Jonathan Moeller's Blog, page 82

DRAGONSKULL: FURY OF THE BARBARIANS underway!

Now that SILENT ORDER: RUST HAND is out, it’s time to start something new!

My next main project will be DRAGONSKULL: FURY OF THE BARBARIANS, and I am pleased to report that I am already 6,000 words into it. If all goes well it should be out in September or October.

I have also started CLOAK OF MASKS and SILENT ORDER: WRECK HAND. CLOAK OF MASKS will take over as my main project once FURY OF THE BARBARIANS is finished.

I’m not sure when I’ll finish SILENT ORDER: WRECK HAND – probably the next time I have a really busy month in Real Life. July 2022 showed me that it’s really helpful to have something shorter that I can finish during busy Real Life months. My original plan was to take the second half of July 2022 off from writing to focus on Mandatory Homeowner Repair Funtivities, but a look at the stack of bills on my desk suggested that wasn’t the best idea in the history of ideas. Since the SILENT ORDER books tend to run shorter than CLOAK MAGE or DRAGONSKULL, it was really, really, immensely helpful to have something shorter I could finish while working on Mandatory Homeowner Repair Funtivities.

So I’ll finish SILENT ORDER: WRECK HAND the next time Real Life gets super busy.

In other words, most likely sooner than I expect.

-JM

recent movies – multiverses everywhere!

It was a busy summer, but at the end of the day (or three hours or so after most people would define “the end of the day”) I did have some time to watch movies, both some new ones and older films that turned up on streaming.

Sahara (released 2005)

This wasn’t a very good movie. A marine treasure hunter gets caught up in a quest to find the Confederacy’s lost gold reserves, and this somehow also involves a corrupt African dictator secretly burying toxic waste on his land. The movie felt like one of those overstuffed 900 pages thriller novels from the 80s and 90s, which makes sense, because it was based off a Clive Cussler novel.

What’s more interesting than the movie is the lawsuit – apparently Cussler hated the movie so much that he sued the producers, the producers sued back, and they spent TEN YEARS suing each other back and forth. In the end, the lawsuits sort of petered without both sides claiming victory and no one getting any money except the lawyers. SAHARA basically stands as a good reminder to writers to be careful to whom you sell the film rights to your books. I felt bad for the actors because it was clear they were all trying really hard, but the material wasn’t rewarding their efforts.

Overall grade: D- (saved from F due to the work of the actors)

The Gray Man (released 2022)

I enjoyed THE GRAY MAN, but it was basically one long action sequence. Granted, it was a superbly done action sequence, but overall I think the movie could have done with fewer set pieces and more character-based scenes. THE GRAY MAN reminded me a lot of JOHN WICK, if John Wick was an assassin for the CIA instead of working for an international crime organization with weird rules. The plot is that a man called Six is an assassin for the CIA, and discovers that his new boss is corrupt. Six goes on the run, which leads to shoot outs in many different locations, while also setting things up for the sequel.

Basically, if you liked the JOHN WICK movies, you’ll like THE GRAY MAN, and if you hated the JOHN WICK movies, you won’t like GRAY MAN.

Overall grade: C+

Everything Everywhere All At Once (released 2022)

This is literally the weirdest thing I have ever voluntarily seen. How weird is it? On his podcast, Brandon Sanderson said it was the weirdest non-animated thing he’s ever seen, and we all know that if you watch anime, you’ve seen a lot of weird animated stuff.

I don’t think I actually liked this movie, but I respect how ambitious it was and the immense filmmaking skill it must have taken to put it all together.

The plot: Evelyn is a middle-aged woman running a laundromat who has almost alienated her daughter and pushed her husband away to the point where he feels he has no choice but to divorce her. Except it turns out that the multiverse is real, and that in a parallel universe, Evelyn’s daughter has become a being of godlike power who, disgusted by the futile nature of reality, created a black hole in the shape of a bagel that will destroy all universes.

