Reader Question Day #41 – the origins of Caina and THE GHOSTS

GHOST IN THE STONE came out yesterday, so it’s only appropriate that we have several questions about Caina and THE GHOSTS this week!

Danielle asks:

If you don’t mind me asking how’d you come up with Caina and the whole series?? 

The idea first came to me in 2007, when I saw that Marion Zimmer Bradley’s SWORD & SORCERESS XXII anthology was looking for submissions. I spent several weeks writing a short story called KNIGHT OF SORROWS, and I deliberately wrote it with a very high fantasy, very Arthurian sort of tone, because I thought that was what the editor would go for.

The editor, Elisabeth Waters, rejected it. She said that while it was a good story, it didn’t have the tone she wanted for the anthology. That would have been that…but there was still a week and a half left in the submission period.

Upon later reflection, that was the genesis of Caina and the entire THE GHOSTS series. I was not going to give up, and I was going to do my best to get into that anthology.

So in about three days I wrote and edited a story called BLACK GHOST, RED GHOST about a spy named Caina sent to investigate (and kill, if necessary) a treasonous Lord Governor. I made sure it has exactly the opposite tone of KNIGHT OF SORROWS, and that Caina had a much harder and more competent personality than the main character in KNIGHT OF SORROWS. (Amusingly, I later found out that in his “Inferno”, Dante named one of the regions of hell “Caina”.) After I finished it at about 3 AM or so on the third day, I sent it in, Ms. Waters bought it for the anthology, and that was that.

(Side note: I wound up selling KNIGHT OF SORROWS to a small-press magazine called MINDFLIGHTS a whilte later – you can still read it here.)

In 2008, SWORD AND SORCERESS XXIII opened up for submissions. I wrote another story with Caina called STOLEN GHOSTS, sent it in, and Ms. Waters bought that, too. I’ve been writing short stories for SWORD & SORCERESS ever since – this year’s story, GHOST PYRES, is the sixth (sixth!) one I’ve written for SWORD & SORCERESS.

After STOLEN GHOSTS, I thought I had a good thing going with Caina, so I decided to write a novel about her. In late 2008 and early 2009 I wrote GHOST IN THE FLAMES, and in later 2009 I wrote GHOST IN THE BLOOD. My idea was that I would try to sell GHOST IN THE FLAMES, with GHOST IN THE BLOOD ready as a sequel in case FLAMES did well.

I did not have any luck selling GHOST IN THE FLAMES – I have an entire spreadsheet tracking many, many rejections from various agents and publishers. By 2010, I decide to try a different tack, and I wrote what would become CHILD OF THE GHOSTS – sort of a prequel to GHOST IN THE FLAMES and GHOST IN THE BLOOD.

However, by the end of 2010, I wasn’t tired of writing, but I was very tired of trying to get published. I started to think that CHILD OF THE GHOSTS would be the last novel I would write, and that I would focus instead on writing my technology blog, which at least made me money via the magic of Google Adsense.

Then in December of 2010 I got myself a Kindle…which tracks nicely into the next phase of our story, continued in answer to Vicki’s question below.

Vicki asks about publishing THE GHOSTS:

I’m curious as to how long you had been writing before you were first published? Did you have to look around a lot for someone to publish your books? I am an aspiring writer myself, and I hope (someday) to get something of mine published. 

I started writing in 1998, had my first novel, DEMONSOULED, published in 2005, my second novel, WORLDS TO CONQUER, published in 2008, and never got another book contract after that. I spent a lot of time trying to sell my additional books to various agents and publishers, and I have (as mentioned above) this fairly massive spreadsheet tracking these hundreds of rejections. By the end of 2010 or so, I had finally concluded that I was wasting my time with fiction, and that I would stick to writing my technology blog.

Then after Thanksgiving of 2010, I bought myself a third-generation Kindle, and  I thought to myself “there has GOT to be a way to make money off this thing.” Previously, I had no knowledge of or experience with ebooks, so I started to read up on ebooks. Specifically, on self-publishing. By April of 2011 I decided to self-publish DEMONSOULED (I had gotten the rights back) and its unpublished sequel SOUL OF TYRANTS as ebooks, just to see what would happen. After I did that, I decided to write one more novel, a sequel to SOUL OF TYRANTS called SOUL OF SERPENTS. That way I would have a proper fantasy trilogy, which I could mention wistfully from time to time as I worked on my technology blog.

Well, I finished SOUL OF SERPENTS in August, and made DEMONSOULED a permanently free ebook in September. And…it started to take off.  People were reading DEMONSOULED, and liking it enough that they bought SOUL OF TYRANTS and SOUL OF SERPENTS. As in, paid actual physical money for them. After all those years of rejections, this was just mind-boggling.

Still is.

So I did the same thing with THE GHOSTS. I posted CHILD OF THE GHOSTS, GHOST IN THE FLAMES, GHOST IN THE BLOOD, and made CHILD OF THE GHOSTS free. They did well enough that I then wrote GHOST IN THE STORM and now GHOST IN THE STONE in 2012.

The whole thing has sort of snowballed from there.

I am extremely grateful to everyone who has bought a book.

One final point: Publishing, in my opinion, used to have two challenges – getting published, and then finding an audience. (Getting published is no guarantee of finding an audience – look at how quickly many writers disappear after their first book doesn’t sell well.) Nowadays, publishing is easy. It’s just a button on a webpage. Finding an audience, however, remains a challenge.

Do you do a lot of research for your novels, or is it something where you just sit down and write? How much editing do you have to do before the book is published?

For my nonfiction computer books, I do a bit of research to confirm that everything works. It’s no good telling someone how to install a print server if one of the commands will wipe their hard drive.

For my novels, I don’t do very much research. Generally, I try to pick a historical “feel” and go for that. Like, Caina’s Empire is a cross of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance, the setting of DEMONSOULED is a bit like late Carolingian France, and so forth.

I edit the books to make them shorter and tighter – I want to say as much as possible using as few words as possible. For GHOST IN THE STONE, the rough draft was 96,000 words, and the final draft turned out to be just over 90,000.  

Vicki asks concerning the cover for GHOST IN THE STONE:

I have a question with regards to the cover of the book: How come the girl on the cover is holding a sword? Caina uses mainly knives, and stealth, yet the character on the cover is conveying more of a Western stereotypical ninja feel to me. Was that a personal design choice, or something your publisher decided on? 

Basically, it’s because artists are expensive.  :)

The idea is that when you pick up a book, the cover is supposed to say “this is X kind of book”. So a book with a cover showing a man in a leather jacket with a gun and a police badge is probably some sort of mystery novel or thriller, while a book with a cover showing a partially-undressed man in 18th century costume holding a swooning woman in a corset is probably some sort of period romance. If the cover sends the wrong signals, people get ticked – if someone buys a book that shows a man with a badge and a gun, they’ll be pretty annoyed if it turns out to be a period romance or a book of crockpot recipes or something (or a period romance about crockpot recipes).

So for the Caina books, we wanted covers that said “this is a book about a female spy and assassin who has adventures”, and I think the covers send that message. Eventually we’d like to hire an artist for custom covers, but we’re not there quite yet.

-JM