Jonathan Moeller's Blog, page 31

The Pulp Writer Show, Episode 218: Summer Movie Roundup, Part II: Very Miscellaneous!

n this week’s episode, I review the movies and streaming shows I saw in the second half of summer 2024. The episode concludes with a preview of the audiobook of HALF-ORC PALADIN, as excellently narrated by Leanne Woodward.

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

Starfield

I actually beat the main quest in STARFIELD last week. By my standards, this is fast – I first started playing SKYRIM in 2011, and I finally beat the main quest in autumn 2020 on the Switch version, since that was during the height of Covid and there wasn’t much else to do.

So, my thoughts on the game.

Overall, I would say I really liked it. It really does capture the feel of being a competent space adventurer wandering around the galaxy. You can do bounty hunting, pirate hunting, mining, exploring, and a variety of other stuff. Like, back in the 90s I really liked WING COMMANDER: PRIVATEER, which had infinite random missions, and STARFIELD kind of feels like an enormously expanded version of PRIVATEER. Or like PRIVATEER with a HALO game attached to it, given the wide variety of firearms you can obtain.

In the grand tradition of Bethesda games, you don’t even have to do the main quest or any of the scripted side quests – you can just wander around visiting random planets and fighting space pirates forever. Honestly, I probably spent more time playing randomly generated side missions than any of the scripted quests.

That said, I very much liked some of the scripted side quest missions. The Vanguard plotline was the best of them, in my opinion – you have to help the United Colonies find the origins of a super-deadly alien predator called a Terrormorph, and at the end there’s a a genuinely hard moral question – does the greater good justify the means for people in positions of authority?

The game has also improved quite a bit since launch with new patches – the updates added a city map feature, which is massively useful, and a Space Car you can use for driving across planetary surfaces, which makes a lot of the game’s missions quite a bit simpler and easy.

While I enjoyed STARFIELD, I concede that many of its critics had a point about its weaknesses. The game relies a lot on procedural generation. Every time you land on a planet, a bunch of nearby dungeons and features are randomly generated. This can get repetitive, though I don’t mind that very much – it makes it easy to play the game in bite-sized chunks when I’m late and it’s tired and I just want to mow down some Space Pirates or something. What is annoying is that sometimes the procedurally generated locations don’t match with the procedurally generated quests, and you can’t finish some of the quests. That was really irritating, though it tends to only happen at very high levels.

The game’s main plot revolved around multiverse stuff, and as I’ve mentioned, I’m not a big fan of the multiverse as a storytelling concept. However, it works better in a video game than in a movie or a book, and STARFIELD’s implementation of it is quite clever. Many games have the New Game Plus concept, where you start a new game but things are slightly different. In STARFIELD, when you go to a new universe, you lose all your possessions, but you keep all your skills and knowledge, so you’re starting the new game at level 65 or whatever. Additionally, a lot of the quests are altered because your character knows in advance what is going to happen from the previous universe, so you can get a better outcome than you did the last time.

Which is perhaps a compelling journey – to go from universe to universe and Put Right What Once Went Wrong.

Anyway, I enjoyed STARFIELD, and will definitely play the SHATTERED SPACE expansion when it comes out at the end of the month.

-JM

HALF-ORC PALADIN audiobook now available!

I am very pleased to report that you can now get the audiobook of HALF-ORC PALADIN, as excellently narrated by Leanne Woodward!

You can get the audiobook at Audible, Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon AU, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, Payhip, Chirp, Storytel, and Spotify.

-JM

SHIELD OF CONQUEST Table of Contents

I am finally far enough along with editing that I can share the Table of Contents for SHIELD OF CONQUEST.

If all goes well the book should be out next week.

-JM

Question of the week: favorite superhero movie?

Welcome to Question of the Week, which is designed to inspire interesting discussions of enjoyable topics.

This week’s question: what is your favorite superhero movie? No wrong answers, of course, including “I don’t like superhero movies.”

The inspiration for the question was the fact that superhero movies are such a major part of pop culture. Nowadays when people think of superhero movies they usually think of Marvel, but there were major superhero movies before the Marvel Cinematic Universe approach really got going.