Yes. A bagel.

Evelyn gains the power to draw on the abilities and memories of her parallel selves, and what follows is an incredibly bizarre mixture of surrealism, black comedy, kung fu action, an attempt at family reconciliation, and a tax audit. Like, I’ve described the movie, but I don’t think the description does it justice. It’s one of those things where you have to see it and make up your mind for yourself.

I have to admit I don’t like the multiverse as a storytelling concept because it negates the consequences of choice (for every choice you made, a parallel universe character made a different one), but this probably handled the multiverse concept as well as anything could.

Overall grade: A, B, C, D, F and every possible grade in every possible universe.

Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness (released 2022)

In this movie, Doctor Strange encounters America Chavez, who has the ability to jump from universe to universe in the multiverse. (More multiverse stuff, alas!) A dark and sinister power is pursuing America, and Doctor Strange has to wrestle with his own inner demons as he tries to find a way to save her.

Overall, I though it was good. I know some people were annoyed with the direction that Wanda’s character took, but I thought it made sense. She had just been pushed too far for too long and finally snapped in a bad way. Sadly, this is all too common in Real Life, and turns up on the news all too often. Except Wanda has a superpowered book of dark magic, so when she Breaks Bad, she really Breaks Bad.

I have to admit that I saw this before EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE, and I liked DOCTOR STRANGE better after seeing EVERYTHING because this movie made more sense. Though the critics generally liked EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE better than DOCTOR STRANGE, but the critics don’t know everything.

Overall grade: B+

Thor: Love & Thunder (released 2022)

THOR: LOVE & THUNDER is basically an attempt to address grief in a superhero movie via the random black comedy of director Taika Waititi’s style. Granted, this concept sounds like a heavy lift when I type it all out, so I can see why the movie wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea. But I thought it was pretty funny – Russell Crowe playing a debauched over-the-hill petulant Zeus was funny (and to be fair, that’s not far off from how Zeus was in Greek mythology) – and Christian Bale’s Gor the God Butcher was a compelling villain. The Marvel movies and shows have been getting weirder and weirder over the last few years with all the multiverse stuff, and are often inaccessible to people who haven’t seen the previous twenty movies or whatever, but THOR: LOVE & THUNDER was funny enough that it might not matter.

Overcall grade: B

RRR (released 2022)

The “RRR” apparently stands for “Rise, Revolt, Roar.”

First, one point. People are mistakenly calling it a Bollywood movie – it’s not, since it was filmed using the Telugu language, and Bollywood traditionally uses the Hindi language. So it’s technically a “Tollywood” movie, even though I think the version I watched on Netflix is actually the version that was dubbed in Hindi.

The difference is significant, but honestly I couldn’t explain that significance if I tried. India has cultural, linguistic, and ethnic divisions that are immediately obvious and comprehensible to people who live there but require years of study for outsiders to begin to understand.

That said, it does have a lot of the traditional elements of Bollywood movies – singing, over the top action sequences, and dancing, including a literal dance-off battle at about a third of the way through the movie. It’s like the director and the producers watched the last couple of FAST & FURIOUS movies (including the one where a rocket shoots a car into space), and said to each other “Guys, you know what? This is good, but way too subtle. Let’s show these Americans how it is done!”

Like, one of the characters uses a motorcycle as a melee weapon at one point, and before that, attacks the evil Governor’s house with an army of jungle animals. It’s that kind of movie.

Anyway, the movie is set in 1920s India. The evil Governor kicks off the plot when he kidnaps a village girl because his wife liked her singing. Bheem, the village’s protector, goes to get her back, and during the process befriends Raju, who works for the government police and has been ordered to apprehend Bheem. The two men become friends when they rescue a child from a train wreck through sheer awesomeness, little realizing that they are on opposite sides. Except Raju is secretly infiltrating the government in order to steal weapons for the people rise up, Both Bheem and Raju are the kind of guys who can fight entire armies with their fists and stern looks (or the occasional motorcycle used as a cudgel), and so they’re on a collision course with each other and the oppressive government.

