Seanan McGuire is writing the Strixhaven: Omens of Chaos book, the first Magic: The Gathering novel since 2019, and she is "dead excited and dead terrified." Excited because she writes for Magic out of love for "the richest continuous multiverse currently in publication", but terrified that if the book's not well received she'll be tarred and feathered as "the girl who killed Magic fiction".
"In my perfect world of sunshine and zombie puppies, Omens of Chaos goes over really well, and I get to write the sequel," McGuire tells me, adding that this would follow the same group of kids over spring break.
"I want to take them to New Capenna. I want to set the whole book on New Capenna," she reveals.
This sounds like a disastrous place to let loose a bunch of magical college students, although I suppose the multiverse has plenty of vacation spots even deadlier. McGuire is hoping her book may be the first in a new batch of Magic stories that can explore as many of them as possible.
"I think that in this modern era of Magic fiction, when we're not wedding books tightly to sets… we have the freedom to basically set up the Magic the Gathering expanded fictional universe," she says. "You could be putting books on planes that we're not going back to for years.
"You have the entire multiverse available to you, and that's just beautiful."
If you've not been following Omens of Chaos too closely, that might be a surprising take. After all, the book is set on Strixhaven and is coming out April 7, the same month as Secrets of Strixhaven arrives on the MTG release calendar.
But while the two do share a setting, they weren't made with one another in mind. Omens of Chaos takes place a full year before Secrets of Strixhaven, and Seanan says she doesn't know if the set's author was even able to read her early manuscript. She explains that the editing process took a while and that set and book weren't originally supposed to come out so close together.
As a result, "they're not so much in conversation as they just are two adventures that happen on the same plane."
As well as a sequel to this book, Seanan has one big contribution she'd like to bring to MTG's 'expanded fictional universe'. "I want to do the full-length, new weird, splatterpunk novel set in Duskmourn": a proper horror story on the haunted house world.
Duskmourn is McGuire's favorite plane to write for, and she does the Junji Ito meme: "This is my hole. It was made for me". She also adds that a Duskmourn side story is where she received her favorite editorial note from Wizards, which simply read "JESUS CHRIST, SEANAN!"
McGuire likes breaking new ground in Magic canon, and because (for the first time while working on this IP) she didn't have a tight word count to stick to, she was able to fill Strixhaven: Omens of Chaos with lore tidbits.
She explains that, "While I was writing it, I kept a file called 'Decisions I have made which are now your problem'," with ideas to run past her editor.
"It included little things like 'this is the name of a holiday they celebrate on New Capenna', 'this is what they use for bedtime stories on Shandalar'."
McGuire says she's super excited for readers to see these "new facets of places that they think they fully understand."
What other parts of the Magic multiverse would this author like to write about? For planes she namedrops Kaldheim, for characters she'd like to spend more time with Nahiri and Tyvar. But although she jokes that if she had not been assigned to Duskmourn, she'd have had to "hunt other Magic authors for sport", McGuire is well-aware that she can't write everything.
"Where Magic is really excelling right now is - tragically - by not allowing me to do everything I want to do. They are getting an incredible breadth of different perspectives, different voices into the story. And that is what's going to help keep Magic Story both inclusive and expansive." she says.
"By having me write one set and then Valerie Valdes write another set and then after Valeria, we get K. Arsenault Rivera in, you manage to keep the voices changing and keep the perspectives changing, and my idea of who, say, Nahiri is does not become the only idea. We still have that flexibility that comes from a shared universe."
What could be improved about Magic story? "I think that we could do a somewhat better job of making sure that people know we exist," McGuire says. "It is occasionally shocking to me how many people that care about Magic: the Gathering still don't know that there's a story - still don't fully realize that the story is out there, and ongoing, and available to them."
McGuire believes Magic story could do with more space and says "I'm hoping that the book will have something to do with this!"
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