What about Caina? Nadia? Jack March?
I mentioned earlier that I’m going to be working on DRAGONTIARNA and WRAITHSHARD, alternating books every other month, until WRAITHSHARD is done. Then I’ll alternate between DRAGONTIARNA and GHOST NIGHT until both series are done, which should be around the same time.
A few people asked when I’m going to get back to Nadia in CLOAK MAGE and Jack March in SILENT ORDER.
I’ll probably write a CLOAK MAGE book here and there when I want a mental break from epic fantasy – they’re more stand-alone than the rest of my books. (You’ll notice that the CLOAK MAGE books don’t have any epilogues, which is where I usually set up the hook for the next book.) Once I finish some of my other series, I’ll start writing a CLOAK MAGE book every other month and bring the overall arc to an end.
Now, SILENT ORDER.
I’ve actually written about two-thirds of the tenth SILENT ORDER book. But there are two problems with publishing it.
-SILENT ORDER #10 is going to be a bit of a cliffhanger. I don’t want to publish a cliffhanger and then not get back to it for like a year.
-The SILENT ORDER books are overall too short, which makes them hard to market. They’re all in the neighborhood of 50,000 words. In the old days, 50,000 was a perfectly acceptable length for a novel. But the modern genre expectation for science fiction books is around 80,000 to 90,000 words.
The solution to this problem is to start a new series after SILENT ORDER – the SILENT WAR series, which will revolve around the mystery of the Pulse superweapon from the previous books. They’ll be longer, around the 80,000 to 90,000 word range.
So, after GHOST NIGHT is done, then I’ll switch back to SILENT ORDER and SILENT WAR.
Of course, if the Great Virus Meltdown of 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that long-term planning is always tentative. 🙂 We’ll see what happens!
That said, long-term I do want to shift to writing shorter series more frequently. WRAITHSHARD is sort of a test run of that idea and it’s going pretty well. I’d also like to get to a point where I only have two unfinished series going on at any given time (whether with new characters or returning old characters), though it will take me a few years to get there.
As always, thanks for reading!
-JM
Very happy to hear that Dragontiarna and Wraithshard are first on the list to be written
Good to have an idea of what your intentions are even if you”re not currently focusing on my favourite characters. Thanks for the update. Managing expectations is good so people aren”t left wondering.
Like all your series, but especially the Ghosts series. Need more in that series – a lot more.