Jonathan Moeller's Blog, page 21

weekend updates

It’s Friday, so it’s time to wrap up the week!

I am 120,000 words into SHIELD OF DECEPTION, and I think I will finish the rough draft on Monday if all goes well.

I am also 13,500 words into GHOST IN THE ASSEMBLY.

Once the rough draft of SHIELD OF DECEPTION is done, I’m going to write SOLDIERS OF THE QUEEN, a bonus short story newsletter subscribers will get for free once SHIELD OF DECEPTION comes out. I’m going to try writing it in a word processor other than Word since I’m really annoyed at how ham-handedly Microsoft rammed Copilot AI nonsense into Word. Maybe MobiOffice, since I’ve been hearing good things about that.

-JM

Question of the Week: Mexican cuisine

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

This week’s question: what is your favorite Mexican dish? No wrong answers, including not enjoying Mexican food.

(I’m aware that “Mexican food” is a very broad net, and like all definitions, is prone to a substantial bit of haziness. Mexican cuisine is not the same as Tex-Mex which is not the same as Puerto Rican cuisine which is not the same as Guatemalan cuisine and so on, and the various regions of Mexico itself have their own culinary traditions. But that is true of all cuisines. By “Mexican food”, I mean “Mexican food” as it is generally defined in the United States, which tends to be an assemblage of various foods from the American Southwest, Mexico, and Latin America.)

For myself, I think my favorite would be Arroz con Pollo. Tasty, very filling, and so long as you don’t go too heavy on the cheese, not terribly bad for you. Steak fajitas would be a close second.

The inspiration for this question was that I made homemade nachos for dinner twice this week and I am probably going to make tacos for dinner tomorrow.

-JM

Another 10k word day!

I am pleased to report that I had yet another 10,000 word day, for my 2nd 10k word day of 2025!

This brings me up to 105,000 words of SHIELD OF DECEPTION, which puts me on Chapter 25 of 31.

I’ve got some other stuff to do tomorrow so I don’t think I’ll push for a third 10k day in a row.

Though 20,000 words in two days is quite the leap forward in progress!

-JM

The Pulp Writer Show, Episode 234: Writer Development

In this week’s episode, we take a look at why it is good for writers to read outside their genre, and consider how writers develop with experience.

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 word day!

I am very pleased to report that I wrote 10,000 words of SHIELD OF DECEPTION today, for my first 10k word day of 2025!

This is also my 2nd 10k word day for SHIELD OF DECEPTION, which is good because it’s going to be a long book  – like early DRAGONTIARNA long. I’m now at 95,000 words, which puts me on Chapter 23 of 31.

-JM

Coupon of the Week, 1/13/2025

Once again it is time for Coupon of the Week!

This coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Ghost in the Veils, Book #2 in the Ghost Armor Series, (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy) at my Payhip store:

VEILS50

The coupon code is valid through January 31, 2025. So if you need a new audiobook for the January weather, we’ve got you covered!

-JM

The Computer Wars!

A couple of weeks ago I posted a meme about choosing a new computer on Facebook and promptly forgot I had done so. But then I looked back a week and a half later to see that it had gone viral and people were still arguing in the comments!

Which is a good summary of social media. You can carefully consider a 1,500 word post that will get three likes at the most, but toss a meme up and forget about it, and you’ll come back in a week to see it had thousands of views! And over 200 comments, all of them arguing for or against specific computing platforms!

So I thought I would share what I actually picked for my computing needs in 2025.

Three caveats:

1.) For your own computing requirements, pick whatever meets your needs and that your budget will allow. Windows, MacOS, Linux, a tablet, whatever, it doesn’t really matter. Honestly, I think 90% of people can do 95% of what they need in a web browser nowadays anyway, and maybe with a cheap laser printer to print something out every other month or so. I recently helped an elderly relative with a computer problem, and she likely does 95% of her computing needs on her Kindle Fire tablet, and only breaks out her laptop when a web page doesn’t render properly on mobile. That said, I definitely fall into that 10% that cannot use a web browser for everything.

2.) My objective isn’t to have the best computer or the most powerful computer, it’s to have the computer that will be the most efficient in helping me write and publish books.

3.) I worked for a long time in IT support, and I wrote an internationally bestselling book about the Linux command line. I have done tech support for operating systems that no longer exist. Remember Windows CE on phones? PalmOS? Windows Phone? Getting Mac OS X to talk to Windows Print Services? Getting Mac OS X to talk properly to Active Directory? (ugh!) Windows Millennium Edition? (double ugh!) I remember them, and none too fondly.

That means whatever objection you have to Windows, MacOS, Linux, or any other operating system, I probably know about it already, have experienced it, and have in fact tried to fix while on the phone with someone having a panic attack about it.

