Courtney Floyd is joining us today to talk about her novel, Higher Magic. Here’s the publisher’s description:
First-generation graduate student Dorothe Bartleby has one last chance to pass the Magic program’s qualifying exam after freezing with anxiety during her first attempt. If she fails to demonstrate that magic in classic literature changed the world, she’ll be kicked out of the university. And now her advisor insists she reframe her entire dissertation using Digimancy. While mages have found a way to combine computers and magic, Bartleby’s fated to never make it work.
This time is no exception. Her revised working goes horribly wrong, creating a talking skull named Anne that narrates Bartleby’s inner thoughts–even the most embarrassing ones–like she’s a heroine in a Jane Austen novel. Out of her depth, she recruits James, an unfairly attractive mage candidate, to help her stop Anne’s glitches in time for her exam.
Instead, Anne leads them to a shocking and dangerous discovery: Magic students who seek disability accommodations are disappearing–quite literally. When the administration fails to act, Bartleby must learn to trust her own knowledge and skills. Otherwise, she risks losing both the missing students and her future as a mage, permanently.
What’s Courtney’s favorite bit?
I’ve always found the idea of worldbuilding daunting. While I love reading novels with intricate, immersive worlds, if you ask about my story’s economics or interplanetary politics or tidal cycles, I start to feel faint. That sort of from-scratch, microscopically detail-oriented planning is what I do for my day job, and it can very easily snuff out my sense of inspiration and wonder when I’m in creative mode.
So, when I found myself elbows-deep in university lore, naming conventions, and magic system design for my debut novel, Higher Magic, I didn’t imagine for a second that I was worldbuilding. I was university building, and having the time of my life.
I knew from the start that I wanted to set the story at a state university, and that choice rippled out in a bunch of interesting ways. For one thing, a state university was unlikely to go all-in on magic, unlike the private institutions that often appear in dark academia. So, I needed to explore what it would look like to have a magic program alongside all of the typical academic ones that you’d find at a real world university.
Would the whole campus know about magic? Yes. Would they all believe in its academic worth as a discipline? No. Even in real-world universities, some disciplines get written off as worthless or, at best, frivolous. How would university administrators respond to magic on campus? With lots of rules. Would it change how students try to game the system? Absolutely. Would magic students be treated differently than their nonmagic peers? Maybe…
It turned out that last question was a long fuse, and it eventually exploded my plot in the best way. In the real world, disability protections in higher education have only been in place for a few decades. They’ve been contested and pushed back against in various ways from the start. What if someone, or a group of someones, saw magic as a tool with which to chip away at those protections? What would happen then?
Over the course of one extremely ill-starred winter term, my protagonist, Dorothe Bartleby, discovers the answer to that question and has to decide what to do about what she knows. And her discovery has implications not just for her university, but for every magic university and program across the country.
Funnily enough, even with all of that university building work, I didn’t name my fictional university until the very last draft of Higher Magic. I wanted it to feel just right, and so I kept putting it off.
Bartleby spends most of the book grappling with her imposter syndrome. The feeling that she’s not enough, and that everyone else around her is miles above her, almost ends her magic career. It wasn’t until I stumbled across H. Earl Pemberton’s Oregon Historical Quarterly article, “Early Colleges in Oregon,” and learned about Sublimity College, that I found a potential name that fit that emotional context.
Sublimity is a word that means everything Bartleby thinks she’s not: nobility, greatness, intellectual excellence, perfection. In fact, it’s a word that’s rather loaded. It might make you ask who gets to decide what’s noble, great, excellent, and perfect. What sorts of students and scholars are automatically accorded those qualities? And who will be excluded from them no matter what they do?
The real-world Sublimity College failed sometime after the Civil War. With a little bit of artistic license, and a lot of word-based alchemy, I transformed it into a modern institution with 150 years of history. In the end, there’s more than just emotional resonance between Sublimity College and my fictional Sublimity University. The first president of Sublimity College was Milton Wright, the father of the Wright Brothers––a fact I’d overlooked until I revisited Pemberton’s article for this essay. It feels especially fitting, then, that one of the most notable pieces of magical scholarship to come out of Sublimity in Higher Magic is Quimby’s Long-Range Teleportation Working, a spell that lets humanity move beyond the need for fossil-fueled airlines.
It turns out worldbuilding was my favorite bit. I just had to learn that it doesn’t need to be the sweeping, build-a-planet-from-the-ground-up type to be powerful. It can be smaller in scope and still make your storyworld come alive for readers. Leaning into my smaller scale university building empowered me to connect my world directly to my characters, their greatest fears, and their burgeoning hopes. From there, I could sketch out the ripple effects in the wider world.
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BIO:
Courtney Floyd is a neurodivergent fantasy author who grew up in New Mexico, where she learned to write between tarantula turf wars and apocalyptic dust storms. She currently lives at the bottom of a haunted mountain in the woods of Vermont with her partner and pets. Her debut fantasy novel, Higher Magic, comes out with MIRA books on October 7, 2025. Courtney has a PhD in nineteenth-century British Literature and a penchant for irreverent literary allusions. Her short fiction can be found in publications including Small Wonders, Haven Spec, and Fireside Magazine. Her audio drama, The Way We Haunt Now, is available on all major podcast platforms. Find her online at courtney-floyd.com.