Reader Question Day #33

Vicky K asks:

I was just wondering when Ghost in the Stone will be coming out?

Thanks for the kind words about THE GHOSTS books.

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 (a short stand-alone GHOSTS novella).

-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 (THE GHOSTS) 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 indeed 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.

Manwe asks:

Was this just a one time thing (the cover art for SOUL OF SORCERY, or do you plan on buying cover art from now on?

It depends on the book. If I can find a public domain image that will work for the cover, I’ll go with that. If I can’t, I’ll look for a stock image.

If you had to make a case for the Baldur’s Gate series (and the old crpgs in general), what would it be?

They were a great recreation of the tabletop gaming experience married to a excellent story. I liked BALDUR’S GATE so much that when BALDUR’S GATE II came out in August of 2000, I walked four miles (and back again) to get the special collector’s edition with the soundtrack CD. (Now, of course, you can download the whole thing for $9.99 off GOG.com.)

PLANESCAPE: TORMENT was excellent, and one of the best games I’ve ever played, hands-down. (I think it had something like 600,000 words of dialog in the game.) It took me from 1999 to 2005 to finally beat it, but I did.

Compared to modern games, they have rather rough interfaces. But at the time, they were the best interfaces available. BALDUR’S GATE also let you import your character from game to game, so you got to see your character go from a level-1 neophyte to a towering figure of power and legend. (DRAGON AGE ORIGINS compressed that into a single game, effectively.) So they were also quite good at letting you take ownership of the characters and story. PLANESCAPE: TORMENT was particularly good at this, with several different possible variations on the ending.

Windows 8, what do you think of it?

It tries to combine a desktop and a tablet interface in a single OS, which is an interesting idea, but doesn’t really work, because it shortchanges both. The tablet OS is pretty and slick – but from time to time you’ll do something and find yourself dumped back into the desktop interface. (Which, if you’re trying to tap Control Panel radio buttons on a 10 inch touchscreen, is deeply annoying.) Or you’ll be working on the desktop, and do something that pushes you to the tablet interface. And since the Start Menu has been replaced by the tablet-ized Start Screen, anytime you want to, say, launch another application, you get pushed out of the desktop and back to the Start Screen.

So I think this is a huge gamble on Microsoft’s part that will either pay off spectacularly and secure their dominant position, or blow up in their faces in a massive way. Like, in four years we’re all using Ubuntu and iOS kind of collapse. So it will be interesting to see what happens.

-JM