Jonathan Moeller's Blog, page 86

CLOAK OF SPEARS now underway!

Now that DRAGONSKULL: CURSE OF THE ORCS is out, my new main project is CLOAK OF SPEARS!

I am pleased to report that I am now 21,000 words into the book, on Chapter 4 of 22 (but maybe 23).

What will CLOAK OF SPEARS be about? There are three unanswered questions that have been bouncing around the series for a while:

1.) Why does Neil Freeman feel compelled to ask strangers about Ashford-Carr Syndrome?

2.) At the time of the Conquest, Earth’s population was around 7 billion, give or take. By Nadia’s time, it’s just over three billion, and most people don’t know why it’s so much lower. Some people think the Conquest killed enough people that the population was permanently lowered, or that it’s a result from centuries of Archon attacks. The official record doesn’t address it at all. So what really happened to cause the population drop?

3.) Why did the High Queen destroy Catalyst Corporation?

As it turns out, all three questions have the same answer…and that answer will be the main plot of CLOAK OF SPEARS.

When I first started writing Nadia as a character, I envisioned her as a bad person who very slowly and against her will starts becoming a good one. But it didn’t work that way in practice – her character arc has been more like Catwoman slowly evolving into Gandalf. We might see some more of that in CLOAK OF SPEARS.

If all goes well, I am hoping CLOAK OF SPEARS will be out in July.

-JM

DRAGONSKULL: CURSE OF THE ORCS now available!

As you might have guessed from recent posts, DRAGONSKULL: CURSE OF THE ORCS is now available at all platforms!

You can get the book at Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon DE, Amazon CA, Amazon AU, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, Smashwords  and Payhip.

A perilous quest. A haunted forest. Even the bravest knight might never return…

Gareth Arban knows he must stop the sorceress Azalmora from seizing the Dragonskull, a legendary relic of power.

But to catch Azalmora, Gareth must first cross the Qazaluuskan Forest, a land of dark magic and monsters.

But even the orcs who dwell within the forest are amenable to bargains.

And the cost of their bargains might be the lives of Gareth and his friends…

-JM

book description for DRAGONSKULL: CURSE OF THE ORCS

Almost forgot I needed to write a book description for DRAGONSKULL: CURSE OF THE ORCS! Anyway, here is what the book will be about.

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A perilous quest. A haunted forest. Even the bravest knight might never return…

Gareth Arban knows he must stop the sorceress Azalmora from seizing the Dragonskull, a legendary relic of power.

But to catch Azalmora, Gareth must first cross the Qazaluuskan Forest, a land of dark magic and monsters.

But even the orcs who dwell within the forest are amenable to bargains.

And the cost of their bargains might be the lives of Gareth and his friends…

-JM

DRAGONSKULL: CURSE OF THE ORCS Table of Contents

It took a while, but I’m ready to share the table of contents for DRAGONSKULL: CURSE OF THE ORCS!

If all goes well, I should have the book ready next week.

-JM

new ad graphics

New month, new graphics (or “creatives” as people like to say) for the ad campaigns.

I should mention that even though I’m mostly focused on DRAGONSKULL: CURSE OF THE ORCS right now, I am 8500 words into CLOAK OF SPEARS. Once CURSE OF THE ORCS is out, it will be full speed ahead on CLOAK OF SPEARS, which hopefully should be out in July.

-JM

DRAGONSKULL: CURSE OF THE ORCS excerpt & short story!

Editing DRAGONSKULL: CURSE OF THE ORCS today! Let’s have a short excerpt:

A little girl of about five or six stood nearby, staring at him. She was so heavily bundled in her cloak and coat that she looked almost spherical.

“Greetings,” said Gareth. “My name is Sir Gareth Arban, and…”

The girl let out a shriek, whirled, and dashed away with quicksilver speed.

Gareth sighed. That could have gone better.

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Additionally, if you sign up for my new-release newsletter, you’ll get a free ebook copy of the short story THE FIRST SIEGE when CURSE OF THE ORCS comes out next month!

-JM

DEMONSOULED anniversary sale!

May 2022 marks the 17th anniversary since DEMONSOULED first came out in hardback!

To mark the occasion, DEMONSOULED OMNIBUS ONE is just $0.99 USD for the rest of the month. You can get the omnibus at Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon Germany, Amazon Canada, Amazon Australia, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple Books, Google Play, and Smashwords.

-JM

DRAGONSKULL progress update

I had to take the last few weeks off from writing, but it’s time to get back to it!

Going to finish writing THE FIRST SIEGE today, which will be the short story newsletter subscribers will get for free when DRAGONSKULL: CURSE OF THE ORCS comes out. Once the short story is done, it will be time to edit CURSE OF THE ORCS.

