Jonathan Moeller's Blog, page 75

Coupon Of The Week – 11/28/2022

It’s time for Coupon Of The Week!

Since if all goes well SILENT ORDER: WRECK HAND will be coming out soon, this week’s coupon is for the ebook of SILENT ORDER: OMNIBUS. Start Jack March’s adventures with this 75% off coupon at my Payhip store:

NOVSILENT

The coupon code will be valid through December 10th, 2022, which should give you enough time to read SILENT ORDER: OMNIBUS ONE before starting WRECK HAND.

-JM

 

SILENT ORDER: WRECK HAND description!

Editing is underway for SILENT ORDER: WRECK HAND! Let’s have a look at the book description below.

###

A wrecked ship. A valuable cargo. Both are death traps for the unwary.

Jack March is on a vital mission for the Silent Order – find and destroy the Pulse, the deadly superweapon of the Final Consciousness, before it can destroy Calaskar.

But when the mysterious artificial intelligence known as the Custodian summons March, he has no choice but to go.

The Custodian holds knowledge that might save Calaskar, or destroy it utterly…

-JM

Seven Things I Am Thankful For As An Indie Author

It’s Thanksgiving 2022, which always makes me think of this quote from the book of Deuteronomy:

“You may say to yourself, “My power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me.” But remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you the ability to produce wealth, and so confirms his covenant, which he swore to your ancestors, as it is today.”

Abraham Lincoln’s original Thanksgiving Proclamation expanded on that idea:

“Now, therefore, I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, do hereby appoint and set apart the last Thursday in November next as a day which I desire to be observed by all my fellow-citizens, wherever they may then be, as a day of thanksgiving and praise to Almighty God, the beneficent Creator and Ruler of the Universe. And I do further recommend to my fellow-citizens aforesaid that on that occasion they do reverently humble themselves in the dust and from thence offer up penitent and fervent prayers and supplications to the Great Disposer of Events for a return of the inestimable blessings of peace, union, and harmony throughout the land which it has pleased Him to assign as a dwelling place for ourselves and for our posterity throughout all generations.”

There are many things for which to be thankful this year.

But this is a writing website, so I thought this year’s Thanksgiving post should focus on things that I am thankful for as an indie author.

1.) That I got as much written as I did.

I wanted to write a million words this year. I’m not going to quite get there – I think I’ll end 2022 at slightly over or under 800,000 words. The time in which I would have written the remaining 200,000 was soaked up by a combination of family issues, home repair, necessary travel, and illness, of which there was quite a lot this year. But still! 800,000 words is a lot of words, and I’m thankful to have been able to write that many.

2.) Freedom from publishers and editors.

I’ve written whatever I’ve wanted for years, and look at the submission guidelines for a publisher reminded me of the Bad Old Days where everything had to be reshaped to meet the requirements in the submission guidelines. None of that matters any longer, and you can write whatever you want and publish it wherever you want.

3.) The different self-publishing platforms.

There are a lot of different places to self-publish your work – Amazon, Google Play, Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, Smashwords, Scribd, and others. There are also newer ways that might involve some more work, but pay off for some people – Patreon, Vella, Webnovel, and so forth. None of this existed in anything even remotely resembling its current form 15 years ago, so I am thankful for that. 15 years ago the only way to get published was to submit to an agent and wait 10 to 18 months for the snarky reply, if one came at all. Now there are many excellent avenues for self-publishing.

4.) The hard work of my narrators.

I put out a lot of new audiobooks this year, and I frankly kind of got overwhelmed with it for a while. In August/September I had about 50 hours of finished audio I needed to listen to in the space of about six weeks. But it paid off – the FROSTBORN series is done in audio, and we also got MALISON as a bonus. If I push it, GHOST IN THE WINDS will be out in December, and the GHOST EXILE series will be complete at last. I’m thankful for all the hard work Brad Wills (and Dynamix Productions) and Hollis McCarthy (and her editor Shaun Toole) put in to bring those audiobooks to life.

5) Photoshop.

Yes. I’m thankful for an Adobe product. Truly it is a Thanksgiving miracle!

But learning to use Photoshop and employ cover design has been incredibly helpful to me. It’s offered immense flexibility in changing cover design and setting of Facebook ads and so forth. Or to just make semi-amusing image headers to accompany my blog posts. So I am thankful for that as well. Even though it is an Adobe product.

6.) Vellum.