So, this is what I will use for computers in 2025, and hopefully longer than that.

WRITING/EDITING COMPUTER: Mac Mini M4.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m increasingly unhappy with Windows 11 because of Microsoft’s turn toward AI. I thought long and hard about either Linux or MacOS, and in the end I decided on MacOS because I have several subcontractors who all use Excel. Granted, you can install Excel on a Linux system with an emulation layer, but it never works 100% right, and some of the more advanced Excel stuff (which I do use) freaks out with it. There are a number of excellent spreadsheet programs available for Linux as well, but none of them have 100% compatibility with Excel, which is what I need.

Additionally, for ebook and paperback formatting, I use Vellum, which is Mac only. I’ve been very happy with Vellum since like 2018, which means I’ve used it to format around 60 different ebooks and paperbacks.

So, based on all that, I chose the Mac Mini M4. I’ve been reasonably happy with it so far. It’s quite fast, which shows there are some advantages to the same company producing both the CPU and the operating system. Microsoft Word is definitely faster than it has been on previous versions of the Mac.

I wasn’t expecting this, but the overall lack of distraction in MacOS is nice. It’s very unobtrusive. Windows 11 is a very cluttered environment by default with lots of distractions, and it is very annoying how Microsoft has been encrusting ads throughout the platform. You can turn on quiet mode, of course, but it’s pleasant to have the overall lack of distraction be the default. So the Mac Mini M4 will be the computer I use for writing, editing, and book layout.

But that’s not all I do.

EVERYTHING ELSE COMPUTER: Windows 11 Intel Core i7

My previous desktop computer, a Windows 11 box with an Intel Core i7, will also remain in use.

The thing about being an indie publisher is that writing and editing isn’t all you do. I do my own covers now, which means Photoshop and DAZ 3d, and both of those applications are big fat memory hogs. I definitely didn’t want to shell out for a Mac with that much memory. There is also advertising, which means a lot of spreadsheets (and using Photoshop to make those ad images), and other miscellaneous tasks like recording expenses, web design, audio proofing, podcast recording, and so forth.

So my Windows 11 box is now my Everything Else computer. It doesn’t have an NPU chip, which means Windows 11’s more odious features like Recall won’t work on it. Therefore I plan to nurse it along as long as possible.

I have to admit there was an unanticipated pleasant psychological effect to this – when I write, I go to my writing computer, and when I need to do something else, I use my Everything Else computer. So it’s easier to avoid getting distracted by something else I need to do when I’m writing.

I should mention gaming. I don’t really use desktop computers for gaming any longer. They’re for work. If there’s a PC game I want to play, it needs to be able to run on my laptop while I sit on my couch, otherwise it’s not going to happen. In the past five years, I have spent more time playing games on the Switch and the Xbox than on desktop PC.

That is my computer plan for 2025 – write on the Mac, do everything else on the PC.

I’m grateful I’m able to use two different desktop computers. Hopefully I will use these computers to produce many good books for you to read!

-JM

Progress updates

Now closing out the week at 83,000 words of SHIELD OF DECEPTION, which puts me about halfway through Chapter 19 of 31. I had hoped to get a little further than that this week, but that’s still pretty good progress.

I think the rough draft is going to end up at about 115,000 words, so it will probably be out in February since it takes longer to edit a longer book.

I’m also 10,000 words into GHOST IN THE ASSEMBLY.

In audio news, CLOAK OF MASKS (as narrated by Hollis McCarthy) is all done. That should start turning up on the various audio stores literally any day.

-JM

Question of the Week: 2025 Games

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

This week’s question: what game are you playing in 2025 so far? No wrong answers, including not playing games at all.

For myself, I have been playing IRATUS: LORD OF THE DEAD, and enjoying it. It’s a roguelike, and it’s basically Reverse Darkest Dungeon. In Darkest Dungeon, you need to send your adventurers deeper and deeper into the dungeon until you get to the final dungeon and fight the evil boss. Iratus is the opposite – you play as the sinister necromancer at the bottom of the dungeon, and you send your minions higher and higher into the dungeon, fighting heroes and harvesting their remains to build your undead minions.

I enjoy it, partly because it’s easy to play it in bite-sized pieces, which works well with my schedule. Darkest Dungeon was a great game, but the save structure wasn’t all that great, and you could lose a lot of progress on a run. By contrast, you can do like one battle in IRATUS, save your game, and get on with your day.

This inspiration for this question was, of course, the fact that 2025 is a new year.

-JM

The Pulp Writer Show, Episode 233: Anatomy of a 10,000 Word Writing Day

In this week’s episode, I take a look at what goes into writing 10,000 words of a rough draft in a single day.

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