Basically, RRR manages to take the visual language of an American action movie, combine it with Tollywood film techniques, and through some mysterious alchemy it somehow manages to become something a global audience can appreciate.

Overall grade: A (with bonus points for sheer audacity)

Lightyear (released 2022)

I heard bad things about this movie, but I watched it and it was a pretty solid science fiction adventure. I’m not sure why it flopped. Maybe it had too much high-concept sci-fi (time dilation and a generational colony) for a kids’ movie? Maybe the concept was too much of a stretch – a movie about the fictional character that inspired the toys in TOY STORY? (They say if you have to explain the joke, it isn’t funny, and maybe that’s true of story ideas as well.) Or it had to compete against TOP GUN MAVERICK? Or maybe it just had the very bad fortune to come out at exactly the right time to be used as a football between competing political factions?

Sometimes, fate just doesn’t like a movie. I heard a joke that God must be a Marvel fan, because He keeps sending misfortune upon the DC movies. I very much doubt that this is actually the case, but sometimes fortune definitely doesn’t favor a particular movie.

Anyway, I suppose this is a good reminder not to rely upon others’ opinions but to make up one’s mind.

Overall grade: B

Men in Black (released 1997)

I saw this originally in the theater back in 1997, and when it popped up on Netflix, I gave it another try. It holds up really well. It is a tightly-scripted science fiction adventure with excellent worldbuilding, and the cinematic skill to reveal that worldbuilding deftly and without clunky exposition. In fact, there is not a single wasted second in that movie, since it’s only an hour and a half long. It would be at least two hours if made today. Though I suspect 2022 Will Smith wishes he could go back in time and warn 1997 Will Smith about a few things.

Overall grade: A

Men in Black II (released 2002)

Everything I said about the original movie applies, except the sequel isn’t quite as tight and sharp as the original.

Overall grade: B

Ghost Rider (released 2007)

I watched this, and I have to admit it doesn’t make a lot of sense. Johnny Blaze, played by Nicolas Cage, sells his soul to the devil to save his father from cancer. Except the devil kills Blaze’s dad anyway (because he’s, you know, the devil) and then Blaze turns into an invincible motorcycle rider with a burning skull for a head to act as hell’s bounty hunter. There’s some additional plot that also doesn’t make very much sense. However, the movie is worth watching if only to see Nicolas Cage do an excellent job of chewing the scenery for the entire runtime.

Overall grade: C-

Obi-Wan Kenobi (released 2022)

Like multiverses, I generally don’t like prequels because of the lack of dramatic tension. It’s not a spoiler to say that Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader live to the end of OBI-WAN because everyone knows they both turn up again in the first STAR WARS movie. That said, a prequel can provide new insights into the characters.

I have to admit I wasn’t sure about this for the first few episodes – I thought it might be another sort of sad sack deconstruction of Star Wars like THE LAST JEDI. But it really nailed the landing! Especially the final scenes between Vader and Obi-Wan, and the final scenes between the Third Sister and Obi-Wan. I think the weakness of a series like OBI-WAN compared to something like THE MANDALORIAN is that most of the episodes of MANDOLORIAN were essentially stand-alone stories, while each episode of OBI-WAN is more like a component of a whole. (BOOK OF BOBA FETT, which I also liked, had something of the same weakness.) Anyway, I think OBI-WAN makes for a worthy Episode 3.5 of the STAR WARS saga.

Overall grade: B+ (with bonus points for Vader’s final howl of OBI-WAAAAAAANNN!!!)

Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (released 2022)

Both SONIC THE HEDGEHOG and SONIC THE HEDGEHOG 2 achieved something very difficult – video game movies that are actually good. They do this by recognizing the inherent humor of the concept – blue space hedgehog battles robot-obsessed mad scientist – and runs with it. Jim Carrey as the scenery-chewing Dr. Robotnik is pretty funny, and both Sonic the Hedgehog movies follow the rules of basic story structure. They’re excellent light entertainment, and the sort of movie you can take a small child to – which is definitely not true of EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE and DOCTOR STRANGE!

Overall grade: B+

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (released 2022)

This movie was absolutely hilarious. Nicolas Cage plays a lightly fictionalized version of himself – Nic Cage – who is having a career meltdown. When a wealthy businessman and film fanatic offers Cage a million dollars to attend his birthday party, Cage thinks it’s beneath his professional dignity, but he really needs the money. To his surprise, he finds himself striking up a friendship with the businessman. Except the businessman is actually an illegal arms dealer, and the CIA wants to use Cage to surveil him, which mean that the movie gradually turns into a 1990s-style Nicolas Cage action movie. Since I’ve seen most of the 1990s Nicolas Cage action movies, it was really funny.

Overall grade: A

Holey Moley Season 4 (released 2022)

Extreme mini golf! We can talk all we want about art, and culture, and the meaning of all these things, but sometimes what you really want is to see is mini golfers knocked into a pool by a giant windmill, and this show DELIVERS!

Overall grade: A+

-JM

SILENT ORDER: RUST HAND now available!

I am pleased to report that SILENT ORDER: RUST HAND is now available! You can get it at Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon DE, Amazon CA, Amazon AU, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, and Smashwords.

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A lawless space station. A ruthless pirate gang. And a superweapon that might destroy everything.

Jack March is on the most important mission of his life – find the Pulse superweapon before it can destroy the Kingdom of Calaskar.

To find the Pulse, he needs a ship that can make the dangerous journey to the Non-Aligned Systems.

But to get that ship, he’ll need to return to Rustbelt Station and survive its dangers.

Because in the lawless depths of interstellar space, it’s might that makes right…

-JM

SILENT ORDER: RUST HAND book description

If all goes well, SILENT ORDER: RUST HAND should be out by the end of this week! Or possibly early next week, if the Internet breaks or something.

But let’s see the book description first!

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A lawless space station. A ruthless pirate gang. And a superweapon that might destroy everything.

Jack March is on the most important mission of his life – find the Pulse superweapon before it can destroy the Kingdom of Calaskar.

To find the Pulse, he needs a ship that can make the dangerous journey to the Non-Aligned Systems.

But to get that ship, he’ll need to return to Rustbelt Station and survive its dangers.

Because in the lawless depths of interstellar space, it’s might that makes right…

-JM

The Pulp Writer Show, Episode 125: How To Write Sympathetic Characters

In this week’s episode, we’ll take a look at six methods for writing characters that the reader will find sympathetic. I’ll also discuss why I spend less time writing about technology than I did a few years ago.

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

-JM

Creating Sympathetic Characters

Today we’re going to talk about how to create sympathetic characters. Not necessarily likeable characters, but ones for whom the reader will sympathize and even root for.

Because a character doesn’t have to be likeable in order to be sympathetic, though it is easy to be sympathetic to a likeable character.

Walter White from BREAKING BAD is a prominent recent example. Walter was a very bad man who got worse over the course of the series, but most of the show’s viewership found him sympathetic and even rooted for him. An older example would be Darth Vader. In the original STAR WARS films and the various other shows and comics and books that have come out since, he is consistently shown to have done some pretty horrible things, yet he remains one of the most popular characters in the STAR WARS franchise.

Which leads to the obvious question – how do you make a character sympathetic to the audience? As we said, the character doesn’t necessarily need to be likeable – depending on the story, we sometimes find ourselves rooting for some pretty unlikable or even downright awful people, like the Walter White and Darth Vader examples above.

For that matter, why do the villains sometimes appeal more to the reader than the protagonists?

