Reader Question Day #23 – The Tower of Endless Worlds
dw asks:
If you finished GHOST IN THE STORM in April, and you’re going to start SOUL OF SORCERY in June, what are you working on now? Some secret project? 🙂
Currently, I am sitting on my couch, eating Cool Ranch Doritos and watching reruns of “House” on Hulu.
I kid. I never eat Doritos. 🙂
Actually, I am working on my urban fantasy series THE TOWER OF ENDLESS WORLDS. I wrote it back in 2002 to 2003 and sold the first volume to a publisher in 2004. It came out in 2008, but did not do terribly well. In the end, I made just enough money to buy a double Whopper with cheese and a side order of large fries, which I did, and that was that.
However, I just got the rights back to the first book last month. So I’ve launched on a massive editing and revision of the entire series, and hope to have it available in ebook form in early June.
The series will have four books:
#1 – THE TOWER OF ENDLESS WORLDS
#2 – A KNIGHT OF THE SACRED BLADE
#3 – A WIZARD OF THE WHITE COUNCIL
#4 – THE DESTROYER OF WORLDS
The entire thing, once I finish editing, will be about 300,000 words long. So I think each book will land in the 75,000 word range or so, depending on where I put certain scenes.
What is it about, you ask? Here’s the one-sentence premise:
What if someone from 21st century Earth brought guns to Middle-earth?
Think about it. If Sauron had 100 orcs equipped with AK-47s, he could probably have wiped out the combined armies of Gondor and Rohan, and given the Elves a run for their money.
I’ll have a sample chapter from the first book up soon.
Maria Jane asks:
I just read GHOST IN THE STORM and loved it (CHILD OF THE GHOSTS is still my favorite though). but all the GHOSTS books seem to be very different from each other – is that something you do on purpose?
Yes. A writer’s analysis of his own work is often useless, but I think each of THE GHOSTS books lands in a slightly different genre.
CHILD OF THE GHOSTS takes place over a period of seven years, and so is a combined epic fantasy and coming-of-age story. Caina is a child at the beginning of the book, and an adult by the end.
GHOST IN THE FLAMES and GHOST IN THE BLOOD are both combined fantasy and mystery stories. In FLAMES, Caina needs to solve a series of strange murders. In BLOOD, she needs to track down a renegade slave trader.
GHOST IN THE STORM is different from the first three books – most of the plot takes place over just two days. If FLAMES and BLOOD were fantasy mystery novels, then STORM is a fantasy thriller. Caina is dropped immediately into an extremely dangerous situation, and must rely on all her cunning and skill just to keep from getting killed in short order.
I haven’t entirely decided what will happen in GHOST IN THE STONE, the fifth book, but I think it will be a combined fantasy mystery and romance.
Marco writes:
you write ebooks but i bet you never read self-published crap you only read real books that are published by real writers.
Actually, that is incorrect. I read an increasingly large number of self-published books – more on that tomorrow.
-JM
“watching reruns of “House” ”
How that show jumped the shark as many times as it did I’ll never know. It’s basically been the same thing in every episode for eight or nine seasons.
Tower of Endless Worlds sounds interesting, but…I’ve never been a big fan of urban fantasy. Though I like your writing, so I just may give it a shot! Does the series take place only in a fantasy world, or does it go back and forth from there to here? And, the main heroes, are they fantasy characters, or us earthlings?
“GHOST IN THE STONE”
That title sounds…implausable. How exactly can there be a ghost in a stone?! Madness I tell you!
“Does the series take place only in a fantasy world, or does it go back and forth from there to here?”
It cuts back and forth between the fantasy world, Earth, and the place between the worlds.
“And, the main heroes, are they fantasy characters, or us earthlings?”
Of the heroes, it’s about half-and-half between characters from the fantasy world and characters from Earth. Of the two main villains, one is a Warlock from the fantasy world who teaches an American politician black magic, and the other is the American politician, who sells the Warlock guns and bombs to take back to the fantasy world.