Jonathan Moeller's Blog, page 51

The Pulp Writer Show, Episode 177: How To Write Believable Mistakes

In this week’s episode, I discuss how to write characters who can make believable mistakes, and we also take a look at November 2023’s ad results. The episode ends with a preview of GHOST IN THE SERPENT as narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can listen to the entire episode at the official Pulp Writer Show site.

-JM

The First Day Of Short Story Christmas!

It’s time for the first day of our Twelve Days Of Short Story Christmas!

We are starting with the DRAGONSKULL short story THE FIRST SPEAR! You can get it for free at Payhip from now until December 31st, 2023!

Check back tomorrow for the second day of Twelve Days Of Short Story Christmas.

-JM

Twelve Days Of Short Story Christmas!

To celebrate the Christmas season this year, we are doing Twelve Days Of Short Story Christmas!

From December 5th to December 19th, I will be giving away one free short story every weekday. I think I’ll pick some of the most popular 12 short stories I wrote from 2021 to 2023.  Then on the 20th, we’ll wrap up with one final big bonus.

Tune in tomorrow to see the first free short story of the Twelve Days Of Short Story Christmas!

-JM

 

Coupon of the Week, 12/4/2023

Once again it is time for Coupon of the Week!

This week’s coupon is for the audiobook of GHOST IN THE COWL as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of GHOST IN THE COWL for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code:

DECCOWL

The coupon code is valid through December 20th, 2023, so if you find yourself needing an audiobook for Christmas travel, we’ve got you covered!

-JM

HALF-ELVEN THIEF rough draft done!

I am pleased to report that the rough draft of HALF-ELVEN THIEF is finished!

Next up is a short story called JEWELED CASK, where Rivah must steal the jeweled cask in question. Newsletter subscribers will get a free ebook copy of JEWELED CASK when HALF-ELVEN THIEF comes out.

If all goes well, I hope to have the book out before Christmas!

-JM

ad results for November 2023

We’re rolling into the final month of 2023, so let’s look back and see how my ads performed for November 2023.

We’ll have three categories this month – Facebook, Amazon, and Bookbub Ads. Let’s start with Facebook ads.

For Facebook, I advertised THE GHOSTS, CLOAK GAMES/MAGE, MALISON/DRAGONTIARNA, and SILENT ORDER on Facebook, and here’s what I got back for every $1 spent.

THE GHOSTS: $6.10 for every dollar spent, with about 12% of the profit coming from the audiobooks.

CLOAK GAMES/MAGE: $7.68 for every dollar spent with about 5.8% of the profit coming from the audiobooks. Of course, CLOAK OF EMBERS skews that a bit, but even without CLOAK OF EMBERS the total would be $3.05 with 13.9% of the profit coming from the audiobooks. Finally CLOAK MAGE OMNIBUS ONE and TWO in audio bundles really helped move the needle for the audio.

MALISON/DRAGONTIARNA: $2.17 for every dollar spent.

SILENT ORDER: $2.51 for every dollar spent.

Next up is Amazon Ads. I tried a couple of different things with Amazon Ads this month, so let’s see how they did.

DRAGONSKULL: SWORD OF THE SQUIRE: $2.29 for every dollar spent, with 11.2% of the profit coming from the audiobooks.

Since I want the sequel to SEVENFOLD SWORD ONLINE: CREATION to come out in the first quarter of 2023 if all goes well, so I shifted CREATION to Kindle Unlimited and started running ads on it.

SEVENFOLD SWORD ONLINE: CREATION: $4.20 for every dollar spent.

This is a very promising sign for the sequel, and makes me wonder if I shouldn’t have just put CREATION in Kindle Unlimited from the beginning.

Finally, as an experiment we tried Amazon Ads for CLOAK GAMES: OMNIBUS ONE. That brought in $2.23 for every dollar spent, with 31% of the profit coming from the audiobook.

It’s obviously easier to advertise a KU book on Amazon Ads, but as it turns out, a wide book (like SWORD OF THE SQUIRE and CLOAK GAMES: OMNIBUS ONE) can also work very well if you have an audiobook, because then you can advertise on the Audible categories which generally cost less.

Finally, on to Bookbub ads. I’m concerned about the long-term direction of Facebook ads, which is why I’m trying to diversify more to Bookbub and Amazon ads. So for this month I tried FROSTBORN on Bookbub ads. Let’s see how we did.

