Jonathan Moeller's Blog, page 342

Today is GHOST IN THE STORM day

Why, you ask? As of yesterday, GHOST IN THE STORM has sold its 1000th copy!

Thanks, everyone!

As I wrap up SOUL OF SORCERY and a few other projects, it will be time to start thinking about the next THE GHOSTS book, GHOST IN THE STONE. So watch this space for a few details about what I have planned for the next GHOSTS book.

-JM

SOUL OF SORCERY – the first chapter

I’m making good progress on SOUL OF SORCERY, and that means I’m ready to show the first chapter of the book.

You can read it right here.

Technically, this is Chapter 1 and the first two-thirds or so of Chapter 3. The reasons for posting the sample chapters like this will become apparent soon after you read the completed book.

-JM

SOUL OF SORCERY – the table of contents

It looks like the final draft of SOUL OF SORCERY will be about 134,000 words or so. Longest DEMONSOULED book evah! (So far.)

Here is the (spoiler-free) Table of Contents:

Chapter 1 – Blood Thirst

Chapter 2 – The Pact Fulfilled

Chapter 3 – Dead Villages

Chapter 4 – Tremors

Chapter 5 – The Dead Walk

Chapter 6 – What We Are

Chapter 7 – Sanctuary

Chapter 8 – A Knight of Old Dracaryl

Chapter 9 – The Moot

Chapter 10 – Tournament

Chapter 11 – Followers of the Urdmoloch

Chapter 12 – Swordthains

Chapter 13 – Sword and Crown

Chapter 14 – Conquerors

Chapter 15- The Battle of Stone Tower

Chapter 16 – Embassies

Chapter 17 – The Lady of Castle Highgate

Chapter 18 – Vassals

Chapter 19 – Betrayal

Chapter 20 – The Assassin and the Apprentice

Chapter 21 – Child of Shadows

Chapter 22 – The Melee

Chapter 23 – The Hive

Chapter 24 – Only Blood

Chapter 25 – Treachery

Chapter 26 – Call to Arms

Chapter 27 – Morvyrkrad

Chapter 28 – The Lady of the Shadows

Chapter 29 – The Horde

Chapter 30 – The Pact

Chapter 31 – The Staff of the Guardian

Chapter 32 -A Traitor’s Death

Chapter 33 – The Battle of Swordgrim

Chapter 34 – The Great Rising

Chapter 35 – The Heir of Dracaryl

Chapter 36 – The Lord of the Tervingi

Epilogue

Look of a sample chapter to appear very soon now.

-JM

Reader Question Day #34

Manwe asks:

One last thing, seeing as how you liked the old D&D games so much: what did you think of the Neverwinter series? Personally I liked NWN2 much more than I did the first. How do you think they compared with the BG series?

I’ve had the discs for NEVERWINTER for over eight years now, but I’ve never gotten around to playing them, alas. I do like the soundtrack, though, which I got off GOG.com.

DWC asks (note there are minor spoilers for SOUL OF SERPENTS and SOUL OF TYRANTS):

And now I am in the middle of “Soul of Serpents” and in chapter 10 as our heroes are riding past Tristgard, Lady Rachel is remembering the last time she was at that fair town. It reads “Here she had seen Mazael take a half-dozen crossbow bolts to the chest, surviving only by a miracle.”  When in fact in chapter 3 of “Soul of Tyrants” it says “A crossbow quarrel slammed into Mazael’s left shoulder, another into his leg, still another into his gut.” Just wanted to point that out.

I actually rewrote that bit three or four times. At first I had Rachel recall exactly that Mazael was hit in the left leg and shoulder. Except that seemed oddly specific, since the battle at Tristgard was a very unexpected and chaotic, and it seemed weird that Rachel would remember it so precisely. (Like when five people witness a traffic accident, they’ll usually have five different accounts of what actually happened.) So I had Rachel remember that Mazael had gotten hit a half-dozen times by crossbow bolts and had somehow survived, rather than the specific details of what had happened.

Still, the next time I update SOUL OF SERPENTS, I might adjust that passage a bit more.

