Jonathan Moeller's Blog, page 58

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If you sign up for my newsletter, you’ll get a free ebook copy of the short story DEFECTOR when SILENT ORDER: PULSE HAND comes out!

For the SILENT ORDER books, covers with planets and spaceships on them sell the best. But since I give away the short stories for free, it’s a chance to play with a character-based cover instead. Still has a planet on it, though.

-JM

Coupon of the Week, 9/4/2023

It’s time for a new Coupon of the Week!

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

SEPGHOSTS

The coupon code is valid through September 22nd, 2023, so if you find yourself dealing with the Back To School blues, it might be time to get yourself a new audiobook!

-JM

Fantasy Worldbuilding: The Magistri of Andomhaim

Reader Paloma asks a question about Andomahim:

“A question: magistrias get married and have families, but I don’t remember any magistrius in the books having any woman (or man, though hard to think like that with mentality of Middle Age Christians) with them. I hope is not that the men in this situation are like monks, cause I hope Joachim has someone amazing in his future.”

Magistri can get married.

MINOR SPOILER – if you read FROSTBORN: THE SHADOW PRISON, the Magistrius Camorak marries a widowed baker after the Frostborn War, after she essentially bakes her way into his heart. The Magistri were founded at a time when Andomhaim’s population was low, and so everyone of every station of life was encouraged to have children. A few of the First Magistri wanted the Order of the Magistri to become a monastic religious order that happened to wield magic, but there was sufficient opposition to the idea that it didn’t happen. They sort of compromised halfway where all magic users in Andomhaim would be required to join the Magistri, but could still have possessions and get married.

That said, the Magistri do tend to get married at a much lower rate than the nobles and commoners of Andomhaim for three reasons.

First reason is that Andomhaim has an overall suspicion of magic. It’s much stronger among the commoners than the nobles, but it’s still there among the nobility. A lot of people remember that a significant portion of the Order of the Magistri sided with Tarrabus Carhaine and the Enlightened of Incariel during the civil war. There are many, many stories about Magistri going bad that have worked their way into the folklore of Andomhaim. The “evil wizard” is as much a stock character in the songs of Andomhaim as it is in modern-day fantasy novels. This isn’t entirely fair to the Magistri, of course, but the belief is there. Though people who have been healed of serious injuries by the healing spell of the Magistri often have much higher opinions of the Order.

The second reason is money. Magistri get a stipend from the Order or from the noble in whose court they serve, and they can’t hold lands, though the Order as a whole can hold estates. Marriage in Andomhaim, especially between nobles and wealthy merchants, is usually more about property and producing heirs than romantic love. Since the Magistri don’t bring any property to a marriage, that’s often a non-starter, especially among nobles. Commoner Magistri (like Camorak) are more likely to get married.

The third reason is that Magistri frequently become so enamored of their studies that they simply don’t have time for marriage and very little interest in pursuing one. Magic, to paraphrase an old comedy sketch, is one heck of a drug. Which is one of the reasons why Magistri do go bad – they become so obsessed with magical power and learning more secrets that they lose their connection to the rest of humanity.

That said, it’s not terribly uncommon for male Magistri to have mistresses in the form of “housekeepers” and so forth. It’s a bit like the western church during the Middle Ages. One thing that perpetually vexed clerical reformers in the western church throughout the medieval period was how many priests had common-law wives and concubines. Remember that life in the Middle Ages was frequently very harsh, and while the village priest often would work lands alongside the rest of the peasants, he nonetheless had a better income and more prestige than many other villagers, and so becoming the priest’s “housekeeper” was often a more attractive prospect than the other available options. In fact, in some regions this arrangement became so common that a frequent effort of clerical reform was attempting to keep a priest from passing his office down to his eldest son via his common-law wife. (In Andomhaim, the church evolved to a structure more like the eastern church during the Middle Ages – priests could be married, but bishops and abbots were expected to be unmarried and celibate.)

