In this week's episode, I explain why I won't write any more crossover series in my 2nd decade as an indie author. We also discuss why too long of a backstory can become a problem. TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 178 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is December the 10th, 2023 and today we're going to talk about why I won't write any more crossover series. Before we get into our main topic this week, let's have an update on my current writing projects. I'm pleased to report that Half-Elven Thief is now available. This book will be out on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited. Amazon seems to have solved many of the Kindle Unlimited concerns I had earlier in the year, and so what I'm going to do with Half-Elven Thief is repeat what I did with Wraithshard back in 2020, where the books first come out in Kindle Unlimited, and then once the series is done (I am planning for six books), then they will go wide to other platforms. So if you are an Amazon and Kindle Unlimited user, you can get that as the last book I have published in 2023. Now that Half-Elven Thief is done, I am writing the outline for Shield of Storms, the first book of the Shield War series, which will be set in Andomhaim and follow up on the results of Dragonskull from earlier this year. I'm hoping to start writing that Tuesday or possibly Wednesday of this coming week. Sooner would be better, obviously. I am also about halfway through the rough draft of Sevenfold Sword Online: Leveling, and I'm hoping to have that come out early in 2024, if all goes well. In audiobook news, I had two audiobooks come out this past week: Dragonskull: Doom of the Sorceress, as excellently narrated by Brad Wills and Ghost in The Serpent, as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get those audiobooks at Audible, Amazon, Kobo, Google Play, Chirp, and all the usual audiobook stores. Audio for Dragonskull: Crown of the Gods is almost finished. If all goes well, it may yet come out before the end of 2023, though, given how the holidays slow down processing for everything, it might not come out till 2024. But in any case, it will be out soon. If you stop by my website between now and the end of the year, you will see that I'm doing 12 Days of Short Story Christmas, where I'm looking over the most popular short stories I've had over the last two years or so and giving them away for free on my Payhip store until December 31st. I’m doing it on weekdays. As of this recording, I have gone through the first four short stories and tomorrow on Monday the 11th we will be having the fifth of The 12 Days of Short Story Christmas. So if you're looking for free short stories to read, stop by my website and at the end of The 12 Days of Short Story Christmas, I will have a bonus coupon for my entire Payhip store. So I think it would be worth checking that out. 00:02:42 Main Topic: Crossovers Now on to our main topic this week: why I am not going to write any more crossover series. Occasionally I get an e-mail from a reader suggesting that would be cool if Caina met Ridmark in a book or if Nadia went aboard Jack March’s spaceship or crossover like that between characters from different series. Much more frequently, I get emails from readers confused by the Cloak and Ghost series. How did Caina get Nadia’s world? Is this a version of Caina that lives in Nadia's world? How does this affect the timeline of Nadia's books and Caina’s? Didn't Andromache die in Ghost in the Storm? Why is she running around and Cloak and Ghost: Lost Gate? Or I will get an e-mail from a reader who read and enjoyed Malison: The Complete Series and then continued on to Dragontiarna: Knights, only to be confused and annoyed that Tyrcamber Rigamond doesn't appear in Dragontiarna: Knights until Chapter 15, even though at the end of Malison: The Complete Series said that Tyrcamber’s adventures would continue in the Dragontiarna series. Tyrcamber really does arrive in Chapter 15 of Dragontiarna, I promise! Now I'm in my second decade of being an indie author and one of the things I've decided for decade two is no more crossovers. My reasons follow: #1: The Cloak and Ghost books. I'm very grateful to everyone who read and enjoyed the Cloak and Ghost books, but boy did I get a lot of confused emails about them, like a lot of confused emails. I still do on occcasion. The idea that when I started writing them way back in 2018 was that it would be a fun little crossover side project. I figured it would just be a side story where Nadia meets the version of Caina who lives on her world and then adventures follow. Comics do parallel versions of characters all the time in comic books, right? Of course that overlooked the fact that one: hardly anyone actually buys comic books anymore, so it's probably best not to use them as an example. And two: when the Marvel movies started doing the Multiverse and parallel versions of characters after 2019, the franchise basically went off a cliff. But that was in the future yet. What actually followed was many confused questions about the continuity I tried to explain in the prologue of the book, but then I remembered the old adage that if you have to explain the joke, it's probably not funny. The same thing