Reader Question Day #32 – the next GHOSTS book and the history of Caina’s Empire

A number of topics this week for Reader Question Day!

First, Manwe asks concerning GHOST DAGGER (the short stand-alone GHOSTS novella I am currently writing):

1). Length-I know it is a novella, but some are alot shorter than others, what are you aiming for page wise?

I ‘m currently on Chapter 7 of 10, and I’m at 13,200 words. So I think it will end up being about 18,000 to 20,000 words. Not terribly long, but not a short story, either.

2.) Price-I don’t mean to be petty here, your books are dirt cheap as is, I’m just curious.

I’m planning to price GHOST DAGGER at $1.99. Granted, pricing is kind of a fluid thing – if the move to add sales taxes to ebook prices gets legislative traction, I might have to raise prices. But for now, I’m planning to put up GHOST DAGGER for $1.99.

The idea for the novella is that since I have a lot of different series ongoing (DEMONSOULED, THE GHOSTS, THE THIRD SOUL) is that GHOST DAGGER will tide GHOSTS readers over until I start writing GHOST IN THE STONE, the next Caina book, sometime around the end of this year (more on that below).

Marsheila Rockwell asks:

But did you LIKE [THE DARK KNIGHT RISES]?

Yes. Yes, I did. I strongly suspect Bane was a metaphor for Vladimir Lenin, so it was fun to watch Batman punch metaphorical Lenin in the face.

Vicky asks:

I was just wondering when Ghost in the Stone will be coming out? I just finished Ghost in the Storm (which I loved!) and at the end of the ebook it said Ghost in the Stone will be coming out later this year, but I was wondering when.

I am planning to start writing GHOST IN THE STONE before the end of the year. Ideally, it would be nice if I could finish writing it before the end of the year, but a lot of stuff in Real Life has come up and I don’t know how it will all resolve.

Basically, this is my writing plan for the rest of 2012:

-Finish SOUL OF SORCERY.

-Finish GHOST DAGGER.

-Finish the UBUNTU DESKTOP BEGINNER’S GUIDE and the WINDOWS 8 BEGINNER’S GUIDE.

-Start writing GHOST IN THE STONE.

So it probably looks like I will start writing GHOST IN THE STONE in November, since I want to get the Ubuntu and Windows 8 books out, if possible, by the end of October (since Windows 8 and the new version of Ubuntu both come out in October, but doing both a Ubuntu book and a Windows 8 book might be overly optimistic). Because I’m starting GHOST IN THE STONE later than I had hoped, that’s why I’m writing GHOST DAGGER right now – a novella for GHOSTS readers until I can get to GHOST IN THE STONE.

I have to ask, I’m pretty sure that the Maatish society they talk about in the series is in reference to Ancient Egypt (because of their worship of cats, their pictographical hieroglyphic writing, and the pyramids talked about in Ghost in the Flame). Did you take influence from other ancient cultures/societies to create Caina’s world, or did you do actual research and make them as accurate as you could to the ancient cultures/societies/empire(s) and then just give them new names? Because the Empire reminds me of the Roman Empire, but I don’t know the history around those times very well.

Good observation! Maatish society is based on ancient Egypt. Given how obsessed the ancient Egyptians were with death (the mummies, the pyramids, the elaborate rituals of burial and the afterlife), I thought it would be interesting to have a fantasy version of ancient Egypt built upon necromancy.

In the backstory, the Saddai (the people who built the pyramids in GHOST IN THE FLAMES) were originally slaves in the Kingdom of the Rising Sun, the Maatish empire. After the Maatish kingdom collapsed, the Saddai migrated north, into the land that would become Caina’s Empire, and founded a kingdom for themselves. So though they never practiced necromancy, they were culturally influenced by the Maatish – the pyramids and so forth, and even the Saddaic language is a corrupted version of the Maatish language.

Caina’s Empire is essentially what the Western Roman Empire would have been if it had survived to the Renaissance. So there are Legions and such, but it’s more technologically and economically developed than the old Roman Empire ever managed.

When it comes to creating cultures in fantasy books, I generally just pick the details from history I find interesting (ancient Egypt and the Maatish, for instance) and go with them.

-JM