Jonathan Moeller's Blog, page 340

the first two weeks of SOUL OF SORCERY

In its first two weeks, SOUL OF SORCERY (the fifth book of the DEMONSOULED series) has sold 342 copies, which is really cool. Thanks, everyone!

Additionally, GHOST DAGGER (a stand-alone novella in THE GHOSTS series), which came out on the 22nd of August, has sold 89, which is also really cool. In the old days, novellas were completely nonviable, since so few publishers considered them.

But we’re not in the old days any more, are we?

-JM

Reader Question Day #37 – the Tervingi, authorial inspiration, and SOUL OF SORCERY

Writers are often asked where they get their ideas. There are as many answers to that question as there are writers, but today I’m going to tell you where I got the idea for SOUL OF SORCERY.

Short answer: the idea for SOUL OF SORCERY came from the Battle of Adrianople, which took place on August 9th, 378 AD.

Now here’s the longer answer.

In 376 AD, a band of Gothic barbarians the Romans called the Thervingi turned up at the borders of the Eastern Roman Empire. Unlike previous Gothic incursions, the Thervingi had not come to raid the Empire. Rather, they wanted to settle in the Empire. You see, this new group of Asiatic nomads called the Huns had begun conquering eastern Europe, The barbarian groups already living in eastern Europe found they could either submit to the Huns as their new rulers, or flee to the west. The Thervingi opted to flee to the west, and petitioned the Emperor for permission to settle inside the Roman Empire.

The Eastern Roman Emperor at the time, a man named Valens, thought this was an excellent idea. It had in fact been common for some time for the emperors to settle defeated barbarian groups inside the Empire. The defeated barbarians provided troops and taxes for the imperial army and treasury, and eventually lost their culture, becoming as Roman as their conquerors. All these Thervingi barbarians turning up on the Empire’s doorstep was a gift out of the blue, and Valens ordered his officials to settle the Thervingi in the Empire and give them lands south of the Danube River. Meanwhile, Valens turned his attention to what he really wanted to do – a war with the Sassanid Empire in the east.

There was a problem, though. There were a lot of Thervingi. Way, way more than had ever been settled in the Empire before. Very quickly there was not enough food to feed them all, and it did not help that Valens’ officials were both a.) corrupt, and b.) stupid. One of the Roman officials decided to solve the problem by assassinating the Thervingi leadership during an official banquet. The Thervingi leaders escaped, and the barbarians revolted. Very quickly they looted most of the countryside in the Roman Balkans, and other barbarian groups crossed the Danube to join them.

Valens’ lieutenants proved incapable of dealing with the barbarians, and lost several battles to the Thervingi. Finally Valens had to make peace with the Sassanids, gather most of the Eastern Roman army, and march to deal with the Thervingi himself. He arrived in Greece in the summer of 378 AD, and decided to wait for reinforcements from his nephew Gratian, who was currently Western Roman Emperor.

Except Valens was jealous of his nephew’s prestige (Gratian had won several victories over barbarians in the west), and decided to claim all the glory for himself. He marched out and caught the Thervingi outside of Adrianople on August 9th, 378 AD. Neither the Thervingi nor the Emperor wanted a battle. Valens wanted to cow the Thervingi back into submission. The Thervingi wanted their treaty with the Empire and lands for themselves within the Empire’s borders.

So Valens and the Thervingi negotiated for most of the day, while Valens’ exhausted troops stood in the August sun. The Thervingi had also set some of the surrounding fields on fire so the smoke blew into the irritated soldiers’ faces. Finally a unit of Roman troops lost patience and attacked the Thervingi, and a moment later the entire Roman force attacked the Thervingi. The Romans were better equipped and better disciplined, but the Thervingi infantry managed to hold them off, if only barely.

And then it all fell apart. The Thervingi cavalry had been away foraging for supplies, and they returned to find the Roman army assaulting the Thervingi infantry. The horsemen promptly charged into the fray and hit the Romans from behind. Exhausted and demoralized, the Roman army collapsed in a rout, and the Thervingi pursued and killed as many of the troops as they could manage. Valens himself was killed in the collapse, and his body was never found. (One account says he was wounded and taken to a cottage. The rampaging Thervingi burned down the cottage, never realizing they could have captured a Roman Emperor alive.)

