Jonathan Moeller's Blog, page 353

SOUL OF DRAGONS – now available on iTunes

It took a while, but I'm pleased to report that SOUL OF DRAGONS, the fourth book in the DEMONSOULED series, is now available on iTunes.

Actually, I suspect the majority of you who read ebooks on your iPad or other iOS device do so via the Kindle or Nook apps. (Though I cannot find the link, I recall reading an article stating that Kindle, Netflix, and Angry Birds are usually the first apps installed on a new iPad or iPhone.) Nevertheless, my goal is to make my books available in every ebook format in the universe, so if you're an iBooks man (or woman), you can get SOUL OF DRAGONS right here.

-JM

23 chapters of GHOST IN THE STORM'S…

…rough draft are finished, with only six left to go. But a lot happens in those six chapters.

Nevertheless, the end of a rough draft is beginning to be in sight, like the crest of a mountain just rising over the horizon.

-JM

Prospero's Daughter, by L. Jagi Lamplighter

I've been reading the PROSPERO'S DAUGHTER (Prospero Lost: Prospero's Daughter, Book I (Tor Fantasy)) trilogy by L. Jagi Lamplighter. I am only halfway through the second volume, but I can say that these are really excellent books and I recommend them completely and without reservation.

I have to admit, the books are not all what I expected. For some reason, I had it in my head that they would be sort of ethereal and bloodless – a woman wasting away in a loveless arranged marriage while pining for the Elf King, that sort of thing. I am pleased to report that I was quite completely wrong. Instead, PROSPERO'S DAUGHTER is a combination between a detective novel and Warhammer 40k.

The premise is that the magician Prospero (from the Shakespeare play) made the modern world possible by forcing the supernatural world into various constraining pacts. For instance, electricity only works because Prospero bound the spirits of the air into behaving a certain way, and internal combustion engines only function because Prospero bound the spirits of fire into burning at a certain rate. For five hundred years Prospero has kept this up, ably aided by his daughter Miranda.

However, Prospero has now disappeared without a trace, leaving behind only a cryptic message that the "Three Shadowed Ones" are hunting his children and their magical staffs. Without Prospero, the pacts binding the supernatural world will quickly fall apart, and civilization will collapse into supernatural chaos. So it's up to Miranda to find her father, fend off the "Three Shadowed Ones", and figure out what's really going on.

Miranda is also an excellent example of an unreliable narrator. Unreliable narrators are often the tools of lazy authors, but that's not the case here. The books are layered like an onion, with another always deeper, and Miranda goes deeper down the rabbit hole with the reader. They're also exceptionally well-constructed – the downside to being a writer is that it's harder to read for pleasure, since you're always analyzing another writer's work. The upside is that when you read a really good book, you can appreciate it on two levels – as a reader, and as a writer admiring the craftsmanship.

To sum up in one sentence, I'd say PROSPERO'S DAUGHTER is sort of like AMERICAN GODS, but without the nihilistic edge and the fixation with weird sex. Go forth and read it now.

-JM

GHOST IN THE STORM, progress update

I'm 2/3 done with the rough draft of GHOST IN THE STORM.

20 chapters down, 9 more to go. About another 30,000 words should cover it.

-JM

Reader Question Day 16

Kallinikos writes:

If you're writing GHOST IN THE STORM, when do you plan on starting SOUL OF SORCERY?

June 1st. The date might get moved up or back depending upon events in Real Life ™, but that is my target start date. The sooner the better, of course.

Manwe writes:

I have heard of King's Dark Tower books, but I generally stayed away from them because they were, well, Stephen King books, heh. His books are either horror stories, or really bad horror stories. Were they fantasy books? Dark fantasy?

The Dark Tower books were dark fantasy, but they're a little hard to define. There's a lot of overlap with 20th century Earth, and in the final three volumes they get very meta – the main character, Roland Deschain, meets Stephen King in person.

Frankly, I would not recommend the Dark Tower series. The first 6.5 books were pretty good, but the final half of the last book goes seriously off the rails, and the ending is messed up.

That said, King has written some good stuff – Duma Key was excellent, as was The Stand, and I've heard good things about 11/22/63.

angel91119 asks:

i love the caina books! but why doesn't she just seduce people wouldn't that be an easier way to spy on her enemies? and why can't poor caina have more sex? [image error]

I know I promised a longer answer to this last week, but I ran out of time. So, I hope the short answer will be adequate. The gist of it is that when I first wrote Caina, it was in a story for Marion Zimmer Bradley's SWORD & SORCERESS anthology, and I very strongly doubted the editor would go for a seductress-type character. Eventually, as an in-world explanation (SPOILER ALERT), I included her ill-fated affair with Alastair Corus in CHILD OF THE GHOSTS as to why Caina generally doesn't use seduction as a means of information gathering.

And to put it more baldly, I wouldn't enjoy writing a seductress as a main character – my books might have romantic subplots, but I'm not a romance writer. As the great philosopher Clint Eastwood said, a man's gotta know his limitations.

