Jonathan Moeller's Blog, page 30

The Pulp Writer Show, Episode 220: Eight Tips For Finishing Your First Rough Draft

In this week’s episode, we discuss eight tips for finishing your first rough draft.

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

Fun With Printers

My podcast transcriptionist informed me that for the most recent episode her software heard “Today we are discussing why I don’t set up preorders for my books” as “Today we are discussing why I don’t set up printers for my books.”

Which is admittedly true. I don’t set up printers for my books since I do all the writing and editing on the computer. I mean, can you imagine the expense? I just sent the Word document of SHIELD OF CONQUEST to Brad Wills for the audiobook, and it was something like 270 single-spaced pages. If I wanted to edit it comfortably by hand, it would need to be double-spaced, so that would probably push it up to 500 pages. 500 pages times (give or take) ten books a year would come to around 5,000 pages I would have to print every single year. And then I would have to enter all those hand-written changes back into the computer anyway!

No, thanks! I just do the editing with Track Changes in Word.

I do have a lot of experience with printers because I spent a lot of time doing tech support before I became a full-time writer. While I am often nostalgic for those days, one thing I am most definitely not nostalgic about is printers, because printers break down, like, a lot.

Even the big laser printers designed for use for large departments. I got very familiar with the HP 4000 line of printers – the 4000, the 4050, the 4100, the 4250, the 4350, and then it was eventually superseded by the P4015 line. The P4015 was my favorite, since it tended to be very reliable and was the easiest one to service. Sometimes getting the fuser out of a laser printer is an immense pain, but in the P4015 it was just one panel and a pair of screws. They also didn’t tend to break down very often.

Some of the older printers didn’t come with network connectivity, so you had to buy an HP Jetdirect network card to add network functionality. Those were a pain as well, since they tended to die with regrettably frequency.

I realized I could probably ramble on about vintage laser printer repair for like another 1,500 words or so, but I’ll just cut it short and say that I’m very, very glad I don’t have to set up a printer for my books.

-JM

Stealth & Spells Audiobook Coupon!

I am pleased to report that the audiobook of STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE: LEVELING, as excellently narrated by CJ McAllister, is done!

It’s going to take a while for it to turn up on Audible, though – since I changed the title of the book from SEVENFOLD SWORD ONLINE: LEVELING to STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE: LEVELING, the ACX platform got confused by that, and so it’s going to take a bit to get through processing.

But! It’s available on my Payhip store right now. And if you go there now, you can get 25% off both the audiobook of STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE: LEVELING and STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE: CREATION, with this coupon code!

LEVELING

The coupon code will last until October 8th, 2024. So if you act now, you can get 25% off about 20 hours of high-quality LitRPG audiobooks.

-JM

Question of the Week: Rereading Novels

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

This week’s question: do you reread novels you have previously read?

There are often numerous reasons to reread nonfiction – research, for example, or double-checking on how to do a certain technical procedure.

For myself, I don’t usually reread novels. That said, this year I had a hard time finding something new to read, so I reread a bunch of novels from the 2000s and early 2010s that I remember I liked, but could recall little else about. I have to admit it was enjoyable to come back to something I had previously liked with 20-ish years of additional experience – I could appreciate nuances and allusions in a way that I couldn’t before.

-JM

The Pulp Writer Show, Episode 219: Prequels & Preorders!

In this week’s episode, I take a look at why I don’t set up preorders and I usually don’t write prequels. I also share my thoughts about the video game STARFIELD.

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

progress updates

A new week is upon us, so let’s see where my writing projects currently are.

-I’m 66,000 words into GHOST IN THE TOMBS. Since I think the book will be in the 90k to 100k range, I’m about 2/3 through the rough draft.

-I’m 22,000 words into CLOAK OF ILLUSION.

-I am 2,000 words into ORC-HOARD, which will be the 4th Rivah Half-Elven book.

I hope to be around 90k into GHOST IN THE TOMBS by the end of the week, but we will see how things go.

-JM

GHOST IN THE TOMBS underway!

