Book Notes: Demonspawn

I'm going to start writing notes on each of my books. This first post is on my novel Demonspawn, which I think is one of my better novels.

• I wrote Demonspawn waaaay back in 1998. It took me about nine months total to write, working at a lazy pace, taking a few days and sometimes even weeks or months off at a time.
• At the time I was writing it, I was really into “The Book of Words” series by J.V. Jones. In Demonspawn, I think I actually was trying to sort of match Jones’s writing style. It’s been a long time since I wrote the book, but as I recall, Jones’s series heavily inspired my own book.
• The character of Nisiter was inspired by Jones’s own character Baralis.
• The two guards in Demonspawn, Carl and Dale, were inspired by Bodger and Grift, two similar characters in Jones’s series. I originally meant them to be just two generic background characters, but they sort of took on a life of their own whenever they showed up in the book. I liked their comic interplay so much that they became my two favorite characters in the book.
• By the time I finished writing Demonspawn, I had intentions to write a sequel featuring the characters of Carl and Kala, the Shazaran slave girl. In Demonspawn, they’re last seen heading south together, and the sequel would have followed their adventures in the south. But I never got around to writing the sequel.
• I was having a hard time coming up with a name for the character of Nisiter. I finally settled on “Nisiter,” as a play on the word “sinister.” I wanted the character to come across mainly as a sinister man, so I finally just twisted the word around and came up with Nisiter. 
• My favorite scene in the book is when Captain Thasus is castrated, and his men take him to the hideous old witch woman Druza, who cauterizes his wound, equips him with a makeshift catheter, and demands that his men sleep with her as payment. This was an unforeseen development that just came to me as I was writing, but which became a major turning point in the story arc of Thasus.