Vellum is the ebook formatting and generation program I use to prepare my ebook and print book files. It is a lot easier and more powerful than the stuff I used before Vellum. Like, back in 2015 when I wanted to make a print book, I had to carefully assemble a Word doc using one of the official templates. Now it’s just point and click to generate an interior PDF file, and it looks better than the templates I used back in the day. It’s nice that the software tools are overall a lot better than they were when I started in 2011, and I am thankful for that.

7.) Readers.

Finally, and most importantly, I am thankful for all of you, the readers! I am very thankful for all of you who have read the books, listened to the audiobooks, and come along on the adventures of the characters.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

(I couldn’t find a picture of a turkey, so I went for a picture of a sandwich to attach to this post.)

-JM

SILENT ORDER: WRECK HAND rough draft done!

I am pleased to report that the rough draft of SILENT ORDER: WRECK HAND is done!

When I wrote SILENT ORDER: RUST HAND this summer, I ran out of time to write a new story with that book.

But! I finished WRECK HAND in time to write a short story to accompany it. I haven’t 100% decided what I will call it – either SAFE HOUSE or FALSE FUNDS. I’ll pick one or the other while editing.

Meanwhile, it’s time to share the cover image for WRECK HAND! If all goes well, the book will be out in December 2022.

-JM

Coupon Of The Week – 11/21/2022

It’s time for Coupon Of The Week!

This December will mark twelve years since I finished writing the rough draft of what would become CHILD OF THE GHOSTS. At the time, I thought it was the last novel I would ever write. Subsequent events proved otherwise.

Anyway, to celebrate this milestone, the audiobook of CHILD OF THE GHOSTS is our coupon of the week! You can get it for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code:

NOVGHOSTSAUDIO

The coupon code will be valid until November 30th, 2022. CHILD OF THE GHOSTS is like 14 hours long in audio, so if you’ve got a really long Thanksgiving drive, we’ve got you covered.

-JM

The Pulp Writer Show, Episode 135: Fantasy Worldbuilding, STAR WARS, and a failed nonfiction book

In this week’s episode, I talk about how STAR WARS provides valuable lessons in fantasy worldbuilding for writers, and why my attempt to write a book about Windows 8 didn’t go so well.

This December will mark twelve years since I finished writing the rough draft of what would become CHILD OF THE GHOSTS. At the time, I thought it was the last novel I would ever write. Subsequent events proved otherwise.

Anyway, to celebrate this milestone, the audiobook of CHILD OF THE GHOSTS is our coupon of the week! You can get it for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code:

NOVGHOSTSAUDIO

The coupon code will be valid until November 30th, 2022. CHILD OF THE GHOSTS is like 14 hours long in audio, so if you’ve got a really long Thanksgiving drive, we’ve got you covered.

-JM

Elder Scrolls Blades, a review

Recently I finished the main quest of ELDER SCROLLS BLADES.

I have a weird opinion about this game – I enjoyed it considerably, but I don’t really recommend it.

After I beat SKYRIM on the Xbox earlier this year, I wanted to play something else ELDER SCROLLS related. I thought about replaying OBLIVION, but I’ve done that before. I tried playing ELDER SCROLLS ONLINE, but I just kind of bounced off it – it’s so big and complicated, and it’s hard to pause and step away when you’re busy.

That led me to ELDER SCROLLS BLADES, a free mobile game that was ported to the Nintendo Switch a few years ago. Mobile games generally have a bad reputation for a variety of well-earned reasons, but I thought it was worth trying. The reputation of free-to-play mobile games is that they’re enjoyable for a bit, but then you can’t really advance in the game without spending money on microtransactions, so either people 1.) spend a lot of money on microtransactions, or 2.) abandon the game.

So, I thought, let’s try it and see if it’s any good. I mean, it’s free, and there’s absolutely no way I’m paying for any microtransactions. If I buy something, I want it to have actual value for me. (Not to be snide, but this is why I never got into crypto.) I started playing it towards the beginning of March.

It’s basically a mobile-sized subset of the typical ELDER SCROLLS experience. Like, it doesn’t have any stealth or archery elements, which were a big part of SKYRIM and OBLIVION. It doesn’t have an open world, either. What it does have is a series of quests and missions that take place in procedurally generated dungeons. The plot is that the player’s home town was destroyed, and since the Empire of Tamriel is in chaos, it’s up to the player to rebuild the town, defend it from enemies, and defeat the local evil undead Sorcerer-King. So there’s a base-building and town-building element in addition to the randomly generated dungeons.