I am pleased to report that GHOST IN THE TOMBS, the third book of the GHOST ARMOR series, is now underway!

Actually, it’s been underway for some time now. I started scratching away at it back in May.

However, enough scratches over long enough of a time span really add up, because I’m now 61,000 words into it, and hoping to have the book out in October if all goes well.

It’s been interesting to write because I’m using a plot device and a specific situation that I’ve never before used in one of my books.

More to come! For now, let’s have a brief preview excerpt in which Caina speaks with her half-sister Calvia Scorneus:

###

“Kylon and Kalliope can’t stand each other. Kalliope only came to ask for our help because she was desperate and afraid for the life of her children. Kylon was only willing to help her because of the children.”

“And I very strongly suspect,” said Calvia, “that without your presence, they would be at each other’s throats.”

“Yes,” said Caina.

“And now you’re returning to New Kyre, where Kylon will be High Seat of House Kardamnos. I expect that means you will be the Consort of House Kardamnos and Kalliope will be the…mmm, Matron. The titles are usually combined but have been split in the past,” said Calvia. She grinned, showing a lot of white teeth. “By the Divine, little sister. And here I thought I had fascinating problems to navigate. Yours will be much more complex.”

“Which is why I am asking for your help,” said Caina.

“Oh, you’ll have it,” said Calvia. “Keeping your husband as High Seat of House Kardamnos and hunting down the Cult of Rhadamathar will be a stimulating challenge…”

-JM

Preorders & Prequels!

I have to admit “Preorders & Prequels” sounds like a really lame tabletop RPG about indie authors.

Like, if you roll a d20, your book gets picked up as Amazon Daily Deal for the US. But if you roll a 1, your book file gets corrupted and you can figure out how to fix it.

Anyway, the inspiration for this alliterative title was that someone asked me about preorders and someone else asked me about prequels within 24 hours.

So, reader Juan asks about preorders:

“Something I noticed about your books, there never is a “preorder” option on Apple Books. Is this by design? I know you self publish so I didn’t know if that was a publisher feature or if there is a way to preorder there. If not no worries, I just know Apple takes a little longer to load the book.”

It’s by design. I never do preorders for a couple of different reasons. They’re good reasons, I promise!

1.) The consequences of missing a preorder date are moderately negative. Like, if you miss a preorder on Amazon, you get locked out of doing another one for the following twelve months. I’m not sure what happens if you miss a preorder on Apple Books, but I suspect it’s about the same level of penalty.

2.) Life is chaotic and unpredictable, and I don’t want to make promises I can’t keep. Like, if I get sick, or something in Real Life comes up, I could easily miss a week of writing time, which would make hitting a preorder date either very stressful or impossible.

3.) If I wrote like two books a year, I might do preorders. That would give me enough cushion of time to make sure everything is ready to go well in advance of the launch date. But I usually write ten books a year. With stuff coming out so frequently, organizing that many preorders would be a headache, and sometimes I don’t actually decide what I’m going to write next until I actually start it. Like, at the end of 2023, I pretty much decided on impulse to finish writing HALF-ELVEN THIEF and have that be my last book of the year. So with the amount I write, managing the logistics of so many preorders would be a serious headache.

4.) The worst consequence of missing a preorder is a lost of reader confidence. Without going into details, let’s say there’s been enough of that in the fantasy genre.

So, preorders have too many negatives and not enough positives, at least for my situation. I’d rather just make a good faith effort of have things out when I can and announce them via my newsletter. Speaking of which, if you sign up for my newsletter, you get regular free short stories!

Concerning prequels, reader Danny writes to ask:

“May I suggest writing a series of prequels to the Cloak Games series? The Shield of Conquest made me hope that it would be a prequel book to the Cloak Games series, A book that speaks about the invasion of Earth by the elves and brings some backstory of the relationship between Kaethran Morvilind and Tarlia – a teacher and a student, and the discovery and invasion of Earth, or other backstories that were not developed enough, for example about Aidan, the brother of Riordan, or Riordan’s experience as a shadow hunter.”

