Jonathan Moeller's Blog, page 330

SOUL OF SKULLS – a fourth excerpt

Here is a fourth excerpt from SOUL OF SKULLS, this one from the point of view of Rachel Roland. Note that it contains spoilers for the ending of SOUL OF SKULLS. (But it does rather nicely illustrate the characters of Rachel Roland, Rhea Roland, and Grand Master Caldarus of the Justiciars.)

“My husband will be dead within a week. Perhaps less. Tobias will soon be the lord of Knightcastle.”

“I’m sorry,” said Rachel.

Rhea let out a ragged breath. “He’s lived a long life, the philandering old scoundrel. But I will miss him.” She gazed up at Knightcastle’s jumble of towers and keeps. “I have seen Knightcastle through war before, daughter. But this…our lord dying, and these armies of dead men, and a rebel who wants to kill every man who is not poor…Rachel, we have never faced anything like this. I fear how it will end.” He voice dropped. “Grand Master Caldarus says the runedead are the vengeance of the gods, a punishment for our sins, and sometimes I wonder if he is correct.”

“Oh, rubbish,” said Rachel. “Lucan Mandragon cast the Great Rising, and my brother slew him. If the Grand Master thinks otherwise, then he is a pompous windbag.”

Her eyes widened as she realized her lapse, but Lady Rhea laughed.

“I cannot dispute your logic, daughter,” said Rhea. She lowered her voice. “But mind your words. The Grand Master’s pomposity is exceeded only by his ruthlessness…”

-JM

Ubuntu is #4 on the iBookstore…

…or, more specifically, my book THE UBUNTU DESKTOP BEGINNER’S GUIDE is (or was, by the time you read this) #4 for the Operating Systems category on Apple’s US iBookstore:

I am frankly baffled as to why this is the case -you can only read iBookstore books on the iBooks app on an iOS device like the iPad or the iPhone, and I didn’t think that many iPad owners would be interested in Ubuntu Linux, which is why I didn’t bother doing an iBooks version of the book until November. (Plainly, I was quite wrong about this.) On the other hand, THE UBUNTU DESKTOP BEGINNER’S GUIDE has a lot of color screenshots, and an iPad’s screen would be the ideal device for reading it.

Though the reasons for it become much more comprehensible if you look at the search results for entering “ubuntu” into the iTunes store:

Both my Ubuntu books are among the top hits in the iBookstore for “Ubuntu”, and in fact if you enter “ubuntu” into Amazon search, THE UBUNTU BEGINNER’S GUIDE is the top hit for all of Amazon for “ubuntu”.

So my Ubuntu books are ideally positioned in terms of search placement, and I can only thank all of you for that – this only happened because so many of you purchased the book and left favorable reviews.

-JM

the verisimilitude of violent women

Here’s an interesting post by thriller writer Seeley James about writing thriller novels with a female protagonist.

I’ve given a great deal of thought to the same topic in writing THE GHOSTS, in particular for the fight scenes involving Caina. She’s in excellent physical condition and very well-trained and experienced, but she’s not very large, and sheer muscle mass counts for quite a bit. And as the linked post points out, a heavyweight boxer facing an equally skilled lightweight boxer will almost always win. So Caina’s goal is to disable or kill an opponent as quickly as possible, preferably before the opponent even realizes her presence. Fighting fairly means something has gone horribly wrong.

(Note that the next paragraph has mild spoilers for the DEMONSOULED series.)

This turns up in DEMONSOULED as well, particularly with Molly Cravenlock. Her Demonsouled heritage gives her superhuman strength and speed, along with the ability to teleport over short distances at will. So she is a very effective fighter. But when she loses that ability to teleport, or meet someone with the power to match her, she’s in big trouble. At the end of SOUL OF DRAGONS, an opponent uses the Glamdaigyr to block her ability to teleport, and quickly overpowers her. Or at the end of SOUL OF SORCERY, when Malaric acquires Demonsouled powers, he is able to overpower her.

