Lukasz asked Ian Gregoire:

Hi Ian, I'm halfway through The Exercise of Vital Powers and I'd like to ask you few questions. First I'm intrigued by Zarantar and spells names - how did you come with them? Were you looking for right sound or is there some linguistic logic to them? Also why did you think Kayden story was worth telling? PS: I enjoy the book. I can see it's unpolished in places but it's really hard to put it down :)

Ian Gregoire To answer the first part of the question as simply as I can, the way I went about devising names for the various different magical abilities etc. was to use Google Translate. I had a general idea of the English meanings of the terms I wanted to create so I would input those terms and check how they translated into half a dozen different languages and listened to how they are pronounced. After that I started messing around with those words, creating portmanteaus to see what new words I could come up with. Once I came up with combinations that looked and sounded good, it was just a matter of finalising a new word based on those combinations and altering the spelling of the finished words, enough to conceal all trace that the made up word was derived by combining real words from other languages.

To answer the second part of the question, the principal reason why I think Kayden's story was worth telling is because it confronts a complacent assumption that many of us have about abusing power. I suspect most of us believe that if we were given power over other people we would never abuse that power. Yet it would be so easy to allow self-interest to cause us to do just that and come up with justification for doing it, while denying that any abuse of power has occurred.

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