill, Resource or Location.
These prompts are selected with a dice roll, which meant that I also came across it again for Olive – but she ends up in a very different location with a different magical character.
Influences
The Magical Year of a Teenage Witch was already quite influenced by Studio Ghibli, and particularly Kiki’s Delivery Service, a beautiful coming of age story about a young witch and her talking cat. I am happy also to use this movie as inspiration.
Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels focusing on witch characters, but particularly the Tiffany Aching stories, are a key influence for me too. The idea of a witch being everything from a midwife, a shepherd, a medic, a kind of wandering social worker and a guardian against a whole dark world of spirits is something I find compelling and inspirational.
Eva Ibbotson’s book Which Witch probably wasn’t a massive influence, but I enjoyed how the very practical normal couple went about sensibly raising their Dark Wizard son so he could live the life he was born to live. Would that all of us could be so accepting!
Epistolary books like Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster and Anne of Windy Willows by L. M. Montgomery have influenced the letter-writing style of my heroines.
Helen Speaks 