FROSTBORN: $5.09 for every $1, with a surprising 35% of the profit coming from the audiobooks.

This, obviously, is a very strong result for Bookbub ads, especially since FROSTBORN has been finished for like six years at this point. I wasn’t expecting the audiobooks to do so robustly well from the Bookbub ads, but obviously I am not complaining.

So what conclusions can we draw from this?

1.) Amazon ads are a bit complicated to use, but in many ways they’re the safest. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you can easily blow a ton of money on Facebook or Bookbub ads and get jack squat in return. The nice thing about Amazon ads is that if they don’t work, they don’t spend money. It’s much harder to accidentally lose a bunch of money on Amazon ads than it is with Facebook or Bookbub.

2.) Amazon ads and Bookbub ads offer far more granular targeting options than Facebook. The problem with Facebook ad targeting is that you can only really target big name tradpub authors like George R.R. Martin or Brandon Sanderson, or broad categories like “epic fantasy”. Like, there’s not a single LitRPG author in Facebook’s audience targeting. (Maybe Ernest Kline?) By contrast, you can get super-granular with Amazon and Bookbub targeting.

3.) If you have a finished audiobook series, it is bonus profit when you advertise the ebooks. Apparently for Bookbub, it’s a LOT of bonus profit.

4.) For Bookbub and Facebook ads, you really need to rotate the ad image a lot to avoid creative fatigue (which is Internet ad-speak for people seeing the same ad image over and over). So you need to change it out pretty frequently, like once a week. Unless you don’t – sometimes you get lucky and get an ad which keeps firing and firing. But that is the exception and not the rule.

And, as always, thanks for reading! Given how consistently terrible the economy has been the last several years, I am very grateful for all of you who have bought the ebooks and the audiobooks. I hope to have new books to read soon.

-JM

How To Believably Write Serious Mistakes

As I’ve mentioned numerous times before, I’m not a huge fan of AI technology. So it was perhaps with an inappropriate amount of entertained interest that I watched the meltdown of OpenAI at the end of November. To sum up a lengthy and complicated saga, the board of OpenAI, for unknown reasons, fired its CEO Sam Altman at 3 PM on a Friday afternoon. There was an immediate backlash because Mr. Altman is a relatively well-respected figure in his field. The backlash intensified because OpenAI is essentially a vassal of Microsoft at this point, and OpenAI didn’t bother to inform their overlords of what was going on, which meant the Great Eye of Microsoft suddenly turned upon OpenAI’s board in wrath, especially since the move might have tanked Microsoft’s stock before its quarterly report.

Meanwhile, many OpenAI leaders quit, a majority of the employees signed a letter calling for the board to resign, Microsoft immediately hired Mr. Altman and the other leaders who quit, but then the board panicked and backtracked, and finally the board quit and Mr. Altman returned. Overall, it was definitely a fascinating saga of corporate politics, and since I personally think OpenAI is like one of the evil organizations from a James Bond movie (I bet they even have an elaborate SPECTRE-style underground base somewhere), it was enjoyable to watch from afar.

But this is the blog of a pulp fiction writer, not a technology, business, or AI blog. Why write about this?

Because there is a lesson for fiction writers in this. The board of OpenAI is not stupid. They’re all intelligent men and women who are leaders in their fields. And yet whatever their goals were in firing Mr. Altman, it is readily apparent that 1.) those goals were not achieved, and 2.) the results were in fact the opposite of what they had hoped to accomplish, since they quit and Mr. Altman remained as CEO of Open AI.

And that provides a good lesson for writers of fiction.

How can you have characters make believable mistakes without breaking the suspension of disbelief?

Because when a character does something stupid solely to advance the plot, it is annoying, isn’t it? Like, the intelligent hero who suddenly becomes dumb as a brick, or the cunning villain who suddenly loses 50 IQ points. Probably the most commonly cited example is the heroine who goes into the basement with just a candle to reset the circuit breakers when she knows a serial killer or a vampire or the Terminator or something is after her. Or when the hero’s plan only works if the villain suddenly becomes much less clever.

That’s annoying in fiction because it breaks the verisimilitude.

Nevertheless, in Real Life intelligent people do dumb things all the time. Like, constantly! Examples are abundant! No doubt you can think of several dozen off the top of your head without even trying. Just as it would break verisimilitude in your fiction to have your characters be consistently idiotic, it would be just as strange to have them be infallible high-functioning geniuses.