For myself, I think my favorite superhero movies would be the Christopher Nolan/Christian Bale DARK KNIGHT trilogy. Strong performances, great action, and they managed to do something very difficult, namely bring a satisfying end to a superhero’s story arc. It almost feels like the DARK KNIGHT movies are the “real events” of Batman, and all the other comics and cartoons and movies are legends and exaggerations after the fact, like how the whole glittering mythos of “King Arthur and the Round Table” developed around an obscure Roman-British warlord in the 500s AD.

Also, Heath Ledger’s version of the Joker was amazing.

-JM

The Pulp Writer Show, Episode 217: The Origins Of HALF-ELVEN THIEF

In this week’s episode, I discuss the origins of my HALF-ELVEN THIEF series, and describe some of the ideas that inspired it. I also talk a little about some of the common scams in self-publishing.

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

Summer 2024 Movie Roundup Part II – Very Miscellaneous!

Autumn is almost upon us, so it’s time for part 2 of my Summer 2024 Movie Roundup!

I did not, however, actually watch all that many movies in the second half of the summer. No nefarious reason for that, it was just 1.) I was busy with travel, 2.) I was busy with multiple instances of home repair, and 3.) I was busy with finishing HALF-ORC PALADIN and SHIELD OF CONQUEST. So I mostly watched some older stuff that I found on streaming.

As usual, the movies are listed from my least favorite to most favorite, and the grades are totally subjective and based upon my own thoughts and opinions.

THE BURBS (1989)

A dark comedy/horror movie satire starring Tom Hanks as Ray, a suburban homeowner with a wife and son. On vacation for the week, Ray becomes obsessed with the Klopeks, a new family that has moved onto his street. The Klopeks have no interest in maintaining their property, and show signs of other odd activities – going out only at night, constant digging in the backyard, and strange noises and lights coming from the basement. Soon Ray and his two neighbors become determined to find out just what the Klopeks are up to.

It was darkly funny, though you could tell that the ending had been rewritten a few times. The movie couldn’t decide if it wanted to be a satire of clannish homeowners, or to totally validate their concerns, or both. I think it tried for both and couldn’t quite get there.

Though it does show how much the US has changed (or declined) in the last 35 years – Ray and his friends are shown as kind of losers, but they live in enormous well-maintained houses. It’s like how Homer Simpson in the first seasons of THE SIMPSONS was shown as a bumbling loser, but yet he could afford to live in a four-bedroom house, his wife didn’t work most of the time, they had two cars and three children, and all without Homer having a college degree. By 2024 standards, Homer Simpson lived like a king.

Amusing anecdote – one scene in THE BURBS was clearly inspired by A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS, which I talk about more below.

Overcall grade: C

THE BATMAN VS DRACULA (2005)

An animated movie where Batman goes up against Count Dracula. As probably dark and gory as something can be while still technically remaining targeted at children.

When a robbery goes bad, the Penguin accidentally releases Count Dracula from his tomb, and becomes the vampire lord’s new chief servant. Dracula is fascinated by the modern world, but he’s especially fascinated by Batman, since for obvious reason he admires Batman’s bat-themed motif. Dracula offers Batman the chance to become his chief lieutenant, with Batman refuses, and Dracula takes personally. He’ll get his revenge by turning Gotham City into a city of the undead, and taking Bruce Wayne’s girlfriend Vicky Vale as his new bride.

Unless, of course, Batman stops him.

It was interesting how neatly Dracula slots into becoming a good enemy for Batman. After all, in the original DRACULA novel, Dracula’s nemesis Van Helsing was definitely a Man of Science who brought logic, reason, and scientific method to his fight against Dracula. Batman is also a Man of Science in the sense that he’s a detective, so he does some detective work to unravel Dracula’s weaknesses and build weapons to use against him.

Overall grade: B

SET IT UP (2018)

A romantic comedy that reminded me a bit of more cynical 1940s-era romcoms like THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER.

