Jonathan Moeller's Blog, page 64

Iron Drive

CLOAK OF DRAGONFIRE was my main focus for most of April, but I also wrote IRON DRIVE, a short story I gave away for free to my newsletter subscribers.

I’m pleased that IRON DRIVE has gotten a positive reaction – it was fun to write a story from a “normal person’s” perspective in Nadia’s world. Like, in the past couple of books, Nadia has been dealing with weirder and more dangerous stuff. By contrast, Cas, the protagonist of IRON DRIVE, just wants to save up enough money so he can retire, afford to travel more, and see his grandchildren more often.

So it was interesting to write his interaction with Nadia from his perspective, and I am glad people found the story compelling!

-JM

Get a free audiobook short story

CLOAK OF DRAGONFIRE was the ninth CLOAK MAGE book, and the twenty-first Nadia book overall, so let’s celebrate with a free audiobook short story!

For the next couple of days you can get PROPHECY OF THE HIGH QUEEN, as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy, for free on my Payhip store.

-JM

Willow 2022: Fantasy Worldbuilding Lessons

I tried watching the WILLOW streaming series, and got so annoyed with it I gave up after the first episode.

I couldn’t quite articulate my annoyance at first, so I thought about it, and then I realized it connected with one of my favorite topics – fantasy worldbuilding!

So, buckle up! We’re going to spend the next several thousand words discussing it.

My annoyance with the WILLOW series reminded me of an email I got when DRAGONSKULL: FURY OF THE BARBARIANS came out in October 2022. A reader was annoyed that I used the phrase “lean in”, assuming I used it in the modern parlance of “giving additional effort” to a certain task. The phrase was popularized in a 2013 book called “Lean In” written by former Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg, where she argues that women can succeed in the workplace by simply 1.) leaning in to the work, 2.) working for one of the most unscrupulous companies in the world, and 3.) having the personal wealth to hire domestic servants.

But perhaps I am snarking somewhat.

Anyway, back to the point! In FURY OF THE BARBARIANS, I didn’t use “lean in” in that sense. The actual sentence was “Gareth leaned into his momentum, attacking a second muridach.” I wasn’t using the phrase in its idiomatic sense, I meant it literally – Gareth was literally, physically leaning into his sword blow to lend it extra power while fighting a muridach. Probably I should have phrased it better. However, I understand my reader’s annoyance – it would be massively jarring to have a cliched concept as so stereotypically 21st century and as trite as “leaning in” appear in a fantasy novel.

But the WILLOW series does that constantly.

The plot of the first episode revolves around an arranged marriage for the Princess. I have to admit the Princess was basically every Plucky Rebellious Tomboy character trope mashed together, and the result was so bland I can’t remember her name. But the Princess is betrothed to a foreign Prince, and isn’t at all happy about it.

This should have been an excellent set up for a conflict. However, the concept of an arranged marriage in the show is so removed from anything connected to reality that it just becomes pointless.

One of the keys to understanding medieval history (and, indeed, most pre-industrial history) is the idea of food scarcity. One of the great blessings of living in the 21st century west is that we’re more likely to die of obesity-related complications than of starvation. This was most assuredly not the case in the Middle Ages and most pre-industrial civilizations. One bad harvest could set off a chain of events that could lead to famine and civil war, along with lowering the overall health of the population, which could contribute to a plague. Medieval Europe from about 1100 to 1300 AD didn’t have that many famines, but after 1300 or so the weather got cooler and wetter, which caused several crop failures, which in turn directly contributed to the many wars and overall political instability of the 1300s. Especially since a chronically malnourished population did not have an immune system capable of fighting off the Black Death from 1347 onwards.

So what does this have to do with arranged marriages? Life in the Middle Ages was often very precarious. Nobles and royals arranged marriages to produce heirs and secure alliances. This seems primitive to modern sensibilities, but remember the concepts of “will of the people” and “democracy” were still quite nascent in the Middle Ages, and most people strongly believed in the ideas of “kingship” and that the king was the anointed of God. A king or a noble not having a viable heir was an invitation to civil war and other catastrophes. A war could also disrupt the planting season and destroy crops, also resulting in famine.

So an arranged marriage between royals was a massively serious business, with potentially disastrous consequences if it went wrong. Like, for those nations whose fortunes would be tied up in it, an arranged marriage between royal families was as serious as a meeting between the President of the United States and the head of the USSR during the Cold War.

