Jonathan Moeller's Blog, page 211

SILENT ORDER: IRON HAND now available!

I am pleased to report that SILENT ORDER: IRON HAND, the first book in the SILENT ORDER series, is now available at Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon Canada, Amazon Germany, and Amazon Australia.

Look for SILENT ORDER: WRAITH HAND, the second book in the series, sometime next week!

The galaxy is at war, but wars are won and lost in the shadows.

To the galaxy at large, Jack March is a privateer of the interstellar Kingdom of Calaskar and a former Iron Hand commando of the malevolent Final Consciousness. In truth, he is an alpha operative of the Silent Order, the most efficient and feared intelligence organization in human space. When there is a crisis, Jack March is the man to call.

But there are many forces that wish to enslave or destroy humanity.

And when a mission leads March to a lawless asteroid space station, he might be the only one left to stop those forces…

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-JM

 

SEVENFOLD SWORD: WARLORD now underway!

I am pleased to report that I am now 12,000 words into SEVENFOLD SWORD: WARLORD! If all goes well, I would like the book to come out in November.

(With the paperback in time for Christmas!

The SILENT ORDER series now finished

The SILENT ORDER science fiction series is finished and ready to be published!

For the first time in a year, I’m not scratching away at it on the side. Odd feeling. Maybe I’ll have to start a new one

SEVENFOLD SWORD question: the ghost orcs?

A reader emailed to ask if the ghost orcs that Ridmark encounters in the novella SHIELD KNIGHT: GHOST ORCS appeared anywhere else in the FROSTBORN/SEVENFOLD SWORD series.

They do! Ridmark previously encounters them in FROSTBORN: THE DWARVEN PRINCE as he travels past the Shaluuskan Forest, and the men of Andomhaim call them either “ghost orcs” or “Shaluuskan orcs.”

Of course, there are many different nations and kinds of orcs in FROSTBORN/SEVENFOLD SWORD, all with their own history, and the ghost orcs are no different.

Most orcs are green-skinned, but the Shaluuskan orcs are gray-skinned, and can turn invisible for short periods of time. They were originally created by the dark elven lord called the Sculptor, but eventually they rebelled against him and settled in the Shaluuskan Forest and claimed it for their own. The ghost orcs worship the orcish blood goddess Shalask, the goddess of mysteries and secrets and illusions, and the priestesses and priests of Shalask dominate their society. Consequently, the Shaluuskan orcs tend not to war among themselves the way that the Qazaluuskan orcs or the Vhaluuskan orcs do. They are intensely xenophobic, but this is balanced out by the fact that they are extremely isolationist, and usually keep to themselves in the Shaluuskan Forest unless provoked.

The one exception is if one of the priests or priestesses of Shalask receives a vision, in which case the priest or priestess will raise a warband and venture out of the forest to fulfill it. They are not as superstitious as the orcs of the Qazaluuskan Forest, who see omens of Qazalask in everything, but they still believe their visions.

But in terms of storytelling, in FROSTBORN/SEVENFOLD SWORD the ghost orcs are part of the background worldbuilding and don’t turn up too much. From a writer’s perspective, the danger of telling a really long story is that you get lost in your own worldbuilding and minor characters and forget to advance the main plot. (I won’t cite any examples here, but I’m sure you can think of a few.) So there are lots of background details in FROSTBORN/SEVENFOLD SWORD that get mentioned a few times but don’t get explored further because they wouldn’t contribute to the main plot.

I do regret that we never got to the dvargir city of Khaldurmar in the books, since several dvargir characters were important villains. Khaldurmar would be a fascinating place to write about, because by it’s run by the dvargir, who follow the letter of their laws scrupulously while actively abusing the spirit. (The dvargir love lawsuits, and some of the lawsuits between the dvargir Great Houses have been going on for thousands of years.) But there was never a good reason for the main plot to go to Khaldurmar.

Maybe I can fix that in a future book or story…

SEVENFOLD SWORD: SWORDBEARER Top 1000!

Amazon UK has this handy tool for tracking a book’s sales rank, and it looks like SEVENFOLD SWORD: SWORDBEARER has been pretty regularly in the Top #1000 on Amazon UK since it came out. Thanks, everyone!

Needless to say, this makes me look forward to starting SEVENFOLD SWORD: WARLORD in a few days!

The Sworn Knight – coming soon!

When SILENT ORDER comes out next month, I hadn’t decided what I was going to do as a bonus for newsletter subscribers.

Then I realized that I’ve never done a DEMONSOULED short story collection, so I’m going to do that!

THE SWORN KNIGHT will be a collection of all seven DEMONSOULED short stories – THE WANDERING KNIGHT, THE TOURNAMENT KNIGHT, THE RANSOM KNIGHT, THE BRONZE KNIGHT, THE RUNE KNIGHT, THE SERPENT KNIGHT, and THE DRAGON’S SHADOW. Newsletter subscribers can get the collection for free using Smashwords coupon codes when the SILENT ORDER books come out next month.

