Jonathan Moeller's Blog, page 32

The Pulp Writer Show, Episode 216: 7 Things Not To Put On A Book Cover

In this week’s episode, I take a look at 7 things you should not put on a book cover, and also discuss how I used to write tech nonfiction.

You can listen to the show at the official Pulp Writer Show site, and you can also listen to it at Spotify, Apple Podcasts , Amazon Music, and Libsyn.

-JM

SHIELD OF CONQUEST rough draft done!

I am pleased to report that the rough draft of SHIELD OF CONQUEST is done!

97,500 words in 21 days.

Next up is THE FIRST COMMAND, a short story that will be told from the point of view of Gareth Arban. Newsletter subscribers will get a free ebook copy of THE FIRST COMMAND when SHIELD OF CONQUEST comes out, hopefully sometime in September.

I should have a cover for the book sometime next week.

As for my other projects, I am 40,000 words into GHOST IN THE TOMBS, and 10,000 words into CLOAK OF ILLUSION.

-JM

Enjoy your tech books!

I can always tell when the school year starts, because suddenly I have numerous orders for the paperback copies of THE LINUX COMMAND LINE BEGINNER’S GUIDE and THE WINDOWS COMMAND LINE BEGINNER’S GUIDE. Some professors have recommended them for their classes because they’re 1.) low-cost, and 2.) a good introduction to the topic.

If you’ve only discovered my writing recently (and by ‘recently’ I mean in the last six years), you might not know this, but I used to do a lot of tech writing. That was, in fact, my first successful attempt at writing for the Internet, tech blogging back in the second half of the 2000s. When I started self-publishing in 2011, I also wrote a bunch of tech books, and LINUX COMMAND and WINDOWS COMMAND are definitely the most successful of them.

Around 2018 I stopped tech writing due to lack of time and the fact that fiction turned out to be much more lucrative.

I occasionally get snide remarks from people saying “why pay $0.99 for an ebook, all this information is available for free on the Internet or YouTube.”

That is true. However, it overlooks the fact that people learn information in different ways. For some people, having the information laid out step by step in a book is the best introduction to the topic.

And the books are intended for absolute beginners. Part of the experience of being an absolute beginner is that you don’t even know the proper questions to ask, which means it’s hard to research and find relevant information on the Internet. It’s said that experts know what they don’t know, but if you’re a beginner, you don’t even know what you don’t know yet! LINUX COMMAND and WINDOWS COMMAND were intended to give people a good beginning foundation for the topic.

And since the books have been out for twelve years, I think I achieved that goal. I’ve gotten many emails from people who found themselves suddenly forced to use Linux (my favorite was from a teacher who unexpectedly found himself teaching a high school computer science class one week before it began) who said that the book helped them come to grips with the Linux command line.

I’m glad it was helpful, and I’m glad that the book has helped people, which is why I’ve kept them at $0,99 USD for over a decade now. And if you are learning the command line for the first time and you’re one of the people who bought book recently, I hope it is helpful.

-JM

Question of the Week: favorite fantasy film?

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

This week’s question: what is your favorite movie in the fantasy genre? No wrong answers, obviously, but I think it’s an interesting question because I suspect fantasy is a LOT harder as a genre to bring to film than police procedurals or romantic comedies.

For myself, I think the overwhelming answer would have to be Peter Jackson’s LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy. Like, in my opinion (and your opinion may vary), THE LORD OF THE RINGS movies set the bar very high, so the trilogy is in kind of its own category. You watch them twenty years later and they hold up well in a way a lot of stuff from twenty years ago does not.

With that said, I think my second-favorite fantasy film would the Arnold Schwarzenegger CONAN THE BARBARIAN, since it does a pretty good job of capturing the spirit of the original stories, and the soundtrack by Basil Poledouris is superb – the ANVIL OF CROM track is excellent. Also, James Earl Jones plays an evil sorcerer/cult leader named Thulsa Doom, which is excellent.

-JM

The Pulp Writer Show, Episode 215: KDP Print vs Ingram Spark For Indie Authors

In this week’s episode, we take a look at the pros and cons of KDP Print and Ingram Spark, and see which one works best for helping indie authors make excellent print books.

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

As we enter in the final week of August 2024, let’s see where I’m at with current writing projects!

SHIELD OF CONQUEST: 82,000 words.

GHOST IN THE TOMBS: 38,000 words.

CLOAK OF ILLUSION: 8,000 words.

Ideally, I’d like SHIELD OF CONQUEST to come out in September, GHOST IN THE TOMBS in October, and CLOAK OF ILLUSION in November, but we’ll see if things slip or not.

-JM

another 10k word day for SHIELD OF CONQUEST!

I am pleased to report that I had yet another 10,000 word day for SHIELD OF CONQUEST!

That puts me up to 74,000 words, which means I am on Chapter 16 of 23.

-JM

Question of the Week: Favorite Historical Period?

I haven’t had time to do a Question of the Week since July, so let’s do one now! Question of the Week is designed to inspire interesting discussion of enjoyable topics.

If you enjoy reading about history, what is your favorite historical period to read about? No wrong answers, obviously.

