Here's where you can find information about Ethshar novels I haven't written yet.
The novels listed below have not yet been written, and aren't sold. Some of them have been started, but how far they've gotten varies immensely; some are little more than a title and concept, while others are outlined in detail and have the opening written. Except for The Vondish Ambassador, these don't yet have separate pages; instead, there's a brief description for each below. You can click on any title to jump down to that bit.
Incidentally, it's possible that one or two of these may tell you more than you want to know about previous books in the series, since some of them are direct sequels to previous volumes.
At the end of the list are a few quick comments about other possibilities.
I used to have a form that let readers vote on which one they most wanted me to write next, but that seems pointless now, and was attracting spammers, so I've removed it. I'm still going to list the final vote totals below, though.
And I'm now listing a couple of ideas that weren't on the form. At least one of them really should have been, I just didn't remember it when I was setting the form up.
Anyway, you can see what I was planning, even if none of these ever happen. Enjoy!
The Spriggan Mirror has its own page, and you can get more details there, but it's about the guy who gets hired to find and destroy the mirror (as seen in With A Single Spell) that creates spriggans.
--80 votes before being withdrawn
In The Unwilling Warlord, a youth from Ethshar inadvertantly became the ruler of the newly-created Empire of Vond, in the southern portion of the Small Kingdoms. Now he's trying to open diplomatic ties with the Hegemony of the Three Ethshars.
The question is: Why? Most of the Small Kingdoms never bother...
This one moved up strongly in the voting after I said I wouldn't write The Final Calling until after The Vondish Ambassador was out of the way, and that's why I chose it as my second reader-supported online serial.
--70 votes
The end of warlockry as we know it, once and for all -- but is it the end of warlockry entirely? This is where we finally see what happened to warlocks who heard the Calling -- and it's probably not what you thought.
I'd always expected this one to be the top vote-getter, but it got off to a slow start. From comments people made, I think readers made some faulty assumptions about how this was all going to play out. Let me assure you, this was not intended to be the final volume in the series! Also, while it might be considered a sequel to Night of Madness and The Vondish Ambassador (and maybe others), it would, like all Ethshar novels, stand on its own.
Notice that I have no intention of writing it until after The Vondish Ambassador, though.
--140 votes
As explained in The Misenchanted Sword, Valder the Innkeeper no longer ages. To hide this fact, he owns two inns: The Inn At the Bridge, a day's journey north of Ethshar of the Spices, and the Crimson Wolf, in the Passes in Sardiron. Every so often he switches which one he runs himself, then later returns to the other claiming to be his own son. In 5230 Y.S. or so he's just arrived at the Crimson Wolf when an early blizzard leaves him snowbound with an assortment of troublemakers, several of them magicians.
I've had this one in the works for a long time, but as it's a relatively low-key story I haven't pursued it very actively. It's recently moved up strongly in the voting -- I'm not sure why.
--110 votes
The soft-hearted buyer of a dead wizard's mansion tries to make amends for the wizard's long-ago actions, and discovers that old magic can still cause trouble. He also discovers that that there was a reason the former owner had kept those strange statues in the garden behind the house. I expect this to tie in with some previous novels, but I'm not entirely sure yet exactly how.
--63 votes
Not long after the Great War, in an area once controlled by the Northern Empire, a kid befriends a mysterious stranger in the woods beyond the family farm -- a stranger who isn't exactly human.
This is the single oldest proposal I haven't sold, and the only one on this list that was ever submitted to Lester del Rey. At least once I included it in a batch of proposals, but he always picked one of the others to buy.
It's possible this will wind up a novella, rather than a full-length novel.
--42 votes
When a wizard mispronounces a name an innocent is accidentally targeted by a vengeance spell, and must find a way to elude and eventually defeat the supernatural creature pursuing him.
This one was thought up while working on Night of Madness -- I was talking with my kids about the scene I was working on, and options I was considering for what might befall a character, and I mentioned the spell called the Rune of the Implacable Stalker.
They loved the sound of it, and insisted there should be a novel about it. So there will be. They want it ASAP, but so far most of the voters out there haven't agreed with them.
--41 votes
Remember her from With A Single Spell and Taking Flight? No? Well, I do, and here's her life story.
She was born to a respectable Ethsharitic family, then orphaned as a girl of ten, and left to fend for herself. She refuses to settle for any of the customary ways to survive, and instead goes adventuring in the Small Kingdoms, but finds she's not the sort of adventurer most people were looking for.
I've had this one planned since I wrote With A Single Spell, back in '85. I like the title character a lot.
--29 votes
A rather callous wizard buys a slave to test his spells on, and gradually realizes that there's more to this slave than he thought.
--27 votes
A young girl in the Small Kingdoms idolizes Irith the Flyer (last seen in Taking Flight), and when she finds a feather from Irith's wing she decides to return it to its owner. It's the excuse she needs to flee her abusive father and go looking for her hero.
She finds the outside world isn't quite what she expected -- and neither is Irith.
I'm a bit disappointed that this one did so poorly in the voting, as it's one of my own favorites. But then, if I ever do write any of these, I'm not actually bound by the votes.
--10 votes
At the end of The Blood of a Dragon, Dumery and Aldagon planned to go into business selling dragon's blood. In Dumery of the Dragon they do exactly that, and discover that their competition isn't going to make it easy for them...
This one's been planned since 1991, so I have no idea why I left it off the voting list.
--not on form
When a well-known sorcerer dies, a pair of con men decide to ''help out'' his widow in disposing of the various magical devices and talismans he left.
It would probably have worked out better if they knew more about magic.
I haven't always planned this one as a novel; at one point I actually started to write it as a short story for an anthology that had invited me to submit something.
I discovered that it didn't want to be a short story; I sent the anthology something else instead and added this to the list of unwritten novels.
--not on form
A simple fire-lighting spell goes wrong, resulting in a permanent magical phenomenon -- and various people look for a way to cash in on it.
--not on form
I included an option to vote for ''Other'' on the form, and more than a score of people did so, but I haven't found any of their suggestions sufficiently inspiring to be added to my list. Some were clever; a few were ideas I was already planning to use somewhere. Some were not clever at all. Some were strange; a couple of people clearly see Ethshar very, very differently from how I see it.
The most common suggestions were for more about sorcery, more about Fendel the Great, and more about the Great War. More about sorcery, sure -- it'd be scattered through several of the novels listed above. More about Fendel -- well, he was going to appear again, but I wasn't planning to make him the lead character anywhere; it's just not his style.
And as for more about the Great War -- naaah. I know a lot more about it than I've put into the stories, but I prefer to keep it in the background.
That's all the novels I know of that I have thought out in any detail at the moment, though if I dug through my old files I might find more. I also have a list of things that I want to use in stories sooner or later other than actual plot ideas. Some of them might wind up as subplots, or in short stories, but some might become yet more novels.
Readers have asked whether I'll be telling any stories about sorcerers, or theurgists, or demonologists, or witches, or ritual dancers, or scientists...
Maybe. I don't know. I think when I finish with the list above I'll be done with warlocks, but there's still more to be said about wizards and some of the other odd groups cluttering up the World.
We'll see.
That's it -- here are some exits:
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