-JM

GHOST IN THE STORM – an excerpt

The rough draft of GHOST IN THE STORM passed 60,000 words today – I'm on chapter 18 of 29.

To celebrate, here is a brief excerpt from today's writing.

Ark kept his face impassive as he watched Korbulus and Tarver confer with their scouts. He wanted to run over and demand their reports. But the men were watching him, and Ark had to look calm, controlled, in command of the situation. If the Legionaries saw him panic, or even hesitate, this entire thing would fall apart. He had taken command of these men, but his command was based on nothing more than a bluff and a show of confidence.

He suppressed the absurd urge to laugh. This kind of mad audacity was the sort of thing Caina would have done. How she would laugh when he told her the story.

If he lived long enough to tell it, and she lived long enough to hear it.

-JM

Bioware and the ending to Mass Effect 3

I don't have time for computer games these days, but it's been interesting to watch the blowback to the ending to Mass Effect 3.

There's an important rule to fiction that all writers, in whatever media format, must remember. You can have any kind of ending to your story that you want. You can have a happy ending, a sad ending, a bittersweet ending, or some mixture of the three.

But under no circumstances can your ending leave the reader feeling cheated. Furthermore, an ending must be an ending, and it must not betray the story that preceded it.

Now, there are people who argue that such endings are unrealistic, and that fiction must be as realistic and gritty as possible. But that's nonsense. Fiction, by definition, is unrealistic. Storytelling is like stage magic – it's an illusion, a trick, but like stage magic, the audience wants to be fooled.

To continue the metaphor, having a "realistic" ending that cheats the audience is a bit like a stage magician performing the "sawing a woman in half" illusion – only that he actually does saw in her half. And as the audience stares at him in shock and dismay, the magician informs them that in real life, women who are actually sawed in half die of shock and/or blood loss, and furthermore, if they are not intelligent enough to appreciate the ending, they are welcome to go eat pork rinds and watch "Jersey Shore" while drinking Miller Lite.

I'm sure you can think of a few books or movies like that – stories where the writer killed off the entire cast or wrecked the setting out of spite, or betrayed the story to make a heavy-handed political point with the ending. There was a remarkably lame sitcom from the 90s called DINOSAURS, which ended with the cast freezing to death to Teach A Valuable Lesson about environmentalism. Another good example is M. Night Shymalan's film THE VILLAGE, where all the mystery and horror of the story only turns out to be a humbug. Or THE SOPRANOS series, in which case the ending simply didn't make any sense whatsoever.

Writers: don't do this. Remember that a fool doesn't learn from his own mistakes, but it's an absolute idiot who fails to learn from the mistakes of others.

-JM

GHOST IN THE STORM – halfway

I'm pleased to report that I'm now halfway through the rough draft of GHOST IN THE STORM, the fourth book in THE GHOSTS series. 15 chapters down, 14 to go.  And 15 divided by 29 is 51.7%,  so I'm technically over halfway done.

I will celebrate this milestone by actually going to bed before midnight on a weekday.

-JM

Reader Question Day #15 – politics, sex, and Kindle Select

Kallinikos writes:

I sometimes send you political questions for Reader Question Day, but you never answer them. Why not?

I've come to thoroughly dislike politics, so I don't write about them on my blog. Sorry.

Looking over your blog archives, I see posts about a THE GHOSTS novel called NIGHTFIGHTER. Is that coming out soon?

Actually, NIGHTFIGHTER was the original title of CHILD OF THE GHOSTS, when I wrote it back in 2010. When I discovered ebooks, I changed the title to CHILD OF THE GHOSTS, since it matched well with the titles of the other two books in the series, GHOST IN THE FLAMES and GHOST IN THE BLOOD. And the new title works on a meta level, as well…Caina Amalas really is a child of the Ghosts, a product of their training.

The next THE GHOSTS book will be GHOST IN THE STORM, and I'm currently writing Chapter 14 out of a planned total of 29 in the rough draft.

angel91119 asks:

i love the caina books! but why doesn't she just seduce people wouldn't that be an easier way to spy on her enemies? and why can't poor caina have more sex?

Actually, I get asked that question more often than you might think. So that's going to be its own post later in the week.

Manwe asks:

I guess a fantasy society could develop more advanced technology, but I think alot of people would ask "but why should it?"

That might take it into the realm of speculative fiction – a story that a speculates on what a society might do in the face of a fantastical (or science fictional) element. Like, let's say you were born, and a wizard cast a spell on you that rendered you immune to all disease until your heart finally wore out in your eighties or nineties. Obviously, that would change a society a great deal – the medical profession would have no need to treat infection or cancer, but you'd still need surgeons to deal with falls and injuries. And it's more interesting if the power comes with a price – like, the wizard can cast the anti-disease spell on a baby, but one in every hundred children develops dangerous magical powers and has to be killed. Would that be worth the price?