For myself, it’s hard to pin down, since it will be whatever catches my interest at any given time. Like, when I visited the battlefield of Chickamauga in 2022, I went on a long reading spiral about the US Civil War. When I watched Season 4 of THE CROWN, I wound up reading a lot about Thatcher-era Britain to see all the (many) details the show got wrong. When I recently read GHOST ON THE THRONE about the Diadochi, I did a lot of supplemental reading about Alexander the Great and the wars of the Diadochi as well. Back in 2010, I beat MEDIEVAL 2: TOTAL WAR as the Byzantine Empire faction, so after that I kind of did a deep dive on Byzantine history.

All that said, I think two historical periods I read the most about are the second half of the Roman Republic, specifically from the Second Punic War to the victory of Augustus, and the High Medieval period from about the Norman Conquest to the Black Death in Europe.

I had to laugh when the “how often does your boyfriend think about the Roman Empire” meme was popular last year, because I do think about the Roman Republic/Empire a lot, but mostly to mine it for inspiration for fantasy novels. Obviously the High Medieval period also provides a lot of potential ideas for fantasy books.

That said, those two historical periods often a lot of examples of a fascinating riddle that has no answer: can a good person also be an effective leader who acts in the best interests of the people? Like, Caesar Augustus and King Henry I of England were unquestionably very bad men who did a lot of very bad things. Yet they’re rated among the more effective Roman Emperors and English kings because they brought peace and order to their respective realms, whether their realms wanted it or not. Monastic chroniclers said that in King Henry’s day a virgin girl carrying a bag of gold could travel unharmed across England, and while this is obviously a poetical exaggeration, Henry did impose peace and order.

Of course, a bad man can often be a bad leader as well, but I’m afraid one of the unfortunate realities of the human condition is that effective leadership does require a good deal of ruthlessness, and you see a lot of that in both the Roman and the medieval periods – bad men who were good leaders, and bad men who were also bad leaders.

-JM

The Pulp Writer Show, Episode 214: Should Writers Rewrite Previously Published Books?

In this week’s episode, we consider whether or not writers should substantially rewrite previously published novels. We also take a brief look at imposter syndrome in writers.

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

Ghost On The Throne

“And a mighty king shall stand up, that shall rule with great dominion, and do according to his will. And when he shall stand up, his kingdom shall be broken, and shall be divided toward the four winds of heaven; and not to his posterity, nor according to his dominion which he ruled: for his kingdom shall be plucked up, even for others beside those.”

-Daniel 11:3-4

As the author of GHOST IN THE THRONE, I was amused to open up my daily Bookbub newsletter and discover that there was a book called GHOST ON THE THRONE, a history book written by historian James Romm that discusses the wars of Diadochi.

If you are not familiar with the term, the “Diadochi” (the Greek word for “successors”) were the various generals and commanders of Alexander the Great’s army who managed to seize a piece of his empire for themselves after Alexander’s unexpected death in 323 BC. The title GHOST ON THE THRONE refers to how Alexander’s shadow dominated events even after his death, since there was no one capable of taking all of the power he wielded in life.

Bonus humor points! The chief villain of my book GHOST IN THE THRONE is the sorcerer Cassander Nilas, and I actually named him after one of the Diadochi. I kid you not!

Specifically, after Cassander of Macedon, who ended up in control of Macedon itself when the first round of fighting among the Diadochi settled down. The Diadochi were all hard and ruthless men, but Cassander took it to another level, and he was responsible for the deaths of Alexander the Great’s mother, wife, and child, which was somewhat vicious by the standards of the time. Though to be fair to Cassander of Macedon, Alexander’s mother Olympias had tried very hard to have him killed and hadn’t quite managed it.

To be less fair to Cassander, it was rumored that he helped assassinate Alexander, smuggling a poison into Babylon for his brother to pour into Alexander’s wine. Granted, we don’t know the precise details of Alexander’s death – he might have been poisoned, he might have gotten sick and succumbed to illness, or his body might have simply shut down after fifteen years of fighting and extreme binge-drinking. Regardless, many people at the time suspected Cassander of involvement in Alexander’s death. It is amusing to see that conspiracy theories are not a modern phenomenon – even twenty-three centuries ago, Alexander’s death began spawning conspiracy theories almost at once.

But back to GHOST ON THE THRONE. If you’re at all interested in this period of history,  you owe it to yourself to read this book. The period of the Diadochi is an extremely complicated one, since everyone betrays everyone else like all the time, but the book lays out it clearly and concisely. You also get a sense for the force of will and personality Alexander possessed – he held this collection of skilled and ruthless men together for fifteen years, but less than two days after his death they were already at each other’s throats.

I have to admit I had the idea for like a dozen different fantasy novels while reading the book – the wars of the Diadochi are ripe with interesting ideas for fiction.

This is why I tell fantasy authors it’s often a good idea to look for ancient and medieval history for inspiration. Like, if you base your fantasy novel off STAR WARS, everyone will complain you ripped off STAR WARS. But if you base your fantasy novel off the final battles between Cassander and Alexander the Great’s mother Olympias, not many people will realize it, and those who do realize will think you’re an erudite genius!

-JM