The gameplay worked for me, I admit. The thing is I’m a really busy guy. I wrote like 800,000 words this year, and there’s all this other Real Life stuff I need to do. (I wanted to do a million words this year, but the reason I missed that wasn’t gaming, it was a combination of various Real Life factors.) I don’t have time for games that don’t allow save states and or that don’t allow you to pick up exactly where you left off. BLADES was designed for bite-sized gaming – you can play one dungeon quest, and then get back to work. That exactly fits with the kind of time I have for gaming nowadays

I admit the endgame can be a bit of a grind. To defeat the Sorcerer-King, you need to be high level, and you need to attack him with exactly the right equipment designed to fit your playstyle. Grinding out those levels took a long time, and I basically stopped playing the game in September and October because I was tired of the grinding and didn’t want to deal with it. But after a break of two months, it was enjoyable to return, and this time I beat the Sorcerer-King on the first try once I had prepared proper weapons and armor for the fight.

But speaking of grinding, let’s talk about microtransactions.

Everything in the game is designed to convince you to buy stuff for it. There’s an in-game currency called “gems” that basically let you skip construction and crafting timers, and there are constant offers to buy gems for actual money. Every day there’s a new notification for a sale on something – $4.99 for 500 gems, $19.99 for a Legendary Chest bundle, that kind of thing. Like many mobile games, if you’re not careful, you could find yourself spending a lot of money very quickly, like “spouse has angry conversation about charges on credit card” kind of money. The game is designed to get you to spend a bunch of money on microtransactions.

That said, it is an entirely playable and enjoyable game without spending a penny. I finished the main game without spending any money, but it took a lot of grinding. I enjoyed that grinding, because I could do it it bite-sized chunks across seven months or so.

So if you’re at all prone too spending too much money on microtransactions and in-game items, you definitely, definitely, should never play this game. But I enjoyed it, and I’ll probably keep playing the random dungeons even though I’ve finished the main quest.

That is my opinion of ELDER SCROLLS BLADES – I enjoyed the game considerably, but I can’t recommend it because the microtransaction model definitely preys on people vulnerable to that kind of thing.

And I will admit that while I didn’t pay for any microtransactions, I did pay for one thing related to the game. I bought Inon Zur’s excellent soundtrack for ELDER SCROLLS BLADES, and frequently listened to it while working on DRAGONSKULL novels this year.

-JM

Andor, Star Wars, & Fantasy Worldbuilding

I’ve been watching ANDOR, and it’s an enjoyable if tense show.

It also presents a valuable lesson for writers of fantasy.

Specifically, that when creating a fantasy/science fiction world, you must be careful not to violate the precepts of your own worldbuilding.

Let us explore this some more below.

ANDOR has been praised for its “realism” (as much as a show with FTL travel can be realistic) – ie, showing the struggles of ordinary people dealing with the oppressive weight of the Empire. No Jedi, no Sith, no Force, just ordinary people caught up in big problems.

But here’s the interesting thing – without the Jedi, without supernatural aid, everything that Cassian and the other Rebels do is inevitably doomed to crushing failure.

Why? Because while the Empire in ANDOR is presented as an oppressive authoritarian state, it has one significant advantage that historical oppressive regimes have lacked. What Cassian the other Rebels don’t know is that the Empire is an oppressive state ruled by an Emperor who is an actual evil sorcerer whose evil magic actually works. Furthermore, the Emperor’s powers also grant him a significant amount of precognition. He is able to see into the future to a considerable degree, and is thereby able to prepare traps for his enemies to destroy them.

Without the Jedi and their supernatural abilities to oppose him, the Emperor cannot be defeated by ordinary people. Cassian and the Rebels will win minor victories, but the Emperor will eventually crush them.

In fact, the first serious defeat the Emperor suffers is because of Jedi supernatural abilities. If not for Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia, both of them possessing latent supernatural abilities, the Rebels would have been destroyed by the first Death Star. Everything the Rebels would have gone through in ROGUE ONE and Episode IV to get the Death Star plans would have come to nothing – the Rebels would have missed their shot, the Empire would have welded a plate or something over the Death Star’s reactor port to prevent that avenue of attack, the Death Star would have blown up the Rebel base and wiped out the Rebel leadership, and that would have been that.

Except Luke Skywalker, using his latent Jedi abilities, is able to make the impossible shot and destroy the Death Star.

In other words, the Rebels could never have have destroyed the Death Star without supernatural aid in the form of Luke’s Jedi abilities.