Also! Recording on FROSTBORN: THE SHADOW PRISON is done. I just have to finish proof listening to the chapters.

If all goes well, hopefully both DRAGONSKULL: CURSE OF THE ORCS and FROSTBORN: THE SHADOW PRISON will come out in June.

-JM

A Visit To A Civil War Battlefield

In the last week, I’ve been to five different US states – that’s like ten percent of the total!

One of the new experiences was visiting a Civil War battlefield for the first time – specifically Chickamauga in northern Georgia.

I had never visited a Civil War battlefield before, so it was an interesting experience. And it caused me to indulge in sober reflection! You get to read about it below.

The American Civil War was big, complicated, frequently confusing, both to later historians and people who actively participated in it, and very bloody. The United States has been involved in a lot of wars, and more Americans died in the Civil War than in all those other wars combined. People have worked out that there were about 10,500 total “battles” or armed confrontations during the war, and of those 50 of them were major battles that moved the course of the war and 100 more of them were highly significant.

The war had different character in different places. In Pennsylvania and Virginia, it was like a Napoleonic-era war of maneuver and pitched battles, though by the end it was an early precursor of World War I trench warfare. In Georgia, it was a precursor of the modern concept of “total war” against a civilian population. In Missouri, the Civil War was a lot like Iraq post 2003, with armed vigilante and commando gangs making war and committing atrocities on each other. Horsemen were a major component of both armies, like in medieval and ancient times – but railroads and factories were more important.

A common alternative history scenario is positing what would happen if the Confederacy won the Civil War. That makes for interesting reading, but it seems that the blunt fact is that the South started out in a bad position that rapidly got worse. The Union had two and a half times the population and way more factories, railroads, and raw materials, while the Confederacy’s economy was mostly agrarian. Very few people grasped that the Civil War would be the first major industrial war, but the North was in a much, much better position to wage industrial war than the South. In fact, one of the common arguments among abolitionists was the slavery was an obsolete, archaic, and inefficient institution that inhibited the progress of the South. Since the North basically outproduced the South into the ground, there may have been some merit to that argument.

The South’s overall strategy during the war relied on two factors – 1.) breaking the Union’s will to fight (the Confederacy never had a realistic hope of conquering the North), and 2.) convincing Britain and France to recognize the Confederacy by using cotton exports as a bargaining chip. Southern newspapers frequently liked to boast about the powers of “King Cotton”, and argued that the hardier agrarian people of the South would make for better soldiers than the weaker city-dwellers of the North.

But as events showed, this was a bad strategy. While it came close a few times, the Confederacy never achieved the first objective of breaking the Union will to fight, and Britain eventually decided their interests were best served by staying out of the Civil War (British public opinion was against the Confederacy, and the British government was more worried about the Prussians anyway), and France used the distraction of the Civil War to conquer Mexico, which didn’t end all that great for the French.

In fact, in a letter to a friend in 1860, William T. Sherman more or less exactly predicted how the Civil War would play out. Sherman wrote:

“You people of the South don’t know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization! You people speak so lightly of war; you don’t know what you’re talking about. War is a terrible thing! You mistake, too, the people of the North. They are a peaceable people but an earnest people, and they will fight, too. They are not going to let this country be destroyed without a mighty effort to save it… Besides, where are your men and appliances of war to contend against them? The North can make a steam engine, locomotive, or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or pair of shoes can you make. You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical, and determined people on Earth—right at your doors. You are bound to fail. Only in your spirit and determination are you prepared for war. In all else you are totally unprepared, with a bad cause to start with. At first you will make headway, but as your limited resources begin to fail, shut out from the markets of Europe as you will be, your cause will begin to wane. If your people will but stop and think, they must see in the end that you will surely fail.”

Granted, Sherman did quite a lot to make that come true, so perhaps it was a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Was there a way to end slavery and resolve the succession question in a way that didn’t get 600,000 people killed, wreck half the country, and create permanent festering social problems? Maybe, but maybe it was inevitable. War is one of the curses of mankind that we are never quite clever enough to escape. More specifically, the Mexican-American War in the 1840s was probably the point of no return and the final catalyst for the Civil War. The rivalry between the free states and the slave states had mostly reached resentful equilibrium at that point, but the US took a big chunk of Mexico at the end of the 1840s. That territory was in many ways a poisoned chalice – the question of whether or not the new land would become slave states or free states dominated US politics in the 1850s and pushed things over the brink. (Ulysses Grant himself wrote that he thought that the Mexican-American War had a been a mistake and the Civil War was the result.)