The female lead, Harper, works as the personal assistant for a workaholic female sportswriter who terrorizes her employees. The male lead, Charlie, works for a workaholic male venture capitalist who also terrorizes his employees. Both their bosses are miserable, demanding people who make everyone around them unhappy. One day, both Charlie and Harper are dispatched to get dinner for their bosses, and end up fighting over the last available deliveryman. However, in the wake of the encounter, Harper hatches a plan. Both she and Charlie know everything about their respective bosses, so why not manipulate their calendars and schedules so they fall in love? They might be more cheerful, or at the very least, they will be in the office less frequently.

Charlie has his misgivings about this plan, but after one more unfortunate encounter with his boss, decides to embark on Harper’s plan. Of course, Charlie has a high-maintenance girlfriend who wants him to make a lot more money, and Harper is trying to find a boyfriend, but as per the rules of romcoms, perhaps Charlie and Harper will have more in common than they might think.

A bit more crude humor than I might prefer, but still enjoyable. It did remind me quite a bit of more cynical 30s/40s movies like MY MAN GODFREY or THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER.

Overall grade: B

BANK OF DAVE (2023)

Basically the cynical British version of a Hallmark movie, but with better production values.

It is very, very loosely based on the activities of Dave Fishwick, a successful van dealer in the north of England who decides to start a local bank for local people, feeling that the big London banks have lost sight of that. To do that, he recruits a London lawyer named Hugh to help him navigate the labyrinth of regulation around financial institutions. Of course, the big banks dislike this idea, and come after Dave hard. Dave is definitely the local Big Man, and it’s interesting that humanity’s default mode of government seems to be Local Big Man. However, if one must have a Big Man, one could only hope he is as benevolent as Dave.

The movie was pretty funny, though a lot of the humor comes from the UK’s class and regional divides, which are rather more pronounced than in the US. Like, here in the US, you can drive for three hundred miles and be in the same state the entire time, and the local culture won’t change that much. The cliche is that the US east cost and west coast look down upon “flyover country”, but you can drive something like a thousand miles from New York before you get to flyover country.

If you drive 300 miles in the UK, you’ve probably gone through six or seven regional accents and local traditions.

It does kind of turn into a Hallmark movie since Hugh falls for Dave’s doctor niece. So basically a romance with a backdrop of British class/regional struggle.

Overall grade: B

COOL RUNNINGS (1993)

A sports comedy film very (and I mean very) loosely based on the debut of the Jamaican Olympic bobsled team in the 1988 Winter Olympics.

When sprinter Derice Bannock is unable to qualify for the Jamaican Olympic team due to an accident, he decides instead to start a bobsled team to represent Jamaica in the games. To do this, he recruits washed up former bobsledder Blitzer (played by John Candy), to act as the team’s coach.

What follows is a pretty good example of a sports movie – the team must come together and perform while overcoming their own personal challenges and inner conflicts. Especially Coach Blitzer, who has to dig deep and overcome his past to effectively coach the team.

It’s interesting that sports movies tend to follow two trajectories – either the team rallies and wins the championship, or they don’t win the championship and nonetheless achieve moral victory by overcoming their internal difficulties and learning to work together. I won’t spoil which path COOL RUNNINGS follows.

Overall grade: B

UNCLE BUCK (1989)

A coming of age comedy film about 40 year old man, oddly enough.

This was pretty funny. Bob and Cindy are a married couple with three children living in the suburbs of Chicago, and when Cindy’s father has a heart attack, they need to rush to his side. Due to the unexpected nature of the news, they have to find someone to watch the kids while they’re gone. In desperation, they turn to Bob’s brother Buck, who alternates between working for his girlfriend at her tire company and making money on rigged horse races. While Buck is kind of a loser, he’s basically a decent guy, just averse to responsibility and settling down. He quickly steps up to take care of the children, though he conflicts with the oldest daughter Tia, who is in the grips of a full-blown adolescent rebellion.

Buck soon realizes that he’s come to a crossroads in his life, which is reinforced when Tia runs away to a party for the weekend.

Slightly dark in places, but definitely more family-friendly than many 80s comedies.

Overall grade: B+

THE ADJUSTMENT BUREAU (2011)

A science fiction romantic thriller based on a Philip K. Dick story. Which is a very odd sentence to type, but it’s true!

