Jonathan Moeller's Blog, page 170

freedom!

I liked this comment on Facebook in response to my recent post about plotting:

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That’s very true. As a self-published writer, I do have a lot of freedom that most tradpub writers do not. When it comes to writing, 1.) I basically do whatever I want, and 2.) I ignore about 99.87% of any criticism I receive. I think that’s mostly impossible in the tradpub world, even if you sell books on the scale of Stephen King or James Patterson or Nora Roberts.

That said, I do feel very strongly an obligation to you, the readers, to write the best book possible and to not dither around too much between books in the series. And with that thought, back to writing SEVENFOLD SWORD: GUARDIAN and CLOAK OF DRAGONS!

More thoughts on planning

Reader RD has two questions about my plotting process post (alliteration!) from the other day:

“How long will you ponder on a brand new series before you start putting things on paper?”

A while. Sometimes upwards of a year. That isn’t because it takes so long to think things up, it’s because it takes a while to actually write the books. Like, I could have an idea for a new series, but (for example) I’m currently writing book 5 of 9 of my current series. So it will take a while to get to the new series, which means I have ample time to think about it.

I do have way more ideas than I will ever be able to use. Realistically, I’m going to write about 12 books in 2019, but I have ideas for many more. But ideas don’t matter quite as much as the implementation. You know the guy who has the great business idea? That idea isn’t actually worth anything unless he actually does something with it.

“Example, how long did you think about Caina and the Ghost series before you decided it was real and needed to be written?”

That’s kind of a unique case, because I started writing about Caina before I realized that the Kindle was viable. Like, I wrote GHOST IN THE FLAMES in 2008, GHOST IN THE BLOOD in 2009, and CHILD OF THE GHOSTS in 2010, and I tried to sell them all to traditional publishers and got precisely nowhere. I eventually concluded that SF/F publishing wasn’t interested in adventure stories (like I write) and more interested in publishing dreary literary fiction about unlikable characters having tedious affairs with other unlikable characters in a plot that goes nowhere, and then slapping a SF/F label on it, and so I decided to stop writing novels, since I wasn’t interested in writing about unlikable characters having dreary affairs.

But then in late 2010 I bought my first Kindle, and I thought “Hey! Maybe there’s something to it!”

So when I started writing GHOST IN THE STORM in 2012, I think it’s a very different book than it would have been otherwise because of the time gap. Originally, all the sorcerers in Caina’s world would have been like the sorcerers in the CONAN THE BARBARIAN stories, always evil. By the time I got to GHOST IN THE STORM, I decided that the sorcerers were in fact manipulating a natural property of Caina’s world, rather than always making pacts with evil forces, so not all the sorcerers in Caina’s setting were evil. That also set up a lot of interesting character development for Caina, since she has to come down from her “kill ’em all” attitude in the earlier books.

For GHOST EXILE, I thought about that more or less continuously from 2013 to 2016. I did make several additions to the series as I went on – the Umbarians, Cassander Nilas, and Kylon weren’t in the original outline for the series.

For GHOST NIGHT, I was thinking about it just this morning.

“The detail in which you write, from the world(s), religions, characters, countries, regions etc is so incredible, that I find myself getting a clouded mind trying to envision how it’s all dreamed up lol.”

I was a history major in college (lo these many years ago) which turned out to be fairly useless in terms of getting a job. It did turn out to be very useful in terms of a source of plot ideas and inspirations. And if you do it well, you can integrate it into the story. Like, FROSTBORN: EXCALIBUR, several characters explicitly compare the siege of Tarlion to Julius Caesar’s siege of Alesia in 52 BC, which they can do because it’s part of their history. (And poor Gavin has to figure out how to pronounce the word “circumvallation”.)

-JM

MALISON: DRAGON CURSE now on Apple iBooks!

A metadata problem caused a few days’ delay, but MALISON: DRAGON CURSE is now available on Apple iBooks!

The sequel, MALISON: DRAGON FURY, is likewise available on iBooks.

-JM

SEVENFOLD SWORD: GUARDIAN and CLOAK OF DRAGONS underway!

Now that MALISON: DRAGON FURY is out, I’ve started on my next two projects – SEVENFOLD SWORD: GUARDIAN and CLOAK OF DRAGONS! I’m 14,500 words into GUARDIAN, and 7000 words into CLOAK OF DRAGONS.

If all goes well, GUARDIAN should be out in March and CLOAK OF DRAGONS sometime in April.

-JM

MALISON: DRAGON FURY now available!

I am pleased to report that MALISON: DRAGON FURY, the second book in the MALISON series, is now available at Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon DE, Amazon CA, Amazon AU, Barnes & Noble, iBooks, Kobo, Google Play, and Smashwords.

Magic has been mankind’s defense against the dark elves and the xiatami…but the Dragon Curse threatens to destroy all.

When Tyrcamber Rigamond is sent to help defend the Empire’s southern border against the xiatami, he expects a difficult campaign.

He doesn’t expect to find the sinister Dragon Cult.

And their treachery might destroy humanity…

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-JM

how to start a book & series

Reader NF asks:

“How do you start a book or better yet!? How do you start a series?”

For a book, I typically start by writing a synopsis of the book, which includes the climactic scenes, emotional high points, story beats, and so on. Then I divided it up into a suitable number of chapters and start writing. I should note that before I actually outline a book I tend to have been thinking about it for a few months already.

Like, I wrote the outline for CLOAK OF DRAGONS a few days ago, but I’ve been thinking about it since last summer, so I had mostly worked it out in my head already. It was just a matter of writing down a synopsis and getting it organized before I started out.

