Jonathan Moeller's Blog, page 150

GHOST IN THE COUNCIL underway!

Editing is mostly wrapped up on DRAGONTIARNA: GATES, so it’s time to devote most of my writing time to GHOST IN THE COUNCIL!

If all goes well, GHOST IN THE COUNCIL should come out sometime in January 2020.

Ideally, I would like to finish the rough draft by the end of November, but with the Thanksgiving holiday that’s not going to happen. Instead, I’m going to shoot for a goal of 60,000 words by the end of November. Since I’m starting at about 21,000, let’s see if I get there!

progress updates!

It’s the end of the week, so let’s see where my various writing projects are at!

-I’m on the final phase of editing for DRAGONTIARNA: GATES, and it should be out in the first week of December.

-Also! Subscribe to my newsletter, and you’ll get a free copy of the short story SHIELD KNIGHT: TWO THIEVES when DRAGONTIARNA: GATES comes out!

-I’m 20,800 words into GHOST IN THE COUNCIL.

-I’m almost to 30,000 words in SILENT ORDER: ROYAL HAND.

-The audiobook version of GHOST IN THE COWL is in pre-production.

-The audiobook version of FROSTBORN: THE HIGH LORDS has been scheduled to be recorded sometime in the first quarter of 2020 if all goes well.

-JM

a free CLOAK GAMES audio story coming soon!

I am pleased to report that sometime next week I will be giving away free audiobook copies of the CLOAK GAMES short story WRAITH WOLF (as excellently narrated by Meghan Kelly) to my newsletter subscribers.

WRAITH WOLF, you’ll recall, is the short story where Nadia Moran, illegal wizard and master thief, and Riordan MacCormac, expert assassin and Shadow Hunter…attempt to have a first date. It’s hilariously awkward.

one million words & one million views

Did some math today, and as of DRAGONTIARNA: GATES, I have officially written one million words of new fiction in 2019.

I think 2019 is going to be down from my all-time high of 1.4 million words of new fiction written in 2017. But 2019 has been a really, really busy year.

The Pulp Writer Show, Episode 2: NaNoWriMo

It’s time for a new episode of my podcast! Since it’s National Novel Writing Month, I talk about how I wrote the 129,000 word rough draft of my novel DRAGONTIARNA: GATES in 24 days.

-JM

CLOAK OF WOLVES: Tarlia meets Caesar Augustus

A question about how Tarlia rules her nobles in the CLOAK GAMES/CLOAK MAGE series turned into a long explanation. Historical references follow!

Tarlia’s problem and advantage is that she’s a lot like Caesar Augustus at the start of his reign. We remember Augustus as the first “Roman Emperor” but his position was a lot less formalized than that. He was a military dictator, but in 27 BC he made a big show of laying down his offices and commands since the Roman world was at peace. The Senate, no doubt well-rehearsed, begged him to keep his offices, and created the title of “Augustus” for him. His power came from the fact that he commanded the army, was the richest man in Rome, had command of the militarily valuable provinces, and held a variety of other offices – he was censor and consul a bunch of times.

Tarlia’s position is somewhat similar. Back on Kalvarion, the High King of the Elves was sort of first among equals of the Elven nobles – he could call the nobles together in war, and judge their disputes, but his power was limited. After her father was assassinated and Tarlia became High Queen, she started consolidating power under herself, and the exile to Earth gave her an opportunity to build a much stronger power base. The Wizard’s Legion is directly loyal to her and no one else, and a lot of human wizards in once place makes for a lot of firepower. The Inquisition started as an “emergency” wartime measure to root out Archon sympathizers and became a police force to keep an eye on the nobles.

The biggest change she made was to parcel out human cities and nations to the nobles as fiefs, but all the Elven commoners she concentrated in cities that act a lot like the Imperial Free Cities of the Holy Roman Empire – they’re sworn directly to her, and no one else. She also goes to great lengths to keep Elves and humans mostly separate from each other. An Elf can kill a human without suffering a human legal penalty, but Elven commoners are not allowed to leave their cities and travel among humans without a work permit or some other reason. And if they do kill a human, they have to pay a wergild to the human’s Elven overlord. Since the Elven nobles hate the Elven commoner cities, they’re always looking for a chance to screw them, and they’ll make a big deal about a human dead at Elven hands even if they don’t particularly like humans. (Not many humans are aware of this.)