So someday I'd like to do what is commonly called an "urban fantasy." But not a book about teenaged vampires having sex with werewolves or werechickens or whatever. Instead, the story would be about what happens when a fantastical element is introduced into contemporary society…or what happens when 21st century technology is introduced into a society that relies upon magic.

Markus writes:

Will you make any of your books available in Kindle Select?

Probably not.

But first, an explanation. "Kindle Select" is a program Amazon offers writers. If you enroll your book in Kindle Select for a three-month term, you get several benefits – Kindle owners can borrow your book for free from the Kindle Lending Library, and you can set your book to go free any five days out of that three month period. The catch is that your book can only be available on Amazon during that three-month span.

About a third of my book sales come from Nook, iTunes, and the Sony eBookstore, so terminating that to gamble with Kindle Select would be frankly stupid.

That said, I don't want to say I will never try Kindle Select – the ebook world is too chaotic for that. Two years ago I said I would never get an ereader, and look how that turned out. It also might become necessary for me to have something in Kindle Select, since it's harder for non-Select books to compete on Amazon, since Select books get an edge in the sales rankings. At some point I might take one of my older stand-alone novels, try it with Kindle Select, and see what happens. (I have a long fantasy novel called THE WITCHMARKED PALADIN that I wrote after SOUL OF TYRANTS that might be the perfect candidate for a Kindle Select book.)

But I have no plans to turn any of my current books into Kindle Select books, or any of the subsequent THE GHOSTS, DEMONSOULED, or COMPUTER BEGINNER'S GUIDE books- there's just too much of an audience for them on Nook, iTunes, and the Sony eBookstore.

ladysaotome asks:

I've got a Reader Question for you – which I think you may have answered previously but I can't remember for sure or find it – the Caina "choose-your-adventure" stories – are there plans to combine and release them as an ebook?

Actually, I think they'll be three separate novels a bit further down the road. At the end of GHOST IN THE STORM, Caina will be twenty, while she's closer to twenty-eight or twenty-nine in the Choose Your Own Adventures. So there's some room to fill in first.

And on the same subject – if you had been writing those stories without any votes, just yourself – would they have gone any differently? Would you have preferred different outcomes, routes, etc.?

Oh, yes. I had to improvise many, many times. For both GHOST RAGE and GHOST WOUNDS, I had a very clear idea of how things would go, and they turned out differently. GHOST ASCENSION went fairly close to how I envisioned it, though.

I do want to do another blog-based Choose Your Own Adventure, but I've got to get some other real-life stuff out of the way first. Or give up sleep.

-JM

Thanks To My UK Readers

My netbook was circling the drain. This was not in the least bit surprising, since in the last year I wrote most of SOUL OF SERPENTS and SOUL OF DRAGONS on that little 10 inch netbook, for a total of over 250,000 words, along with heaven only knows how many other words of miscellaneous writing.

So, it was time to find a replacement. But where was I going to get the money?

Then a check arrived from Amazon UK. That took care of that nicely.

So I got myself this netbook, the Acer Aspire One A0722, specifically because it was on sale at Target. I immediately installed my preferred operating system, Ubuntu 11.10, and sat down to set it up…

…only to have my brand-new netbook freeze up every single time I turned it on.

Bummer. I've seen grown men break down and cry over this sort of thing.

But, y'see, I do this sort of thing as a day job. Computer disasters are my bread and butter. I once set up the AV equipment for a politician who was later forced out of office for looting the county pension fund. I talked a man out of spending $1500 on a new laptop with a five-minute fix. I've hunted down more lost papers, presentations, and reports than I can recall. I've built email servers out of obsolescent junk from a dumpster. I recovered a report from a dying floppy disk five minutes before it was due. I've fished more data than I can remember from dying or virus-infected hard drives. I've had failures and setbacks (more than I care to remember), but I've come out on top more often than not.

So my react to a brand-new freezing netbook was not "oh, crap, I voided the warranty by installing Ubuntu", but "interesting."

Some research and a little bit of experimentation revealed the fix. Apparently, to work with Ubuntu, the Asus Aspire One AO722 needs to be configured to attempt to boot off its network card first. Otherwise, the wired Ethernet and the wireless Ethernet cards duel with each other, causing the system to crash. Once that adjustment was made, the netbook worked flawlessly.

And it is a lovely system. The 11.6 inch screen is much easier to use than a 10.1 inch one, yet small enough for easy portability. The AMD Athlon II C-60 processor, mated to the Radeon graphics, offers excellent performance, certainly better than the previous generation of Intel Atoms. And, added bonus – the netbook actually came with two gigabytes of RAM, rather than the advertised 1 gigabyte.

So, thank you, UK readers, for providing the money for this netbook. And thank you to all my readers for reading so many of my books. I hope to use this netbook to write many more books – in fact, I just finished chapter 13 of GHOST IN THE STORM on it.

-JM