So let’s have some tips and tricks on how to have your characters believably make bad decisions.

1.) Emotional pressure.

A key reason for many bad decisions is emotional pressure, because for most people emotions almost always trumps logic.

The most obvious example of this is a high-powered professional who has an affair with someone in his or her office, only to end up resigning in disgrace when it comes out. Once again, examples abound, and you can probably think of numerous cases from the last few years, whether national or local political figures or people you know personally who work in your organization. We can think of more positive examples – a man could have pity on a homeless man and give him his lunch, even though this means he might perform badly at an important work task this afternoon. Or a woman might be trying to save money, only for love to override her better judgment and convince her to buy a gift for her grandchild.

In fiction, you can use this is many, many ways. Both love and hatred are powerful motivators, and so are envy and resentment. A character could take dangerous risks to help someone he or she loves. Or a character could be so gripped by envy that he or she tries to sabotage a rival in a way that is self-defeating.

In romance novels, characters make decisions from emotional pressure all the time. It’s one of the staples of the genre.

A good example is the scene at the end of THE LORD OF THE RINGS when Saruman tries to stab Frodo and fails. This is, objectively, a stupid decision. Even if Saruman kills Frodo, it won’t improve his position, and if he succeeded in killing Frodo, Saruman would be immediately killed by the enraged hobbits. In fact, Frodo at that point is the only hobbit who doesn’t want to kill Saruman for his crimes, so killing Frodo would have been quite possibly the worst decision Saruman could make at that moment in time. But it makes sense in the context of the story and Saruman’s character because at this point Saruman has been devoured by hatred and resentment and cares mostly about screwing with the hobbits who (as his twisted mind sees it) robbed him of the chance to become the new Dark Lord of Middle-earth.

So long as the character’s emotional reality makes sense to the reader, decisions they make in the context of that emotionality reality, even objectively bad ones, will not seem like dumb decisions to advance the plot.

2.) Acting on bad information.

In computer science, there is a principle called GIGO – Garbage In, Garbage Out. The idea is that if you enter bad information into a computer program, the program is only going to generate bad results.

This is also very true of human decision-making. To make good decisions, you need to have good information.

For fiction writers, this means if you want to have an intelligent character make a bad decision, you can have them act on bad information.

For example, a group of fantasy heroes could be on a quest to find a magical sword that will slay the dragon terrorizing the kingdom. According to the kingdom’s wizards, the sword is in a ruined castle in the wilderness. Except the sword isn’t actually there – the castle is controlled by an evil sorcerer who magically enthralls anyone who enters it. The heroes have made a bad decision by going to the ruined castle, since they’ve gained a new enemy in the form of the evil sorcerer. But they thought they were making a good decision, but it turns out they were acting on bad information.

You can easily use this technique in non-fantasy genres as well. A detective could be misled by a witness, and waste time going down dead-ends in his investigation until he realizes the truth. In a thriller novel, the hero could realize that the informants have deliberately been feeding his agency bad information about potential threats.

Acting on bad information is also a common technique in romance novels. Usually, romance novels have a plot twist where the heroine can’t get together with her love interest for some reason, and often it’s because the heroine and the love interest misinterpret each others’ motives. PRIDE & PREDUJICE is maybe one of the oldest examples of this, since Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett immediately attribute wrong motivations to each other and it takes most of the book to work through it.

3.) Unforeseen consequences.

This is a big one, and one of the major reasons that very smart people make decisions that turn out to be bad ones. Like the example of the OpenAI corporate intrigue I mentioned above. The OpenAI board members didn’t set out to get themselves booted from the company while strengthening Sam Altman’s and Microsoft’s grip, but that’s exactly what happened.

My favorite historical example of unintended consequences is Prohibition. The US didn’t just randomly decide to wake up and vote to ban alcohol one day in 1920. The Prohibition movement in the US dated back to the early 1870s, which meant nearly fifty years of work, public relations, persuasion, and changing local laws went into what should have been Prohibition’s crowning triumph, the passing of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1920.

