Jonathan Moeller's Blog, page 105

TALES OF THE SHIELD KNIGHT now available!

I am pleased to report that the short story collection TALES OF THE SHIELD KNIGHT is now available! It contains all 17 SHIELD KNIGHT short stories, and you can get it for $0.99 USD at Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon DE, Amazon CA, Amazon AU, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple Books, Google Play, and Smashwords.

Since I’ve given all of the SHIELD KNIGHT short stories away for free to my newsletter subscribers at various times over the last four years, the anthology will be at $0.99 USD through Labor Day Weekend. However, because it’s really long (the paperback version’s going to be like 560 pages) it will go up to $4.99 after Labor Day.  So through 9/6/2021 will be the best time to get TALES of THE SHIELD KNIGHT.

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Knights, wizards, thieves, dragons, and epic heroes!

Combined for the first time in one collection are all seventeen SHIELD KNIGHT short stories, adventures set in the world of FROSTBORN, SEVENFOLD SWORD, and DRAGONTIARNA!

Follow the adventures of Ridmark Arban and his allies as they fight to defend the kingdoms of Andomhaim and Owyllain from the powers of dark magic.

-JM

DRAGONSKULL: SWORD OF THE SQUIRE underway!

I am pleased to report that I am now writing DRAGONSKULL: SWORD OF THE SQUIRE, the first book in my new epic fantasy series.

(DRAGONSKULL will be either eight or nine books, depending on how I decide to do the audio.)

I have to admit that it’s good to be returning to epic fantasy – after finishing DRAGONTIARNA, I admit I’ve felt somewhat aimless all summer. (Of course, that only counts for certain values of “aimless” – this summer I finished CLOAK OF BLADES, COVERING FIRE, SILENT ORDER: ROYAL HAND, two short stories, and numerous audio projects, and have also started GHOST IN THE SUN. So maybe it’s less “aimless” and more “saturation fire.”) Still, I’m excited to start something new.

What will DRAGONSKULL: SWORD OF THE SQUIRE be about? You can read a preview of the main villain in THE FIRST SORCERESS. Meanwhile, here is the book description for SWORD OF THE SQUIRE!

War comes for an unprepared squire.

Gareth Arban wants to become a knight and win glory enough to marry the girl he loves.

But death is the other face of glory.

When invaders sweep out of the north wielding mighty dark magic, it will take more than a squire’s bravery to stop them…

-JM

TALES OF THE SHIELD KNIGHT coming soon

Very soon now I’m going to start work on DRAGONSKULL: SWORD OF THE SQUIRE, the first book in my new epic fantasy series set in the world of Andomhaim. (I’m also halfway through writing a novella for Kindle Vella, but more on that later.)

Before that, though, I’m going to publish TALES OF THE SHIELD KNIGHT, a collection of all 17 SHIELD KNIGHT stories I’ve written since 2017.

It took me a bit to decide on the proper order of the stories in the table of contents, since there really isn’t one. Quite a few of the stories are frame stories, where the main character is describing a past event to one of the other characters. So I wound up ordering them in three loose groups – the stories that took place during SEVENFOLD SWORD, the stories that took place between SEVENFOLD SWORD and DRAGONTIARNA, and the stories that took place during DRAGONTIARNA. That said, I ended the collection with SHIELD KNIGHT: RIDMARK’S TALE, which is the account of how Ridmark met Third, since people ask about that all the time.

Since I’ve given away all these stories for free, the collection will be $0.99 USD for the first week it’s out. After that first week, however, it will go up to $4.99 because it’s really long.

If all goes well, TALES OF THE SHIELD KNIGHT will be out the first week of September 2021.

-JM

SILENT ORDER: ROYAL HAND now available!

It took three years and there were a whole dang lot of setbacks along the way, but I am pleased to report that SILENT ORDER: ROYAL HAND, the tenth book in the SILENT ORDER science fiction series, is now available!

You can get the book at Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon DE, Amazon CA, Amazon AU, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple Books, Google Play, Scribd, and Smashwords.

Jack March must choose between duty and the woman he loves.

Elite Silent Order operative Jack March has only ever loved one woman.