While less frequent than a Magistrius with a “housekeeper,” female Magistri sometimes become the mistresses of the nobles in whose court they serve. It’s frequent enough that the “beautiful young Magistria” and the “grim lord whose eye is caught by the beautiful young Magistria” are stock characters in the songs of Andomhaim, like the “evil wizard” described above. Though depending on the personality of an individual Magistria, a bard who sings one of those songs within her earshot might gain a lifelong enemy.

The Swordbearers, by contrast, are much more popular than Magistri. Partly this is because they integrate into Andomhaim’s social structure more easily – Swordbearers can (and frequently do) hold land. Constantine Licinius is a Swordbearer and the Dux of the Northerland, and Ridmark Arban is the Comes of Castarium and the Constable of Tarlion. Since Swordbearers are supposed to protect the people of Andomhaim from dark magic, and knights and nobles are supposed to protect the people of their lands, the two roles fuse rather neatly. While both commoners and nobles have become both Magistri and Swordbearers, there’s something more aspirational about becoming a Swordbearer, a wandering knight who wields a sword of white fire against monsters. Knights of the Soulblade, of course, can get married, even though they are more likely to leave widows and orphans than the Magistri.

And consider the Swordbearers and the Magistri from the perspective of a common peasant who doesn’t know any of this. A Magistrius or Magistri would be a remote, aloof man or woman wielding abilities that you don’t understand and that he or she might have gotten from the devil. You’ve heard stories about how Magistri can serve dark powers. Maybe they can heal injuries, but at what cost?

But then an urvaalg starts prowling around the forest near your village. It kills three of your cows, and it also kills the blacksmith’s son and two of the lord’s men-at-arms. Nothing can kill the monster, and everyone locks themselves in their houses at night, fearing that the beast will come out of the darkness for them. Then a grim, taciturn warrior arrives at your village, maybe alone, maybe with a few trusty companions. With a sword of white fire, he kills the monster that’s been terrorizing your village, and leaves its head mounted on a stake. Then he kills one of the village elders – apparently the elder had been controlling the urvaalg with dark magic, using it to attack his rivals’ livestock and in some cases his rivals themselves.

With that done, the Swordbearer moves on.

So both the Magistri and the Swordbearers are feared, but the Swordbearers are more respected. However, the Magistri in general tend to live much longer.

-JM

The Pulp Writer Show website!

I am very pleased to report that my podcast, The Pulp Writer Show, now has its own dedicated, easy-to-browse website!

You can view it here:

https://thepulpwritershow.com

-JM

Ad Results August 2023

Let’s take a look back at ad results for August 2023.

First, let’s look at Facebook ads. Here’s what I got back for every $1 I spent advertising a series on Facebook ads:

THE GHOSTS: $3.12

CLOAK GAMES/MAGE: $3.62

FROSTBORN: $4.39

Having a complete series also in audiobook really, really helps with the profitability of an ad. Like, for August 2023, it looks like about 38% of the FROSTBORN revenue came from the audiobooks, and for GHOSTS it was about 36%.

The challenge, of course, is that having a complete series in audiobook, especially when you write long series like I do, is an enormous amount of time and expense. It can also take a long time for the audiobooks to earn back their investments. Like, Brad Wills narrated FROSTBORN #6 through #15 for me, and so far #6 through #11 have earned back what I spent on them. I’d have to double check the math, but for the eighteen GHOSTS books Hollis McCarthy narrated, I think about seven of them have earned back the investment. (I do have complete confidence they will all earn out in a few years.) It very much helps that, at least for my specific business circumstances, audiobook production counts as a tax deduction.

I didn’t really do anything with Amazon Ads in August because DRAGONSKULL: SWORD OF THE SQUIRE was an Amazon monthly deal in the UK, but I expect I will do more with it in September once SWORD OF THE SQUIRE goes back up to $4.99 USD.

As always, thanks for reading (and listening to the audiobooks)!

-JM

SILENT ORDER: PULSE HAND rough draft done!

