Jonathan Moeller's Blog, page 103

OTHERWORLDS anthology now available!

I am pleased to report that the OTHERWORLD anthology, a collection of 23 of my short stories from before the era of self-publishing, is now available! You can get it at Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon DE, Amazon CA, Amazon AU, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, and Smashwords.

It will be $0.99 USD until whenever DRAGONSKULL: SWORD OF THE SQUIRE comes out, but after that it will go up to $4.99 because it’s so long, so now’s the best time to get it!

Here’s the description:

Dragons, knights, wizards, monsters, and more! Visit other worlds of fantasy in this short story collection!

Combined for the first time in one volume are the OTHERWORLDS series of fantasy and science fiction short stories from Jonathan Moeller, for 23 total stories.

In these stories, a knight hunts for his wife, kidnapped by wicked elves.

A dragon wishes to live quietly in Chicago, but ancient enemies will not leave him in peace.

An emissions-free car promises to revolutionize global transport, but the cost might be more than mankind can pay.

A telepath realizes the government agency helping her does not have her best interests at heart.

All these tales and more await you in OTHERWORLDS.

-JM

Super Castlevania IV!

It’s been nearly thirty years since the game came out, but I’ve finally, finally finished Super Castlevania IV.

(As an aside, I like how the game’s proper title isn’t Castlevania IV, but SUPER! Castlevania IV.)

This was a hard, hard game. I played it in the Castlevania Collection version for Switch, and I am frankly amazed anyone ever beat the game without using the Save State feature.

But I have to admit platform games really aren’t my thing. I generally prefer games that are based more on math than how fast you can press buttons. Like, if I hover my cursor over an enemy orc, and the game tells me that my pikeman unit has a 68% chance to hit the orc, that’s more my kind of game.

That said, I do like platform games that capture my imagination. (The Mario games I just like because they’re cheerful and silly.) But Castlevania definitely caught my imagination – the lone hero, armed with only his trusty whip and few secondary weapons, storming Dracula’s castle of horrors, battling Dracula’s dark legions and lieutenants, and then a final epic duel with the Count himself. Dracula in Bram Stoker’s novel wishes he was as formidable as the Castlevania version of Dracula. Novel Dracula spends all his time skulking in dark basements and stalking Victorian maidens, and his chief lieutenant is an escaped mental patient who eats bugs. Castlevania Dracula can teleport and shoot fireballs, and his lieutenants include the Mummy, Frankenstein’s monster, werewolves, crazy wizards, and dragons.

Anyway, the Castlevania games definitely caught my imagination. (Metroid did, too, once I finally had a chance to play the Metroid games in 2019.) Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest is still one of my favorite games, even though it’s a bit of a flawed gem.

So after almost thirty years, I’m pleased to have finally finished Super Castlevania IV.

Though one of the common jokes about video games is that Mario is caught in a time loop, fighting Bowser over and over again trillions of times. But maybe it’s the other way around – maybe Dracula, as punishment for his crimes, is stuck in the Castlevania games, and he gets beaten by some guy with a whip and a throwing axe over and over again…

-JM

sign up for my newsletter and get a short story!

Sign up for my new-release newsletter, and you’ll get a free ebook copy of the short story THE FIRST RIDING when DRAGONSKULL: SWORD OF THE SQUIRE comes out next month.

-JM

OTHERWORLDS: The anthology

People have been asking for this on and off for years, but next week I will finally publish an anthology of the OTHERWORLDS short stories.

OTHERWORLDS, if you haven’t heard of it, is a series of short stories I published back in 2014 to test out Kindle Unlimited, which was new at the time. (The experiment really didn’t work.) They were short stories I wrote back before the pre-Kindle era, before 2010 or so, and a pretty random assortment – some fantasy, some science fiction, some that were outright horror.

The TALES OF THE SHIELD KNIGHT anthology did a lot better than I expected, so I finally combined the OTHERWORLDS stories to make an anthology of 23 short stories. I’ll follow the same approach as with the TALES anthology – for the first week the OTHERWORLDS anthology will be $0.99, and then after a week it will go up to $4.99 because it’s really long.

So if all goes well, next week you can get the OTHERWORLDS anthology for $0.99 USD at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, and Smashwords.

Here’s the book description!

Dragons, knights, wizards, monsters, and more! Visit other worlds of fantasy in this short story collection!

Combined for the first time in one volume are the OTHERWORLDS series of fantasy and science fiction short stories from Jonathan Moeller, for 23 total stories.

In these stories, a knight hunts for his wife, kidnapped by wicked elves.

A dragon wishes to live quietly in Chicago, but ancient enemies will not leave him in peace.

An emissions-free car promises to revolutionize global transport, but the cost might be more than mankind can pay.

A telepath realizes the government agency helping her does not have her best interests at heart.

All these tales and more await you in OTHERWORLDS.

-JM

DRAGONTIARNA OMNIBUS ONE on Hello Books today!

I am pleased to report that DRAGONTIARNA OMNIBUS ONE is featured on Hello Books today! (Today being 9/24/2021.) If you haven’t read it already, you can get it for $0.99 USD today.

I think the DRAGONTIARNA series has some of the best epic fantasy battle scenes I’ve written, particularly in DRAGONTIARNA: LEGIONS, DRAGONTIARNA: DEFENDERS, DRAGONTIARNA: STORMS, and DRAGONTIARNA: WARDEN.