But when the brutal cybernetic Final Consciousness unleashes its battle fleets upon Calaskar, March must decide upon his loyalties.

Yet every path leads to ruin.

Because no matter what choice he makes, the sinister masterminds of the Final Consciousness want him dead…

-JM

 

SILENT ORDER: ROYAL HAND table of contents!

Did a bunch of work on SILENT ORDER: ROYAL HAND, and then drove to a nearby city to have a Popeye’s Spicy Chicken Sandwich for lunch, since there isn’t a Popeye’s anywhere near where I live.

The last time I did that was in late 2019, and as I sat in my car and ate lunch (the dining room was closed) I had a disturbing feeling of repetition.

See, the last time I was at that particular Popeye’s in 2019, I had been sure that I would finish SILENT ORDER: ROYAL HAND relatively soon. But, of course, now it is 2021.

Maybe the last two years had been some sort of ghastly time loop, and it was all about to repeat again.

Perhaps the only way to break the time loop was to finally publish SILENT ORDER: ROYAL HAND! Could the fabric of space-time be so badly designed that a delay in publishing a science fiction novel had caused time to circle back onto itself?

Or maybe the Spicy Chicken Sandwich really was very spicy, and causing me to mildly hallucinate that I was in a time loop?

It really was a very good sandwich.

Anyway, if all goes well and nothing unexpected happens (like the time loop repeating!) SILENT ORDER: ROYAL HAND should be out by the end of the week. Let’s have a look at the table of contents!

-JM

sign up for my newsletter and get a free short story!

When SILENT ORDER: ROYAL HAND comes out (hopefully before the end of August!) subscribers to my newsletter will get a free ebook copy of the short story PHASE DRIVE!

Sign up for my newsletter now, and when ROYAL HAND comes out, you’ll have the option of a Smashwords coupon code for a Bookfunnel download link to get the short story.

-JM

Willow, The Movie

I vaguely recall watching WILLOW in the 1980s, but remembered no details of the plot and the story. So I decided to watch it this weekend since it’s currently free on Amazon Prime.

I would sum up the plot with two points:

1.) It’s kind of like a Dungeons & Dragons campaign where both the players and the Dungeon Master get progressively drunker as the session goes on.

2.) I mean that as a compliment.

It’s a good fantasy adventure. The kingdom is ruled by the evil sorceress-queen Bavmorda, and her seers has foretold that a child has been born who will undo her. Bavmorda hunts for the child, but a bold nursemaid gives the baby the Moses treatment and sends her floating down the river. The baby is found by the children of Willow, who is a Nelwyn (basically, a hobbit) who wants to become a wizard. After one of Bavmorda’s creatures attacks the Nelwyn village, the village council decides to send the baby back to the humans. Since Willow found the baby, he gets stuck with the job, which proves that the principle of “you found the problem, you fix it” is universal among all nations and creatures. Little does Willow know that the baby is a child of destiny and that Bavmorda’s creatures and minions are hunting for her.

It’s interesting to see the influence of Star Wars on the movie, since George Lucas was the executive producer – Willow is like Luke, Madmartigan is like Han, Sorsha is a lot like Leia, and so forth. (Queen Bavmorda, like Emperor Palpatine, should have spent less time messing around with black magic and more time focused on the practical applications of ruling and economics, which would have given her a much more competent army.) What’s interesting is that the movie seems to have influenced THE LORD OF THE RINGS movies in a few ways, but the Tolkien’s book very clearly influenced WILLOW! It’s like a perfect feedback loop of cultural influence.

Anyway, it’s an enjoyable fantasy adventure and worth watching. The version currently on Prime includes a bunch of special features, and it is interesting to see how the many special effects were approached at the start of the computer age.

-JM

Why write mystery novels?

Of the 123 novels I’ve written, nine of them have been science fiction, and the rest have been various kinds of fantasy.

A few people have asked why I wrote COVERING FIRE, a mystery novel? Four reasons!

1.) I enjoy the genre.

I’ve read a lot of mystery novels over the years, and I enjoy the genre. If you’re a writer and you enjoy reading something, eventually you’re going to try writing it yourself.

