More thoughts on planning

Reader RD has two questions about my plotting process post (alliteration!) from the other day:

“How long will you ponder on a brand new series before you start putting things on paper?”

A while. Sometimes upwards of a year. That isn’t because it takes so long to think things up, it’s because it takes a while to actually write the books. Like, I could have an idea for a new series, but (for example) I’m currently writing book 5 of 9 of my current series. So it will take a while to get to the new series, which means I have ample time to think about it.

I do have way more ideas than I will ever be able to use. Realistically, I’m going to write about 12 books in 2019, but I have ideas for many more. But ideas don’t matter quite as much as the implementation. You know the guy who has the great business idea? That idea isn’t actually worth anything unless he actually does something with it.

“Example, how long did you think about Caina and the Ghost series before you decided it was real and needed to be written?”

That’s kind of a unique case, because I started writing about Caina before I realized that the Kindle was viable. Like, I wrote GHOST IN THE FLAMES in 2008, GHOST IN THE BLOOD in 2009, and CHILD OF THE GHOSTS in 2010, and I tried to sell them all to traditional publishers and got precisely nowhere. I eventually concluded that SF/F publishing wasn’t interested in adventure stories (like I write) and more interested in publishing dreary literary fiction about unlikable characters having tedious affairs with other unlikable characters in a plot that goes nowhere, and then slapping a SF/F label on it, and so I decided to stop writing novels, since I wasn’t interested in writing about unlikable characters having dreary affairs.

But then in late 2010 I bought my first Kindle, and I thought “Hey! Maybe there’s something to it!”

So when I started writing GHOST IN THE STORM in 2012, I think it’s a very different book than it would have been otherwise because of the time gap. Originally, all the sorcerers in Caina’s world would have been like the sorcerers in the CONAN THE BARBARIAN stories, always evil. By the time I got to GHOST IN THE STORM, I decided that the sorcerers were in fact manipulating a natural property of Caina’s world, rather than always making pacts with evil forces, so not all the sorcerers in Caina’s setting were evil. That also set up a lot of interesting character development for Caina, since she has to come down from her “kill ’em all” attitude in the earlier books.

For GHOST EXILE, I thought about that more or less continuously from 2013 to 2016. I did make several additions to the series as I went on – the Umbarians, Cassander Nilas, and Kylon weren’t in the original outline for the series.

For GHOST NIGHT, I was thinking about it just this morning.

“The detail in which you write, from the world(s), religions, characters, countries, regions etc is so incredible, that I find myself getting a clouded mind trying to envision how it’s all dreamed up lol.”

I was a history major in college (lo these many years ago) which turned out to be fairly useless in terms of getting a job. It did turn out to be very useful in terms of a source of plot ideas and inspirations. And if you do it well, you can integrate it into the story. Like, FROSTBORN: EXCALIBUR, several characters explicitly compare the siege of Tarlion to Julius Caesar’s siege of Alesia in 52 BC, which they can do because it’s part of their history. (And poor Gavin has to figure out how to pronounce the word “circumvallation”.)

-JM