Ok, I
think I’m so confused now. Will and focus aren’t the same, supposedly. But I
guess I must have been using one or both of them in some of the spells I’ve
learnt over the last five weeks, no? So focus is about the task you want your
spell to accomplish while will is the actual power you put into it? But both
require you to be good at clearing your mind and not letting stray thoughts
enter it. I don’t know why, but I had assumed it was kind of the same thing. I
had thought that if you focused on what you wanted and it didn’t work it meant you
just didn’t focus hard enough. So all those branches I couldn’t cut with the
Severing Charm could have been because I wasn’t using enough willpower? I know
I read those chapters in Quintessential
Magic before, but I don’t think it had sunk in until the teacher mentioned
it again. And so I reread the chapter on willpower and yeah, I’ve totally
dumped those two together. And with concentration as well, but that’s next week
course, so I’ll worry about it then. So if will is a muscle, then I should be
practicing on harder stuff, like the branches for the Severing Charm, until it
becomes easy and then move to harder stuff again. That’s what you do with
muscles, start with light weight and increase the charge when you can easily do
3 sets of 12-15 reps. Ok so I’ll keep at it with the branches (though I might
have to repair them at some point, so more practice with the Reparo I guess,
yay… yeah that is sarcasm). I guess outside of the Diffindo and Reparo, there
are the Leviation Charm and the Spongify I could practice my will with…

And the
first spell this week was to actually revisit the Levitation Charm. I’ve been using
it a bit since the second lesson in Charms. It started with levitating my socks
from the floor and then the cat’s empty food bowls and dishes. I’ve been
feeling like I live dangerously, levitating dishes out of the dishwasher, after
all, I do tend to be accident-prone and my concentration isn’t the best… But
it’s been fun. I guess I should try heavier and heavier things. But right now I
need to try that visualization technique the professor talked about. I’ve got a
hamper full of dirty laundry; I guess that would be a good target practice.

Well, it
hobbled. Levitated, no, but it hobbled. The visualizing exercise was good,
maybe I’ll do something like that every night, like feel my magic and do a
mini-workout with it. I’ll need to practice more this week anyways.

So, the
second spell this week was the Sticking Charm, Astrictus. The pronunciation is
“a-strik-toose”. Now, that, I had to think about. When I first read the incantation,
I thought “tus” sounded like “mucus”. So how is “toose” supposed to sound I
wondered. I figured it wasn’t like “toes” and then it hit me, like “moose”. The
other difficulty was to separate the “s” from the “a”; to make sure I was
saying “a-strick-toose”, not “ass-trick-toose”. But it wasn’t too hard once I
had said it a couple of times. The wand movement for this one is the infinity
symbol starting and ending in the centre. I remember when I reread that chapter
in Quintessential Magic, I was bit
tired and I skipped the detail table on the spell and went directly to the text
and couldn’t make heads or tails of what it was saying about a loop on the left
and a loop on the right (it didn’t mention it was a horizontal loop). But I’ve
seen the table since then and an infinity symbol is easy! I have a wooden box
with a latch that I never use anymore (the box), so I figured, it would be a
good target practice. I focused on the lid of the box sticking to the box, I
visualized my magic coming out the wand and sticking the two parts together and
I said the word and did the wand movement. The box got sealed, but it only took
a few seconds until the charm died. I tried a couple more times, but always
with the same results. I guess that’s another charm I’ll be adding to my list
of daily practices. Soon I won’t have enough time to do everything I should be
doing, maybe I should do like physical workouts and alternate, one day work on
focus spells, the other on will spells…