Matt Damon plays David Norris, a Congressman from New York who just lost a Senate race. Preparing for his concession speech, he meets Elise (played by Emily Blunt) and is immediately smitten with her. A month later he runs onto her by accident on a bus, and receives her phone number. However, soon mysterious suited men with unusual powers arrive and burn the paper with the phone number. The men explain to David that they are the Adjustment Bureau, charged with making sure history unfolds according to the mysterious Plan.

And the Plan says that David can never see Elise again.

David, of course, is not the sort of guy to take that lying down, so he soon finds himself trying to outwit the Time Cops and find Elise.

It was interesting that the Adjustment Bureau was very similar to the Time Variance Authority from the Marvel LOKI show, so I wonder if they drew from some of the same sources of inspiration.

An interesting movie and worth watching. It wrestled with the oldest philosophical question in western civilization – are all things predestined, or do we have free will? Or is it somehow both?

I have to admit the scene where Elise dunked David’s Blackberry in coffee was VERY satisfying since I had a lot of support headaches with Blackberries back in the 2000s.

Overall grade: B+

A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS (1964)

The first Spaghetti Western I’ve seen, which means it’s an Italian director Sergio Leone’s sort of stylized version of what the Old West was like. Of course, the movie actually ripped off the Akira Kurosawa samurai movie Yojimbo. In fact, it was so heavily ripped off Yojimbo that Kurosawa sued, settled out of court, and received fifteen percent of the film’s revenue. Apparently Kurosawa made more from the settlement than he did from Yojimbo.

Legal troubles aside, it was quite good, and I can see how it heavily influenced many subsequent movies. For instance, the STAR WARS character of Boba Fett was inspired by A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS, and Boba Fett in turn inspired THE MANDALORIAN. Stephen King’s rather disappointing DARK TOWER series was inspired by DOLLARS as well, and there are many other examples, such as the scene in THE BURBS I mentioned above.

Anyway, Clint Eastwood plays the Stranger, a mercenary gunslinger who seems to be drifting from town to town without a purpose. He arrives at San Miguel, a US-Mexican border town that is dominated by two crime families at each others’ throats – the Rojos and the Baxters. Both clans seek to hire the Stranger for their organizations, and the gunslinger begins playing them off each other for personal profit. As mercenary and as ruthless as he is, the Stranger seems to have a core of honor to him – a couple times he goes out of his way to help people because he can, which sometimes gets him into trouble.

Definitely worth watching as a classic film.

Overall grade: A

-JM

Let’s Write A Free Article About HALF-ELVEN THIEF!

One of the side effects of having been in self-publishing as long as I have is that my email has been out there a long time, so I get a LOT of scam messages.

Sketchy book promo sites are a dime a dozen, and they spring up all the time and frequently send out cold call emails to authors. I know some of them are operated by the same guy (or guys), because in his email database he mistakenly has my email address linked to  LitRPG author Darren Hultberg Jr.  So whenever the scammer guy (or guys) starts a new promo site with a name like BookSplurgzzzzzzz I get an email addressed to “Dear Darren Hultberg Jr” inviting me to the site. (I’ve never spoken with Mr. Hultberg or read his books, but I’m sure he’s a fine author who doesn’t deserve to have scammers emailing him.) Or I get emails from sketchy “book marketing” sites that say in exchange for $5,000, they’ll make sure your book gets featured on Publishers Weekly or something like that.

Lately I’ve been getting a lot of “Facebook ad” phishing messages, claiming that if I don’t click on their fake link and fill out their fake form, my Facebook ad account gets deactivated. Lately they’ve all been coming from Hotmail accounts for some reason, and recently I had a message claiming to be from “Facebook ad support” that actually came from address that looked something like jesusrises@hotmail.com

If Jesus Christ, the Son of God and the Lord and Savior of mankind, wanted to disable my Facebook ads account, I am pretty sure He would express His divine will through a method other than a Hotmail account. And if the rather less-than-divine organization of Facebook wanted to disable my ad account, they don’t send warnings, they (or whatever algorithm is running amok) just does it.