applies to concepts in fantasy novels. If you can't explain it adequately within the book itself, then it's time for a rethink. #2: Malison. Malison actually went pretty well. Thanks for reading it, everyone. The idea for Malison was that it would help set up the Dragontiarna series. When I wrote Dragontiarna, I wanted the story to cut back and forth between two different worlds, Andomhaim and Tyrcamber’s world. Writing Malison also helped me to work out the way the rules would work in Tyrcamber’s world, and then that would lead into the first book of the Dragontiarna series, Dragontiarna: Knights, which also happened to be my 100th novel. Malison did well enough on its own, especially in the box set, that lots of people picked it up in both ebook and audiobook. This did cause an unintentional degree of confusion, since it says at the end of the final Malison book that Tyrcamber Rigamond will return in Dragontiarna: Knights, so numerous people continued onward, and I still get confused emails ever since from people since Dragontiarna: Knights starts with Ridmark's perspective, not Tyrcamber. So now I have a form letter that I copy and paste reassuring people that yes, Tyrcamber does return in Dragontiarna: Knights in Chapter 15 and is one of the chief point of view characters for the rest of that series. So Malison was probably the most successful crossover I ever did, but it still caused confusion. Reason #3: internal setting logic. Very often my settings have completely different internal logic from each other and so a crossover simply wouldn't work. Malison was probably as successful as it was because I deliberately planned it from the beginning to tie into Dragontiarna, so the internal logic of the settings matched. Like when people suggest that Nadia come aboard Jack March’s spaceship, in Nadia's world, magic is real. In March's world, there's no such thing as magic, and even things that appear are magical like the targeting abilities of Navigator or Lysiana’s superhuman intelligence are the result of natural phenomena that are only partially understood by the characters, but are nonetheless essentially the results of applied science. So for characters from these two different settings to cross over, one or the other would have to submit to a completely different set of logic, which would be difficult to write and confusing to read. Like if Nadia went aboard Jack March’s spaceship, would her magic be a partially understood scientific phenomenon? Would magic suddenly come to the galaxy of the Silent Order series? Or would Nadia’s magic stop working, which would be a bad thing, since sudden character depowerment is frequently a sure sign that the author is beginning to run out of ideas. Elves are another good example. I've written a lot about elves in both the Frostborn world and the Cloak Game/Cloak Mage setting, and now I'm about to add more elves in Half-Elven Thief. The elves in Frostborn and the elves in Cloak Games work under extremely different rules. Like, in Andomhaim so far we've had the High Elves, the Dark Elves, the Gray Elves, the Cloak Elves, the Umbral Elves, and occasionally Half Elves. In Cloak Games, we just have the elves and they're way more concerned about the divide between nobles and commoners than they are about High, Dark, Gray, Cloak, and Umbral elves. For that matter, the way magic works in Andomhaim and the way it works in the Nadia-verse is completely different. So the basic premise of some of my settings are incompatible and trying to force them together would create some weird story structure problems. #4: Marvel movie lockout syndrome. The entertainment press has spilled much ink over the fact that The Marvels is the worst performing Marvel movie in the last 15 years. A lot of the opinions about it are wholly subjective and based around whatever social or cultural drum a particular writer feels like beating. But I think two undeniable facts worked against the movie, one of which is very relevant to me as an indie writer. First, it just cost too much. The Marvels cost $274 million to make, and it brought in about $200 million. If your movie costs $75 million to make, a $200 million return is a good return. If it costs $274 million, you are up the proverbial foul-smelling creek without a paddle. To put these numbers into perspective, the top three movies of 2023 were Barbie, Super Mario Brothers, and Oppenheimer, and with respective budgets of $145 million, $100 million, and $100 million, they all cost less to make than The Marvels. In fact, the combined budgets of all three movies put together is only like about 25% higher than the budget of The Marvels alone. Granted, while I wouldn't object to someone giving me $100 million budget for something, as an indie writer, this is not a particularly relevant concern to me. Nonetheless, it is a good reminder of the importance of keeping your costs down while running a business. The second fact that is in fact very relevant to me as an indie writer with 147 novels published, who has written many long series: the movie’s backstory was way too complicated because it was a sequel for too many different things. The backstory to The Marvels…okay, so this is a sequel to Captain Marvel from 2019, but also to Wandavision from 2021, which