Except it all backfired, didn’t it? The temperance movement wanted to end alcohol consumption in the United States. What they got instead was an explosion of organized crime, increased disrespect for public authority, the loss of jobs and government tax revenue coming into the Great Depression, and public opinion turning against prohibition. The explosion of organized crime was especially ironic since many temperance advocates believed, sincerely and firmly, that the majority of all crime was caused by alcohol consumption, and that most of society’s evils could be traced to the consumption of strong liquor. Some local communities actually sold their jails after Prohibition passed, believing that crime would soon drop to near-zero.

Alas, the causes of societal evil remain multitudinous and cannot be solely hung on alcohol, and the Twenty-First Amendment passed in 1933, which was the end of national Prohibition in the United States. Prohibition’s legacy remains in the minimum drinking age (another law often ignored), restrictions on the time of alcohol sales, and “dry” counties where you can’t legally purchase or consume alcohol, but the concept of national Prohibition in the United States is obsolete.

The temperance advocates didn’t accurately foresee the consequences of their triumph, and you can use this same principle in writing fiction. A character could achieve what they set out to do, only to find that unanticipated consequences of their success are more severe than the original problem. In a thriller novel, the heroes could take out the leader of the bad guys, only for the leader’s more competent and dangerous lieutenant to take over. In a romance novel, the heroine could win a lawsuit or a big business deal, only to discover that this damages her love interest’s family business. In a detective novel, the protagonist could finally track down the key witness to the murder, only for the murderer’s attention to be drawn to that witness.

4.) Victory disease.

In military history there is a concept called “victory disease.” It happens when an army or a commander has won so many times that they have become overconfident and lazy and start making avoidable mistakes. Sooner or later they run into a more serious opponent, and an army subject to victory disease will make errors that a less complacent opponent will not. You sometimes see this is professional athletics as well – a superstar athlete or winning team gets overconfident, stops training as hard or gets complacent, and then gets their clock cleaned by a hungrier opponent.

So “victory disease” is a combination of overconfidence and complacency, and you can definitely make use of it to have a character make an understandable bad decision.

In fictions, villains tend to be more prone to victory disease than protagonists. Nevertheless, having a protagonist with victory disease can force them into internal conflicts and character growth.

A good example of victory disease in a protagonist is Batman/Bruce Wayne in THE DARK KNIGHT RISES film. When Batman comes out of retirement to fight Bane’s organization, he’s so used to winning against criminals and outwitting the police that he doesn’t take Bane seriously enough, despite Alfred’s warnings. This bites Batman hard when he confronts Bane for the first time, and he’s forced to undergo character development to get ready to save Gotham City from Bane.

You can apply a similar plot arc to your characters – an overconfident character makes a serious mistake and has to recover from it, learning and undergoing character growth in the process.

5.) Fields of expertise.

There’s a certain kind of public intellectual (they usually have “Ph.D.” in all their social media handles) that likes to pronounce upon the issues of the day. They will often say things like “as a scientist I think” or “as an academic I think” when commenting upon various issues.

What’s amusing is that their pronouncements are often wrong or wildly impractical because they are straying out of their fields of expertise. Like, they might have a Ph.D. in cellular biology or something and be a world-renowned expert in that field, but knowledge and expertise in one field does not necessarily translate to competence in another. This can result in basic errors that could otherwise be avoided.

Academics run into this a lot.

Two examples from Real Life might suffice. A reporter was covering some protests, and was alarmed to discover rubber bullets lying on the ground, and posted a picture of them to social media. He was widely mocked because the objects in question were not rubber bullets, but earplugs. A minor celebrity went to a city and was horrified to see racist graffiti on the sidewalk and complained about to social media, only for (many) commentors to point out that the symbols were not graffiti at all but markings from utility workers indicating where electrical and gas lines ran underneath the sidewalk.

This makes for a very believable way for your characters to make bad decisions – force them to make decisions in an area where they don’t really know what they’re doing.

6.) Conclusion

To maintain verisimilitude in fiction, you need to walk a fine line – if your characters suddenly become stupid to advance the plot, that will annoy the readers, but neither can your characters be infallible reasoning machines. Hopefully these tips and tricks will help your characters make mistakes in a believable way.

-JM

10k words of HALF-ELVEN THIEF!

I am very pleased to report that I wrote 10,000 words of HALF-ELVEN THIEF yesterday, which brings us to my 10th 10,000 word day of 2023.

This is very gratifying since I had 9 10k days in 2021 and only one in 2022.