By the next day Valens was dead and about two-thirds of the Eastern Roman army had been destroyed. It was the worst defeat the Empire had suffered in nearly a hundred and twenty years. The Thervingi could not follow up on their victory (they had no siege equipment, and so could not take fortified cities), but it still took the Empire another four years to subdue the Thervingi. And when they did, the Thervingi submitted on favorable terms – they kept a large chunk of the lands they had taken in the Balkans, and remained essentially an autonomous subject nation within the Empire’s borders. Thirty years later, these Thervingi would form the core of Alaric’s Visigoths, who would sack Rome itself in 410 AD, and found a kingdom in Spain that would last until the Muslim conquest in 710 AD.

So, if you’ve read SOUL OF SORCERY, you can see where I got the inspiration for the Tervingi and their predicament in the book. Granted, the real Thervingi and the fictional Tervingi are very different, and what happens to the Tervingi in SOUL OF SORCERY is not at all like what happened to the historical Thervingi. But the root of the idea for SOUL OF SORCERY – a barbarian tribe desperately trying to get away from terrible enemy – had its genesis there.

For additional reading, my favorite book on the Battle of Adrianople is THE DAY OF THE BARBARIANS by Alessandro Barbero, and my favorite book on the late Roman Empire is Peter Heather’s THE FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE: A NEW HISTORY OF ROME AND THE BARBARIANS.

-JM

The Ubuntu Desktop Beginner’s Guide

This book is a bit of an experiment. Previously, all my computer books have revolved around command-line topics, which kept the cost down, since I needed to take minimal screenshots.

This new book, though, is entirely about the graphical interface in Ubuntu Linux, so it has just under a hundred screenshots illustrating various procedures. I’m not entirely sure if there’s actually a market for a book aimed at people completely new to Ubuntu (who also have no desire to learn the command line), but it was worth a shot. Especially since the next version of Ubuntu comes out in October.

Anyway, if you’re curious (and want a primer on Ubuntu), you can get it at Amazon.com, Amazon UK, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo. I’ll do a Smashwords version eventually, but there’s a hundred screenshots to arrange, and frankly I would rather keep working on GHOST IN THE STONE. If it does well enough on Amazon, I’ll eventually do a Smashwords version.

-JM

Thursdays of Sword & Sorceress 27 beginning next week

As I have done for several years in the past, I will be running interviews with my fellow contributors to Sword & Sorceress 27.

It’s fun to do, and a good chance for the writers to talk about themselves and their work.

Anyway, the first interview will go up next week, and we’ll be talking about these questions:

1.) Tell us about yourself.

2.) Why do you write?

3.) Sword & Sorceress is known for sword & sorcery centered around a strong female character. Is there any particular trick to writing strong female characters?

4.) What would you say makes sword & sorcery different than other kinds of fantasy?

5.) How do you think ebooks and the Internet will change the way we read & write?

6.) Tell us about your Sword & Sorceress story.

7.) Can you share an excerpt from your Sword & Sorceress story?

8.) Recommend one other book or short story you have written that we should read.

9.) Recommend one non-fiction book that you haven’t written.

-JM

SOUL OF SORCERY and ebooks in the UK

SOUL OF SORCERY was (briefly) up to #89 on the Epic Fantasy list on Amazon UK. Thanks, everyone!

What’s interesting that around Christmas, a book only had to be about #8,000 or so on Amazon UK to make the top 100 on the Epic Fantasy list, but now it has to get to at least #4,800 or so. I think this shows how rapidly ebook adoption has grown in the UK over the last year.

Which means that many of the UK’s traditionally published authors are now entering the Five Stages Of Traditionally Published Author Grief. (Here is a good example of a UK writer who struck the Anger stage.) It will be interesting to see if the pattern of ebook adoption plays out in other countries.