Another recent scam came from a “book marketing” service inviting me to write a free article for their members about the inspirations behind HALF-ELVEN THIEF. It was obviously an automated letter generated by scanning the Amazon sales ranks. I didn’t want to write a free article for some scammy book marketing service, but I decided instead to write it for my site!

So, therefore, here are the origins and inspirations for my HALF-ELVEN THIEF series.

I first started thinking about what would become HALF-ELVEN THIEF in early 2023. A couple of different ideas went into the series.

I’ll talk about the business/publishing side of the ideas first, and then the creative/artistic ones.

1.) I wanted to try writing shorter, less complicated books, because it felt like my books had been becoming more complicated and difficult to write lately. Of course, that’s not entirely true – my books have always been kind of complicated. SOUL OF SERPENTS was pretty complex, and I wrote that way back in 2011. SOUL OF SORCERY was VERY complicated, and that was 2012. But that means I have been writing complicated books for the last thirteen years at a minimum, so I wanted to try something different.

2.) I also wanted to write something completely new and put it in Kindle Unlimited.

Like many indie authors, my relationship with the Kindle Unlimited program has been fraught because of its exclusivity requirement. There is potentially a lot of money to be made in Kindle Unlimited, but at the same time that also prevents a book from selling on any of the other ebook platforms. I have experimented with putting some of my older series on KU, but what usually happens is that I end up making about 90% of what I would make if I had just kept the books wide.

KU’s algorithms also have a pretty strong recency bias. The best way to have a book perform well in KU is to write a series of them and release them fairly close together. They all tend to reinforce each other then. Which, of course, is obviously easier with shorter, less complicated books.

3.) Marvel lockout syndrome.

I also wanted to write something completely unrelated to anything I had written before.

Like, by this point I’ve written almost fifty books set in Andomhaim, over thirty books with Caina as the main character, and over twenty with Nadia as the main character. Readers tend to be completionists who want to read everything in the proper order, but at the same time, you also tend to lose readers from installment to installment. Several dozen books in a character’s backstory can be a daunting obstacle to starting a series.

I had been thinking about this for a while, and then in 2023 we saw cinematic juggernaut Marvel Studios run into trouble after fifteen years of putting out very interconnected movies. Marvel movies used to regularly pull in over a billion dollars, but suddenly they weren’t performing at the box office like they used to. As with everything in pop culture, there’s a billion different theories about that (and a billion terabytes worth of Internet arguments), but I suspect continuity lockout was part of it. For example, THE MARVELS was the sequel to something like ten different things with a combined watching time of over fifty hours. That’s nearly an entire semester’s worth of stuff to watch, and at that point, it almost feels like homework instead of entertainment.

That was just sort of a crystallization of what I had been thinking about with long series.

So I wanted to write a self-contained series that would be a good entry point and introduction to my writing for people, and yet wouldn’t be connected to any of the other very large series that I have written.

Those were the business/publishing reasons for HALF-ELVEN THIEF, and now let’s talk about some of the creative ideas that went into it.

4.) I love basic/generic fantasy tropes.

My absolute favorite kind of fantasy is what people call “generic” or “traditional” fantasy. Like, I want to see a knight, a dwarf, an elf, and wizard go into a dungeon and fight some orcs, maybe an evil wizard, and steal their loot. Or go on a quest where they have to visit several successive dungeons and fight different monsters. Or a Conan-style barbarian wandering around having adventures in decadent city-states and occasionally beheading an evil wizard. That’s my favorite kind of fantasy story.

Of course, in the bad old days before self-publishing, you couldn’t sell a book like that because the publishers didn’t want traditional fantasy. That’s why the original books in THE GHOSTS didn’t have orcs or dwarves or anything like that, since I wrote them long enough ago that I was still trying to sell them to traditional publishers.

So when it came to HALF-ELVEN THIEF, I decided to write a book around some of those traditional fantasy tropes – thieves’ guild, half-elves, sinister wizards, and so forth.

5.) Half-elves.

So why is Rivah, the main character of HALF-ELVEN THIEF, a half-elf?

