Where did the stormdancers in THE GHOSTS come from?

Yesterday on Facebook I mentioned that the historical Greek Fire employed by the Byzantine Empire was the inspiration for the Alchemists’ Hellfire in GHOST EXILE, so someone asked where I had gotten the idea for the stormdancers.

Now that is a long story.

The original inspiration was wuxia movies like CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON and HERO, movies that feature their protagonists performing physically impossible martial arts, usually explained by the heroes’ devotion to a secret school of sword fighting or virtuous discipline.

Now, a Very Long Time ago, I saw a call for submissions for an anthology of Asian-themed fantasy stories, so I wrote a story about a wuxia-style warrior trying to free a prince from a clan of shadow-wielding ninjas.* As an explanation for the warrior’s powers, I came up with the “stormdancer”, who used elemental magic of air to go faster and elemental magic of water to become stronger. I actually sold the story, but the company publishing the anthology went under and mutated into one of those scam places selling overrated editorial services, so that was that.

After that, a Slightly Less Long Time Ago, I saw another anthology for “fortress” themed short stories, so I wrote THE FALL OF KYRACE.  I’d already thought up Kyrace as sort of an ancient Greece/Atlantis type setting, and I imported the stormdancer concept into the story. (In the story, the stormdancer Rykon and the stormsinger Agia are Kylon’s distant ancestors.) The story was rejected for that anthology, and by then I was becoming thoroughly disgusted with traditional publishing (this was well before the Kindle), so I never bothered trying to sell the story anywhere else.

But! Jump forward a couple of years to 2011, and the Kindle and ebooks came along, and I was looking at continuing a second series since I realized I couldn’t write just DEMONSOULED books. Since I had already written three GHOSTS books at that point, it seemed logical to continue that series. I needed a villain for what would become GHOST IN THE STORM, and so I thought of the Kyracians. THE FALL OF KYRACE explained the enmity between the Empire and the Kyracians, and so I thought up Andromache as the main villain of the book, with Kylon as sort of her thuggish enforcer.

Except Kylon turned out to be more honorable than I had originally envisioned, and he and his sister Andromache were not the main villains of the story after all – Sicarion and the Moroaica were. And Caina and Kylon clearly clicked, so reader demand brought him back, and here we are.

So I suppose it’s appropriate that Kylon is still around thirteen books later – I started thinking about the ideas that would become the stormdancers and hence his character a long time ago.

-JM

*Yes, I am aware that wuxia is Chinese and ninjas are Japanese.