The Spriggan Mirror

A Legend of Ethshar

Welcome to the page for The Spriggan Mirror, which is the ninth Ethshar novel. This page is up to date as of January 25, 2007.

Copyright 2005, 2007 by Lawrence Watt Evans.
Published in trade paperback January 2007 by Wildside Press, ISBN 0-8095-5672-3, or 978-0-8095-5672-4, with cover art by Charles Bernard.
Published in hardcover April 2007 by Wildside Press, ISBN 0-8095-0046-9.
Available in electronic form in the archived second issue (February 2006) of Son and Foe, an electronic journal.
First publication was as a reader-supported serial on this website -- see "The Spriggan Experiment".

The Spriggan Mirror is a sequel to Ithanalin's Restoration and With A Single Spell, but should still stand on its own.

I conducted an experiment in online serial publication with it, which was more successful than I expected. It brought in much more money than I expected, though still far short of what Tor pays me for a novel, and it was fun. I repeated the experiment with The Vondish Ambassador in the fall of 2006 and into 2007, and expect to continue with others. These serialized novels will all, if all goes as planned, have ink-on-paper editions from Wildside Press.

The premise of The Spriggan Mirror is simple enough. In With A Single Spell I introduced magical little creatures called spriggans that are created by a magic mirror that's been lost somewhere in the mountains of the Small Kingdoms. As long as the mirror is out there it keeps producing more spriggans, so their numbers are steadily increasing.

Spriggans are drawn to wizardry, and have a habit of getting underfoot at inopportune moments, interrupting spells, knocking over delicate equipment, and otherwise causing trouble.

Eventually, at the urging of Ithanalin and various other people, the Wizards' Guild decides that something must be done about this nuisance. Since Tobas of Telven accidentally created the mirror and is therefore responsible, he and his wives, Karanissa and Alorria, are instructed to deal with the matter.

Tobas knows what the mirror looks like, and roughly where it was last seen -- but that doesn't mean finding it will be easy, even with magical aid, so he hires an expert, a man named Gresh who has made a career of finding things for wizards.

And nobody said that dealing with it once it's found would be easy, either.

Some relevant links:

Son and Foe.
Some background on the novel's history.
A sample chapter.
A JPEG of the cover of the Wildside edition.
Covers that never were...
A FAQ about Ethshar.
The general World of Ethshar page.
An Introduction to Ethshar.
Exits.

Some Background:

Although Tor and I canceled the contract, I decided to try an experiment with this project. You can still read the first chapter or two online in the original format, but the project has moved well beyond that now.

The experiment was a success, I wrote the whole novel, and sure enough, publishers showed up. Not the major New York houses, but publishers.

The novel appeared in the February 2006 of the electronic journal Son and Foe, and was published by Wildside Press in trade paperback as a January 2007 release. (I had previously negotiated a deal with FoxAcre Press, but the Wildside deal has supplanted that. I went with Wildside because they were able to offer more money, better promotion, and the advantage of having most of the Ethshar series in one place; FoxAcre was understanding and released me from our agreement.)

And here are a few background facts about the novel:

It was obvious as soon as I wrote With A Single Spell that eventually I would need to deal with the spriggan mirror, but I wasn't in any hurry to do so. Originally this was way down on my list of projects.
When I let visitors to my webpages vote on which Ethshar novel I should write next, The Spriggan Mirror took an immediate lead and kept it throughout the voting. By the time I sold the proposal and took it off the list of possibilities it had garnered fifty-seven votes, sixteen more than its closest competitor, so I figured I really ought to write it next in the series.
This meant I needed to come up with an actual story to tell. I had originally assumed that my protagonist would be Tobas of Telven -- but then on a boring flight home from California I found myself devising a new character, who I eventually named Gresh. By the time the plane landed I knew a great deal about Gresh and his eleven (I later added a twelfth) sisters, and his business supplying wizards with hard-to-find ingredients for their spells, and after awhile it all clicked -- this, not Tobas, was the hero of The Spriggan Mirror! And as soon as I'd decided that I knew most of the plot.
The ending I had in mind when I started writing came about as the result of a phone conversation with Kurt Busiek, and chatting with my kids about the project. It was modified significantly by the time I finished the story, though.
I had a deal with Tor on this, but then sales figures for Night of Madness and Ithanalin's Restoration came in, and were somewhat disappointing -- not bad, but well below what my other Tor titles were selling. Therefore, Tor asked me to shelve the Ethshar series and concentrate on other projects.
I wrote the first four chapters before the deal fell through, but no more than that; the real story had hardly even started. When I started the serialization, I honestly didn't think I'd ever need more than those four chapters, but I'm very glad I was wrong.
I originally estimated that The Spriggan Mirror would run about 100,000 words. It actually only came to 90,000.

And here's one final extra: Covers that never were...

The Spriggan Experiment
Chapter 1
Chapter 2

The Legends of Ethshar
The Misenchanted Sword
With A Single Spell
The Unwilling Warlord
Taking Flight
The Blood of A Dragon
The Spell of the Black Dagger
Ithanalin's Restoration
Night of Madness
''Portrait of a Hero''
''The Guardswoman''
''Sirinita's Dragon''
''The Bloodstone''
''Night Flight''
''Weaving Spells''
''Ingredients''
Other Exits

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The electronic edition is available from:

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