Jonathan Moeller's Blog, page 194
April 2, 2018
Cloak Games
I told a bunch of people I would publish a book this week.
Time to go do that! 
March 30, 2018
CLOAK GAMES: LAST JUDGE table of contents & SEVENFOLD SWORD updates!
I’m going to take a few days off for Easter, but before I do, here’s where I am with various projects!
CLOAK GAMES: LAST JUDGE is just about done, and it should come out next week. You can see the Table of Contents below at the bottom of this post. (It’s one chapter shorter than BLOOD CAST, but is actually several thousand words longer).
I’m 90,000 words into SEVENFOLD SWORD: UNITY.
I’m also on Chapter 3 of 16 of CLOAK GAMES #11, and I’ll announce the title for that one after LAST JUDGE comes out.
And I’m also on Chapter 6 of 10 of SILENT ORDER: IMAGE HAND. Over halfway there!
SILENT ORDER will also be exiting Kindle Unlimited and returning to all the other retailers in April.
Here’s a short preview of the SILENT ORDER: IMAGE HAND:
“Are we stealing a car?” said Cassandra, scrambling for the passenger’s side door.
“We are stealing a car,” said March, dropping behind the wheel.
And now the CLOAK GAMES: LAST JUDGE Table of Contents:
[image error]
-JM
One-day free book!
A one-day (March 30th!) free sale! L. Jagi Lamplighter’s Rachel Griffin series is a bit like Harry Potter meets Narnia meets HP Lovecraft, and today only, you can get the first free!
Details below:
Birthdays are a time of celebrations! Even the birthdays of imaginary characters. In the Books of Unexpected Enlightenment, Rachel Griffin’s birthday is March 30th, and Sigfried Smith’s birthday is April 1st (falls on Easter this year.) The closeness of their birthdays allows them both to be the same age for two days every year!
In honor of Rachel and Sigfried’s birthday, some of their books are going to be on sale March 30th.
The Unexpected Enlightenment of Rachel Griffin — FREE
Rachel and the Many-Spendered Dreamland — on sale for $1.99
The Awful Truth About Forgetting — on sale for $2.99
-JM
March 29, 2018
SEVENFOLD SWORD vs the MacBook Air!
I wrote about the refurbished 2012 MacBook Air that I use to make print books in yesterday’s post.
I guess the computer is shy and doesn’t like attention, because immediately after I did that, it tried to update itself to MacOS 10.13.3, and promptly got stuck in a reboot loop. Some research revealed that the MacBook’s recovery partition was still using 10.8, and the update installer for 10.13.3 didn’t like that at all. So I wound up wiping the hard drive and reinstalling everything from scratch.
Just like a Windows machine!
March 28, 2018
Vellum vs MacBook Air
I have a refurbished 2012 MacBook Air I use to run Vellum, a program which makes creating the interior layout for print books much easier.
That said, if you have ever used a Mac, you know that their power cords tend to be on the fragile side. When I sat down to make the print edition of SILENT ORDER: MASTER HAND, I discovered that the power cord had gone bad.
Fortunately, the MacBook was still fully charged. I wondered if I could get SILENT ORDER: MASTER HAND converted to a paperback book off a single battery charge, so I decided to give it a try.
And as it turns out, I could! It took exactly 6% of the remaining battery charge to import the Word document of SILENT ORDER: MASTER HAND, get it arranged properly, clean it up, and export it to a print-interior PDF.
That could be a tagline for Vellum – you can do your book interior in 6% of the battery charge!
SILENT ORDER: MASTER HAND is now available in print here.
-JM
March 25, 2018
10 years of GHOST IN THE FLAMES
I think it was ten years ago this month that I started writing GHOST IN THE FLAMES.
Dang, but time flies.
I remember that was the last book I tried really hard to sell to traditional publishing. All rejected, of course.
But! It’s sold more copies self-published than it ever would have through a traditional publisher. And today I just saw the first versions of the covers of GHOST NIGHT books #3 and #4. Which would not exist if I had not self-published GHOST IN THE FLAMES!
-JM
March 23, 2018
how to write a really long series, part II
Following my earlier post on How To Write A Really Long Series, another reader asked how I thought up the ideas to fill all those books.
It’s simple – you just have to take two principles from real life, and then apply them to your fictional characters.
1.) Nothing Ever Goes According To Plan.
2.) Even When Things Go According To Plan, There Are Always Unintended Consequences.
First, Nothing Ever Goes According To Plan.
This is true on both the micro or the macro level, and you can use this to introduce all kinds of plot complications. An example: earlier this week, I had to drive to a nearby urban area to have some work done on my car. After the appointment, I planned to drive to a restaurant on the other side of the city to have lunch. I knew where the car shop was, and I knew where the restaurant was, but I had no idea how to get from one to the other. Fortunately, I had my phone’s GPS to guide me.
Unfortunately, after the second left turn, the phone announced in a calm and pleasant voice that the GPS signal had been lost. (I said a word in a voice that was neither calm nor pleasant.)
I did eventually figure out how to get to the restaurant, though I wound up seeing way more of the city than I planned!
You can use this principle in fiction. Like, in a fantasy novel, a character might have to travel to the city to give a message to the king, but halfway there he finds that a bridge is out, or that the city is under siege, or that a plague has broken out in the city and it’s closed to visitors. In a detective novel, the detective might go to interview a witness, only to find that the witness has been murdered, or that the witness’s testimony totally destroys the detective’s theories about the crime.
I use this a lot in my own books – basically all the battle scenes in FROSTBORN: EXCALIBUR and SEVENFOLD SWORD: WARLORD are the result of plans breaking down in a major way.
Second, Even When Things Go According To Plan, There Are Always Unintended Consequences.