A lot has been written about the realism of women fighting in fantasy, but let us be honest here – if you are writing about magic and people with superhuman powers, you have ordered realism taken out back and shot. However, the trick for writing is not realism but verisimilitude. It doesn’t have to be realistic, just seem realistic. You want to write in such a way so that if one of your characters is a superpowered female fighter, the readers say “oh, that makes sense in the context of the story” instead of “WTF is the author smoking?” or, even worse, “WTF is the author smoking to make him lose all knowledge of physics and basic human biology?”

-JM

a minty fresh book

Cover image copyright Silverrose1 | Dreamstime.com

A few eagle-eyed readers noticed that I managed to sneak in one more book before 2013. This is THE LINUX MINT BEGINNER’S GUIDE, an introduction to Linux Mint. If you’ve never heard of Linux Mint, it is a version of the Linux operating system derived from  Ubuntu. Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, has made some controversial decisions in the last two years, and because of that, Linux Mint has grown in popularity. Linux Mint also has a pretty smooth UI, and comes with multimedia codecs pre-installed.

Because of that, I wanted to do a book about Linux Mint. It turned out to be pretty easy, since a lot of what works in Ubuntu works identically in Linux Mint. So I wrote a few new chapters dealing with things unique to Linux Mint, and then modified material I had already written for Ubuntu to Linux Mint.

The result, THE LINUX MINT BEGINNER’S GUIDE, is now available at Amazon, Amazon UK, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo. Soon I will have a version out at Smashwords and iBooks, but not until after I finish up SOUL OF SKULLS.

-JM

Traditional publishing is like Super Mario Brothers, and self-publishing is like The Sims

I’ve noticed that a lot of writers, whether veterans or just starting out, have a difficult time wrapping their heads around self-publishing ebooks. Or, more specifically, the mindset of self-publishing ebooks. Like, many writers want someone to set goals for them - someone to offer a Seal of Approval and say that the plot is good enough, the editing is good enough, the sales are good enough, and the book is therefore good.

I realized you can also see this quality is in recent college graduates. After all, in the modern Western world, a kid typically spends 18 years in some form of schooling or another before he’s released upon the world, and this transition from school life to real life is often a massive shock. In school life, everything is regulated, and there is a set of orderly and defined goals – pass this class, pass this paper, advance to the next level. In real life, by contrast, you can do pretty much whatever you want so long as you don’t get arrested and can cope with the consequences. And some people just cannot wrap their minds around that – interestingly, it’s often the kids who excelled academically who have the hardest time dealing with life outside of school. The same sort of dynamic, I think, is at work in writers who have a hard time dealing with self-publishing.

In other words, traditional publishing is Super Mario Brothers, and self-publishing is The Sims.

Super Mario Brothers is a side-scrolling, linear game. In his quest to rescue Princess Peach from King Koopa, Mario runs left-to-right through a world full of things trying to kill him, hoping to reach the castle where the Princess is held prisoner. Except at the end of almost every world, the castle instead holds this talking humanoid toadstool who informs Mario that “the princess is in another castle.” In the original NES Super Mario Brothers, Mario had to go through seven freaking castles before he got to the end of world eight, which finally held the Princess. Needless to say, only the terminally bored or the highly obsessive-compulsive ever got to the end of Super Mario Brothers.

This is a lot like how traditional publishing worked. Submit work to the agent, and get back the letter informing you that the princess is in another castle. Send out books and articles in cold submissions, and get back the letter telling you that Princess Peach is still in another castle. Keep at it long enough, and eventually you will find the Princess. And then it’s time to start looking for the next Princess – but make sure she’s 90,000 words long, and has a capable female protagonist, and shapeshifting sex wereotters because those are hot right now, and be sure to write the book in one specific genre, as well.

So traditional publishing, like Super Mario Brothers, is very linear, with a lot of talking Toadstools of Disappointment in princess-free castles.