The reason came from a semi-ridiculous controversy in 2023. Apparently Hasbro, the owners of Dungeons & Dragons, had decided to remove the terms “half-elf” and half-orc” from the game since they might be potentially offensive. The usual Internet furor ensued, though the truth was that the game had been modified so that you could have characters who were any combination of fantasy races, like a character who was half elven and half gnome or something. (I suppose the larger issue is that Hasbro really wants to turn Dungeons & Dragons into a subscription service like Xbox Game Pass, but that’s a different topic.)

Anyway, the idea caught in my head, and so I decided that Rivah would be a half-elf.

6.) Failures of leadership.

Of course, you can tell a story with traditional fantasy tropes, but all stories, regardless of genre, have themes to them.

An author’s opinion of his own work is often erroneous, but I think one of the chief themes of HALF-ELVEN THIEF is failures of leadership.

I thought about that a great deal in 2023, because in 2023 I knew a lot of people who quit the traditional “helping” professions like the medical field, teaching, law enforcement, and so on. They didn’t quit because they disliked the work and not even because the money was bad, but because the leadership at their institutions was so inept and even malignant that it turned the workplace into a toxic environment. So they left to seek more lucrative employment elsewhere, which overall is a net loss for civilization, isn’t it? We need people to be nurses and teachers and cops, but if they leave not because the work is challenging but because their managers are grotesquely incompetent narcissists, that is a bad thing.

Like, to return to this week’s Question of the Week about villains, the one of reasons Grand Admiral Thrawn is an effective villain is because he is an effective leader. His soldiers are glad to follow him because he’s not egotistical, he’s not capricious or unfair, and he cares mostly about results. Unfortunately, in Real Life, leaders like Thrawn are rare. We have far more leaders like Admiral Ozzel from THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, a petty, insecure, incompetent man who Darth Vader finally Force-chokes to death in exasperation.

We’ve all experienced working under someone like Admiral Ozzel, even if you’re not in one of the helping fields. No doubt we have all had an incompetent or malicious supervisors before, and it’s remarkable how often incompetent managers turn out to be malicious ones as well.

So I was thinking a lot about that, about how incredibly destructive bad leadership can be, and that reflected quite a bit into HALF-ELVEN THIEF.

Those were the business and creative inspirations that went into HALF-ELVEN THIEF.

Finally, I would like close with gratitude for how well HALF-ELVEN THIEF has been received. I’ve tried three “new” things in the last three years, and HALF-ELVEN THIEF by far has gone the best. I’m grateful that so many people have enjoyed Rivah’s adventures!

-JM

SHIELD OF CONQUEST cover image!

I am far enough along with editing that you can see the cover image for SHIELD OF CONQUEST below.

Hopefully the book will be ready around mid-September if all goes well.

-JM

Question of the week: favorite fictional villain?

Welcome to Question of the Week, which is designed to inspire interesting discussions of enjoyable topics.

This week’s question: what is your favorite fictional villain?

The inspiration for this question was that I saw a writer complaining about how hard it is to write a book without a villain. It’s not impossible, of course – the conflict of the story might be Man Vs. Nature or two people competing in a sporting event on equal footing – but it is easier to write a book with a villain. And, of course, really memorable villains often become popular characters.

For myself, I think my favorite fictional villain would be Grand Admiral Thrawn from the HEIR TO THE EMPIRE trilogy. He’s an interesting contrast to Darth Vader and the Emperor from the original movies – he’s just as capable of being ruthless as they are, but it’s not his first choice the way it is with someone like Darth Vader. The Emperor and Vader relied on the Force, but Thrawn uses logic and deduction. What he usually does is studies his opponent’s artwork or the style of artwork they favor, deduce their psychological blind spots from that study, and then builds attacks around those blind spots that his opponents will not (indeed, cannot) see coming. He takes the remnants of the Empire from the brink of defeat to the verge of total victory during the trilogy.

I think it works because while HEIR TO THE EMPIRE is still STAR WARS, Thrawn is a completely different kind of villain than Darth Vader & the Emperor, while nonetheless being just as formidable. One way to make your characters more sympathetic is to have them go up against a strong, competent villain.

-JM