I think the key to creating a sympathetic or unsympathetic character doesn’t have anything to do with likability or unlikability. Rather, it has more to do with something more elemental – empathy. Can the reader empathize with the character’s situation or predicament? Humans are wildly different from one another, but we all have the same essential physical needs – without food, water, and shelter, we will die. We also have a lot of the same emotional needs, and it is through those emotional needs that it’s possible for a writer to create a sympathetic character.

If the reader can relate to the character’s emotional needs, you have created a sympathetic character.

This is why sometimes a villain is more popular than a protagonist. The writer, whether accidentally or deliberately, created a villain with emotional needs that are more relatable to the audience.

So, here are six ways that you can use emotional drives to create sympathetic characters. Very often you will find that these emotional drives can overlap in a single character, but that’s all right, since humans are emotionally complex.

1.) Fear of Loss.

Loss is something that every human will experience during their lives. It could be loss of a loved one, or loss of position, prestige, or property, or the loss of physical ability that can come through illness, accident, or inevitable aging. From a storytelling perspective, attempting to avoid these losses or avert them can create a compelling character.

Like, in a fantasy novel, the protagonist could be fighting to defend their home from orcs or the rapacious local lord, knowing that they’re in danger of losing their village. In a thriller novel, a common plot is for the protagonist’s child or spouse or lover to be kidnapped. In a less fraught setting than orcs and kidnappers, a common trope in romance novels is the heroine in danger of losing her business or her job because of the actions of her potential love interest. For villains, fear of loss is also an effective motivator – an evil CEO might fear losing his company to his rivals, or an evil queen might fear losing her daughter to the side of the rebellion.

The fear of that loss, and the characters’ efforts to avoid it, helps drive the plot, and also makes the characters’ emotional needs more sympathetic because we have all experienced the fear of loss at various times in our lives.

I personally got a lot of mileage out of this concept in the CLOAK GAMES series – Nadia’s fear of losing her brother is what drives her actions throughout the books.

2.) Experienced Loss.

The next phase of this, of course, is for the character to have actually experienced loss. Losing a loved one can be a common storytelling trope – the grim detective who lost his or her spouse, or the protagonist dealing with the loss of a sibling. It is common for characters to be orphans, as well – both Luke Skywalker and Harry Potter were orphans. Loss is also a common trope for villains. The loss of a loved one is also a common motivator for villains to embark on their start of darkness or a revenge-fueled rampage.

There are less fraught forms of loss that are nonetheless emotionally sympathetic in a character. The loss of a job, for example, especially when the character’s entire identity is tied up in their career. I think I’ve read a couple of detective novels where the protagonist has a breakdown after getting suspended from the force. The loss of one’s home can also be a severe emotional blow – from something like a house fire to peasants in a fantasy novel who are forced to flee their home to escape orcish invaders.

Either way, the emotion of  loss is an excellent way to create sympathy for a character. It’s very possible for this to mix with “Fear Of Loss” as well. The character, having experienced a loss, is afraid of undergoing it again – a warrior who was badly wounded fighting orcs, for example, or a man who went bankrupt once and is afraid of experiencing it again.

3.) Ambition.

An ambition is also a good way to create emotional sympathy in a character. We all want to achieve things in our lives – whether finishing graduate school, having a fulfilling career, or finding a spouse and having healthy and successful children. In fantasy fiction, it’s common for the villain to have overweening ambitions – to usurp the throne, to become the most powerful wizard in the world, to become a god, etc. The protagonists tend to have less grand ambitions in those kinds of novels, usually focusing on providing for their families and loved ones. And, of course, it’s common for protagonists in fantasy novels to have Quests, and fulfilling the Quest definitely qualifies as an ambition.

But ambition is a common emotional drive across all genres of fiction. In crime novels, the detective might want to prove himself to his superiors by cracking the big case. A thriller protagonist might want to advance in rank in his elite special forces squad or capture the world’s most famous terrorist. A science fiction protagonist might want to explore a new planet, or unlock a new scientific discovery. It’s very common for characters to want something, and while that can lead to all sorts of plot developments, it can also provide sympathy from the audience.