Many people ask (paraphrased):

How is SOUL OF SORCERY coming?

I’m currently editing chapter 33 of 36. So if all goes well, the book will be out in early September!

-JM

How Dr. House Helped Me Lose 135 Pounds

Today I’m going to tell you how Dr. Gregory House, fictional nihilist, helped me lose 135 pounds.

See, I used to weigh 135 pounds more than I do now. This was because a.) I ate too much, and b.) did not exercise. I was fully cognizant of both these facts, but I simply did not care. I loathed organized athletics, and really liked junk food. In those days, a meal for me would have been large fries, a Big Mac, a 10-piece Chicken Nuggets, and a large Coke. This was gluttonous excess, but it did not trouble me in the slightest. In fact, I told myself, throughout most of human history, most people have starved. So, really, shouldn’t I be thankful to be 135 pounds overweight?

Granted, in hindsight this is an obvious rationalization, but at the time I believed it. We can lie to no one like we lie to ourselves.

So, at night, when I settled down with my bag of popcorn, my can of ginger ale, and my plate of cheese sticks (they’re a LOT better if you cook them in the oven instead of the microwave), I would watch things on Hulu, because Hulu is free, and eventually “House, MD” caught my attention.

“House, MD”, if you’ve never seen the show, is about the titular Dr. Gregory House, a genius diagnostician who has Sherlock Holmes levels of observation acuity and deductive prowess. Unfortunately, House lost a major chunk of his right leg to a blood clot, and consequently walks with a cane and has a Vicodin addiction to keep the pain manageable. House is also a tremendous jerk, and much of the show revolves around House’s efforts to free himself from his chronic misery. (He usually fails.) But despite his self-destructive habits, he almost always manages to save his patient in the end.

I found the show fascinating, because I saw a bit of myself in House. Not a great deal, certainly – I don’t have a cane, a Vicodin addiction, I’m not a nihilist or an atheist, and I don’t have a team of attractive young assistants to help me (alas). But I do have a day job that revolves around solving puzzles, and like House, I had always preferred the intellectual realm over the physical (see the “loathing for organized sports” above). So I watched the show with a good deal of fascination.

Then the bad habits caught up to House.

Towards the end of Season 5 (this would have been April and May of 2009), he began hallucinating due to years of Vicodin abuse. At first he thought the hallucinations would be a convenient way to tap in the processing power of his subconscious mind. Once this almost led to the accidental death of a coworker, House tried to ignore the hallucinations. But they grew worse, until he could no longer tell reality from delusion. To fix the problem, he locked himself in his apartment with his longtime love interest Dr. Cuddy and attempted to detox off Vicodin. After 24 hours, he was successful, and fell into bed with Dr. Cuddy (who apparently is not all that bright).

The next day House went to work to enjoy his new, drug-free life and continue his relationship with Dr. Cuddy…

…only to realize that none of it had happened. He had hallucinated all of it. He had spent the night, and most of the following day, overdosing on Vicodin, and the hallucinations had grown so intense that he literally could not remember taking Vicodin, nor could he stop himself from doing so.

The Season 5 finale ended with House limping into a mental hospital, his career and life in ruins.

And holy crap did that freak me out. It shook me the way that few pieces of art, whether books or movies or games or whatever, have ever done.

Because, I wondered, what if that was me? Like House, I valued the mental much more than the physical. Except the body is the house (bad pun) of the mind, and the condition of our body affects the mind much, much more than we would like to admit.

For a while I had had the uneasy feeling that something wasn’t quite right. And what if, I realized, what if it was the overeating? Was it going to catch up to me the way Vicodin had caught up to House? After thinking about it for a few months, I concluded that I should try to change (and that overeating had probably warped my life in other ways), and so I decided to try and lose weight. (More details of that can be found here.)

I suspect not many people are inspired to major life revelations from a medical soap opera, but I suppose I’ll take what I can get.

-JM

ebook sales for July 2012

4,153.