Self-publishing is more like The Sims. The Sims is a “sandbox game”, which means that it’s not linear and there are no stated victory conditions, like rescuing the Princess or finding the TriForce or defeating the dread dragon Alduin or whatever. In The Sims, you control a simulated person, a Sim, and you can do…pretty much whatever you want. If you want to turn your Sim into a hard-driving career man, you can do that, or have kids, or expand your Sim’s house, or turn your Sim into a bum who sits around all day watching Sim Oprah…you can do that, too. There’s no princess to rescue, and you can do whatever you want.

Self-publishing works a lot like that. Have a 600,000 word fantasy epic? Go for it. Or a string of 45,000 word romantic novels? You can do that, too. A detailed guide describing how to clip your toenails? No one will stop you. You can do whatever you want for cover art, editing, layout, plot, and topic…and there is no final authority to tell you whether you are winning the game or not.

The thing is, there are people who find The Sims infuriating. There’s no plot, no goals, no quests, no point! You see a similar reaction with writers settling into self-publishing for the first time as they wrestle with the realization that there’s no official Princess to rescue from  King Koopa’s castle – save for whatever goals you set your yourself.

And that, I believe, is the key to self-publishing: the realization that no one is going to set goals for you, but that you must set them for yourself.

-JM

SOUL OF SKULLS – a third excerpt

Here’s a third excerpt from SOUL OF SKULLS. This one is from the point of view of Sir Hugh Chalsain, one of the new characters introduced in the book.

Kynoth’s bailiff was an elderly man named Corman, and he shared the same sense of injured self-importance as his lord Alberon.

“It is not surprising that those heathen devils should attack Kynoth,” declared Corman, leaning hard upon his cane. “We are the most prominent of Lord Stormsea’s estates. Why, the Prince of Barellion himself dines upon fish caught by Kynoth’s fishermen.”

“Indeed,” said Hugh, who had never once seen the Prince eat fish.

-JM

THE NEXT BIG THING – follow-up

John C. Wright and Tom Simon, fine fellows both, have done their own THE NEXT BIG THING posts. Follow the links to read!

-JM

SOUL OF SKULLS – excerpt #2

A second excerpt from SOUL OF SKULLS:

“Why are you still here?” said Lucan.

Malaric glanced up from a shelf. “I told you, my lord Lucan. You leave power in your wake.” He grinned. “And I rather like power, you know.”

“You have power,” said Lucan. “Your own magic. The spells I taught you. And the skull you took from Arylkrad. With that, you are a match for any mortal man…ah.”

“Oh?” said Malaric.

“You’re afraid,” said Lucan, “that Molly Cravenlock is going to hunt you down.”

“I could have taken the girl,” said Malaric.

“And yet,” said Lucan, “she is still alive.”

-JM

a one-sentence review of THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY

It was excellent, and you should go see it immediately – I’m not sure what, exactly, the critics who gave it negative reviews were smoking.

ebook sales for November 2012

5,400.

Which is both a new record and an amazing lot of books. Thanks, everyone!

I think three things contributed to the high number. The first was that GHOST IN THE STONE had an amazing run – as of December 12th, two months after it had come out, the book had already sold its 1,000th copy. The second was THE BURNING CHILD, which managed to do 179 copies in November. Finally, GHOST IN THE STONE had sort of a halo effect for the other GHOSTS books – for a while, CHILD OF THE GHOSTS was in the top 300 of the free Kindle store in Amazon UK.

So, thank you again, and for the historical record, here’s what we have done so far in the bold new world of self-publishing:

April 2011: 22

May 2011: 105

June 2011: 236

July 2011: 366

August 2011: 489

September 2011: 1335

October 2011: 1607

November 2011: 2142

December 2011: 2340

January 2012: 3261

February 2012: 3750

March 2012: 3644

April 2012: 3521

May 2012: 3886

June 2012: 3580

July 2012: 4153

August 2012: 4608

September 2012: 4785

October 2012: 4923

November 2012: 5400

-JM