introduced the adult version of Monica Rambeau and also a sequel to Miss Marvel from 2022 on Disney Plus, which is where Kamala Khan made her introduction, but is also a sequel or possibly a prequel to 2023’s Secret Invasion and in some sense is a continuation of the story is told in the four Avengers movies and the setup for the plot was introduced for the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie back in 2014, with the character of Ronan the Accuser, who also appears in Captain Marvel as the younger version of himself and they're also linked to the X-Men movies and the larger multiverse, and on and on and on. That is a lot of backstory. And if I've learned anything writing really long series is that people are very often completionists. They want to read everything and read it in the order it was written. The downside of this is that the longer something goes on, the more readers or viewers you lose along the way. You can see how this works against The Marvels. It has, like dozens and dozens of hours of movies and TV shows to watch first as its full backstory. That's a big time commitment and an expensive one. For indie authors, if the series goes on long enough, you tend to lose people from book to book as they get distracted with other things or the budget happens to be tight the month the new book comes out. I think Cloak Mage will be the last series I write that has a double digit amount of titles in the series and everything after that is going to be around five to eight books, depending on the complexity and length of the story I want to tell. The problem with crossovers is that it increases the complexity of the backstory exponentially. I ran into that with Malison and Dragontiarna, even though they were both pretty successful and in a smaller way with Cloak and Ghost, even though that was a crossover with no connection to the main storyline for either Caina or Nadia. So as I plunge into my second decade of being an indie author, I don't think I'm going to do anymore crossovers for the reasons listed above, which is why my new book, Half-Elven Thief is entirely unconnected to anything else I've previously written. But of course, when I start at the Shield War next week, it will be a direct continuation of Dragonskull and the Frostborn series. So that's it for this week. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe, stay healthy, and we'll see you all next week.

In this week's episode, I discuss how to write characters who can make believable mistakes, and we also take a look at November 2023's ad results. The episode ends with a preview of GHOST IN THE SERPENT as narrated by Hollis McCarthy. This week’s coupon is for the audiobook of GHOST IN THE COWL as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of GHOST IN THE COWL for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code: DECCOWL The coupon code is valid through December 20th, 2023, so if you find yourself needing an audiobook for Christmas travel, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello everyone. Welcome to Episode 177 of the Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is December the 1st 2023 and today we're going to talk about how to write believable mistakes. We'll also talk about ad results for November 2023 and end the show with an audio book preview. First up, let's do Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon is for the audiobook of Ghost in the Cowl, as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of Ghost in the Cowl for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon: DECCOWL and again, that coupon code is DECCOWL and this coupon code will be valid through December the 20th 2023. So if you find yourself needing an audiobook for Christmas travel, we've got you covered. So before we get to our main topics, let's have an update on my current writing projects. I am almost done with my next book, which will be called Half Elven Thief. I am in fact hoping to finish it after I record this podcast episode and it's on track to be out before Christmas. My next book after it is published will be Shield of Storms, the first book of the new The Shield War series that will be a follow up to Dragonskull. I'm going to start writing that in December and if all goes well that will be out towards the end of January or perhaps February, depends on how the next couple of months go. I am also 41,000 words into Sevenfold Sword Online: Leveling and I am hoping to have that come out after Shield of Storms, if everything goes well. We'll see, once again we will see how the years goes. In audiobook news, Dragonskull: Doom of the Sorceress and Ghost in the Serpent are finished, paid for, and processing. They are working through quality assurance at ACX and Findaway and should be available before too much longer and we will in fact conclude the show with a preview from Ghosts in the Serpent, as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. First up, let's have our ad results for November 2023. I had three categories of ads this month: Facebook, Amazon and Bookbub ads. Let's start with Facebook ads. I advertised The Ghosts, Cloak Games, Cloak Mage, Malison/Dragontiarna, and Silent Order. And here is what I got back for every dollar spent. For The Ghosts, I