Jonathan Moeller's Blog, page 14

Question of the Week – Current Game

It’s time for Question of the Week, which is intended to inspire enjoyable discussions of interesting topics.

This week’s question: what games (if any) are you currently playing? No wrong answers, including “I don’t play games.”

The inspiration for this question was the fact that Nintendo is having its big Switch 2 announcement today, which is amusing on a meta level because people have been speculating wildly about the Switch successor for years. Baseless Switch 2 rumors have been a clickfarm industry for years. Probably Nintendo had to have it on April 2nd so no one would think it was a really elaborate April Fool’s Day joke.

Anyway, my current games!

-I am playing the MASTER OF MAGIC remake on PC.

-I am still playing IRATUS: LORD OF THE DEAD and drawing closer to the final level.

-And, when I’m really tired and don’t want to do anything else, I fire up some STARFIELD and go really mess up the day of some Space Pirates.

-JM

The Pulp Writer Show, Episode 245: Research Challenges For Writers

In this week’s episode, we take a look at how research can both help and hinder writers, and offer tips for effective research for fiction.

You can listen to the show with transcript at the official Pulp Writer Show site, and you can also listen to it at Spotify, Apple Podcasts , Amazon Music, and Libsyn.

-JM

10k words of SHIELD OF BATTLE

I wrote 10,000 words of SHIELD OF BATTLE today, for my sixth 10k word day of 2025!

This puts me on Chapter 19 of 24 of the book.

I had hoped to have at least one 10k word day in March, and since it’s still March for like four hours here as I post this, it counts!

-JM

Coupon of the Week 3/28/2025

Once again it is time for Coupon of the Week!

This coupon code will get you 25% off DRAGONTIARNA: OMNIBUS ONE at my Payhip store:

DRAGONOMNI25

The coupon code is valid through April 14th, 2025. So if you need a new book to read for spring, we’ve got you covered!

-JM

Mac Mini as writing computer: pros and cons

As of GHOST IN THE ASSEMBLY, I’ve now written and published two books using an M4 Mac Mini as my primary writing computer, and written two-thirds of another one (SHIELD OF BATTLE).

Overall, it’s been a good experience and I haven’t had any serious problems. Granted, nothing is perfect, and so I thought I would share the list of pros and cons for using a Mac Mini as my main writing computer.

Pros:

-Boots quickly.

-Interface is way less cluttered and less intrusive than Windows 11.

-Updates tend not to be as calamitous as Microsoft ones traditionally are.

-AI nonsense is much less overstated than in Windows 11.

-Very stable. I haven’t had a single crash.

-Computer runs very quiet with no fan noise.

Cons:

-Expensive.

-Finder just isn’t as good as Windows Explorer. For all the criticisms that one could level at Windows 11, Windows Explorer is nonetheless a very well developed file management shell. Finder just isn’t, and Windows Explorer can do more stuff.

-Apple still has AI nonsense, even if it isn’t as in-your-face as Copilot.

-The Mac Mini sometimes gets very hot when it goes to sleep. It appears to be running some sort of disk optimization process, which would defeat the point of putting it to sleep.

So, all in all, it’s a pretty good writing computer.

If I could perfectly work my will, I would write on a Linux computer, but that would introduce too many inefficiencies into my publishing/editing process due to software incompatibilities. My goal with a computer is not to have the coolest computer but one that will help me produce books efficiently, and so far the Mac Mini has done that.

-JM

Question of the Week: Comics

It’s time for Question of the Week, which is intended to inspire interesting discussions of enjoyable topics!

This week’s question: do you read comic books/graphic novels? Marvel, DC, indie, manga, whatever. No wrong answers, obviously, including “I don’t read comics.”

That’s a good thing, because for myself the answer is “I don’t read comics.” It’s not out of snobbery or disdain for the art form – it just doesn’t speak to me or hold my interest. Not all art speaks to all people at all times.

But given how often I see people discussing comic books, I’m clearly in the minority.

-JM

The Pulp Writer Show, Episode 244: Inspirations For GHOST IN THE ASSEMBLY

In this week’s episode, I take a look at some of the historical influences & inspirations that went into my new book GHOST IN THE ASSEMBLY.

You can listen to the show with transcript at the official Pulp Writer Show site, and you can also listen to it at Spotify, Apple Podcasts , Amazon Music, and Libsyn.

