Start with a young man whose family is murdered by raiders. Throw in a cursed amulet and a vengeful blood mage, magicked monsters, bounty hunters and a nomadic caravan, and you’ve got the backstory for the Jonmarc Vahanian Adventures series of ebook short stories.
Readers first met Jonmarc Vahanian in my Chronicles of the Necromancer series, where he is a strong secondary character but not the main protagonist. Even so, he’s always been a favorite of mine, and he was certainly a reader favorite as the series progressed. In those books, we meet him at age 29, a wary and bitter smuggler with a mysterious and disreputable past who is hired as a bodyguard and guide by four young noblemen who have witnessed the murder of the king and need to get out of the kingdom fast.
Of course, Jonmarc becomes much more than a guide, playing a role as friend, king-maker, lord of Dark Haven and Champion to the Queen of Principality. Over the course of the Chronicles of the Necromancer books and the Fallen Kings Cycle, we watch Jonmarc grow and change, confront enemies from his past, fall in love and step into roles he would never have believed possible.
But the readers always wanted to know—what about before? How did Jonmarc end up becoming the best swordsman in the kingdom? Why did the king of Eastmark place a bounty on his head and issue a death mark? And how did a guy who grew up in the Borderlands, far from the palace in Shekerishet, end up with a blood grudge against a powerful dark mage like Foor Arontala?
Gail Z. Martin
I’d always had three books in my head of Jonmarc’s story. So I decided to serialize the books as a progression of short stories. Each story is complete in itself, but taken together, eventually readers will have Jonmarc’s whole saga. The stories run around thirty pages or more, so there’s time to tell a complex tale. Raider’s Curse, the first story in the series, was an immediate hit.
Fast-forward nearly two years. There are ten stories in what I think of as “Season One” of Jonmarc’s adventures, taking him from the death of his family through his time with Maynard Linton’s caravan, and up to the point where he joins a mercenary group in Principality. Readers of the Chronicles series will recognize the key events, but the short stories tell the full story from Jonmarc’s point of view, giving insights into Jonmarc and other familiar characters like Linton and Alyzza the mad mage that you won’t find in any of the other books.
I’m now working on “Season Two,” which starts off with the story Bad Blood. This group of ten stories will take Jonmarc from his time with the mercenaries through his stint in the Eastmark army and into Nargi. If you’ve read the Chronicles series, you know what that means, but this is your chance to experience it through his eyes.
I am having a blast working on the short stories. It’s a lot of fun to be back in my world of the Winter Kingdoms, since the series is currently on hiatus while I write the Ascendant Kingdoms Saga. (I have six more books planned for Tris and his friends. They will get written at some point.) Serializing the Jonmarc books as short stories is a little different way of writing, since instead of chapters that lead up to a big climax as you’d have in a normal book, each short story is complete on its own yet linked to the others. But it’s been great to revisit old friends and reveal a lot of secrets I’ve kept for many years about who these familiar characters really are.
The short stories are available on Kindle/Kobo/Nook for .99 each, and I post a new short story each month. I hope you’ll check them out, and discover the Winter Kingdom’s most intriguing rogue!
My Days of the Dead blog tour runs through October 31 with never-before-seen cover art, brand new excerpts from upcoming books and recent short stories, interviews, guest blog posts, giveaways and more! Plus, I’ll be including extra excerpt links for stories and books by author friends of mine. And, a special 50% off discount from Double-Dragon ebooks! You’ve got to visit the participating sites to get the goodies, just like Trick or Treat! Details here: www.AscendantKingdoms.com.
Trick or Treat: Enjoy an excerpt from Dark Haven here: http://www.ascendantkingdoms.com/books/chronicles-of-the-necromancer/dark-haven/dark-haven-chapter-one/
And a bonus excerpt from Caves of the Dead, one of my Jonmarc Vahanian Adventures short stories here: http://www.ascendantkingdoms.com/short-stories-and-more/the-jonmarc-vahanian-adventures/jonmarc-vahanian-adventures/an-excerpt-from-caves-of-the-dead/
And a second bonus excerpt from Blood and Iron by my friend Jon Sprunk here: http://www.blackgate.com/black-gate-online-fiction-an-excerpt-from-blood-and-iron/
And a third bonus excerpt from my friend Danielle Ackley-McPhail’s Badass Faeries series here: http://www.badassfaeries.com/excerpts.htm