Examples are manifold – Henry II of England ended his reign at war with his sons because he fell out with his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine. Henry I of England’s son drowned in a boating accident, which directly caused twenty years of civil war. King Edward the Confessor died without an heir, but had apparently promised the English throne to three different men, which led to a year of war. Philip IV of France died without a son, which directly contributed to the Hundred Years’ War that devastated much of France. King Edward IV of England marrying Elizabeth Woodville in a fit of passion caused the Wars of the Roses to restart after Edward’s early death. Henry VIII’s relentless quest for a male heir didn’t cause a civil war (Henry had the ultimate long-term survival trait for a monarch, ruthless paranoia), but it did set off the English Reformation and all the social chaos and upheaval that it brought. By contrast, his father Henry VII brought an end to the Wars of the Roses by marrying Elizabeth of York, which helped him secure a mostly peaceful reign.

Now, wars obviously have many causes, but the failure of marriages and heirs was a significant cause for all the conflicts and loss of life above.

But the WILLOW series doesn’t have any of this. All the characters are basically 21st century people dressed up in fantasy clothes. There’s no reason for the Queen to force the Princess to marry. You get the impression that if both the Queen and the Princess died suddenly, the characters of Willow would decide they were ready for 21st-century parliamentary democracy and maybe put those Co-Exist bumper stickers on their ox-drawn wagons. The Queen is forcing the Princess to marry for no other reason than to be a Mean Mom, which allows the Princess to be a Plucky Rebellious Tomgirl and generate conflict for the plot.

Now, I’m not saying that all fantasy needs to be filled with GAME OF THRONES-style grimdark. But you can get a very tense plot with just, like, say 15% of the reality of the stakes of a medieval arranged marriage. Indeed, if you’ve been reading this blog for a long time, you know that I enjoy taking cheap shots at GAME OF THRONES, a petty vice that I try not to indulge too often. But I will say this for THE HOUSE OF THE DRAGON, the spinoff series of GAME OF THRONES – HOUSE OF THE DRAGON does get the very serious stakes and the lethal dynamics of a medieval succession crisis mostly right. Perhaps we should count ourselves as fortunate that Henry VIII did not have access to dragons.

Another dissonant note in the show is how pointedly egalitarian everyone is.

We live in a very egalitarian age, where billionaires and politicians feel the need to make gestures to show that they are part of The Common Man. Like, the President of the United States and the President of China are two of the highest-ranking people on Earth, and they both dress in somber black business suits most of the time, suits that would not be out of place in a variety of professions. Compare this to the way that, say, Louis XIV dressed, where his clothes were so magnificent that helping him to dress in the morning was considered a great honor. If the President of the United States gave a press conference dressed as Louis XIV one day and proclaimed that his rich garments reflected his authority and status, both his allies and his rivals would assume that he had lost his mind and start plotting to remove him under the 25th Amendment

So egalitarianism is so ingrained in modern life that most people assume it’s the natural order of things and take it for granted. (Overall, I think this is better than the sort of society where, for example, you could be executed for accidentally making eye contact with a social superior.)

Anyway! What does this have to do with Willow? The Princess’s brother, the Charming Roguish Prince, is conducting a romantic affair with one of the servants in the kitchen. This, of course, is so common as to be unremarkable. Even today, it’s fairly common for a married CEO or a high-ranking politician to have an affair with one of the staffers in his or her office. Hardly commendable, but that’s true of a lot of things.

What’s odd is how the Charming Roguish Prince’s affair is treated exactly like a modern teenage romance, complete with bouts of squabbling and hurt feelings. It’s treated like the Poor Girl From The Wrong Side Of The Tracks dating the Richest & Most Popular Boy In High School.

A Prince who had a commoner as a mistress could (and often did) behave very badly. But the sword could sometimes cut both ways. If the Prince acted in a way too far outside of his station, his peers could react badly. Remember Elizabeth Woodville from above? She was technically very minor nobility, but she was of low enough rank that when King Edward IV married her, several of his most powerful supporters turned against him and nearly deposed him. (It didn’t help that Elizabeth had a large and very greedy family that immediately began enriching themselves as fast as possible.) For that matter, the Prince’s mistress could have been cast off at any time with no recourse. But remember the food scarcity we mentioned above? Being the Prince’s mistress was a lot better than working in the fields or in a tavern.

Now, it could have been a reflection of Charming Roguish Prince’s character that he acted courtly and chivalric towards his paramour from the kitchen in defiance of social convention and the pressure of his peers. Or the rest of the servants could have turned against the paramour, both scornful and jealous that she was acting above her station. That would have been a potentially interesting plot. But there’s nothing like that – it’s just a teen romance in the background while Mean Mom forces Plucky Rebellious Princess Tomgirl to marry for ill-defined reasons, and the only backlash the girlfriend gets is a vague warning that her heart is probably going to get broken. Given that the Charming Roguish Prince’s girlfriend isn’t who she appears to be, there’s a potentially interesting plot there, but I got too bored with the show to continue on.

