Nadia Moran, The Unsinkable Protagonist: a CLOAK GAMES behind-the-scenes retrospective
I was going to include this retrospective at the end of CLOAK GAMES: MAGE FALL, but decided it was too self-indulgent. But I think it will make for a good blog post! 🙂
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Now that CLOAK GAMES: MAGE FALL is out, I think it’s time to look back a little at the entire CLOAK GAMES series. A glance behind the scenes, as it were, of what goes into writing a 12 book series.
Note that this post contains !!!SPOILERS!!! for the entire CLOAK GAMES series, so if you haven’t read to the end, you should probably stop reading this post right now.
First, I would like to say thank you to everyone who read to the end of CLOAK GAMES! Nadia truly has some enthusiastic readers. 🙂
Now to the behind-the-scenes look.
I think what is most surprising is how many times I almost stopped writing the series, but Nadia proved resilient.
The first three books came out pretty quickly from August to December of 2015, and the original plan was for a 10 book series. But there was a five month gap between REBEL FIST in December of 2015 and SHADOW JUMP in May of 2016. I was busy with Real Life in the first part of 2016, and then FROSTBORN took off in February of 2016 and I was focusing on that. And then I got extremely busy with Real Life in the summer of 2016, and I didn’t have much time to write for a while. I didn’t get back to CLOAK GAMES until December of 2016 with SHATTER STONE.
Obviously, going 6-7 months between books wasn’t good for the sales, so I decided to focus on CLOAK GAMES for a while, alternating between FROSTBORN and CLOAK GAMES for the first half of 2017.
Then I published TRUTH CHAIN in February 2017, which was the darkest book in the CLOAK GAMES series and a major change for Nadia. I worried that it had killed off the series, a concern that seemed to have some basis in fact when TOMB HOWL came out in April of 2017, and sold considerably fewer copies than either SHATTER STONE or TRUTH CHAIN. I decided to pause on CLOAK GAMES and think about what to do next, and instead wrote GHOST IN THE RING, which sold very well in June.
I seriously considered giving up on CLOAK GAMES and thought about just focusing on SEVENFOLD SWORD and GHOST NIGHT, but decided that abandoning CLOAK GAMES would be a jerk move. Instead, I trashed my original CLOAK GAMES series outline, and decided to finish it with four more books – HAMMER BREAK, BLOOD CAST, LAST JUDGE, and SKY HAMMER. That seemed like a classier way to do it than simply walking away from the series. I outlined a couple of different potential endings for CLOAK GAMES, but the one I thought worked the best was having Nadia die to stop the Sky Hammer bomb, and then the High Queen arranging for Russel’s frostfever to be healed in gratitude.
When I got to BLOOD CAST in February of 2018, however, two things happened that helped me figure out how to market CLOAK GAMES better.
1.) I changed all the book descriptions from 1st person to 3rd person. Previously, all the 3rd person descriptions really focused on the worldbuilding, and the worldbuilding in CLOAK GAMES is kind of hard to explain in 100 words and less. The 1st person descriptions put the focus on Nadia’s personality, and she’s quite charismatic.
2.) One of my relatives pointed out that CLOAK GAMES reminded him of Shadowrun.
“What the heck is Shadowrun?” I said. I had never heard of it before.
So I got two of the Shadowrun PC games in late 2017 (Shadowrun Returns & Shadowrun: Dragonfall) and played them some, and realized what he meant. CLOAK GAMES and Shadowrun have a lot of the same urban fantasy DNA, though CLOAK GAMES doesn’t have any cyberpunk influences and Shadowrun is heavily cyberpunk.
But this was useful because it provided a way to market the series that made sense. The best way to market books (and numerous other things) is to say that it’s like X meets Y. For example, I regularly say in ads that FROSTBORN is like “Lord of the Rings meets Warcraft”. It’s very useful in marketing materials, and it helps sell the books. If you say something is like “Lord of the Rings meets Warcraft”, people instantly know what kind of book you’re describing. So now I could say that CLOAK GAMES was like “The Dresden Files meets Shadowrun”, and people instantly knew what I was talking about. The CLOAK GAMES books started selling a lot better after that.
When I started SKY HAMMER, I fully intended it for it to be the last book in the series, and I was pretty sure that Nadia would die at the end. But I started to have a better idea. As so many country music songs have said, dying is easy, but living is hard, and forgiving is harder. What if I had a scene where Nadia was all set to kill Arvalaeon for the Eternity Crucible, but couldn’t bring herself to do it? Wouldn’t that be a great scene? I decided that would be way more compelling than Nadia dying in the Sky Hammer blast.
