Jonathan Moeller's Blog, page 128

now playing BLOODSTAINED: CURSE OF THE MOON

Now that I’ve finally finished SKYRIM’s main quest after nine years, the next game I want to finish is BLOODSTAINED: CURSE OF THE MOON.

Earlier in the year I beat BLOODSTAINED: RITUAL OF THE NIGHT and quite enjoyed it, so next up is CURSE OF THE MOON. RITUAL was a modern game, but CURSE is what’s called a “retraux” game, made deliberately in imitation of the old 8-bit NES games. RITUAL was Kickstarted, and apparently the conceit of CURSE is that it’s the “old” NES game that RITUAL was based on, but the development of RITUAL took so long that CURSE came out a couple years earlier and went in its own direction.

(I have to say that every firsthand story I’ve ever heard about video game development makes me very glad I never went into that field!)

CURSE reminds me a lot of CASTLEVANIA III (which I finally beat earlier this year) but with a lot of the rough edges of the old NES games smoothed off. Definitely enjoying it! So if you enjoyed the old CASTLEVANIA games for NES and SNES, you’ll enjoy CURSE!

-JM

The Pulp Writer Show, Episode 45: The Series Marketing Escalation Paradox

In this week’s episode, I examine David Gaughran’s Series Marketing Escalation Paradox, and consider how best to promote a long series of novels.

I also talk about finally finishing the main quest of THE ELDER SCROLLS V: SKYRIM nine years after starting the game!

-JM

DRAGONTIARNA: CROWNS, the final push

I’m starting Monday at 117,000 words of DRAGONTIARNA: CROWNS, and my goal is to reach either 140,000 words or the end of the book by the end of the week.

I’m not sure how long the book is going to end up. I think it will be somewhere around 130,000 to 140,000 words, but we’ll see. However, I am entirely certain that it will be the longest thing I’ve written in 2020, and pretty sure that it will be the longest book to date in the DRAGONTIARNA series.

-JM

 

His Girl Friday

I felt like watching an old movie last night, so I wound up watching HIS GIRL FRIDAY from 1940. It was pretty funny, though the protagonists were reporters and I always find the trope of “heroic journalists” to be about as believable as phrenology.



Then again, the reporters in the movie were extremely shifty, which was much more believable

After Nine Years, I Finally Beat The Main Quest Of SKYRIM!

It took me nine years, but I finally beat the main quest of THE ELDER SCROLLS V: SKYRIM.

Back in 2011, I got SKYRIM when it first came out, because I had spent a lot of time the previous game playing THE ELDER SCROLLS IV: OBLIVION, and it was one of my favorite games. I think I played through nearly all the content – I finished the Mages Guild, Fighters Guild, Thieves Guild, and Dark Brotherhood storylines before I started the Kvatch mission in the Main Quest. (I even finished the quest where you have to find all ten statues for that crazy Umbacano guy, and after he went nuts, I broke into his mansion and stole them all back.) So I put a lot of hours into the game, though I was able to do that because I didn’t have all that much else to do at the time.

By contrast, when SKYRIM came along, I was working a full-time job, a part-time job, and I had just gotten started with indie publishing. I think I was about halfway through writing SOUL OF DRAGONS when I bought the game. So over the last nine years, I didn’t have all that much spare time, because I was busy writing like 100 novels or so. When I did play SKYRIM, I tended to get sidetracked into side quests. Like, I finished the College of Winterhold and the Companions quests, but every time I started the main quest, I would get distracted by something else in Real Life and forget the game.

But last year, to celebrate my 100th novel (DRAGONTIARNA: KNIGHTS) I got a Nintendo Switch. SKYRIM had been released for Switch a little bit before that, so this summer I decided that, once and for all, I would beat the main quest of SKYRIM. And since the Switch is handheld, I could do so while reclining in comfort on my couch!

I started on July 8th, 2020, and finished on September 9th.

I was surprised at how short the Main Quest was (but it still took me two months to get through it – I don’t spend that much time playing games nowadays). OBLIVION’S was longer, and MORROWIND’s was WAY longer, but I suppose MORROWIND had the advantage that it wasn’t fully voice acted, so it could use the “Wall of Text” technique to explain complicated things like just who Dagoth Ur was and his relationship to Vivec and Almalexia. For that matter, to finish OBLIVION’S main quest you have to visit every town in the game at some point, but there are towns in Skyrim that you never have to visit to finish the main quest. But I think something like only 10% of SKYRIM’s content is in the main quest. The game is an enormous sandbox, and you can wander around doing random stuff practically forever.

So after nine years, it’s nice to have finished the Main Quest. A sense of closure and all that.

But I suspect I’ll be back. I still play OBLIVION from time to time, after all.

DRAGONTIARNA: CROWNS progress report!

I had hoped to get to 100,000 words of DRAGONTIARNA: CROWNS by the end of Friday.

Fortunately, by the end of Thursday I was up to 108,200 words! I missed a lot of writing goals in August/September, so it’s nice to hit one.

antitrust vs indie authors?

