Sometimes I Don't Like Magic, by Kari Sperring:

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Sometimes I think I don't like magic. Or, at least, capital M Magic - the whole paraphernalia of wands and spells and wizards in towers - sometimes doesn't sit well with me. It gets a bit overwhelming, a bit portentous,  even a bit silly and I'm not quite sure where to put myself in thinking about it.  After all, it's messy and illogical, uncontrolled and irrational and it can seriously derail the plot of a book.

And yet, and yet.... I've been a fan of fantasy books as long as I can remember. I started in early childhood with Through the Looking Glass and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,  progressed to The Hobbit and A Wizard of Earthsea and have never stopped. And I love to read about wizards' colleges and orders of mages, about curses and dark conjurings, about books of lore and old rituals, I love books by Sharon Shinn, Katherine Kurtz, and Susanna Clarke. I love books where magic behaves and makes sense. So I do like magic. I just like it to have rules and to know its place.

I suspect I have that in common with many other fantasy writers. The problem with magic is that you have to approach and handle it with care. Out of control, it wreaks havoc on everything from your characters' lives to the plausibility of your book. I don't always have to know, when I read a book, what magic can do, but I like to be sure there are some things it can't.

I was resistant for a long time to writing about magic at all. My first attempt at a novel had none, although there was a shape-shifter and some dubious behaviour with poisons.  But it became clearer and clearer to me that magic was there in Living With Ghosts, whether I liked it or not. Even so, I spent a considerable period trying to call it something else  -- abilities, say, or even proclivities. But it's magic and in the end I gave in and admitted it. Hello, my name is Kari Sperring and I write about magic. I knew how it worked and why, I was just chopping logic about words.

It started with the shape-shifters. In Living With Ghosts, being able to take another shape is hereditary and is limited to one specific shape. It's also rare: both parents must have the ability in order for their child to have it. Most people don't. Shape-shifters are also rather closer to the world than ordinary people - they can sense certain things and occasionally influence them. But they aren't magicians: what they do is personal. (There are historical reasons why they're so rare. That's part of the plot of the book.)

There are magicians, too, or at least people who are like magicians, although the only people who would call them that don't actually believe in them. In Merafi and the lands it rules, magic is a child's story. It's part of a mythology about living elements - waters and rocks and fires that can take human form, talk, fight, do strange and dangerous things. But - just as there are a handful of shape-shifters - there are people who are descendants of these elemental beings, who mated with humans long ago. These people have the potential to influence and understand the world around them in magical ways, but these are limited by their ancestry. Gracielis, the main protagonist, is domained in stone; his antagonist Quenfrida in air and what they can do is defined by that and by the way I think about the elements. Some of these abilities are like senses, always operating, like Gracielis' ability to see ghosts. Some of them can be accessed via rituals and study. Someone with a little of this heritage or a trace of shape-shifting heritage can increase their abilities through studying, but only to a limited extent. To most of the characters, all this is a myth, or, at best, a set of religious beliefs which can be neither proven nor demonstrated. As I said, I like magic to have rules and to stay within them.

Kari Sperring, Living With Ghosts, fantasy, DAW Books, Penguin Books