It’s also very useful for book progress, since it really supercharges progress.  It’s like in MARIO KART when you get the three red mushrooms and can have a sustained surge of speed.

-JM

How To Finish Your Book

I was so busy trying to finish CLOAK OF EMBERS that I totally forgot November is National Novel Writing Month. Of course, I’ve been doing this long enough that every month is NaNoWriMo for me.

The whole point of NaNoWriMo, of course, is to write an entire novel in the space of a month, or barring that, to get 50,000 words down of your novel. The entire exercise is to encourage people to learn to finish a novel.

This is because finishing a novel is hard, and some writers never manage to get that far. Like, there are a lot of people who have started numerous novels, but always run out of gas about a third of the way through. Or they get really excited about writing the first chapter or the really cool opening scene, but then can never get past it.

So learning to finish novels is a vital skill if you actually want to write novels, but it’s a hurdle some people never get over. And, no doubt about it, it is a pretty significant hurdle.

However, CLOAK OF EMBERS is going to be my 146th novel. (I had to look it up, which shows how many novels I’ve written, I can’t remember the number off the top of my head any more.) So let’s take a look at some of the tips and tricks I’ve used to finish books in the past.

1.) It really does help to plot in advance.

In the writing world, writers tend to break down into two camps – those who outline in advance, and those who do not. This is sometimes called “plotters” and “pantsers” (ie, writing by the seat of your pants) though given that “pants” means something somewhat different in the UK than it typically does in the US, people have proposed the more dignified terms “discovery writers” or “writing into the dark” for writing without an outline.

People who write without an outline say that the process of figuring out what happens is part of the joy of writing, hence the term “discovery” writer.

That said, I really do think you can save yourself both a lot of headaches and a lot of doubt if you outline in advance. It does offer many advantages. If you think through the plot in advance, you can potentially avoid any plot holes by working through the story first. Outlining in advance will also let you avoid running into a problem where your characters get stuck in a situation or a conversation and you don’t know how to resolve it because you can’t think of a solution on the spot. Advance outlining is also more efficient – you generally have to spend less time in rewrites and editing because you are less likely to spend writing time going down blind alleys that will need to be removed from the story later.

I’ve heard people say that they tried outlining and found it too confining and were much happier once they started discovery writing. The reverse may also may be true. If you find yourself running out of gas as you try to write a novel, outlining the plot in advance might help.

2.) Start short.

There was a post on a famous author’s blog where a reader emailed to say that he wanted to write a twelve-volume epic fantasy series with like 20 POV characters for his very first writing project, and the author gently suggested that perhaps that idea was just slightly too ambitious for a first project.

You can see the same thing at the gym after New Year’s Day. Suddenly a bunch of new people turn up, and they will sprint at maximum speed on the treadmill for like a tenth of a mile before having to stop, or load as many plates onto the bar as possible and attempt a deadlift. Except that isn’t how sensible exercise works. You should start small, and then build on what you have done every week or every two weeks. Trying to sprint a eight minute mile your first time or attempting a 250 pound deadlift the first time means, at best, you’ll just get discouraged and give up, and at worst, you might mess your back up if you don’t do the deadlift properly.

Thankfully, the chance of physical injury while writing is much lower.

But it might be wiser to to let your first bite at writing fiction to be smaller. Maybe a short story, maybe a novella. Or perhaps a shorter novel. Instead of a 12 volume fantasy epic, perhaps a 50,000 word sword and sorcery tale with a single POV? Learning to finish novels, like muscles, is something that is best built up gradually.

3.) Persistence.

Like many other areas of life, in writing there is no substitute for plodding persistence in the face of obstacles.

Many of the basic writing guides say to start out by writing 1,000 words a day. Even that might be a bit much, especially if you have a lot of other things going on in your life. If 1,000 is too much, why not aim for 500? Five hundred words a day is definitely manageable. You don’t even need an actual computer with a keyboard any more – you can open up a Google doc on your phone and thumb-type in five hundred words. (Some people easily compose thousands of words of text messages and social media updates a day, why not five hundred words of fiction?) A little bit every day builds over time, and setting a minimum for yourself can help you get through some of the harder parts of the book to write.

4.) The middle is always a slog.

It’s important to understand that no matter how many books you’ve written, no matter how long you’ve been doing this, no matter how experienced you are, the middle of the book is always a slog to write.

Every single time.