Depending on what the character wants, of course – if the character’s ambition is to, say, betray his lord to the invading orcs in exchange for money and a high position in the orcish horde, that is unlikely to inspire emotional sympathy.

Ambition also leads nicely into the next emotional drive we will discuss.

4.) Thwarted Ambition.

This occurs when the character has an ambition that can be blocked in some way. This can happen unjustly – a fantasy novel, for example, where the rightful heir to the castle is disowned due to the scheming of the evil chancellor. It can also happen for logical and deserved reasons – a military officer is denied a promotion because his performance isn’t good enough, a student can’t pass the bar exam to become a lawyer, a woman wants to start her own business but can’t get a commercial loan because her credit score is bad. As with the previous example, this works equally well for both protagonists and antagonists, since the villain might have an evil ambition he wants to achieve, only to find himself thwarted again and again.

In Real Life, we’ve all had times when we’ve wanted to achieve something only to have it go wrong, allowing us to sympathize with fictional characters in the same situation. Additionally, a thwarted ambition has the additional bonus of providing excellent levers to drive the plot forward. In fiction, it is necessary for the protagonist to act, and having the protagonist act to achieve his or her thwarted ambition is an excellent way to advance the plot.

5.) Injustice or unfairness.

When a character is at the receiving end of an injustice, that can easily create sympathy in the reader because everyone has been treated unfairly at some point in their lives. I suspect a lot of people’s first encounter with the concept of “unfairness” came as children when the teacher decided to punish the entire class because one student was misbehaving. Granted, there are far more serious examples of injustice or unfairness we could name, and while they are unpleasant in Real Life, they can help make for very sympathetic characters in fiction.

Some common examples of this concept in fiction are a character unfairly accused of a crime, a character successfully framed for something they didn’t do, or a character held in disdain by the local community for something done by his or her parents or siblings. This sort of situation is commonly a backstory for both protagonists and villains. For the protagonists, it is often a situation that they rise above, whether by proving their innocence or going through an internal struggle to gain the inner strength not to care what people think of them. (Obviously, for a situation involving a false accusation of murder, solving the murder might take precedence.) For villains, this can be the start of their path of evil, where they decide to take retribution upon the community that ostracized them.

Which leads us nicely into the final method of character sympathy we will discuss.

6.) Revenge.

In the Bible, the LORD says that revenge belongs to Him and that it is His to avenge. However, in fiction depending on the circumstances of the original wrong, the quest for revenge can be incredibly effective in making a character sympathetic. In THE PRINCESS BRIDE film, Inigo Montoya’s quest is to avenge his father’s death at the hands of Count Rugen. Even though Inigo is initially an antagonist, he eventually flips over to the hero’s side.  Given how evil Count Rugen, is Montoya’s desire for revenge makes him even more sympathetic.

The need for revenge can also make a villain sympathetic. For example, consider a detective novel about a string of murders. The detective discovers that the victims were all part of a conspiracy that got an innocent person man killed, and the dead man’s wife or brother or perhaps parents are the ones committing the murders. This would make the murderer far more sympathetic than they would be otherwise. Of course, depending on how sympathetic the writer wants the villain to be, the murderer could go too far, and start targeting the innocent relatives of the conspiracy members.

In villains, the amount of sympathy generated in the reader depends on the nature of what is being avenged. If the villain turns to evil to, for example, avenge the death of his son, that is inherently sympathetic. But if the villain is, say, a property developer who starts killing the people who blocked his crooked land deal, that makes him far less sympathetic.

So those are six ways you can try to make your characters sympathetic to the reader. Obviously, you can’t inspire the same emotion in every reader, but if you want the readers to find a character emotionally compelling, one of (or an overlap) of these six emotional drives will definitely help.