-JM

Ghost in the Stone – the fifth Caina book

Now that SOUL OF SORCERY and GHOST DAGGER are done, it’s time to start on the new project. Specifically, the fifth GHOSTS book – GHOST IN THE STONE.

Actually, I’ve already started it. Two chapters down, 25 to go! If all goes well, I hope to have it finished in November.

What will the book be about? Well, here are some details:

-Caina will be the only point-of-view (POV) character in the book. GHOST IN THE STORM rotated the POV between Caina, Ark, and Kylon of House Kardamnos, but Caina will be the only POV character in the chapters of GHOST IN THE STONE.

-Theodosia, the famed opera singer and Ghost circlemaster of Malarae from CHILD OF THE GHOSTS, will return.

-The Kindred assassins from CHILD OF THE GHOSTS will return.

-Most of the book will take place in the city of Cyrioch, the Empire’s southernmost city and capital of the Cyrican provinces. Cyrioch is also known as Cyrica Urbana (its proper name in High Nighmarian), and the Shining City, since it is built around a large hill of peculiar white rock called “the Stone.” Also, the Cyrican provinces are the one place in the Empire will slavery is still legal, so you can imagine how cheerfully Caina will respond to that.

-Caina will meet a potential love interest. (Which, unfailingly, is the #1 topic people have asked about when asking questions about future GHOSTS books.)

-Lord Corbould Maraeus from GHOST IN THE STORM will return. The Emperor will send him to Cyrioch to keep the local nobles from breaking the Cyrican provinces away from the Empire.

-A villain from GHOST IN THE STORM will return.

Watch this space for future updates!

-JM

SOUL OF SORCERY…

…is now available on iBooks. So if you’re an iBooks user, you can get the book at the link.

And if you haven’t read the first chapter of SOUL OF SORCERY yet, you can do so right here.

-JM

GHOST DAGGER now available on iBooks

Click here to find it. And as of this writing it’s at #73 on the iTunes Epic Fantasy list. Thanks, iBooks readers!

What’s interesting is that GHOST DAGGER has already shown up on iTunes, but SOUL OF SORCERY (which I uploaded a week earlier) has not. Mysterious indeed are the vagaries of the iTunes store.

Or, since Apple manually approves every book that appears in the iTunes store, maybe there are Caina fans in Cupertino.

If you haven’t do so already, you can read the first chapter of GHOST DAGGER here.

-JM

I was going to post…

…to say thanks that SOUL OF SORCERY had sold 100 copies in its first week.

But turns out that SOUL OF SORCERY actually sold 183 copies during its first week.

So I think I’ll say thanks for that instead. Thanks, everyone!

-JM

Reader Question Day #36

Manwe asks:

Way back when, when you were creating Mazael, did you have any visual inspirations for him?

I’m afraid not. Though his name came from Johan Maelzl, the inventor of the metronome.

And hey, speaking of Skyrim, did you ever get it yet?

Yes. And I’ve gotten all the way up to level five! So you can see how much time I’ve had to play it. Though at nights lately I’ve been playing ICEWIND DALE, since it’s a straightforward dungeon crawl, and sufficiently brainless for the end of the day.

I asked what type of game you want DS to be, how about this, if you had to choose one developer to make it, who would you choose?

No one affiliated with Electronic Arts, Blizzard, or Ubisoft. Which I suppose would disqualify most developers at a stroke.

How much does it cost you in the long run to do the createspace stuff? I mean is it worth the investment?

I believe the base version of CreateSpace is free, but then the printed books are only available through Amazon. For $25 per book, you can get “expanded distribution”, which makes the book available in other venues. That said, the author gets a higher royalty rate for paper books sold through Amazon than any of the Expanded Distribution places.

Selene asks:

I was wondering when will Ghost in the Stone come out.

I’m hoping to start Ghost in the Stone by the beginning of September, once I’ve produced a satisfactory outline. So unless Real Life intervenes, I should have it done by November or December.

More on that later this week!

-JM