I am very pleased to report that the rough draft of the 14th and final SILENT ORDER book is done!

I’ve also written a short story called DEFECTOR. Newsletter subscribers will get a free ebook copy of DEFECTOR when SILENT ORDER: PULSE HAND comes out next month.

Meanwhile, editing is underway on PULSE HAND, so let’s take a look at the cover image below.

If all goes well the book will be out in September.

-JM

The Pulp Writer Show, Episode 165: Finishing the Dragonskull series

In this week’s episode, I take a look back at the DRAGONSKULL series, and discuss what it took to complete a 9-book epic fantasy series.

As always, you can listen to the show on Libsyn, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Amazon Music.

-JM

Coupon of the Week, 8/28/2023

It’s time for a new Coupon of the Week!

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

AUGUSTFLAMES

The coupon code is valid through September 15th, 2023, so if you find yourself traveling for Labor Day, perhaps it’s time to get an audiobook to listen to on the trip.

-JM

Summer Movie Roundup 2: The Sequel!

The trees in my yard are already losing their leaves, which means that summer is almost done, alas.

That means it’s time to do the second half of my Summer Movie Roundup!

SECRET WARS (2023)

Dour, plodding, and very confusing. Marvel’s attempt to do a John le Carré spy novel but with space aliens, and it didn’t really work.

All the actors gave good performances, especially Ben Mendelsohn, Kingsley Ben-Adir, Olivia Coleman, and Emilia Clarke (and Don Cheadle is really good as a villain, as you know if you’ve seen his hilarious CAPTAIN PLANET parody), but again, they seemed like characters in a John le Carré novel, not characters in a Marvel show about shapeshifting space aliens.

It was annoying that Nick Fury got the LAST JEDI treatment in this – he went from mastermind superspy to a bumbling old man who single-handedly causes all the problems in the series with his incompetence and is replaced by an effortlessly competent younger woman. Honestly, if his exasperated Skrull allies decided to eliminate Fury and replace him with one of their own, you really couldn’t blame them. Disney seems to really love this “legacy character is now a loser” storyline – if Disney had made TOP GUN: MAVERICK, Maverick would have been a bitter old man unwillingly dragged out of retirement by resentful recruits, and the movie would have lost $100 million instead of making $1.4 billion.

Honestly, it feels like the Marvel Cinematic Universe had a satisfying ending with AVENGERS: ENDGAME and an excellent epilogue with the Tom Holland SPIDER-MAN movies (especially NO WAY HOME) and GUARDIANS 3 (more on that below), but most of the TV shows feel like DLC cranked out to squeeze a few more bucks out of a good game fading from the public consciousness.

Overall grade: D-

BATTLESHIP (2012)

I saw this for a very idiosyncratic reason – I listen to the HALO soundtrack a lot on Spotify, and Spotify decided to recommend the BATTLESHIP soundtrack to me. Then I saw that the BATTLESHIP movie was on Prime, so I thought “what the heck, let’s try it.”

You could tell this movie had been in production hell for a while. It’s ostensibly based on the board game Battleship, and while the connection is there, you kind of have to squint and have a few drinks first to notice it.

It was as dumb as SECRET INVASION, but much more entertaining. The first third of the movie plays like some sort of wacky comedy – aimless loser steals a chicken burrito to impress a girl at the bar, but it turns out the girl is the admiral’s daughter, so he joins the US Navy to impress her. This apparently works, because after the time jump he’s a lieutenant and they want to get married to the admiral’s daughter (who is in fact a physical therapist at the naval hospital in Hawaii), except Lieutenant Loser keeps screwing up and threatening his naval career.

Then space aliens invade. For some reason, aliens who have mastered interstellar flight and impenetrable forcefields land their ships in the ocean and engage in naval combat. All the other senior officers get wiped out, so Lieutenant Loser suddenly finds himself in command. Since the aliens’ ships are impervious to radar and sonar, the US Navy has to track them using water displacement on a grid. Just like the game of Battleship!