Generally speaking, I’m not a big fan of prequels. I have written a couple of prequel novels out of the 155 that I’ve written – FROSTBORN: THE FIRST QUEST comes to mind – and sometimes I’ll do short stories as a flashback. Probably the most recent example is PROPHECY OF THE HIGH QUEEN, the first meeting between Nadia and the High Queen written from the High Queen’s perspective. The High Queen uses magic to look into Nadia’s past and her various potential futures, and so the short story bounces all over the place in time. I have also written novels that kind of jump around in time – in CLOAK OF IRON, the scenes from Lauren Casey’s perspective go back even before the CLOAK GAMES series actually started, to set up why she was desperate enough to save her brother that she was willing to deal with someone like Mr. Shang of the Deathless Society. Or in the very first Nadia book, CLOAK GAMES: THIEF TRAP, where we blur through the first twenty years of Nadia’s life in the first chapter.

That said, I do write the short stories as “bonus” material, like extra scenes on the DVD. However, at this point, I don’t think I would write a prequel novel, and I certainly wouldn’t write a prequel series.

Why not? It feels like prequels are sort of like procrastinating before you continue on the main story, which is likely what most readers really want. I’ve noticed some writers (again, without going into details) have a bad habit of writing prequels instead of getting on with the main story. Making yourself continue on the main story instead of getting sidetracked by prequels or side quests is difficult, but it must be done for the greater good of the story.

Also, some things are better left to the reader’s imagination. Writing fiction is in some ways an exercise in creating a line drawing and letting the imagination of the reader provide the color and the shadow. Like, since we’ve been talking about Nadia, here’s someone describing her from first-person perspective:

“A woman in a dark coat and black jeans sat across from me. She had red-tinged brown hair tied in a loose ponytail and pale gray eyes the color of knives. I thought she looked like she could stand to eat more. That, combined with the eyes, gave her a look of feverish, almost unsettling, intensity. I probably outweighed her by a good ninety pounds, but I felt the sudden urge to reach for the gun I wasn’t carrying.” 

That’s just a line drawing, right? Every reader will fill in that line drawing with something from his or her own imagination.

In the same way, I think it is sometimes best to let the reader’s imagination fill in the details of a character’s backstory. Like Riordan – we know he tried to save his brother Aidan and failed, that he became a Shadow Hunter, and that his first wife joined the Rebels and tried to murder him to score points with her new friends. I could write out a prequel series describing those events, but I think at this point it wouldn’t be as vivid as whatever the readers have in their imagination.

Besides, that would be a distraction from the main story!

So, that is why I don’t set up preorders and I don’t usually write prequels.

-JM

SHIELD OF CONQUEST now available!

As you might have guessed from recent posts, SHIELD OF CONQUEST is now available at all ebook stores!

You can get it at Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon DE, Amazon CA, Amazon AU, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, Payhip, and Smashwords.

Battle and dark magic await!

Ridmark Arban has led the army of Andomhaim to the Isle of Kordain, ready to wage war upon the sinister Exarch of the Seven Temples and her fanatical soldiers.

But powers older than either Andomhaim and the Seven Temples have fought over the Isle, and a lord of the dark elves sees the chance to seize the Isle for himself.

And if he is not stopped, first the Isle and all the world will burn…

-JM

Question of the Week: Most Annoying Videogame Enemies

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

This week’s question: what is the most annoying videogame enemy?

For myself, I think it would be those stupid Medusa Heads from the CASTLEVANIA series. If you’ve played any CASTLEVANIA games, you know what I’m talking about. You’ll be climbing the stairs and a Medusa Head will somehow come in at exactly the right angle to avoid all your weapons and to knock you off the stairs to your death at the same time. Honestly, a lot of the old school CASTLEVANIA games are much more enjoyable with save states on modern systems.

A strong runner up would be Lakitu from SUPER MARIO BROTHERS – he’s the guy in the cloud who drops all those Spiny Shells on your head.

Obviously, there is no profound reason for this question. I happened to be reading an article about the upcoming STARFIELD expansion and the comments devolved into a rambling discussion of game design.

-JM