Bringing it all together
Readers of my books will understand that I construct my stories to be plausible within the context of a world that contains magic. In other words I try to make my magic believable by giving some thought to the mechanisms behind each concept. The same goes for the stageing of the events in my stories. Sometimes this means that I have to do a considerable amount of research (and sometimes development) to bring my stories to life in my imagination. In my vanity I have supposed that my readers may be interested in my thought processes which created some of the things in my books.
I try to think of ways in which things would work or might concievably work. There are literally hundreds of plot artefacts that need such thought and I'd be the first to admit that some of the reasoning behind them might be a little 'creative'. These include the creatures and artefacts that populate my books. As time goes on I have increasingly resorted to creating these objects in my imagination and then fleshing them out with pictures. This has escalated to the extent that I have recently been creating pictures of some of the animals, artefacts and locations that play parts in the action.
As an example take fire breathing dragons. At first such a creature seems impossible but we all know that methane burns and methane is a gas created in copious quantities by the digestive system. Add to this the fact that several species consume pebbles as an aid to digestion and, as is easily demonstrable, grinding rocks together can create sparks. Hence we have a source of ignition and a fuel. Thus, when these combine in air we might get flame. So a fire breathing ( strictly a fire producing) creature might exist in theory. All that is needed is evolution to supply a way of the creature being able to survive the ensuing flames and explosive effects (Sessile cooling and ceramic based sinuses come to mind.) and for the fire to give the creature an evolutionary advantage over its fellows.
My extrapolations aren't limited to artefacts and animals, and I try to base my stories on some sort of believable technology or extrapolation thereof. Occasionally, as these ideas have evolved I have often had to revise my pseudo science to keep up. This happens in real science; once upon a time atoms were miniature solar systems with electrons orbiting a central mass like tiny planets. Then the electrons became indeterminate clouds and their paths entered the realms of probability. I'm not up-to-date on the latest theories of matter but I believe that nowadays its all about quarks which have exciting properies like colour and strangeness.
As an example take the hoary subject of teleportation. It appears in one form or another in many fantasy stories but even a smattering of thought will tell an intelligent reader that in any guise teleportation, be it Star Trek transporters or Disapparation, is horrendously complex and fraught with paradoxes. However, it is an extremely useful plot feature. Now dissolving an object into its constituent information at one point in space and re-constituting at another point (without introducing errors) is mathematically unrealistic but taking that same object and ( keeping it whole) whilst moving it through a dimension slightly outside the normal three, is merely mathematically improbable.
In my stories I started with the 'split everything up into tiny particles and re-assemble them' but once I had to extend the concept to gateways between life and death it needed revising. Just like real science does, in fact.
Lately much of theoretical Physics revolves around theories of 'strings' which are polydimensional spaces 'wrapped' around our normal three dimensions at infinitesimally small scales. But even these have rivals in the form of quantum entanglement and superposition. It seems that some clever souls in America have created a two dimensional version of a wormhole (beloved of many SF novels to get around the speed of light limit) inside a quantum computer.
I swear that Science is now becoming stranger than any classical magic ever could be.