Outlining a series is a bit more work, but not unduly so. Usually I write a thumbnail sketch of the series and its arc, and then I divide it up into the number of books. Then I write a thumbnail sketch of each individual book, which focuses on the main events that each book has to hit. Like, “Ridmark meets X”, or “Caina fights X for the first time”, or “Nadia finds out the truth about X”, that kind of thing.

Once the time comes to write the book, I’ll take the thumbnail sketch, expand it into a synopsis, and then make it into an outline with chapters.

Most of the time I’m pretty rigid about the number of books in a series I’ve planned out from the beginning. Like, I planned for twelve SEVENFOLD SWORD books, and so there are going to be twelve SEVENFOLD SWORD books, especially since the contract for the audiobooks is for twelve books, so changing that number would cause all kind of problems. I almost turned Chapter 22 of GHOST IN THE SEAL into its own book, but I decided that the concept would only sustain a chapter, not an entire book. So GHOST EXILE remained nine books.

The one exception was when I wrote CLOAK GAMES: MAGE FALL. The CLOAK GAMES series was supposed to be eleven books, but I decided that the series wouldn’t properly have an ending until Nadia and Lord Morvilind had come to some kind of resolution in their conflict. There aren’t any CLOAK GAMES audiobooks, but adding a book to the series was still a logistical challenge – I had to order another cover, GHOST IN THE AMULET and GHOST IN THE TOWER got delayed, and so on.

Anyway, that’s how I plan out books and series. The longer the series, the more planning that is necessary – I planned out the FROSTBORN series five year before I finished it in May of 2017.

-JM

fret not over reviews

I occasionally tell younger writers not to take reviews personally, and today I can provide an excellent example.

Recently I read a thriller novel. It was reasonably solid but I hadn’t decided if I liked it enough to read the sequel, so after I went on Amazon to browse the reviews for the book. It’s always interesting and occasionally amusing to see what other people think of a book. While doing so, I came across a 1-star review that complained of the “frequent explicit sex scenes” in the book.

This was somewhat surprising, because there weren’t any sex scenes in the book.

Like, none at all.

The closest is the start of the chapter after the heroine spends the night at her boyfriend’s apartment, and the book says she feels “refreshed” after spending time with her boyfriend. It was even more discreet than a 1940s movie where the male and female lead would walk into a hotel, the screen would fade to black, and then the character would be fully dressed in the next scene. In fact, from the way the scene is written in the book, you could just as easily assume they spent the night watching TV or playing Super Smash Brothers or something. I wondered if the reviewer had left the review on the wrong book (I once had someone leave a review for one of my books complaining the compression socks she had ordered aggravated her varicose veins), but no, the review mentioned all the characters by name.

This leads to three possible conclusions.

1.) The reviewer hallucinated the explicit scenes.

2.) The reviewer made stuff up.

3.) The reviewer didn’t like the book but was unable to articulate the reason why, and so went with the “explicit scenes” complaint.

So, the moral of the story is you can’t please everyone, so you shouldn’t take reviews personally. Like, last year I had people email to complain that SEVENFOLD SWORD: TOWER was both 1.) too long, and 2.) too short. It literally cannot be both!

Often, bad reviews have no actual basis in reality, so best not to worry about them too much.

-JM

MALISON: DRAGON FURY cover image and excerpt

Below is both an excerpt from MALISON: DRAGON FURY and the cover image!

If all goes well, it should hopefully come out towards the end of next week.

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“And begging your pardon, sir, but I think your sister is high in the Duke’s councils as well.”

Tyrcamber snorted. “Of course she is. She’s his wife, for God’s sake. Have you met my sister, serjeant-captain?”

“I haven’t yet had that honor, sir.”

“Adalhaid has always known her own mind, and she’s very good at getting her way,” said Tyrcamber. “You might as well try to command the sea as to tell my sister what to do. You’ll get the same results, more or less.”

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-JM

 

now editing MALISON: DRAGON FURY

Editing is underway for MALISON: DRAGON FURY! I would share the cover image, but I haven’t actually made it yet.

The 25 Bestselling Books of 2018

It’s end of the year bookkeeping time, and that means I can list my 25 bestselling books of 2018!

Thanks for reading them! Enough of you read my books that I had to buy special software to keep track of how many copies I sold.

1.) SEVENFOLD SWORD: NECROMANCER

2.) SEVENFOLD SWORD: SHADOW

3.) FROSTBORN OMNIBUS ONE

4.) SEVENFOLD SWORD: UNITY

5.) SEVENFOLD SWORD: SORCERESS

6.) SEVENFOLD SWORD: CHAMPION

7.) SEVENFOLD SWORD: SERPENT

8.) SEVENFOLD SWORD: WARLORD

9.) SEVENFOLD SWORD: SWORDBEARER

10.) SILENT ORDER: OMNIBUS ONE

11.) SEVENFOLD SWORD: TOWER

12.) FROSTBORN: THE MASTER THIEF

13.) FROSTBORN: THE SHADOW PRISON

14.) FROSTBORN: THE IRON TOWER

15.) FROSTBORN: THE DRAGON KNIGHT

16.) FROSTBORN: THE DARK WARDEN

17.) FROSTBORN: EXCALIBUR

18.) FROSTBORN: THE GORGON SPIRIT

19.) FROSTBORN: THE BROKEN MAGE

20.) FROSTBORN: THE DWARVEN PRINCE

21.) FROSTBORN: THE WORLD GATE

22.) FROSTBORN: THE FALSE KING

23.) FROSTBORN: THE HIGH LORDS

24.) CLOAK GAMES: BLOOD CAST

25.) CLOAK GAMES: LAST JUDGE

So it looks like the FROSTBORN/SEVENFOLD SWORD universe wins the popularity contest! But I was very surprised to see that SILENT ORDER: OMNIBUS ONE made the top 10.

-JM