-JM

Coupon of the Week, 3/24/2025

Once again it is time for Coupon of the Week!

This coupon code will get you 25% off SILENT ORDER: OMNIBUS ONE at my Payhip store:

SILENT25

The coupon code is valid through April 7th, 2025. So if you need a new book to read for spring, we’ve got you covered!

-JM

160 books and Master of Magic

GHOST IN THE ASSEMBLY was my 160th book, and I’ve noticed that 160 just sounds unimpressive compared to 150, even though 160 is in fact the larger number. If you’ve written 150 books, it’s only logical that you’re gonna write ten more. Like, at that point, there’s abundant historical precedent to back up that assumption that you’re gonna write ten more.

Anyway, to celebrate book #150, which was GHOST IN THE VEILS, I got a portable monitor. Basically it’s an LCD panel from a laptop, and you put it on a kickstand like a tablet. I used it to play my Xbox comfortably on my couch, and that means I’ve basically spent the last year playing STARFIELD.

Something I’ve wanted to play for a while is the remake of the 1990s classic MASTER OF MAGIC, which came out in 2022. The trouble is that the game is pretty processor-heavy, so playing it on a laptop means the laptop’s fans kick into overdrive and laptop itself gets quite hot. It was just too uncomfortable to play for more than 10 minutes or so at a time, so I never really got into it.

But like most computer people, I have a closet full of computer parts and half-dead computers I’ve accumulated over the years (I might need that DVI to HDMI cable JUST IN CASE!) and then a thought occurred to me. Why not use some of those parts to build a small desktop PC that would fit on my end table, and then I plug my portable monitor into that? I could then comfortably play MASTER OF MAGIC.

So that’s what I did to celebrate my 160th book. I assembled a PC out of old parts and have been playing MASTER OF MAGIC with my portable monitor. It’s quite comfortable.

I’m looking forward to finally beating the MASTER OF MAGIC remake, and I’m also looking forward to trying some PC games that just don’t do well on a laptop. At the end of 2024, Steam had an interesting report that of the total playtime on the platform, only 15 percent of it came from games actually released in 2024.

I have to admit I would definitely fall into the 85 percent!

-JM

GHOST IN THE ASSEMBLY: inspirations and sources

!!!SPOILERS!!! follow for GHOST IN THE ASSEMBLY. So if you haven’t finished GHOST IN THE ASSEMBLY yet, STOP READING!

I thought it would be interesting to write about some of the ideas and influences that went into GHOST IN THE ASSEMBLY.

I have to admit it took me a few years of thinking between GHOST NIGHT and GHOST ARMOR to figure out how to write more Caina books because Caina had become a political figure, and political figures typically do bad things for personal advancement and then lie about it. That is, in some ways, the essential definition of a political figure.

This is hard to write as a sympathetic protagonist.

Of course, I eventually realized the way around this. The success of a political figure cannot be judged by their personal morality or even their political morality, but by the results of their decisions. Therefore, I just needed to write a political figure who did somewhat sketchy things (like subverting the Kyracian Houses via buying up their debt) in the name of the greater good of the people (defending them from the impending Caphtori attack).

I’ve frequently said that if you want to write a good fantasy novel, you should try to stick to about like fifteen to twenty-five percent of the actual harshness of the past. Like, you don’t want to go Full Grimdark, but you don’t want your fantasy world to be indistinguishable from a typical twenty-first century parliamentary democracy.

So for GHOST IN THE ASSEMBLY, I went for about fifteen to twenty percent of the experience of ancient Greek democracy.

For the entire time that New Kyre and the Kyracians have been in the series (GHOST IN THE STORM was way the heck back in 2012, and the Kyracians were mentioned before that), they’ve always been very loosely based on the democracy of ancient Athens. In fact, the very name “Assembly of New Kyre” comes from ancient Athens, where the gathering of voting citizens was called the “ecclesia”, which translates into English as “Assembly.” Interestingly, this is also the origins of the word “ecclesiastical” in terms of a church, since one of the first words for a church was “eccelesia” in the sense of the “assembly of the believers in Christ.”

Athens wasn’t the first ancient Greek democracy, but it was one of the most successful. It was also one of the democracies that self-destructed in the most spectacularly dramatic fashion possible – the Athenians decided to convert the Delian League from an alliance of city-states into their own private empire, a demagogue convinced them to waste enormous resources on attacking Syracuse in Sicily, which ended disastrously, and the Athenians were eventually defeated by the more militaristic Spartans.