-JM

DRAGONSKULL: SWORD OF THE SQUIRE rough draft done and cover!

I am pleased to report that the rough draft of DRAGONSKULL: SWORD OF THE SQUIRE is done! 86,100 words in 22 days, with two 10k word days in the mix.

Additionally, I wrote 8,800 words to finish the book, and then 1,200 words of short story, making yesterday my 8th 10,000 word day of 2021!

Next up is THE FIRST RIDING, a short story that will take place shortly before the events of SWORD OF THE SQUIRE. Subscribers to my new-release newsletter will get a free ebook copy of THE FIRST RIDING when SWORD OF THE SQUIRE comes out.

I don’t usually share the cover image until I start editing, but I said if I finished the rough draft by the end of the week I would share it, so here is the image below!

If all goes well, DRAGONSKULL: SWORD OF THE SQUIRE will be out sometime in October.

-JM

another 10,000 words of DRAGONSKULL: SWORD OF THE SQUIRE!

Wrote 10,000 words of DRAGONSKULL: SWORD OF THE SQUIRE yesterday, which now puts me on Chapter 16 of 20.

This is my seventh 10,000 word day of 2021!

(I have to admit, I had so many 10k word days in 2020 that I made this banner for them, and then I didn’t have any for a real long time in 2021, which struck me as a classic example of Hubris meeting Nemesis. But I am pleased I’ve gotten to use it twice for DRAGONSKULL: SWORD OF THE SQUIRE!)

-JM

Godzilla vs Kong!

I finally had a chance to see GODZILLA VS KONG. The movie promised that Godzilla would fight Kong, and it delivered! There was a plot, but it was mostly there to support the monster fight.  Let’s be honest, we’re all there to see the giant monkey fight the radiation dinosaur. The plot revolved around an evil corporation building MechaGodzilla for reasons of, well, evil. The evil corporation also had terrible security, and was easily infiltrated by two teenagers and a guy with a conspiracy podcast. You’d think that after spending trillions of dollars to build MechaGodzilla, they would invest in better security, but I guess not. Then again, no one asked the obvious question of how building MechaGodzilla would increase shareholder value. Anyway, since the evil corporation’s evil plan was not well thought out, naturally MechaGodzilla goes berserk, and Kong and Godzilla have to team up to battle the robotic menace.  A couple of times I thought I could see Kong thinking “back in the 1930s I was stop-motion, and now I’m CGI and fighting a radiation dinosaur with a giant crystal axe, what just happened?” Anyway, this was a thoroughly entertaining monster movie, and you could tell that all the actors were trying really hard. As mentioned above, the plot was a bit thin, but we were there for the monster fight, not the plot, and there was LOTS of monster fighting.-JM

An important Christmas recommendation

I am pleased to report that CLOAK OF BLADES is now available in both paperback and hardcover. You can now get it in ebook, audiobook, trade paperback, and hardcover.

In that vein, I have a recommendation about the Christmas holidays. Sometimes people like to buy my books in paperback as Christmas presents, which is nice (and in my opinion makes for an excellent gift!), but if you want to do that this year and have them arrive in time for Christmas, I strongly recommend you do that right now.

The reason for that is all the supply chain disruption has really slowed down printing times, and there are general shortages of paper and printer time. Of course, the larger reason for that is that for the past several decades a bunch of Experts with Big Brain energy, advanced degrees from Ivy League institutions, and really complicated spreadsheets thought it would be super duper great if the United States moved most of its manufacturing to other countries and left no backup capacity built into the system. Their complicated spreadsheets and advanced degrees said it was a good idea! There was no way, for example, that some sort of unforeseen global natural disaster could screw up the supply chains. The spreadsheets said that was impossible!

(A totally true fact: in the Bible, during the Ten Plagues, God was originally going to send a plague of Experts with advanced degrees from Ivy League institutions on Egypt, but showed mercy and instead sent hailstones and locusts because they’re less destructive.)

Fortunately, ebooks are unaffected by the disruption. That said, people don’t like to give ebooks as gifts. So if you want to buy my books (or any books, really) as Christmas presents, it’s probably better to order them sooner rather than later.

-JM

 

 

DRAGONSKULL: SWORD OF THE SQUIRE progress update

I needed to travel a bunch the past week, so progress on DRAGONSKULL: SWORD OF THE SQUIRE has been slow.

But! I had a 10,000 word day this week, and I’m now on Chapter 12 of 20. Over halfway there! The book is still on track to be out sometime in October.

Let’s close out the week with another excerpt:

###

“Humans are not welcome here. What is your purpose? Speak quickly!”

When Gareth had been a child, his father had ordered him to learn the orcish tongue. Gareth had absolutely hated the lessons, preferring instead to spend his time at swordplay and horsemanship and the other skills of the knight. Latin was the common tongue of the realm of Andomhaim, and so why should Gareth learn any other language? His father had responded that orcish and its dialects was the common language of practically every other nation and tribe outside the lands ruled by the heirs of Arthur Pendragon, and Gareth would be well-served by learning it.

At the time, Gareth had been frustrated and annoyed.

Suddenly he was very grateful that his father had insisted.

-JM