Even in the modern egalitarian-esque age, romantic affairs between two different people of drastically different social standing can have very bad consequences for both participants. We can all think of many, many, many, many, many, many examples of married politicians and business leaders who got caught having affairs with people who worked for them, which often winds up destroying the careers of everyone involved. For that matter, there are numerous situations where single people entering a relationship would have harsh consequences. A college professor seeing a student, for instance, or even both are technically of age, or a military officer seeing a subordinate or someone higher in rank.

So, what lessons can fantasy writers learn from this?

I think one of the appeals of most fantasy fiction is that it’s a different and alien place from Earth. Conan’s Hyperborean Age, Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, the Forgotten Realms, Earthsea, the Dying Earth, all of them are fantastical places that aren’t like 21st century Earth. Even in urban fantasy that takes place in something like the contemporary world, there’s an element of the fantastic – your neighbor might be Harry Dresden, or an exiled elven noble living in disguise because Earth is neutral territory between the elven courts like Switzerland or something.

So there needs to be an element of the fantastic, the alien, the eldritch, and it can’t just be the characters throwing CGI magic-swirly things at each other. I think that’s why the WILLOW series didn’t work for me. (And given that it was canceled without a second season, I don’t think it worked for a lot of people.) All the characters were basically 21st century people LARPing as fantasy characters. Even that could have been interesting – you could have a 21st century character transported to a fantasy world and find himself baffled by monarchial bloodline succession, only for the local characters to sternly (and perhaps condescendingly) explain to him that the gods instituted bloodline succession, and if the rightful heir is not seated upon the throne, famines and plagues will visit the land, and the orcs will come down from the frozen north seeking manflesh to devour. And since it’s a fantasy world, all that might even be true!

So, if you are a fantasy writer, maybe it would be a good idea to “lean in” to making your setting unlike the modern world.

-JM

DRAGONSKULL: DOOM OF THE SORCERESS progress update

Now 49,000 words into DRAGONSKULL: DOOM OF THE SORCERESS, which puts me on Chapter 10 of 20.

Still hopefully on track to have the book out in June!

-JM

CLOAK OF DRAGONFIRE

CLOAK OF DRAGONFIRE has been out for a few days, and the reaction has been overwhelmingly positive.

Thanks for reading, everyone! I am glad you enjoyed the book.

-JM

DRAGONSKULL: SHIELD OF THE KNIGHT now in audio!

I am pleased to report that DRAGONSKULL: SHIELD OF THE KNIGHT is now in audiobook, as excellently narrated by Brad Wills.

You can get it at Audible, Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon AU, Apple, Kobo, Google Play, Chirp, Scribd, and Payhip.

-JM

Is Passive Voice Actually Bad?

When people give writing advice, one of the most common proverbs is to “avoid passive voice.”

But what does that mean? And why is passive voice bad?

Let us first define our terms. To put it the simplest, in passive voice, the object and subject of a sentence get reversed. A basic sentence in active voice typically goes noun/verb/object. For example:

“Jenkins ate pie.”

In that sentence, Jenkins is the subject, “ate” is the verb, and the pie is the object. That’s active voice.

Passive voice, by contrast, flips it so that the object is the subject of the sentence. Like this:

“The pie was eaten by Jenkins.”

The difference is subtle, but it’s there. In active voice, Jenkins, the subject of the sentence, is acting upon the pie. In passive voice, the pie, the subject, is being acted upon by Jenkins.

Both sentences have identical meanings. Either way, Jenkins is getting his pie! So why is active voice better than passive voice?

1.) Passive voice is more work to read. This is simple mathematics.  “Jenkins ate pie” has half the words of “The pie was eaten by Jenkins”, which means it takes half the time to read. When writing any kind of prose, the goal is to convey the maximum meaning with the fewest amount of words. “Wordy” is not a good adjective to have applied to your writing. If your writing is wordy and hard to read, it is likely that the reader might not grasp your meaning. If you’re a fiction writer, that means the reader will get bored and go do something else. As Jerry Pournelle said, fiction writers are trying to separate Joe from his beer money (or Josephine from her beer money), and anything that reduces the odds that Joe/Josephine will spend beer money on your book is a bad thing.