Many people tried very, very hard to find a compromise or a political solution, and when they all failed, force settled the question.

Which is a sobering reality, isn’t it? In the realm of politics, when all the moral and rational arguments fail, when the less savory (but usually less violent & bloody) tactics of coercion and bribery prove useless, it’s might that makes right. Of course, the choice to use force is inherently a double-edged sword or a cast of the dice. Or, to quote another proverb, the enemy gets a vote. Sometimes, the enemy gets more votes than you anticipated. Throughout human history a lot of very smart people have launched wars that didn’t go at all the way they expected.

Anyway! Enough historical ruminating.

I got to visit the battlefield at Chickamauga. The battle took place in September 1863, and it was more or less the last significant Confederate victory of the war. However, the victory did no good for the Confederacy. The Union army withdrew mostly intact and dug in at Chattanooga in Tennessee to the north, and the Confederate commander Braxton Bragg wasted the next two months laying siege to the city. This gave the Union time to reorganize and send reinforces, and in November of 1863 the Union pushed Bragg’s army out of Chattanooga and back into Georgia. That marked the end of any realistic Confederate control of Tennessee, and opened the way for Sherman’s March to the Sea through Georgia.

The battlefield has an excellent museum with a good introductory movie, and then a driving tour through the significant locations of the battlefield. You can call a number to listen to a description that particular site on the battlefield, or get the same thing through the National Parks app. Since one of the notable features of northern Georgia is the heat, driving around the battlefield with air conditioning is much more enjoyable than walking.

I recommend a visit if you find yourself in the area and have a few hours to spare. It is an educational experience, and you might write a 1,300 word blog post reflecting on the visit.

-JM

Goodbye To The iPod Era

Apple discontinuing production of the iPod really does mark the end of an era, and the end of the era of the MP3 player, which was a great gadget.

I got my first MP3 player – a Rio Chiba – in 2003 as a birthday present. It was pretty great. You had to use the Rio software to load the MP3 files in the order you wanted, so basically the music played like one giant playlist. Before this, I would bring a CD player, some headphones, and a stack of CDs with me when I went to write anywhere. (And some spare AA batteries, too – that CD player ate up batteries like, well, me eating fries.) Of course, this was long before you could buy MP3 files easily, so I spent a lot of time with Windows Media Player ripping CDs.

After that, I got a Sansa View player when it came out in 2007. That was a pretty great little device. I avoided getting an iPod for most of the 2000s because I didn’t like the thought of a small portable device with a mechanical hard drive – it would only take one solid mechanical shock to break the hard drive, as many people found out with the Click of Death.

But when 2009 rolled around, I started running regularly, and I needed something more robust. So I got my first iPod Touch and started using iTunes to manage my music library, and I haven’t looked back since.

In the thirteen years since, I’m now on my 3rd iPod Touch, and they’ve improved with each iteration. In fact, I’m listening to the soundtrack of BATTLE BROTHERS on my iPod Touch as I type this post, and I took it with me when I went running this morning.

A few people have tried to dethrone the iPod – Microsoft spent a lot of money on the Zune, SanDisk tried with the Sansa line, and Creative cranked out a bunch of MP3 players for a while – but the iPod outlasted them all. In fact, what finally defeated the iPod was its own obsolescence as the concept of an MP3 player was absorbed into the smartphone.

I will miss the era of the dedicated MP3 player. I don’t trust streaming services because if the Internet goes down or there’s some squabble over a licensing contract, the content can disappear in the blink of an eye. If I like something, I’ll get it in MP3 and add it to my library, which I’ve been building up since 2003 and now holds 37 gigabytes of music.  Like, I’ve been playing ELDER SCROLLS BLADES recently on the Switch (with a point of pride that I haven’t paid for a single microtransaction) and I liked the soundtrack enough that I bought it and added it to my MP3 file hoard. Though, of course, I can just copy my music library over to my phone.

I suppose this shows how quickly the New & Cool can become a historical relic. I can remember when everyone thought that iPods were just the coolest thing ever. Yet to a child who’s two years old as of this writing in 2022, when he’s old enough to understand the concept, an iPod will be little different to him than a TV vacuum tube or a phonograph, a relic of a bygone age that he might have to memorize for a class about the History of Computing or something. I can just imagine the multiple choice question – “In what year did Apple introduce the iPod, one of the forerunners of the smartphone revolution?”

Still, Apple does like money and people like nostalgia, so maybe in a few years they’ll put out an iPod Classic. Like, the best iPod clickwheel design, but with Bluetooth and 512 gigabytes of flash storage or something.

I’d buy one.

-JM