After a hiatus of three years, I’ve started writing the third and final Johnny adventure—tentatively titled Johnny Graphic and the Last Ghost. I’d been thinking about the story for a long time, but one can brainstorm and outline only so much.

This story takes Johnny and his friends to Okkatek Island to search for the ancient wizard Morbrec—from whom Percy Rathbone has taken dangerous knowledge. But Johnny, it turns out, has other ideas. Ideas that lead him into great danger.

To refresh your memory (and mine) about how ghosts work in Johnny’s world, here are the Eight Laws of Etheristics:

Ghosts—also known as specters, wraiths, sprites, spirits, phantoms, phantasms, and spooks—are the sentient remains of deceased humans and animals.

Ghosts exist non-corporeally in the forms and with the perquisites in which and with which they died, in a non-material universe parallel but contingent to our own, called “The Ether.”

Ghosts are creatures of free will.

Ghosts may exercise their free will by serving living humans and—and thus endowed by living “effectuators”—assume a degree of corporeality required to perform the tasks requested of them in our material universe.

Ghosts’ corporeality—including use of implements they may have utilized when alive—finds expression as it is needed and vanishes when it is not, often in the blink of an eye. The duration and efficacy of this phenomenon can vary, however, for reasons not yet understood.

Ghosts who are engaged corporeally in any activity that may harm living humans or animals are subject to the same injuries as the living—though they cannot be killed a second time.

Ghosts are free at any time to withdraw from their arrangements in service to practicing etherists, and others with the capacity to see and hear them, but thereby lose the benefits of corporeality.

Practicing etherists and others with the capacity to see and hear etherians are free to end arrangements with them, thereby terminating the ghosts’ benefits of corporeality.