(long pause)

Holy crap that is a lot of books. I’m trying to visualize 4,153 people in a single place, and I just can’t do it. Like, across the street from my apartment, there’s a high school athletic field (don’t ask), and I think the bleachers can hold maybe 5,000 people, and I’ve never seen it full.

Thank you, all. I’m not sure what happened, but almost all my books were up this month. It helped that THE WINDOWS COMMAND LINE BEGINNER’S GUIDE was a “What’s Hot” books on iTunes for a few weeks, and all my computer books were up. (Even THE LINUX COMMAND LINE BEGINNER’S GUIDE did over 100 copies in a month for the first time.)

So, once again, thank you all. For historical reference, here is the record of my book sales since I started this in April 2011.

(Also, in the future, I’ll post numbers on the 16th or the 17th of the following month, since Amazon auto-generates this nice little spreadsheet that makes the math easier.)

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

-JM

I like this screenshot…

…from the iBooks bestseller list for Epic Fantasy. It shouldn’t be hard to figure out why.

Reader Question Day #33

Vicky K asks:

I was just wondering when Ghost in the Stone will be coming out?

Thanks for the kind words about THE GHOSTS books.

I am planning to start writing GHOST IN THE STONE before the end of the year. Ideally, it would be nice if I could finish writing it before the end of the year, but a lot of stuff in Real Life has come up and I don’t know how it will all resolve.

Basically, this is my writing plan for the rest of 2012:

-Finish SOUL OF SORCERY.

-Finish GHOST DAGGER (a short stand-alone GHOSTS novella).

-Finish the UBUNTU DESKTOP BEGINNER’S GUIDE and the WINDOWS 8 BEGINNER’S GUIDE.

-Start writing GHOST IN THE STONE.

So it probably looks like I will start writing GHOST IN THE STONE in November, since I want to get the Ubuntu and Windows 8 books out, if possible, by the end of October (since Windows 8 and the new version of Ubuntu both come out in October, but doing both a Ubuntu book and a Windows 8 book might be overly optimistic). Because I’m starting GHOST IN THE STONE later than I had hoped, that’s why I’m writing GHOST DAGGER right now – a novella for GHOSTS readers until I can get to GHOST IN THE STONE.

I have to ask, I’m pretty sure that the Maatish society they talk about in the series (THE GHOSTS) is in reference to Ancient Egypt (because of their worship of cats, their pictographical hieroglyphic writing, and the pyramids talked about in Ghost in the Flame). Did you take influence from other ancient cultures/societies to create Caina’s world, or did you do actual research and make them as accurate as you could to the ancient cultures/societies/empire(s) and then just give them new names? Because the Empire reminds me of the Roman Empire, but I don’t know the history around those times very well.

Good observation! Maatish society is indeed based on ancient Egypt. Given how obsessed the ancient Egyptians were with death (the mummies, the pyramids, the elaborate rituals of burial and the afterlife), I thought it would be interesting to have a fantasy version of ancient Egypt built upon necromancy.

In the backstory, the Saddai (the people who built the pyramids in GHOST IN THE FLAMES) were originally slaves in the Kingdom of the Rising Sun, the Maatish empire. After the Maatish kingdom collapsed, the Saddai migrated north, into the land that would become Caina’s Empire, and founded a kingdom for themselves. So though they never practiced necromancy, they were culturally influenced by the Maatish – the pyramids and so forth, and even the Saddaic language is a corrupted version of the Maatish language.

Caina’s Empire is essentially what the Western Roman Empire would have been if it had survived to the Renaissance. So there are Legions and such, but it’s more technologically and economically developed than the old Roman Empire ever managed.

When it comes to creating cultures in fantasy books, I generally just pick the details from history I find interesting (ancient Egypt and the Maatish, for instance) and go with them.

Manwe asks:

Was this just a one time thing (the cover art for SOUL OF SORCERY, or do you plan on buying cover art from now on?

It depends on the book. If I can find a public domain image that will work for the cover, I’ll go with that. If I can’t, I’ll look for a stock image.

If you had to make a case for the Baldur’s Gate series (and the old crpgs in general), what would it be?