-JM

Technical writing vs creative writing

Concerning my recent post about Linux, Scott writes to ask:

-How has having a technical writing background made a difference to you as an author? Or would you consider your technology books to fall outside the technical writing arena.
I have one son who is highly imaginative and another who is direct and to the point. The first does well with creative writing classes, the second studying to be a medical lab assistant. When I was studying I found the technical writing class to be helpful and the creative writing classes fun. Neither were required for my degree.

Technical writing has been very helpful for fiction, because it’s been good practice in breaking down complex ideas for logical and orderly explanation. In terms of creativity vs clear exposition, I think you need both to write a novel, but clear exposition is probably more useful. You can have the best, most creative plot in the history of fiction, but if you can’t write about it clearly, it’s not going to do you much good.

You can see this sometimes in the first novels of new fiction writers. A first novel from someone who previously had a job that involved a great deal of writing – a journalist, a college professor, a law enforcement official (which involves the constant writing of reports) – is often better-written than the first novel from someone who has less experience writing nonfiction.

Besides, being able to write clearly and succinctly is a useful skill regardless of your career. A good example is Ulysses S Grant, who commanded the Union armies at the end of the US Civil War. Historians think that one of the keys to his success was his ability to write clear, direct orders that his subordinates immediately understood. This was long before any form of telephone or radio, and orders were given either verbally in person or through written directives delivered via messenger. Obviously the ability to make his orders clear via a written message without the need for further clarification was vital.

Granted, that’s something of an extreme example. Hopefully no one reading this will wind up commanding the armies of a major industrial power during a civil war! I’m sure we’ve all received emails from coworkers or business contacts that were difficult to understand at best and outright incoherent at worst. By contrast, this makes clearly written emails all the more enjoyable.

Being able to write clearly is useful in any career, but it’s definitely useful for fiction writers as well.

-JM

 

progress updates

Here’s where I am at with various writing projects.

-Editing is underway for SILENT ORDER: RUST HAND. If all goes well I think the book will be out towards the end of next week, but we’ll see.

-I am on Chapter 1 of 20 of DRAGONSKULL: FURY OF THE BARBARIANS. Full speed ahead on that once RUST HAND is done.

-Once RUST HAND is done, I’ll write the outline for CLOAK OF MASKS and that will be my background project until FURY OF THE BARBARIANS is done.

-The audio recording on GHOST IN THE THRONE is done, with editing underway. I’m hoping that we can finish GHOST EXILE in audio by the end of 2022.

-Recording is underway for MALISON: DRAGON CURSE. I would like to get the complete MALISON series in audio by the end of the year, since audio bundles always sell well, and I think an audiobook with THE COMPLETE SERIES in the title (like MALISON: THE COMPLETE SERIES) will sell quite well.

Happy Friday!

-JM

SILENT ORDER: RUST HAND cover art & excerpt

Let’s have a look at the cover art for SILENT ORDER: RUST HAND! You can see it below.

A short except of the book follows.

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Rustbelt Station remained, catering to those who wished to conduct their business far from official eyes. Smugglers and pirates and drug runners turned up here, along with people involved in far more serious crimes, such as slaving and kidnapping. Naturally, spies from the various starfaring nations and alien races had a presence on Rustbelt Station as well.

March had met Adelaide on the station.

That was about his one positive memory of the place.

He had gotten shot at a lot here, both on the station itself and in his ship.

And stabbed. And then shot at some more.

-JM

SILENT ORDER: RUST HAND rough draft done!

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

Due to the time crunch created by all the Homeowner Funtivities I did in July, I’m not going to write a new short story to accompany the book this time around. However, I will give away ebook copies of two older SILENT ORDER short stories – specifically, RAIL GUN and PHASE DRIVE – to my newsletter subscribers when the book comes out. So if you haven’t read either of those short stories yet, this is an excellent time to subscribe to my newsletter.

Check back tomorrow to see the cover image!

-JM