DRAGONTIARNA & GHOST NIGHT questions

Edward asks:

“How many books will ghost nights and dragontiarna be? Also if you can tell us, which of your ideas will be next on your list to write or if you can’t tell us anything about the story itself how about which genre it falls into?”

DRAGONTIARNA will be between 10 and 16 books. I’ve plotted out the entire series, but I haven’t decided how many books I’ll divide the plot into. For SEVENFOLD SWORD, I had a hard limit of 12 books because of the audiobooks, but I have to admit towards the last three books it started to feel a little cramped – like I have to get this, this, and this into book #11, because we’re just about out of space. I wanted to avoid that with DRAGONTIARNA. So it’s plotted out, but I’m not sure how many books it will be. It depends on how many subplots I add – Selene wasn’t in the original outline draft of SEVENFOLD SWORD, for example.

I’m planning to do a DRAGONTIARNA book every other month, but we’ll see how it sells. If it doesn’t quite sell as well as FROSTBORN/SEVENFOLD SWORD, I might change that to every three months and give myself a chance to do some other things, like the idea for a science fiction epic that’s been bouncing around my head for a while.

For GHOST NIGHT, I don’t actually know how many books it will be because I changed the outline about halfway through GHOST IN THE AMULET.

(SPOILERS for the first four books of GHOST NIGHT follow.)

Originally, in the outline for GHOST NIGHT, I planned to spend the entire series in Ulkaar. Except I just got bored with that idea, and I wanted to write like I did in the first GHOSTS series, where Caina tends to visit a new city every book. So I tossed the original outline and rewrote it (which is why Morgant turns up a third of the way through GHOST IN THE AMULET). I haven’t divided the rest of the new outline into books yet, but the entire series will probably end up at around 9 to 12 books or so.

What’s interesting is that I was looking over the previous GHOSTS books for continuity while writing GHOST IN THE VAULT, and I don’t really think Caina was on an entirely even psychological keel from the end of GHOST IN THE SURGE until the end of GHOST IN THE TOWER. Meeting Ariadne Scorneus was very good for Caina, in that she talked to a female relative she immediately didn’t hate and want to kill. It’s interesting to see how Caina is evolving from a secret agent to a mentor and a person of authority.

Anyway, I hope this will be my publishing schedule for the rest of 2019.

September: GHOST IN THE VAULT

October: DRAGONTIARNA: THIEVES

November: CLOAK OF WOLVES

December: DRAGONTIARNA #3

-JM