Meanwhile, the Admiral’s Daughter is helping a double amputee acclimate to his artificial legs when they discover that the aliens are preparing to phone home from Hawaii and they need to stop it.

That would have been a much more interesting movie – wounded war veteran is recuperating at a hospital, only aliens invade. Since he’s the only one with leadership skills, it’s up to him to save the day. It was also interesting when a group of retirees take a museum ship to fight the aliens, since that’s the only ship they have left. That also would have been a better movie than this one.

Overall grade: D-, but C+ for the bits with the wounded veteran and the retirees.

THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2 (2014)

Honestly, I think this movie got a bum deal. It’s actually pretty good.

I saw the first AMAZING SPIDER-MAN movie last year, and thought it was so-so. Sort of a gritty reboot for Spider-Man. I expected AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2 to be worse, but instead I really liked it. It had an entirely self-contained arc, and had good character growth for both the villains and the protagonists. This was the first version of Harry Osborn who seemed kind of scary and not just a loser punching-bag for his evil dad.

It was nice that the Andrew Garfield version of Spider-Man got a proper send-off in SPIDER-MAN: NO WAY HOME.

Overall grade: A-

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY: VOLUME 3 (2023)

It’s a rule of thumb in writing and screenwriting in particular that if you want the audience to hate a character, show the character being mean to an animal.

Boy, does GUARDIANS 3 lean hard into this.

The villain, the High Evolutionary, regular experimented on animals and raised them to sentience, and then killed them if they failed to meet his increasingly insane expectations to perfection. Of course, the High Evolutionary also committed genocide fairly regularly for thousands of years, but that mostly happens off-screen. There was a minor Internet controversy about animal cruelty in film when this movie came out, but I think it was overblown because 1.) all the animal cruelty is the work of the villain, 2.) this is shown to be unambiguously morally bankrupt, and 3.) it’s mostly shown off screen through montages of whirring surgical instruments, and the results of the High Evolutionary’s experiments – a rabbit with cybernetic spider legs and so forth.

Anyway, the plot of the movie is that Rocket Raccoon was the High Evolutionary’s most brilliant creation, a technical genius without equal, and the High Evolutionary wants him back so he can dissect Rocket’s brain and use that genius to chase his elusive perfect society. The Guardians team up to rescue Rocket.

It’s a very dark movie for all the reasons mentioned above, but it has numerous moments of genuine humor, and it achieves an increasingly rare feat – a satisfying ending in a superhero saga. All the characters experience growth in their arcs and achieve resolution, even if it is somewhat bittersweet.

Overall grade: A-

MISSION IMPOSSIBLE DEAD RECKONING PART ONE (2023)

An excellent example of a high-quality action movie.

I think we can all agree that Tom Cruise is a strange dude, but his devotion to his craft is both inspiring and very unsettling. However, in the early 2010s, he seems to have embraced the role of Action Star, and he’s been running with it (often literally) ever since.

The MISSION IMPOSSIBLE movies are implausible as the FAST & FURIOUS movies, but somehow they maintain a greater air of verisimilitude. Perhaps Mr. Cruise’s insistence on doing as many of his own stunts as possible really does help with that. In this movie, Ethan Hunt’s up against an evil artificial intelligence called The Entity, and it’s up to him to find the two halves of the key that can control the artificial intelligence. Many action sequences follow.

Overall grade: A

And now for the best movie I saw in the second half of the summer:

OPPENHEIMER (2023)

A biopic about J Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb, done in Christopher Nolan’s non-linear style.

In my opinion, I think this is tied with THE DARK KNIGHT and INCEPTION with Nolan’s best movie. All the cast give stellar performances, and for a movie that is about historical events (meaning the ending has already been spoiled by default), it has a remarkable degree of tension.