2.) Bigger potential audience.

More people read mysteries and thrillers than do fantasy. I’ve noticed that the mailing lists for Mystery on promotional sites like Bookbub and BargainBooksy are 30 to 40 percent higher than those for fantasy. In Real Life, I’ve known people for years who know that I’m a writer but never read anything I wrote until AVENGING FIRE came out. There are people who will never read a fantasy or a science fiction novel but who will read a mystery novel. Eventually I would like to have at least three Cormac Rogan novels because then I’m pretty sure I can advertise them and turn a consistent profit.

I should note that I wouldn’t write a mystery novel if I didn’t enjoy the genre, and I don’t think you should try writing in a genre that you do not yourself enjoy. (Or writing a kind of nonfiction you do not find interesting.) Like, I know some writers who decided to write romance novels because that’s the biggest genre, but the writers in question don’t enjoy romance, so all they did was make themselves miserable and not sell a lot of books in the process.

3.) Not like I’ll stop writing fantasy.

And it’s not like I’m going to stop writing fantasy novels. After SILENT ORDER: ROYAL HAND, the next two books I’ll write will be DRAGONSKULL: SWORD OF THE SQUIRE and GHOST IN THE SUN.

4.) A kind of fantasy on its own.

In a way, mystery novels are a kind of fantasy.

If you look at Real Life, the bad guys very often win. I’m sure we can all think of examples. Or, for that matter, the truth is very hard to discern in many situations. Like, if you look at current events, there are multiple potential explanations for various things that have happened over the last few years. What is the truth? What really happened?

The problem is the human mind is not always the most reliable tool for uncovering the truth. Like, you can discern the truth with your mind, but very often it’s like using a screwdriver as a hammer – doable, but it’s difficult, it takes a while, and you might hurt yourself if you do it wrong. That is why the detective, the truth-seeker, makes for a compelling protagonist. All of us know that in Real Life uncovering the truth is often so difficult, so we can emphasize with the detective’s mission.

So in a way, a mystery novel is a kind of fantasy where the truth is discovered.

But! The best kind of fantasy is always hopeful. And even in Real Life, the bad guys’ misdeeds sometimes catch up to them, and the truth comes out. A good mystery novel is a reminder of that.

Raymond Chandler had an excellent quote on this topic:

“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it…The story is this man’s adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure.”

-JM

SILENT ORDER: ROYAL HAND cover image and description

Time to share the cover image for SILENT ORDER: ROYAL HAND!

I had originally intended this for the hardcover version of SILENT ORDER: OMNIBUS ONE, but it turns out that OMNIBUS ONE is like twenty pages too long to be a hardcover, and no matter how I reformatted the file I couldn’t get it under the maximum page count for hardcovers. Fortunately I was able to use the cover for ROYAL HAND.

If all goes well the book should be out in August yet, but it looks like it might slip to early September. Too much going on in Real Life!

Meanwhile, here’s the book description:

Jack March must choose between duty and the woman he loves.

Elite Silent Order operative Jack March has only ever loved one woman.

But when the brutal cybernetic Final Consciousness unleashes its battle fleets upon Calaskar, March must decide upon his loyalties.

Yet every path leads to ruin.

Because no matter what choice he makes, the sinister masterminds of the Final Consciousness want him dead…

-JM

FROSTBORN: EXCALIBUR now in audio!

I am pleased to report that FROSTBORN: EXCALIBUR Is now available in audiobook, as excellently narrated by Brad Wills! You can listen to it at Audible, Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon AU, and iTunes.

EXCALIBUR is the 13th FROSTBORN book, and there are only two left. I really would like to have the entire series in audio, and right now the tentative plan is for Brad to record THE DRAGON KNIGHT and THE SHADOW PRISON back to back start in December.

So if all goes well the entire FROSTBORN series will be available in audio in the first half of 2022.

And then once Podium finishes recording the final two DRAGONTIARNA audiobooks, you will be able to listen to the entire FROSTBORN/SEVENFOLD SWORD/DRAGONTIARNA saga from beginning to end for over three hundred hours of fantasy adventure!

-JM