That would mean Nadia would meet the High Queen. Tarlia would be pretty annoyed at Morvilind over the whole Sky Hammer thing, and what better way to punish him by poaching his most excellent shadow agent?
And then, as I planned that scene, I realized the story wasn’t done. CLOAK GAMES, in the end, was about Nadia and Morvilind, and the series wouldn’t be over until they resolved their conflict.
So I wrote the entirely unexpected twelfth book, CLOAK GAMES: MAGE FALL, and properly ended the series.
That, of course, means that I’m not done with Nadia. She survived every attempt of her author to walk away, and the idea of her as a royal shadow agent is just too interesting to pass up. CLOAK & GHOST: BLOOD RING was sort of a trial of that, just as Nadia’s job for the High Queen in that book was a trial run for her. That is why Nadia will be returning in the new CLOAK MAGE series next year – I already have an appointment with a cover designer for CLOAK OF DRAGONS.
Lastly, and most importantly, I would like to say thanks to everyone who read the CLOAK GAMES books. CLOAK GAMES never sold as well as FROSTBORN/SEVENFOLD SWORD, but the people who did read it were vocal in their enjoyment of it. Hope to see you again with CLOAK OF DRAGONS in 2019!
-JM
I started reading your books with Frostborn and then went to Ghost then Iron Hand, Sevenfold. I had an aversion to Cloak Games because I haven’t had much luck with magic set in the modern era but I really enjoyed the series once I started it. I honestly didn’t realise you started on Cloak Games before the Frostborn series. I was drawn by the tried and true Fantasy setting and tried your other series once I decided I liked your writing.
I think reworking the blurbs actually helped get me to give Cloak Games a go. I remember reading your blog post about it and thinking I should give it a try.
I also have a slight bias against Demonsouled… I am sure I will love it once I start but have to many active series at the moment and don’t want to add another.
I am dying for the next Ghost Night novel, perhaps even more than the Sevenfold: Serpent. How is work progressing?
Thanks! I’m on Chapter 5 of 20 of GHOST IN THE AMULET, and that should come out in October.
Thanks for not killing the series off early, that would’ve been disappointing.
Also, thank you for not killing off Nadia, that would’ve been extremely disappointing and as much as I loved Cloak Games I would’ve preferred you killed the series off instead of Nadia. In fact, one of the things that made the series so compelling to me was that I assumed that Nadia would beat Morvilind and I wanted to see how.
It’s really upsetting to have the hero you’ve been reading about die. In the Bartimaeus Trilogy by Stroud, the main character (Nathaniel) goes from innocent child to power hungry and corrupt young adult to redemption as a hero and someone the reader could care deeply about. In the last chapter he dies and my daughter who was 10ish at the time was so distraught that she read the chapter over and over and over and … hoping that if she read it just one more time the story would somehow miraculously change and Nathaniel would still be alive.
Please don’t kill off heroic and likable main characters! There’s enough pain in the world already.
Yeah, killing off the characters does seem cheap. Or amateurish. Like you want to get a reaction from the audience, so you exaggerate to do it, that kind of thing.
Besides, poor Nadia had already died like 57k times, so it seemed churlish to do it once more.
So maybe to avoid ever having to kill her off you could arrange for her to bond with a shadow morph and become a shadow hunter, or get stuck as a lord of a demesne and one of earth’s knights. Or will her regenerative spell allow her to live as long as Riordan?
In the original outline for the series, she was going to become a Shadow Hunter and kill Morvilind, but I decided I could do better for the ending.
A character can be killed provided that a character needs redemption to end their story. I’ve read a few series where the whole thing becomes WAY more powerful with their end. Honestly Nadia dying would have worked buuuuut, it would have also been sad because she hasn’t really done anything to be needing forgiveness for. Morvilind did, Arvaleon did, but Nadia hasn’t done anything that would have needed to be “balanced” with her death. Mage Fall kicked tail because it ended Morvilind in a way that I believe his character would’ve accepted. Kill few to save many was his philosophy.
The chapter titles in the last half of Sky Hammer though:)……very cool.
My favorite chapter title from the series is still “You’re Just Mad Because I Nuked You”. Though I really enjoy picking the chapter titles in general – in the Bad Old Days of traditional publishing, chapter titles were usually forbidden.