There are lesser sources of her authority as well – if a human corporation gets large enough, she becomes a majority shareholder, and she owns businesses in every single one of the Elven commoner cities. The education system among both Elves and humans is designed to inculcate reverence for her. (“Get ’em while they’re young!”) She’s the only one on Earth with control of nuclear weapons. Her alliance with the dragons she allowed to settle on Earth allows her to call on powerful friends in a crisis. Tarlia saw on Kalvarion how the Elven serfs became a recruiting ground for the Archons, so at all costs she wants to avoid a large pool of unemployed (or underemployed), unmarried men.

All this means that she is able to wield much more political power than the Elven monarchs on Kalvarion ever managed, which numerous Elven nobles resent.

All her children are dead or presumed dead, so Tarlia has no heir.

-JM

progress updates

It’s Friday, so let’s see where I’m at with my various writing projects!

-Editing is well underway on DRAGONTIARNA: GATES! Hopefully that will come out in December if all goes well.

-I am 19,000 words into GHOST IN THE COUNCIL. I am hoping to publish that in January.

-I am also 27,000 words into SILENT ORDER: ROYAL HAND. Not sure when that will come out, but sometime in the first quarter of 2020.

-JM

Thanks for reading CLOAK OF WOLVES & a CLOAK OF ASHES preview!

I’d like to thank everyone for the kind words they’ve sent about CLOAK OF WOLVES!

The core idea of the book was simple:

“Nadia hates law enforcement. What if she had to work with an officer?”

That made for an interesting conflict. The officer in question, Owen Quell, assumed that Nadia was exactly the sort of powerful criminal he hated. On the flip side, Nadia assumed that Quell was a thug and a bully. Both had their reasons for assuming that, but didn’t see the entire picture – Quell didn’t see that Nadia ripped herself apart to save her brother and then the world, and Nadia didn’t see that Quell was a devoted family man who took his job and responsibilities seriously.

It was also fun to write Nadia’s developing “frenemy” relationship with Governor Arnold Brauner. Brauner’s a bad guy, but he’s not that bad of a bad guy – more like a “get out the vote” machine politician and petty racketeer and not someone like, say, Nicholas Connor, who tried to blow up a stadium full of soccer fans. So Nadia doesn’t like him, but she can respect him, and deal with him.

One of the common complaints about long-running fantasy series is that the characters become overpowered. The key to avoiding that problem is to remember that 1.) there are different kinds of power, and 2.) not every kind of power is applicable in every situation. Nadia is one of the most powerful human wizards and can mow her way through a small army of Shadowlands creatures, but that kind of power would not be helpful in her problems with Owen Quell and Arnold Brauner.

I want to start writing CLOAK OF ASHES in December or January, so let’s have a short preview of the book!

###

My name is Nadia, and I’m a shadow agent of the High Queen of the Elves.

I don’t have many friends, but I look after the ones I do have…and I pay my debts.

So when Hakon Valborg’s teenaged granddaughter Lydia is arrested for the murder of her computer science teacher, I agree to help.

But there’s more going on here than just murder.

Because an ancient enemy of both humans and Elves just might have taken up residence in Lydia’s high school…

-JM

DRAGONTIARNA: GATES editing underway!

Editing for DRAGONTIARNA: GATES is now underway, so it’s time to share the cover image, which you can see below.

If all goes well, the book will be out in December.

[image error]

-JM

The Pulp Writer Show, Episode 1

I am pleased to announce that I have started a podcast. I figured that since I’ve now published 103 novels, I was probably uniquely qualified to talk about writing.

So listen to the first episode of my new podcast, The Pulp Writer Show! On the podcast, we’re going to discuss all aspects of indie publishing – writing, formatting, cover design, the publishing platforms, and so forth.

If all goes well there will be one episode every week.

You can hear the first episode here:

-JM