People have debated for centuries whether or not this means democracy is inferior to the Spartans’ harsher system, but that overlooks the key fact that a few decades later, Athens, Sparta, and all the rest of the Greek city-states were conquered by the Macedonians anyway. I suppose the actual lesson is that a city-state, regardless of government, is no match for a larger centralized state with better leaders and better military organization. In fact, historically city-states tend to eventually get subsumed into larger political entities. If they last for a long time, it tends to be because of geography (like in ancient Greece) or because of weak and/or remote central authority, like the medieval Italian city-states, which were ostensibly under the authority of the Holy Roman Emperor but in practice tended to do whatever they wanted. (Places like modern Vatican City tend to be special exceptions.)

Caina’s criticism of the Assembly of New Kyre is that it’s not as egalitarian as it pretends and is easily swayed by both demagogues and bribes. The Athenian assembly of citizens had both those problems, but far worse. You needed to have a substantial level of property to be allowed to vote, and there were numerous examples of the votes swinging on bribes or last-minute orations. The Athenian assembly was easily swayed into making bad decisions, such as supporting the disastrous attack on Syracuse during the Peloponnesian War that was the start of Athens’ downfall.

In GHOST IN THE ASSEMBLY, Lady Eirenea Tritos is one of the nine chief magistrates of the city, but in Athenian democracy, women were not allowed to vote and they most definitely were not allowed to hold political office. The ancient Greeks in general did not have a very high opinion of women – one Greek orator said that men had wives to produce legitimate heirs, concubines to attend to the body’s “daily needs”, and prostitutes for pleasure.

Because of things like that, I thought a setting with a hundred percent of the harshness of ancient Greece would be off-putting to the reader, so I shot for between fifteen and twenty-five percent. New Kyre is definitely richer, better governed, and less elitist and chauvinistic than the ancient Greeks. That said, New Kyre isn’t an egalitarian place – nobles have vastly more rights and money than commoners, and both nobles and commoners own slaves, and only the poorest commoners own no slaves. Indeed, slavery is so common in New Kyre that the other nobles see Kylon’s decision that House Kardamnos will have no slaves as the sign of malevolent foreign influence.

Kalliope’s fear that she could be dispossessed and Kylon simply take her children is very real – if Kylon wanted, he could probably keep Kalliope from seeing Nikarion and Zoe ever again, though that would inevitably put him in conflict with Lysikas Agramemnos and Kalliope is charismatic enough to win powerful allies to her side. If Kylon did in fact refuse to allow Kalliope to see their children, he might well set off a civil war. But Kylon, who lost both his parents when he was young, doesn’t want to deprive his children of a loving mother.

Of course, the ancient Greeks never had to fight the Red Krakens and orcs. The Red Krakens, the Caphtori, are kind of written like snake-worshipping Vikings. In fact the Caphtori are inspired by the “Sea Peoples”, pirates that seemed to have contributed to the collapse of Bronze Age civilization. Historians argue endlessly about the impact of the Sea Peoples or whether they existed at all, but if they did exist, they might well have been proto-Ancient Greeks. Since having one ancient Greek-esque group fighting another would be confusing, I made the Caphtori/Red Krakens more like Vikings. Which I suppose is a bit of historical anachronism, but GHOST ARMOR is a constructed world with elves, orcs, and sorcerers, so it’s not like I’m writing period-accurate historical fiction here.

So these are some of the influences that went into GHOST IN THE ASSEMBLY. I don’t have any grand point here. Though I should mention that for a while I was a graduate student in medieval history, and I hated the experience so much I went into IT instead. That said, decades later, it has proven a useful source of plot ideas for fantasy novels, so it worked out in the end.

One final note – a reader suggested that Kalliope Agramemnos and Mardun Scorneus might hook up in later books, and I admit I laughed at that suggestion. Kalliope would react with dismay at the thought of marrying anyone other than an extremely high ranking Kyraican noble, and at the prospect of marrying Kalliope, Mardun would think about it, fake his death, and flee back to the Empire, preferring to take his chances with the Magisterium rather than Kalliope.

Anyway, thanks for reading GHOST IN THE ASSEMBLY! I am grateful so many people have enjoyed the book.

-JM