It’s a great portrait of Oppenheimer – a man who helped build the atomic bomb so the Nazis wouldn’t get it first, is later horrified by the consequences of what he has done, and yet still loves his work and probably would have done it all over again if given the chance. Oppenheimer’s nemesis Lewis Strauss is usually portrayed as a villain in popular American history (in Real Life he did numerous admirable things that his rivalry with Oppenheimer overshadowed in the public consciousness), but the movie is also an excellent character portrait of him, an egotistical man who is underhanded and a very petty, but absolutely convinced that he is doing the right thing to serve his country, and finds Oppenheimer both personally and morally offensive.

“Moral ambiguity” is a phrase that gets thrown around a lot, but OPPENHEIMER actually does manage to do moral ambiguity quite well. All the characters have no good choices, only an array of bad ones and the resultant consequences.

I would give it an A+, but I think the nude scene was pointless and I don’t approve of nudity in film in general.

Overall grade: A, almost an A+

FINAL THOUGHTS:

I didn’t get around to seeing BARBIE, though I don’t disapprove of the idea of a Barbie movie, and I thought the whole “Barbenheimer” thing was hilarious. But I don’t go to the actual movies all that often – I took a half day off to celebrate publishing DRAGONSKULL: CROWN OF THE GODS – so I went to see OPPENHEIMER. I expect I’ll see BARBIE on streaming at some point, but let’s be honest – I’m definitely in the “Christopher Nolan” target demographic and not the “Greta Gerwig” one. Though Gerwig’s adaptation of LITTLE WOMEN was excellent.

What’s amusing is that Warner Discovery released BARBIE on the same day as OPPENHEIMER to screw with Nolan, since he fell out with Warner during the pandemic and went to Universal instead. The goal, obviously, was to try and bury OPPENHEIMER. What actually happened was the “Barbenheimer” meme and BARBIE made a billion dollars and OPPENHEIMER did seven hundred million. Some executive at Warner was probably like “we wanted revenge and all we got was a lousy billion dollars!”

-JM

A look back at DRAGONSKULL

Two years, nine books, 731,000 words, and ten short stories later, the DRAGONSKULL series is finally complete!

Thank you all who came along on the quest of the DRAGONSKULL – I hope it was an enjoyable journey.

So it’s time to take a look back at the writing process. We’ll do this using the Internet’s favorite form of communication – a numbered list!

Note that this list will have minor spoilers for some of the nine books, so if you haven’t read them all yet, time to stop right here.

1.) Deciding on a new series

After I finished writing DRAGONTIARNA: WARDEN way back in summer 2021, I knew I wanted to write another epic fantasy series, I just wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. I did know that I wanted it to be different than DRAGONTIARNA. If you will recall, DRAGONTIARNA had five main point of view characters over the ten books – Ridmark, Niall, Tyrcamber Rigamond, Moriah Rhosmor, and Third, along with a bunch of secondary POVs – and writing that got to be really challenging towards the end, since it’s generally best to include something of an arc for every main POV character in a book.

So after that, I wanted to write something a bit less complicated for my next series. Of the nine DRAGONSKULL books, the first five (with the exception of the epilogue) are entirely from the protagonist’s point of view.

I also wanted a more focused scope and stakes for the new series. Like, in DRAGONTIARNA, the fate of the cosmos was at stake, and you can’t do that with every book and every series. DRAGONTIARNA sometimes had major battles taking place simultaneously on two different worlds, and so I wanted to write something with a tighter focus for the new series.

I thought for a while about starting the new series in an entirely new setting. I do intend to do that at some point, but not this year, and probably not in 2024.

Since Andomhaim (and neighboring realms) is such a big place, I decided to set the new series there, and visit locations that we didn’t see too much of in FROSTBORN, SEVENFOLD SWORD, and DRAGONTIARNA – the Qazaluuskan Forest as beyond.

2.) Choosing a main character

I wanted to try a younger main character this time around. Ridmark, by the time of DRAGONTIARNA, was a middle-aged man, and by the time most people reach his age, they usually are who they are going to be. By contrast, a younger protagonist has more development and maturing to undergo, which means that there is an opportunity to tell a different kind of story.