They were a great recreation of the tabletop gaming experience married to a excellent story. I liked BALDUR’S GATE so much that when BALDUR’S GATE II came out in August of 2000, I walked four miles (and back again) to get the special collector’s edition with the soundtrack CD. (Now, of course, you can download the whole thing for $9.99 off GOG.com.)

PLANESCAPE: TORMENT was excellent, and one of the best games I’ve ever played, hands-down. (I think it had something like 600,000 words of dialog in the game.) It took me from 1999 to 2005 to finally beat it, but I did.

Compared to modern games, they have rather rough interfaces. But at the time, they were the best interfaces available. BALDUR’S GATE also let you import your character from game to game, so you got to see your character go from a level-1 neophyte to a towering figure of power and legend. (DRAGON AGE ORIGINS compressed that into a single game, effectively.) So they were also quite good at letting you take ownership of the characters and story. PLANESCAPE: TORMENT was particularly good at this, with several different possible variations on the ending.

Windows 8, what do you think of it?

It tries to combine a desktop and a tablet interface in a single OS, which is an interesting idea, but doesn’t really work, because it shortchanges both. The tablet OS is pretty and slick – but from time to time you’ll do something and find yourself dumped back into the desktop interface. (Which, if you’re trying to tap Control Panel radio buttons on a 10 inch touchscreen, is deeply annoying.) Or you’ll be working on the desktop, and do something that pushes you to the tablet interface. And since the Start Menu has been replaced by the tablet-ized Start Screen, anytime you want to, say, launch another application, you get pushed out of the desktop and back to the Start Screen.

So I think this is a huge gamble on Microsoft’s part that will either pay off spectacularly and secure their dominant position, or blow up in their faces in a massive way. Like, in four years we’re all using Ubuntu and iOS kind of collapse. So it will be interesting to see what happens.

-JM

eBook of the Month July 2012 – Hal Spacejock, by Simon Haynes

The last two eBooks of the Month, William King’s THE STEALER OF FLESH and Hugh Howey’s WOOL, have both been rather grim. Good books, to be certain, but definitely not lighthearted. So for this month, we’ll do something lighter – specifically, HAL SPACEJOCK, by Simon Haynes.

HAL SPACEJOCK is an entertaining humorous science fiction novel. It reminded me a great deal of the old RED DWARF television series crossed with the Sierra SPACE QUEST adventure games of yore. The protagonist, the eponymous Hal, is the owner of the rundown Black Gull, a space freighter that (like Hal) has seen better days. Hal is also up to his ears in debt, and unless he does something quick, a man with a very large repo robot is going to come around and break his thumbs. Granted, a lot of Hal’s problems are his own fault – his level of obliviousness and the fact that he is still alive would make a Darwinist weep with despair over the future of natural selection.

Things might turn around for Hal when he accepts a cargo of robot parts, but thinks quickly turn south, with angry corporate oligarchs, loan sharks, and an entire planetary navy in pursuit of Hal for one reason or another.

Hal, like the hero of all good farces, is thoroughly dense, yet nonetheless likable. HAL SPACEJOCK was quite funny, and I’ll be picking up the later books in the series at some point.

-JM

SOUL OF SORCERY – a brief excerpt

I’m working on the edits for SOUL OF SORCERY, and here’s a snippet from today’s work:

“Silence!” said Ardasan, lifting his black blade. “Dracaryl may have fallen. But I sense the presence of the Glamdaigyr, the great weapon the high lords forged to steal the might of the Demonsouled! With it, I shall rebuild Dracaryl, and rule an empire of the undead that stretches from sea to sea.”  

Mazael lifted Lion. “You’ll have to kill me first.”

“Easily accomplished, little mortal,” said Ardasan. “I ground my foes beneath my boot centuries before you were born, I…”

“Oh, shut up,” said Molly. “Were all the nobles of Dracaryl such utter windbags? Little wonder your miserable realm fell, if you wasted all your time making pompous speeches.”

“Impudent child!” roared Ardasan. “I shall tear the…”

-JM