You can have fun with this one, though it’s annoying in Real Life!
Another minor example from my life. A while back, I stopped for lunch at a sandwich shop, got my sandwich, and left without incident. Mission accomplished, right? Except without my knowledge the back left tire of my car had picked up a nail, so the next time I went out to the car, the tire was as flat as a pane of plate glass. I wanted to reinflate it, except I needed a different attachment for my air compressor, which meant a trip to the hardware store, and then I had to make an appointment to get a new tire and have it installed.
All these Unintended Consequences just because I wanted a sandwich for lunch!
The applications of this principle in fiction should be obvious. Like in our fantasy novel, let’s say the hero goes to hire a ferry because of the damaged bridge. Except at the ferry station, he’s spotted by a spy hired to make sure the king doesn’t receive the message, and the spy goes to arrange an ambush further down the road. Or in the detective story, the detective gains a crucial piece of evidence from the witness. Except the murderer realizes it, and then kills another eyewitness who has the final piece of the puzzle.
I use this one a lot in my books, because it lends a good air of verisimilitude to nearly any genre. (Because in Real Life there are always Unintended Consequences!) In FROSTBORN, the events of FROSTBORN: THE MASTER THIEF and FROSTBORN: THE IRON TOWER basically happen because Ridmark goes out of his way to cure a friend of wyvern poison. Mara’s and Third’s entire plotline in FROSTBORN is an extended exercise in Unintended Consequences. In GHOST EXILE, Caina spends the first several books terrorizing Istarinmul’s Brotherhood of Slavers, but she doesn’t realize that’s helping push Istarinmul towards civil war. Also in GHOST EXILE, Grand Master Callatas decides to cheat on his bargain with Cassander Nilas of the Umbarian Order, thinking he can get away with it without consequences. (Unsurprising spoiler: he can’t!)
If you’re having trouble plotting out a long series or even a single novel, you could do worse than using the law of unintended consequences and remembering that nothing ever goes according to plan.
-JM
March 22, 2018
SILENT ORDER: Who Is Adelaide Taren?
The other day I mentioned Adelaide Taren from my SILENT ORDER science fiction series as an example of a character with intellectual curiosity, and a reader (perhaps out of intellectual curiosity) asked who Adelaide Taren was.
To amuse myself, I wound up writing an in-universe news profile of Adelaide Taren. Readers of the SILENT ORDER series will be amused to compare the official profile with what actually happened.
March 21, 2018
Nadia Moran vs technology!
Tarun asks:
“The Conquest also seemed to have frozen human technological development completely which is extremely unrealistic. No advancement in any tech for 300 years ? Does no human study science or do R&D any more ? I find it rather strange that Elves have suppressed this – they could have waged their wars against the Archons far more effectively if humans had advanced technologically.”
The High Queen did that on purpose.
Some technology has advanced quite a bit – like, agricultural science, materials science, and medical technology are way more advanced than they were at the Conquest. If James Marney had lived in 2013, he would have died from his wounds, or at the absolute minimum he would have lost the leg. There are also fusion power plants that Nadia doesn’t know about, and electrical technology is more advanced – think about Nicholas telling Nadia about EMP shielding. A lot of the technological improvements are quiet things that Nadia doesn’t notice or takes for granted.
That said, the Elves have deliberately stalled human technological progress in three areas:
-Weapons tech. No one but the High Queen has control of any weapons of mass destruction. Not humans, not Elven nobles, only the High Queen.
-Information technology. The Elves don’t want people organizing without them knowing about. So IT and the Internet are carefully monitored.
-Automation technology. The High Queen wants all her former men-at-arms to have stable jobs so they can marry and have children and raise the next generation of men-at-arms, and a large pool of unemployed men is fertile ground for a revolution. So any kind of automation technology that would make jobs redundant gets shut down. Like, if a grocery store owner installed a self-checkout, he would find himself in a lot of trouble very quickly. The Elves care more about social stability than any economic inefficiencies this generates.
The tricky part about writing CLOAK GAMES is that Nadia is at times a very solipsistic narrator – if she doesn’t care about something and it doesn’t affect or threaten her, she won’t think about it at all. (She doesn’t have the intellectual curiosity that someone like Caina or Adelaide Taren would have.) On the other hand, this makes it easy to reveal plot-important information without resorting to infodumps.
-JM
March 19, 2018
history vs histories
One of my favorite parts of writing fiction is the historical backstory – specifically, how everyone has a slightly different version of what really happened in the past.
That’s how history works in Real Life. If you ask twenty different people what happened in a historical event, you will get twenty different answers. Even if the facts are beyond any possibility of dispute, you will get twenty different interpretations of those facts.
Like, think about the CLOAK GAMES series. In that series, the backstory is that the High Queen of the Elves conquered Earth on Conquest Day, and the Elves have ruled mankind ever since.
Except, what really happened? Nadia’s heard many different versions of the story in the last nine books:
-The High Queen destroyed the corrupt governments, and brought duty, order, and peace to mankind.
-The High Queen brutally conquered Earth, executed anyone who resisted her, and enslaved mankind.
-The Conquest has brought stagnation and coercive control to Earth.
-The Conquest has brought peace and order to Earth.
-The High Queen seized control of Earth in a day.
-The High Queen spent several decades putting down various insurgencies.
-The Archons liberated their homeworld from royal rule and established a republic, while the royalist Elves cowardly took shelter on Earth.
-The Archons overthrew the rightful government of their homeworld and slaughtered millions, forcing the survivors to flee to Earth to save their lives.
Nadia’s heard different versions of that story from different people. Which one is true? Maybe they’re all true, but it depends on who you ask.
Or maybe Nadia’s going to find out the hard way in CLOAK GAMES: LAST JUDGE.
