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Sometimes I think I don't like magic. Or, at least, capital M Magic - the whole paraphernalia of wands and spells and wizards in towers - sometimes doesn't sit well with me. It gets a bit overwhelming, a bit portentous,  even a bit silly and I'm not quite sure where to put myself in thinking about it.  After all, it's messy and illogical, uncontrolled and irrational and it can seriously derail the plot of a book.

And yet, and yet.... I've been a fan of fantasy books as long as I can remember. I started in early childhood with Through the Looking Glass and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,  progressed to The Hobbit and A Wizard of Earthsea and have never stopped. And I love to read about wizards' colleges and orders of mages, about curses and dark conjurings, about books of lore and old rituals, I love books by Sharon Shinn, Katherine Kurtz, and Susanna Clarke. I love books where magic behaves and makes sense. So I do like magic. I just like it to have rules and to know its place.

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Imagine a city. Close your eyes, stretch out your arms, spread your fingertips. What can you smell? Hear? What does the air taste like? Every city is different, every city has its very own DNA. Cambridge (England) where I live now, is the click-click-whirr of bicycle wheels and the grind of aircraft engine testing, the smell of clean stone and institutional cooking. Its air strikes chill in winter, as winds come to rest over it from the distant ice of the Urals: in the summer the dust is full of drying leaves and grass. In the early 1990s, I lived in Dublin, with the hum of traffic travelling wide straight streets and the heady yeast smell of the Guinness brewery and the backdrop of the wind, so constant that once, when it dropped, the sudden silence woke me.

The first thing I knew about Merafi, the city where Living With Ghosts is set, was the feel of its air. It was a brush along my fingertips, a touch on skin and bone, a softness, faintly gritty, faintly sweet. It blew past me, cottony and misted, carrying upon it the faint brown, brackish scent of river water, the dull cold of damp, a hint over all of honeysuckle. As it wound around me, as I listened to it and touched it, it opened out, gave glimpses of what lay beyond and within it. Here it carried the tolling of bells, there a rumble of wooden wheels; here the voices of a market-place, there the clatter of boot-soles on cobbles. It was an old city, then, and a busy one. It was crowded and busy and pre-occupied. As I wandered out into its streets, it ignored me, intent on its own business.

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At the height of his fame, Alexandre Dumas was constantly interrupted by visitors who had come to meet the great man and tell him of their admiration for his works. He was, by all accounts, both generous and sociable in his reception of his fans, and he enjoyed their praise. It pleased him that his books pleased others. But all the same he must sometimes have found all the interruptions frustrating. He wrote as he did everything else in his life - whole-heartedly, exuberantly and prolifically. His most famous books - The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo, are still widely loved and read today. I have a postcard of him over my desk, smiling down at me. I've always been sorry that I have never had the option of sending him a letter, at least, to tell him how much his books have meant to me. I would love to be able to send him a copy of Living with Ghosts.

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I write both fiction and non-fiction. As a result from time to time, I'm asked what the difference is, when writing them. I always say: it's a question of where you start. With non-fiction, you start at the end. Or close to it, at least.  Which sounds, now I think about it, both facile and slightly ridiculous. But for me, anyway, it's true.

It's a matter of process. I write historical non-fiction aimed at both the popular and the academic markets. A book or an article is the final stage in the project. To get myself to that point, I've already spent a considerable amount of time on preparatory work. For the sort of history I specialise in - mediaeval British and particularly Celtic - this usually begins with a collection of source materials composed in the period which I'm intending to study, often written in Old Welsh or Old English or Latin and available in rather elderly editions or even in single manuscripts. The bulk of the work is in reading and studying these sources, working out their relationships to each other and their biases and problems, in seeing what it is they say, hint at and convey. There is also a long period analysing and absorbing secondary materials - books and articles by other scholars, texts from other cultures and such things. By the time I come to the writing stage, the bulk of the work is behind me and I am drawing conclusions. Non-fiction is a culmination, a summation of what has gone before, a tip of an often rather inky iceberg. I tend to write non-fiction fairly fast: I know what needs to go where and how I need to relate it to the rest of what surrounds it. It's a question of ordering and explaining and laying out. The end, or at least the beginning of the end, of that project. Indeed, the last section I tend to write with non-fiction is usually the introduction.

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Gracielis wants to forget his strange abilities. Thiercelin wants his wife to love him. Valdarrien wants to find his lost lover, Iareth, and to live again. And Joyain just wants a quiet life. But in the ancient city of Merafi, you don't always get what you want.

When I was fifteen, I wanted to be a musketeer. Or just maybe a mediaeval philologist. It was all down to the books I'd been reading - The Three Musketeers and Humphrey Carpenter's biography of J. R. R. Tolkien. You see, books can change your life. I'd always wanted to write: indeed, I had by then been writing for almost half my life. But when I was fifteen, I finally realised what kind of writer I wanted to be, a fantasy author. I wanted sword-fights and magic, shape-shifters, ghosts, plots, duels, intricate politics and a dash of romance. And I wanted to get it right. I spent a lot of years practicing, writing stories with ghosts and aliens, intrigues and duels, but it wasn't until I was twenty-eight that I managed to finish something novel-length. By then I was already a published author of non-fiction: I'd had articles in several academic journals and a book about eleventh century Wales under contract. I hadn't managed to be appointed to the musketeers, but I was writing about swordsmen, and I was a working historian specialising in the early middle ages. That first novel - long consigned to my bottom drawer - was full of duels and quarrels and narrow escapes. It wasn't good enough, but I'd found my voice as a fiction writer and I'd laid down the bones of the world I wanted my characters to inhabit.

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Kari Sperring is our guest blogger during the week of March 23rd. If you have any questions for Kari Sperring, add a comment to any of her posts.

Here is more information about Living with Ghosts:

The dazzling debut from a brilliant new fantasy talent.

This highly original, darkly atmospheric fantasy novel immerses readers in a world where ghosts and other malevolent spirits seek entry into mortal realms-invisible to all but those who are not entirely human themselves. Drawn into the ancient city of Merafi, yet barred from entering by an ancient pact sealed in blood, these hungry haunts await their opportunity to break through the magical border and wreak havoc on the city's innocent denizens.

And as a priestess and prince weave a sorcerous plot to shatter the pact and bring ruin on Merafi, only a failed assassin-priest who is now a courtesan, a noble lord married into the ruling family of Merafi, an officer of the city guard, a woman warrior who was the former lover of a now-dead lord, and the ghost of that lord himself stand between Merafi and the tidal wave of magic that may soon bring ruin flooding down upon the city.