Beginnings are fun. You’ve got all these shiny new ideas in your head and its time to put them down. The endings are pretty fun, too – you’ve probably had the climactic scenes in your mind’s eye for a while and its time to write them.

The middle, though…that’s where people tend to get stuck. If you haven’t outlined in advance, that’s where you realize that you haven’t figured out how to get from Point A to Point B, or that you’ve written yourself into a corner or a potential plot hole. Even if you have outlined in advance and you have a pretty good idea where you’re going, sometimes you arrive in the middle and figure out that your outline isn’t going to work and you have to redo it. Or it’s working, but you just have to do it. You’re putting in the words day after day after day, but the ending somehow seems to be getting farther and farther away.

This is simply part of the process. It’s also true of a lot of other things – the middle of a workout almost always seems to be the hardest, or a 300 mile road trip somewhere around mile 130 or so.

I don’t think there’s any fancy trick but to keep going. Plodding persistence always wins out in the end.

5.) Done is better than perfect.

As I’ve said before many times, never let perfect be the enemy of the possible. That is a manifestation of my favorite logical fallacy, the Nirvana Fallacy, which is a cognitive error that says if a perfect outcome is not achievable, then it’s not worth doing. This overlooks the reality that 60% of a good thing is definitely better than 0%.

Pizza is a good metaphor for this. Obviously, you’d like to eat the entire pizza. But a single slice of pizza is still better than no pizza at all. The Nirvana Fallacy is refusing to eat any pizza at all if you don’t get to eat the entire pizza.

Writers (and creatives in general) seem particularly prone to this. Like, they’ll get in a loop of endlessly polishing the first chapter but never getting past that point, or rewriting their first draft over and over in an attempt to finally make it Perfect.

But Perfection in this life is much like attempting to go faster than the speed of light. It cannot be done and it takes infinite energy to even attempt it. In the case of Perfection, the energy you spent trying to make your book achieve Perfection could have been better spent on writing and finishing new books.

I’ve never written any book I would consider perfect. I always look back years later and think I should have done this or that differently. But you know what? I still finished those books, and a lot of people enjoyed them, even if I think that in hindsight I would change various things. A finished yet imperfect book is better than the perfect one that exists only in the imagination of the writer.

So I think learning to accept “I did the very best I could, now it’s time to set this finished project aside and move on to something else” is a necessary attitude for a writer to develop.

Which I am about to put in practice myself, since as I reach the end of this blog post I just finished CLOAK OF EMBERS, and I’m about to move onto my next book, HALF-ELVEN THIEF.

I hope these tips and tricks will help you finish your book.

-JM

Half-Elven Thief

Now that CLOAK OF EMBERS is out, many people have asked what I will write next.

I’m going to start SHIELD OF STORMS, the first book of the new Andomhaim series, in January 2024.

However, my final book of the year will be something completely new.

For the last eight years or so, I’ve often written shorter books between longer ones to reset my brain. Like, CLOAK GAMES, MALISON, and SILENT ORDER all started as shorter books I wrote between longer ones.

Except MALISON has been done for a while, SILENT ORDER finished this year, and the last Nadia book I wrote, CLOAK OF EMBERS, is both the longest Nadia book to date and the longest book I’ve written in the last two years.

I also want to write something completely new and unconnected with any of my previous settings. I’ve been doing this long enough that my longer series sometimes have Continuity Lock-Out for new readers the way that Marvel movies do now because there’s so much backstory, and many people are completionists and like to read absolutely everything in order.

So it will be nice to have something shorter and unconnected with anything else that I can offer to people.

So my next book will be called HALF-ELVEN THIEF, which will be the first book of five in its series. If all goes well HALF-ELVEN THIEF will be out shortly before Christmas. Currently I am 46% percent of the way through the rough draft.

What will it be about? Let’s see the book description.

There is honor among thieves…but only to a point.

Rivah Half-Elven is a master thief of the Court of the Masked King, the ruling thieves guild of the imperial city of Tar-Carmatheion. Yet her debts hang over her head like a sword that might fall at any moment.

So when a Master of the Court orders her to take a job from a mysterious client, Rivah has no choice but to accept.

But the client wants her to steal the spell book of a fearsome and powerful wizard. 

And when you steal from a wizard, death might be the happiest outcome…and it will take all of Rivah’s wits, skills, and courage to survive.

-JM