Soul of Sorcery – 3,000 copies

SOUL OF SORCERY passed a milestone in March when the book sold its 3,000th copy. To celebrate, let’s have some new cover art:

I had always wanted to do a fantasy novel based on, or at least inspired by, the Battle of Adrianople, and SOUL OF SORCERY drew at least some of its inspiration from that period in Roman history. (You can read more about the process here.) Of course, I also wanted to do a book that had woolly mammoths and griffins, and both of those wound up in SOUL OF SORCERY as well.

SPOILERS FOR THE BOOK BELOW!

SOUL OF SORCERY was inspired by the Battle of Adrianople, but it doesn’t match the history completely. Lord Richard, for instance, might be similar to the Roman Emperor Valens, but he’s nothing like Valens. Additionally, that period of Roman history has no equivalent figure to Mazael Cravenlock. Theodosius the Great ended the Gothic War and made peace with the Thervingi Goths, and he was nothing like Mazael.

One interesting thing about the character of Malaric was that I didn’t plan him – in the outline it said “Lucan hires mercenary captain (decide name later)” and that was that. But when I got to the scene where Lucan meets the “nameless mercenary captain”, his personality sort of just jumped off the page, along with his grudges – and Malaric had a lot of grudges. I like to outline my books thoroughly, but sometimes it’s good to improvise, too.

-JM