2.) Bad habit. Passive voice, in general, seems like a bad habit in writing to which people naturally gravitate. Like, many fields of endeavor have bad habits that newcomers need to learn not to do. Firearms instructors will tell you that people need to be trained not to rest their finger on the trigger of the weapon and to always check if it is loaded, if there’s a round in the chamber, and if the safety is on when they pick up a firearm. Personal trainers will tell you that people need to be trained to do deadlifts and squats properly so they’re not lifting with their backs. Artists will tell you that the big breakthrough in learning to draw is not to make symbols of what you see (like a smiley face is a symbol of an actual human face) but to actually put down on paper what your eye observes.

It seems the mind naturally wants to write in passive voice. I’ve even met people who like writing in passive voice, and believe it gives their writing an air of authority and even gravitas. This is mistaken – passive voice is a bad habit the a writer needs to avoid because too much of it makes prose harder to read than necessary.

3.) Air of diffidence.

Passive voice uses a lot more words than active voice, which means that your document is longer and therefore more effort to read. That is quantifiable.

Less quantifiable but still apparent is that a lot of passive voice is much less energetic than active voice. It sounds weaker, more timid, less confident, less sure of itself. Passive voice gives an air of diffidence to prose. Which, at the proper time and place, might be a good thing. (More on that below.) But most of the time, it just sounds bad.

Especially in action scenes. Consider this quote:

“Jenkins slashed the sword through the orc’s neck, sending the creature’s head rolling away across the flagstones.”

It would be much worse like this:

“The sword was slashed through the orc’s head by Jenkins, and the creature’s head was sent by the blow to roll away across the flagstones.”

Much worse!

Now, you might say to yourself that you’re not a fiction writer and have no desire to become one. This isn’t applicable to you. Wrong! Even in business writing, especially in business writing, active voice is preferable. Consider this example:

“By adding new features to the product, we anticipate a forty percent rise in sales in the East Asia region.”

Clear and concise. By contrast:

“If new features were to be added to the product, our sales in the East Asia region will be enhanced by forty percent.”

That’s much worse.

I think some of the tendency towards passive voice is a side-effect of school. Back when people are in high school and college, writing assignments usually involve “write a three page essay” or “write a thousand words” about a various topic. So if you’ve ever graded student essays, you’ll know they’re very good at padding things, which is why the sentences are totally, completely, massively, heavily, seriously, grotesquely, laboriously, and stupendously overladen with as many adverbs as possible. Passive verbs, as we mentioned above, use more words than active ones, so I suspect quite a few people get into the habit of using them as students and then get stuck with it.

So writing clear and lucid prose is a useful skill regardless of one’s occupation. I know several people who have attained professional advancement simply because they can write more clearly than their coworkers.

4.) Passive voice has its uses.

The title of this post was “Passive Voice Is Bad”, but that’s hyperbole. Passive voice is ultimately a tool, and it has its proper time and place. (It’s just not as often as beginning writers think.)

Passive voice is often useful in dialogue. You can use it to indicate that a character is uncertain about something, or is thinking something through aloud. You can use it to indicate characterization, when a character might have a tendency towards diffidence and wordiness in their speech.

Another good use for passive voice is simply getting on with things. Remember, in fiction the goal of the prose is to tell the story, and sometimes you just need to get on with the story.

Simply using sentences like “It was Friday” or “His girlfriend was an over-promoted sales rep” or “The car was parked across the street” is fine. Sometimes you just want to tell the reader that it was Friday or that the car is parked on the other side of the street so you can get on to the more interesting parts of the story. It’s a mistake to spend too much time on the “liminal” parts of the story where the characters are moving on to the more interesting scenes, and sometimes writers fall into that trap. (For example, a certain Major Fantasy Author wasted hundreds of pages of the fifth book of his series describing an extremely long and tedious river journey.)

So there nothing wrong with using some passive voice to lay down some necessary info and get on to the more interesting parts. The trick is not to overuse these sentences and to shake them up.

For example:

“It was Friday.”

Perfectly serviceable, but we can eliminate the passive voice and get the sentence to do some characterization for us.

“At 8 AM on Friday, Jenkins had already eaten his third Egg McMuffin, with the fourth waiting on his tray.”

This lets the reader known the important information – it was Friday – but it also includes some character details about Jenkins. It’s even better if you can wrap some sensory detail into it.

“At 8 AM on Friday, Jenkins unwrapped his fourth Egg McMuffin, the greasy paper crinkling under his sweat-damp fingers.”

This sentence accomplishes the same thing, but includes two senses – touch and sound.

