Jonathan Moeller's Blog, page 250

GHOST IN THE WINDS – halfway there!

Now halfway through the rough draft of GHOST IN THE WINDS!

17 chapters down, 17 to go.

-JM

FROSTBORN: THE FALSE KING – the third week

FROSTBORN: THE FALSE KING has now been out for three weeks, and it’s had the strongest launch of any book I’ve written so far.

Thanks everyone!

Eleven FROSTBORN books down, four to go, and FROSTBORN: THE DWARVEN PRINCE will be coming later this year.

-JM

GHOST IN THE WINDS progress update

Now 60k words into GHOST IN THE WINDS.

Still not even at the halfway point! This is indeed going to be a long one.

-JM

GHOST IN THE WINDS excerpt

Now on Chapter 9 of 34 for GHOST IN THE WINDS. Let’s have an excerpt:

Tomazain blinked. “Hell. How did I get mixed up in all of this? I should have opened up an inn someplace when I left the Legion.”

There was a flicker of old grief in his emotional sense. Kylon suspected that whatever had driven him into the life of a mercenary had not been pleasant.

“Don’t most Legion veterans open up inns that go out of business?” said Kylon.

“Bankruptcy’s still better than fighting mad sorcerers,” said Tomazain.

“Having experienced both, I cannot disagree,” said Kylon.

Tomazain snorted once, and nodded his approval.

-JM

GHOST IN THE WINDS and running

Started the day with a brisk 5k run, which seems appropriate, giving how much Caina will have to run for her life in today’s writing session of GHOST IN THE WINDS.

Come to think of it, in the previous seventeen (eighteen if you count BLADE OF THE GHOSTS) books, has there been a single book where Caina didn’t have to run for her life?

I can’t think of one.

Running: good for your health in more ways than one!

GHOST IN THE WINDS update

Now 20k words into GHOST IN THE WINDS.  20k words, and I still haven’t introduced all the POV characters.

This book is going to be a long one!

Anyway, the POV characters shall be Caina, Kylon, Morgant, Callatas, and Kalgri. The short stories GHOST NAILS and GHOST MIMIC were pretty popular, so Damla will be in GHOST IN THE WINDS as a POV character.

-JM

GHOST IN THE WINDS now underway!

I am pleased to report that I have started the rough draft of GHOST IN THE WINDS, the ninth and final* book of the GHOST EXILE series, and the eighteenth overall GHOSTS book.

I’ve been really looking forward to writing it. I plotted out GHOST IN THE WINDS three and a half years ago when I first laid out the outline for the GHOST EXILE series, so I’m excited to reach the conclusion of the saga at last. After all, if you’ve spent the last three years writing a mystery and keeping secrets, it is enjoyable to reveal all the secrets at last.

And there’s nothing quite as fun as writing the final book in a series. How many other people have gotten to write a nine book series all the way to the end, with people actively looking forward to it? Some, but not many.

So thank you all for coming along to the end of GHOST EXILE!

I have to admit I’m not sure when it will be done. I’m 9.000 words into it, and outline has 34 chapters, and the last thing I wrote with 34 chapters was SOUL OF SWORDS, and that book was like 7300 Kindle locations and about 140,000 words long. I suspect GHOST IN THE WINDS  will be somewhere around that length. So it will probably be a long book, and that makes it hard to predict how long it will be.

But it will be out before the end of 2016. Be sure to watch this page for updates!

-JM

*There will be another GHOSTS series after GHOST EXILE.

FROSTBORN: THE FALSE KING is now out!

FROSTBORN: THE FALSE KING, the eleventh book in the FROSTBORN series, is now out!

You can get it at Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon Germany, Amazon Canada, Amazon Australia, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, iBooks, and Smashwords. It’s not on Google Play yet due to technical difficulties, but hopefully we can get those ironed out soon.

Click here to read the first chapter.

Ridmark Arban is the Gray Knight, leading the war against the malevolent Frostborn.

After a year of battle, the war has ground to a bloody stalemate. Unless Ridmark can find new allies, the Frostborn will win through slow attrition.

But the shadow of the Frostborn has fallen over all lands, and Ridmark might not live long enough to find new allies…

-JM

Amazon Fire Phone

Back in 2014, Amazon introduced the Fire Phone, which failed commercially and wound up inflicting a $170 million dollar loss on the company. Basically, it was an unsuccessful attempt to duplicate the iPhone and enter the premium electronics market. Amazon seems to have learned from the experience with the $50 Kindle Fire tablet, which has been wildly successful and offers quite a lot of value for the money.

That said, I recently acquired a refurbished Fire Phone for a fraction of the original cost of the device. I didn’t want to use it as a phone, but it was cheap enough that I wanted to try it as an MP3 player and an ereader.

The reason the phone had to be refurbished became obvious the moment I opened the package and I detected the strong odor of pickle juice.

I suspect the story behind the phone’s “refurbished” status involved the line “hold my beer and watch this.”

That said, once the pickle odor faded, it’s a nice little device. The whole 3D interface thing is a little gimmicky (the view of the screen changes as you tilt it), but other than that, without the phone function it’s basically the iPod Touch version of the Kindle Fire. It accompanied me on a 6 mile run this morning and worked flawlessly, though it does still smell faintly of pickles.

Fortunately, pickles are among my favorite foods, and I kind of want some pickle chips now.

MASK OF SPELLS update

GHOST IN THE WINDS is the next book I’m going to write, but I’m still working on MASK OF SPELLS, and am on Chapter 3 of 20. A short excerpt follows!

Earnachar scowled, but said nothing more. He was not happy, but he would cooperate. Mazael had made up his mind, and that was that. Earnachar would not oppose his will, especially since Mazael had been well within his rights to execute Earnachar after the siege of Banner Hill.

Adalar was not sure that he could have been as merciful.

Earnachar would not oppose the plan…but the gods knew he would not shut up about it.

-JM