Also! I’ve changed newsletter providers, and I’ll be testing out the new one next month. Hopefully this one will be more reliable and avoid some of the problems I’ve been having with newsletters disappearing and not going to certain domains.

If you haven’t signed up for my new-release newsletter yet, you can do so here. I only use to announce new books, and whenever I send out a newsletter I try to make sure it has goodies in it.

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-JM

The Ubuntu Novel Project, Take Two

To prove a point, this month I decided to write, edit, layout, do the cover design, and publish a book entirely on the Ubuntu Linux operating system. I did this because I wanted to show it’s possible to write and publish a book entirely using a $200 Ubuntu desktop or laptop and the free software that comes with the Ubuntu Linux OS.

The book in question, SILENT ORDER: ECLIPSE HAND, is now completely finished, and it’s ready to be published in October with the rest of the SILENT ORDER science fiction series.

So what was the experience like?

-Ubuntu itself (specifically 16.04 Xenial Xerus) was rock-solid and gave me no trouble whatsoever. It was quick and efficient. And like everyone else in the world, I use DropBox for quick backups while working, and DropBox works just fine on Ubuntu. (In fact, I think it’s the only cloud storage provider that works flawlessly on Linux – neither Google Drive nor OneDrive nor iCloud have Linux clients.)

-LibreOffice Writer was pleasant to use as well. The layout, of course, is quite different from Microsoft Word, more reminsicent of the pre-2007 menu UI rather than the Ribbon UI that Office started using in 2007 onward. That said, the help files are good, so it isn’t a big deal.

The biggest problem I had was that I use so many made-up and custom words (a common peril of fantasy and science fiction writers) that I had to add them all manually to LibreOffice’s spell-checker. Fortunately, that is easily accomplished with a right-click.

-Unfortunately, when it comes to editing, LibreOffice Writer isn’t so good. I typically use Word’s Track Changes feature to edit books, and the equivalent in LibreOffice, just isn’t as functional. Also, I use the Grammarly plugin for Word, and there’s no equivalent for LibreOffice. That said, Grammarly does have a web editor, so I just copied and pasted individual chapters into that.

-I used Sigil to prepare the EPUB file, and it worked smoothly on Ubuntu. (If you want to learn how to lay out ebooks, you could do much worse than to open an EPUB file in Sigil and look at the underlying HTML code.)

-I used Calibre to convert the EPUB file into MOBI for Amazon. Calibre is a vital tool for any ebook reader or publisher. For instance, if a book is only available on Amazon, you can download the file from the Manage My Kindle page, convert it into EPUB in Calibre, and then sideload it onto a Nook or Kindle or iPad.

-I used The GIMP to create the cover for the book, using stock images licensed from Dreamstime.com. The GIMP has a learning curve like the Matterhorn, and it can’t do quite as many advanced things as Photoshop. But it’s free, which means you don’t have to deal with Adobe’s crazy Creative Cloud licensing scheme.

So, is it possible to write and publish a book using just free software? And it is possible to write and publish a book without spending a lot of money?

I think it is safe to say that it is. Clearly, the iPad Pro is not a better productivity tool than Ubuntu Linux.

That said, of course, you do have to spend some money. Ubuntu is free, and all the programs I listed above are free, but I the computer I ran them on isn’t free. I had to spend some money to license the stock photos from Dreamstime.com. Also, I pay for my Internet connection, electricity to run it all, etc. Learning how to use free software can be a time expense as well. I knew all this stuff already from previous IT jobs, but someone dropped into a Ubuntu desktop would have to spend some time getting their bearings.

And it’s a good idea to use the tools that work best for you. If you like writing on an iPad Pro (and you have $900 to drop on one), well, more power to you. But if you can do the job with a $200 Ubuntu desktop, there’s no reason not to use it instead of a far more expensive tool.

Would I do this again? Definitely. All the free software worked well, and it was pleasant to look at something other than Microsoft Word while writing. A little variety never hurts. Though when I do this again, I think I’ll write the book in LibreOffice and edit it in Word.

-JM

now editing SILENT ORDER #5

I am now editing the fifth and final (perhaps only for now) book in the SILENT ORDER series, SILENT ORDER: FIRE HAND.

On track to release them in October!

-JM

one million words

With SILENT ORDER: ECLIPSE HAND, I have passed one million words written in 2017.

Appropriate that I did it on a Ubuntu computer.

a short SILENT ORDER excerpt

Editing SILENT ORDER: AXIOM HAND today. Let’s have a short excerpt from the series!

“We are freelance professionals who solve problems for reasonable fees.”

That was one of the more unusual euphemisms March had ever heard for contract murder.

He rose to his feet and shook her hand. “I’m Jack March. I’m a privateer captain.”

The woman raised one eyebrow. “And just why was a privateer captain running around a rooftop with a gun?”

March met her eye as he released her hand. “I was solving a problem on a freelance basis.”

-JM