GHOST IN THE FLAMES: what happened to Maltaer?

Reader question time! Chelsea asks:

“I was just rereading Ghost in the Flames and I was struck by what a cool character Maltaer – the slaver murdering, sorcery sensing pirate – is. I’m surprised that he never showed back up in the series!”

Time for a trip down memory lane!

If I can remember correctly (it’s been 11 years at this point) when I wrote GHOST IN THE FLAMES I had vague idea of Maltaer someday coming back as a potential love interest for Caina.

But this was back in the Bad Old Days before the Kindle and self-publishing. There was no guarantee that I would ever have a chance to write any more GHOSTS books, let alone the chance to ever publish the first one.

Anyway, I wrote the first three GHOSTS books (CHILD OF THE GHOSTS, GHOST IN THE FLAMES, and GHOST IN THE BLOOD) and gave up on the idea of getting them tradpublished.

But then the Kindle came along, I wrote GHOST IN THE STORM, and the series went in a totally different direction than whatever I had planned back in 2007/8 when I wrote GHOST IN THE FLAMES. And to be fair, I don’t actually remember what I had planned back in 2007/8 for future books because the prospect of future books seemed so unlikely.

This is actually a fairly common thing in long series – it’s nicknamed Early Installment Weirdness. When you write the first book or first few books in what becomes a long-running series, there are always a few ideas or concepts that don’t gel or that you decide later on don’t really work. Like, in the 1st three GHOSTS books, sorcerers were Always Chaotic Evil, but that changed when GHOST IN THE STORM came along. In CHILD OF THE GHOSTS, the rivalries between the different factions of the nobility is a big plot point, but that gets dropped in later books once the Empire goes to war with New Kyre and Istarinmul, and then with the civil war against the Umbarians.

And sometimes you change plans for the series on the fly. I tried to write Kylon out a bunch of times, and look how that worked out! 🙂

-JM