Giethoorn in Netherlands has no roads or any modern transportation at all, only canals. Well, and 176 bridges too. Tourists have to leave their cars outside of the village and travel here by foot or boat by. So you can probably imagine how peaceful it is here.
You know what fantasy writing needs? Working class wizards.
A crew of enchanters maintaining the perpetual flames that run the turbines that generate electricity, covered in ash and grime and stinking of hot chilies and rare mushrooms used for the enchantments
A wizard specializing in construction, casting feather fall on every worker, and enchanting every hammer to drive nails in straight, animating the living clay that makes up the core of the crane
An elderly wizard and her apprentice who transmute fragile broken objects. From furniture, to rotten wood beams, to delicate jewelry
A battle magician, trained with only a few rudimentary spells to solve a shortage of trained wizards on the front who uses his healing spells to help folks around town
Wizarding shops where cheery little mages enchant wooden blocks to be hammered into the sides of homes. Hammer this into the attic and it will scare off termites, toss this in the fire and clean your chimney, throw this in the air and all dust in the room gets sucked up
Wizard loggers who transmute cut trees into solid, square beams, reducing waste, and casting spells to speed up regrowth. The forest, they know, will not be too harsh on them if the lost tree’s children may grow in its place
Wizard farmers who grow their crops in arcane sigils to increase yield, or produce healthier fruit
Factory wizards who control a dozen little constructs that keep machines cleaned and operational, who cast armor to protect the hands of workers, and who, when the factory strikes for better wages, freeze the machines in place to ensure their bosses can’t bring anyone new in.
Anyway, think about it.
Construction wizards to turn back time to root out wood worm and strengthen old buildings.
A wizard tailors who transmutes cloth into fully made clothes without seems and leaving behind no scraps
A wizard who works in public transit, timing out teleports with detailed schedules, time magic, and enchanted communications, sending dozens of people to far away cities for a day or work or leisure
A team of wizard gardeners tend to trees grown far outside their native range, and ideal climate, encircled with runes and fed potions to grow none the less
A wizard sits in their office in the aqueduct, re-casting the spells that allow its precious water to flow to the city uphill
A wizard fisher casts water repelling spells on the sailors and the stairs, keeps the hoist on the anchor from rusting, casts balls of heat that keep everyone warm below decks. Their real job is to herd fish together so they can be caught in single huge nets, and keep them cold as the boat returns to land.
There are so many possibilities outside of “stodgy academic who wears ugly robes” and “Very good holy man who helps everyone and the fact they’ve never had a job is never brought up” and “evil wizard toiling away on great evils in his evil tower in the evil country.”
Wizards who come out and ward your home for you, like the magical equivalent of a home security system.
Wizard companies that create direct channels of more concentrated energy (off of key lines and/or nodes) that can be tapped for a price.
i’m fifteen minutes into this interview with a black woman who works in a verizon warehouse in tennessee and she’s already told a story about how another black woman died on the warehouse floor and the foremen set up cones around her dead body and left her there for two hours while forcing all the other employees to continue working. and the woman being interviewed said that herself and four other employees suffered miscarriages while working because the foremen refused to honour their doctor’s notes saying that they shouldn’t lift heavy objects on the job. when she began to miscarry on the warehouse floor, she asked a foreman if she could go home because she wasn’t feeling well and she was worried about jeopardizing the health of her baby, the foreman said, “why are you pregnant? you don’t need any more kids. go have a fucking abortion.”
Today, someone in class saw my ‘I love guns and coffee’ patch that I have on my backpack and said, “Oh, wow! I really like that patch. It’s so cute. But, it’s funny – you don’t look like a gun person.”
Obscure Fandoms 