The same pattern is repeated on a larger scale with the second Death Star. The Emperor, recognizing that both the Rebellion and Luke now represent serious threats to him, designs a cunning trap to eliminate the Rebels and corrupt Luke to his side. The second Death Star will lure the Rebels to their destruction, but more importantly, it will goad Luke into a furious rage. If Luke kills his father Darth Vader while in the grip of hate and anger, it will open him to the dark side of the Force, and the Emperor can corrupt him easily.

Except it all goes seriously wrong. Luke refuses to kill his father, and actually convinces Vader to repent. And his sister Leia’s latent supernatural abilities are the final wrench in the Emperor’s plans. Not only does she help anchor her brother Luke, she also helps convince the Ewoks to attack the Empire. Without Leia, the Emperor’s plan would have worked.

Which means that without supernatural aid in the form of Luke and Leia’s Jedi abilities, the Emperor would have destroyed the Rebels. Everyday people like Cassian and the other Rebels could have risen up against the Empire all they wanted, but without something to counter the Emperor’s supernatural powers, their efforts would have eventually failed.

This, of course, grates on modern egalitarian sensibilities, because we all want to believe deep down that if enough ordinary people rise up, the world can be changed. The modern ideal is that large groups of people rising up can defeat evil, rather than a single hero defeating evil on behalf of the people. In other words, we believe in the idea of the Mandate Of The Electorate or The Will Of The People as much as people used to believe in the idea of the Divine Right Of Kings.

Except the “single hero” fits with the original building blocks of STAR WARS. George Lucas was very open with the fact that one of his influences was Joseph Campbell’s monomyth and THE HERO OF WITH A THOUSAND FACES, and one of the parts of the Hero’s Journey is that he descends into the underworld, confronts evil, and returns with powers and abilities to defeat evil and restore peace to the world. In the context of STAR WARS, Luke is that hero.

In terms of worldbuilding, I think this is partly why THE MANDALORIAN was well-received and THE LAST JEDI was not. The version of Luke Skywalker in THE LAST JEDI was a sad old man hiding from his failures in the middle of nowhere. This contradicts the earlier parts of the STAR WARS stories, like dissonant notes appearing in the later movements of a symphony. Whereas the version of Luke Skywalker who shows up at the end of THE MANDALORIAN is the Campbellian Hero With A Thousand Faces set up by the earlier movies – the main characters of the MANDALORIAN have fought as hard as they can, but Luke arrives to save them. While Luke is portrayed as a benevolent figure, he is still mysterious, powerful, and terrifying, as a Campbellian hero would be at that point in his journey.

The lesson for writers of fantasy and science fiction, I think, is to be careful about how you set up the terms of your worldbuilding at the beginning. ANDOR works because it focuses on ordinary people and can rely on the framework of the other STAR WARS stories to support it – we know that Luke will win because Cassian and the Rebels created a path for him. THE MANDALORIAN worked for basically the same reason, while THE LAST JEDI did not work because it violated the previously established terms of worldbuilding.

So when writing a book of fantasy and science fiction, be careful not to break the rules of the worldbuilding, since readers will inevitably feel cheated.

-JM

SILENT ORDER: WRECK HAND underway!

Now that CLOAK OF MASKS is out, my next project is SILENT ORDER: WRECK HAND. I am currently on Chapter 8 of 13, and am hoping to have the book out in December. The goal was to have the rough draft done by Thanksgiving, but that might slip a bit.

WRECK HAND will be the 12th book in the series, and I think SILENT ORDER will wrap up with 15 books.

Long-time readers will know that I had originally planned to stop the SILENT ORDER series at 9 books, but I think 15 will let me wrap up the series in an emotionally satisfactory matter.

Anyway, if all goes well SILENT ORDER: WRECK HAND will be the last book I publish in 2022, and hopefully will be out in December.

-JM

The Pulp Writer Show, Episode 134: Publishing Gatekeepers, Twitter, and Indie Authors

In this week’s episode, we discuss whether or not publishing gatekeepers are good for writers, and the effect that Twitter changes might have on indie authors.

It’s time for a new regular podcast feature – the Coupon of the Week! Once a week I’ll share a coupon for a discount off an ebook or an audiobook at my Payhip store.

To celebrate the launch of CLOAK OF MASKS, here’s a coupon for the audiobook of CLOAK OF DRAGONS, the first book in the series. You can get it for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code:

NOVDRAGONS

The coupon code will be valid until November 30th, 2022. Get the audiobook here:

https://payhip.com/b/ThXjD

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