Let’s try another one:

“His girlfriend was an over-promoted sales rep.”

This is a perfectly fine sentence, though it depends on what follows. This sentence works better:

“Jenkins would never admit it, but he thought Maura had been promoted past her competence when she left sales behind for management.”

Or we could rework it for more character details about Jenkins and Maura:

“As Maura rambled on for the fourth night in the row about her first major project as district manager – a revision to MegaCorp’s employee dress code – Jenkins realized with growing concern that his girlfriend might not have been quite as intelligent as he believed. That the charm and attention to appearance that had served her so well in sales had covered over her complete inability to understand a business model. He made a mental note to sell his remaining shares of MegaCorp as soon as possible.”

But let’s not pick on Maura too much. Consider the basic sentence:

“Jenkins was a high-functioning alcoholic.”

Again, this is perfectly serviceable. But we can make the sentence do much more for us:

“Jenkins dropped the beer bottle in the recycling bin. It clinked off the thirty or forty other discarded bottles. Hadn’t that been empty two days ago? Jenkins shook his head, took two breath mints to cover the smell, and went to prepare for his meeting. Governor Smith did not approve of drinking, and so far he remained unaware that Jenkins had been the one filling up the recycling bins.”

Even better, let’s engage a few more of the senses in the description:

“Jenkins dropped the beer bottle in the recycling bin. It clinked off the thirty or forty other discarded bottles. the sour odor of the dregs coming to his nose. Hadn’t that been empty two days ago? Jenkins shook his head, took two breath mints to cover the smell, sharp and minty against his tongue, and went to prepare for his meeting. Governor Smith did not approve of drinking, and so far he remained unaware that Jenkins had been the one filling up the recycling bins.”

In the end, passive voice is a tool like any other. It’s a bit like watering down the sauce when you’re cooking. There’s a time and place for that, but you definitely don’t want to overdo it.

-JM

 

 

 

Ad results April 2023

I realized last month that a surprising number of people follow my monthly ad reports, which I discovered because I forgot last month and so received several concerned emails.

So here are my ad results for April 2023! This is what I got back for every $1 spent on Facebook ads for a particular series.

Facebook:

Frostborn: $2.32

Ghosts: $2.72

Cloak Games/Mage: $2.76

Sevenfold Sword: $2.31

So good results all around.

Here’s how the Amazon ads did. Remember, for an Amazon ad to be effective, it needs to get at least 1 sale for every 6 to 8 clicks.

Dragonskull: Sword of the Squire: 0.38 clicks, $14.90

Cloak of Dragons: 2.5 clicks, $2.80.

As usual, Dragonskull performed very well on Amazon US Ads.

I also expanded into Amazon UK ads for the first time.

Amazon UK results:

Dragonskull: Sword of the Squire: 2.5 clicks, $2

I was initially spending too much for UK clicks, so I am hoping that I can improve that performance for May.

I did take DEMONSOULED out of Kindle Unlimited and stopped using Amazon ads for it. The reason was that the KU page rate had the biggest drop in its history for April, probably because people are flooding the store with stuff turned out on ChatGPT. So Amazon’s going to come down hard on that, which means random account banning that’s inevitably going to have false positives, so for the immediate future Kindle Unlimited is a headache I’m going to avoid. (I suspect it’s less of a problem on other stores because reading in Kindle Unlimited creates the illusion that it’s “free”, but on the other stories, you have to do the harder work of convincing people to actually buy the book.) The good news is that if you were waiting for DEMONSOULED to be back on the other platforms, it’s back!

So a good month for advertising! Let’s see how May goes.

-JM

DRAGONSKULL: DOOM OF THE SORCERESS underway

I am pleased to report that I am now 18,000 words into DRAGONSKULL: DOOM OF THE SORCERESS.

If all goes well I hope the book will be out in mid-June!

-JM

CLOAK OF DRAGONFIRE now available!

I am pleased to report that CLOAK OF DRAGONFIRE is now available!

Available at Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon DE, Amazon CA, Amazon AU, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple Books, Google Play, Smashwords, and Payhip.

Dragons never forget a debt.

My name is Nadia, and I’m a Marshal of the High Queen of the Elves. That means I’ve learned all kinds of secrets.

One of them is that several dozen dragons live on Earth, disguised as famous musicians and wealthy industrialists.

Now the dragons are holding a council to determine whether or not they wish to leave Earth, and my job is to persuade them to stay.

But so many dragons in one place make a big juicy target for the High Queen’s enemies.

Including the ruthless cybernetic wizards of Singularity…

-JM