A very worried reader emailed to ask if I was worried that the recent antitrust hearings would negatively affect indie authors on Amazon.

Not really, no. I doubt it will have much effect for good or bad on indie authors, at least in the immediate future.  Admittedly, I think it is very likely that Amazon and other “Big Data” companies are going to face new regulations, but there are too many variables to predict what will actually happen and how it will affect indie authors, and it may turn out to be nothing.

To start with, Amazon most likely does not qualify as a monopoly under current US law – Amazon has lots of competitors in every field in which it does business. It’s not even close to the biggest retailer in the US. Wal-Mart does three times Amazon’s sales, and Costco and Kroger are right behind Amazon.  Even in cloud computing, where Amazon is pretty dominant, it still has heavyweight competitors in Microsoft, Salesforce, IBM, and Oracle. You might recall a recent news story where Microsoft beat out Amazon for a big Department of Defense data contract, and the courts recently ruled in Microsoft’s favor when Amazon tried to sue over it.

Calling Amazon a monopoly is one thing, but proving it in court in a way that will survive appeal is something else entirely.

For that matter, in the US it’s not technically illegal to be a monopoly, but it is very illegal to use monopoly power to raise prices on consumers, or to collude with competitors to raise prices on consumers. Apple and the Big Six publishers got into legal trouble for that at the start of the 2010s. By contrast, Amazon has pretty consistently tried to drive down consumer prices. Granted, they’ve frequently done that by squeezing their suppliers for every last cent, but the courts don’t mind that as much, and that’s been a standard practice among big retail chains for years. Everything that Amazon is accused of doing, Wal-Mart has also done, and frequently with a great deal more ruthlessness. If you’re old enough to remember, you may recall that back in the 1990s and early 2000s, Wal-Mart and Microsoft were the sinister corporate bogeymen the way that Amazon and Facebook are now. The wheel of history keeps on turning, and I imagine that some lifers at Microsoft are laughing that it’s Apple’s turn to get yelled at in front of Congress.

So, under current laws, I suspect Amazon won’t get in much trouble, though it might be forced to pay some fines or abandon some of its own retail brands like the “Amazon Basics” products.

That said, there might be a push to change the law or impose new regulations. Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook are very powerful companies in ways that no one could have imagined when antitrust laws first came along. None of them are really monopolies in the current legal sense, but they all have considerable amounts of power, and there’s starting to be rumblings on both the left and right factions of US politics that Something Needs To Be Done. Google and Facebook are probably more vulnerable to this, since they’ve made a lot of political enemies in a way that Apple and Amazon have not (and don’t have the same level of competition that Amazon and Apple do), but both Apple and Amazon have their weak points to new regulation.

I could see a law coming to regulate “Big Data” companies in new ways, like the GDPR law in the European Union, but it’s impossible to predict how that would play out. The art of politics is promising to do 110% of something, and declaring victory when you’ve delivered about 4.6% or so, if that. And any new law would be hashed out in the courts, and likely applied in ways its drafters did not intend or failed to foresee, which means it could generate a whole host of new problems on its own. Sadly, very often the default tactic of any government when it decides that Something Needs To Be Done is to engage in a wild overreaction that does not solve the original problem, aggravates the original problem, and also generates a legion of brand-new problems. (I’m sure we can all think of many examples, but please don’t list them in the comments and start a flame war.) It’s also possible that the outcome of the upcoming US presidential election will be so bitterly disputed that whoever does win will inherit a deadlocked national government that doesn’t have the political will to do anything major, or the government will be too preoccupied with the pandemic and its various consequences to address antitrust changes.

To sum up, it’s possible big changes are coming but there are too many variables to predict, and it’s just as possible that not much will happen.

What will happen on the macro scale will happen regardless of individual preferences, so it’s wise to focus on things that you can control. Change in any form, whether good or bad, is the one constant in life, so it’s wise to be prepared for it.

The takeaway for indie authors is that it’s good to remain nimble – indie authors can sell their books on any platform they wish, and while Amazon will likely remain the majority of an indie author’s sales (usually about 60% for me) it’s smart to have as many of your books for sale on as many different sites as possible. A diversified income stream is a happy income stream.

The Pulp Writer Show, Episode 44: A Reader Asks How I Write So Fast

It’s time for a new episode of the Pulp Writer Show! In this week’s episode, I answer a reader’s question about how I  manage to write so fast (most of them time, anyway).

-JM

another DRAGONTIARNA: CROWNS progress update

Currently on Chapter 18 of 31 for DRAGONTIARNA: CROWNS. Hoping to hit the 100,000 word mark by the end of the week!

I’m also up to Chapter 4 of 24 of GHOST IN THE VISION.

-JM

10k words of DRAGONTIARNA: CROWNS!

Yesterday I wrote 10k words of DRAGONTIARNA: CROWNS, which brings me to my 20th 10,000 word day of 2020.

Amusingly enough, I think I’ll wind up writing about as many words in 2020 as I did in 2019. I missed a lot of writing days in 2020, but the 10k days help to balance it out.