I settled on Gareth as the main character, and decided to start the series when he was seventeen. Most of us, when we are seventeen, 1.) know nothing, 2.) think we know everything, and 3.) usually undergo a variety of unpleasant experiences to cure us of points one and two. Naturally, this provides excellent opportunities for storytelling.

In Gareth’s case, he thought he knew what it took to be an honorable knight, but he had gotten some of the particulars wrong. In hindsight, I think it took too long for him to develop – if I could do it over, I probably would have had that scene in book 2.

3.) The villain

The main villain was Azalmora, though of course we had numerous other villains over the course of the series.

I actually happened across her name by accident – in the first draft of THE FIRST SORCERESS, her name was Azermera. Then I was editing, and I mistyped her name and it came out with “Azalmora” instead. I thought that sounded much better, so I changed her name to Azalmora.

She turned out to be a pretty great villain – disciplined, intelligent, and self-controlled, which of course makes it easier to write the protagonists since the villain doesn’t make obvious mistakes that they have to be willfully blind not to exploit.

4.) Improvising the Norvangir

As you might recall if you have read my website for any length of time, I usually outline everything in advance, and I did the same thing with DRAGONSKULL.

I did, however, improvise the Norvangir entirely.

In the original outline, Gareth & company would meet the Ghost Path tribe of halflings after leaving the Qazaluuskan Forest. The closer I got to that point, however, the more bored I became with the idea, since it just felt like I would be digging up an obscure point from FROSTBORN: THE SKULL QUEST. At the time, I happened to watch a National Geographic (or possibly PBS) documentary about how the Vikings came to North America, specifically Canada, substantially sooner than anyone thought, and the idea took hold. What if a group of Vikings accidentally sailed into a mysterious mist that was actually a world gate and ended up in the world of Andomhaim?

I liked the idea enough that I rewrote the series outline to accommodate it, and thus the Norvangir were born. I do wish I had gotten the Ghost Path halflings into the story, but once I had swapped in the Norvangir it seemed like an unnecessary side quest at that point.

5.) Improvising Niara

Niara was always in the outline from the very beginning. I wasn’t entirely sure what her personality would be like, though. Early one, I envisioned her as much more somber and stoic. As the books went on and her character developed, the stoicism remained, but the somberness was replaced by a combination of a love of fighting, stubbornness, and a violent charisma. When Niara is convinced she is in the right, she absolutely will not back down, and will cheerfully fight anyone who tries to force her to change her mind.

I’ve found that happens quite a bit when writing fiction – you envision a character one way, but then you actually write them and they start interacting with the setting and the conflict and the other characters, and they turn out differently than the way you thought.

6.) The End

I’ve realized that when writing a series you need to have a definite end point in mind. Like, if you’re JD Robb, John Sandford, or Jeffrey Deaver, you can write a long series of open-ended novels about the same detective, but that doesn’t really work in fantasy. I’ve tried writing a fantasy series with an open-ended plotline in mind, but it never seems to work.

So the ending is important, both for the individual books and definitely for the entire series as a whole.

I think I arrived at a satisfactory ending for the series. The key to a proper ending, of course, is that it needs to provide emotional resolution to the conflicts raised previously in the story.

Fantasy as a genre has a bad reputation for unfinished series. Mostly this is the publishers’ fault – they’ll contract a writer for a trilogy or a five-book series, and then cancel it after the 2nd book only sells 80% of the copies of the first one. On occasion, it is the writer’s fault – the writer just bit off more than he or she can chew, or got excited with a new idea and didn’t really plan it out or think it through.

So I hope the ending for DRAGONSKULL is satisfying. And if it isn’t, remember than an ending is much better than no ending at all.

7.) What’s next?

DRAGONSKULL is over, but there’s more stories in the land of Andomhaim (and neighboring realms).

If all goes well, I will start SHIELD OF STORMS, the first book in THE SHIELD WAR series, sometime in the first half of 2024.

-JM