Writing Sword-fights and Fantasy, by Kari Sperring

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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.

Living with Ghosts was the second novel I finished. And finished again and then again. It took me a lot more years to get it into the shape I wanted. Along the way I wrote a lot more non-fiction plus a handful of short stories, some of which were published. The non-fiction works are the books of my knowledge and training, but Living with Ghosts is the book of my fascinations. I realised fairly early on that I was writing a homage to Alexandre Dumas, but despite that, I didn't notice I had four main characters until quite late: somehow in my head they were three, plus the dead one. He had been the hero of that first novel I finished and I'd killed him off on the last page. But he wouldn't go away.  He haunted me - as he haunts Gracielis in the book - until I realised what the book must be about and the shape it needed to take. It was the book that would pull together all my various interests and obsessions. There's a city under threat and a series of hauntings, mist that bites, court soirées and intellectual salons, an archaeological dig and a masquerade, glimpses of a Celtic-type clan-based culture and endogamous marriage practices (that derives from my non-fiction side) and, yes, sword-fights. It's as close as I can get it to the book I really wanted to write, all those years before. Have I got it right? I don't know. I hope so, but that's for you to tell me.

Kari Sperring, Living With Ghosts, fantasy, DAW Books, Penguin Books