After GHOST NIGHT, what next for Caina?

A few people (okay, well, many people) have asked if I intend to start another series with Caina now that GHOST IN THE SUN is out and the GHOST NIGHT series is complete.

Yes, but I don’t know what it will be about.

I have written a lot about Caina, and for a very long time now. I think I wrote the first Caina story in either 2006 or 2007, and since then I’ve written 28 books with her as the main character, for over 2.7 million words, and I don’t even know how many short stories – it has to be at least twenty. I’ve been writing about Mazael Cravenlock for longer, but I’ve only written fifteen books with Mazael as the main character, as opposed to twenty-eight for Caina.

That is a lot of books and a lot of words. It’s also a long time – fourteen years. It’s been a great privilege to be able to do it this long. I want to think for a while about what I will write next with Caina. Let it simmer for a while on the subconscious, so to speak. I’ve heard other writers talk about “refilling the creative well” and I want to let the portion of the well labeled CAINA to refill for a bit.

So when I do go back to writing Caina, I’ll want to write something new for her. It will probably be one of the seven following ideas (or some combination thereof) that I’ve been considering.

1.) Caina and Kylon go back to New Kyre.

We never did find out why the Surge summoned Kylon back to New Kyre, and I never actually did decide why the Surge tried to summon him back. Kylon has spent a lot of time helping Caina, so it might make for an interesting story if Caina had to help him with something and watch his back the way he’s watched hers for the last fifteen books or so.

2.) Caina and Kylon go back to the area near Catekharon and the Free Cities.

The Empire, when it’s not in the grips of a civil war, is very orderly and stable. The area near the Free Cities around Catekharon is much less stable. Big possibilities for adventure. 🙂

I’ve had this idea kicking around in my head for a while that Caina would somehow wind up in command of a mercenary company. The Free Cities, like the Italian city-states of the Renaissance and medieval period, prefer to fight their wars with mercenary companies, and sometimes the mercenary companies prefer to manage the wars themselves for fun and profit. (If you’re curious about the concept, read about the condottiere, the Italian mercenary captains of the late Middle Ages. Cesare Borgia was a typical example of an Italian mercenary captain, and he got speared to death by some knights he was trying to besiege, which was also a typical demise for an Italian mercenary captain.) So there are definite story potentials in that idea.

3.) Caina becomes the guildmaster of a thieves’ guild.

This could be related to #2 above, but I think that would be an interesting plotline.

4.) Something with orcs and serpent men.

Like, Caina’s world has been a human world for its entire history. What would happen if orcs showed up out of the blue one day? How did they get there? What do they want? Why are they attacking everything in sight? And why are these serpent men being so “helpful?”

5.) Cloak & Ghost.

Maybe I should write more CLOAK & GHOST books. I stopped because I got tired of all the emails complaining about the crossover and related questions – but in the four years they’ve been available, these three very short books have brought in five figures’ worth of sales. And that’s even with me giving away the three books for free a bunch of times to newsletter subscribers! So maybe I was just too grumpy about it. (I admit I was very grumpy at the end of 2018 and the start of 2019, which may have affected my judgment.)

6.) A new version of Caina in a new continuity.

I sort of did this already with CLOAK & GHOST.

The thing is that THE GHOSTS has a very specific fantasy setting – no orcs and elves or dwarves, just humans. The reason for that is back when I started writing the books back in the 2000s, all the Big Brain Energy agents and editors at the traditional publishers said that people weren’t interested in fantasy with orcs and elves and dwarves. So I wrote the GHOSTS with no elves or orcs or dwarves, and I hardly ever even use the word “magic” – we have “magi” and “sorcery”, but no wizards. Except 15 years later, my bestselling books are the ones in the FROSTBORN universe with lots of elves and orcs and dwarves, and all the traditional publishers are getting assimilated Borg-style by multinational conglomerates, who then fire all the Big Brain Energy editors and replace them with 20-something recent MFA graduates. In fact, CLOAK GAMES/MAGE has only sixteen books to the 28 of the GHOSTS, and still outsells GHOSTS sometimes, probably because it has elves and orcs and dwarves.

So it might be fun to write a version of Caina who lives in an Empire with elves and orcs and dwarves and dragons and wizards and the other traditional elements of a fantasy story.

7.) Something I haven’t thought of yet.

I cannot expound on this further because I haven’t thought of it yet. 🙂

But I want some time to think about all of this. In 2022 I’m going to focus on DRAGONSKULL and CLOAK MAGE, and hopefully another SILENT ORDER book.

So thanks for reading Caina’s adventures, everyone! 28 books is a lot of books to have read. 🙂

-JM