got back $6.10 for every dollar spent, with about 12% of the profit coming from the audiobooks. For Cloak Games and Cloak Mage, I got back $7.68 for every dollar spent, with about 5.8% of the profit coming from the audiobooks. Of course, Cloak of Embers skews that's a bit, but even without Cloak of Embers the total will be $3.05, with 13.9% of the profit coming from the audiobooks. Finally, Cloak Mage: Omnibus One and Cloak Mage: Omnibus Two and audio bundles really help move the needle for the audio. For Malison/Dragontiarna, I got back $2.17 for every dollar spent. And for Silent Order, I got back $2.51 for every dollar spent. So overall a pretty good month for Facebook ads. Next up is Amazon ads. I tried a couple of different things with Amazon ads this month, so let's see how they did. For Dragonskull: Sword of the Squire, I got back $2.29 for every dollar spent, with 11.2% of the profit coming from the audiobooks. Since I want the sequel to Sevenfold Sword Online: Creation to come out in the first quarter of 2023 like I mentioned earlier in the show, I shifted the first book to Kindle Unlimited and started running ads on it, which one very well. Sevenfold Sword Online: Creation got back $4.20 for every dollar spent. This is a very promising sign for the sequel and honestly makes me wonder if I shouldn't have just put Creation in Kindle Unlimited from the beginning, as much as I did not want to try that. We also tried an experiment with Amazon ads for Cloak Games Omnibus One, even though that is not in Kindle Unlimited. That brought in $2.23 for every dollar spent with 31% of profit coming from the audiobook. It's obviously easier to advertise a Kindle Unlimited book on Amazon ads, but as it turns out a wide book like Sword of the Squire and Cloak Games Omnibus One can also work very well if you have an audiobook, because then you can advertise on the Audible categories on Amazon, which generally cost less per click. Back finally on to Bookbub ads. I'm concerned about the long term direction of Facebook ads and how they're trying to push more AI targeting type stuff, which is why I'm trying to diversify more to Bookbub and Amazon ads. So for this month I tried Frostborn on Bookbub ads. Let's see how we did. Frostborn: $5.09 for every dollar I spent, with a surprising 35% of the profit coming from the audiobooks. This obviously is a very strong result for Bookbub ads, especially since Frostborn has been finished for like six years at this point. I wasn't expecting the audiobooks to do so robustly well from the Bookbub ads, but obviously I am not complaining. So what conclusions can we draw from this? 1: Amazon ads are a bit complicated to use, but in many ways they're the safest. If you don't know what you're doing, you can easily blow a ton of money on Facebook or Bookbub ads and get jack squat in return. The nice thing about Amazon ads is that if they don't work, they don't spend money. It's much harder to accidentally lose a bunch of money on Amazon ads than it is with Facebook or Bookbub 2: Amazon ads and Bookbub ads offer far more granular targeting options than Facebook. The problem with Facebook ad targeting is that you can only really target big name tradpub authors like George RR Martin or Brandon Sanderson, or broad categories like epic fantasy. Like, there's not a single RPG author in Facebook's audience targeting. By contrast, you get super granular with Amazon and Bookbub targeting. 3: If you have a finished audiobook series, it is bonus profit when you advertise the ebooks. Apparently for Bookbub, it's a lot of bonus profit about which I am not complaining. 4: For Bookbub and Facebook ads, you really need to rotate the ad image a lot to avoid creative fatigue, which is Internet ads-speak for people seeing the same ad image over and over and getting tired of it. So you need to change it out pretty frequently, like once a week, unless you don't. Sometimes you get lucky and get an ad which keeps firing and firing. But that is the exception and most definitely not the rule. And as always, thank you for reading. Given how consistently terrible the economy has been the last several years, I am very grateful for all of you who have bought the ebooks and the audiobooks, and I hope to have new books for you to read and listen to very soon. 00:06:41 Main Topic of the Week: How to Believably Write Serious Mistakes Now let's transition to our main topic of the week, how to believably write serious mistakes. The inspiration for this week's episode was watching the news, specifically all the news around the corporate drama and shenanigans at Open AI. As I've mentioned before, numerous times, I am not a huge fan of AI technology. So it was perhaps with an inappropriate amount of entertained interest that I watched the meltdown of Open AI at the end of November 2023. To sum up a lengthy and complicated saga, the board of Open AI for unknown reasons fired its CEO, Sam Altman at 3:00 PM on a Friday afternoon, which is the traditional time corporations like to drop bad news. There was an immediate backlash because Mr. Altman is a relatively well respected figure in his field. The backlash intensified because Open AI is essentially a vassal of Microsoft at this point, and Open AI didn't bother to inform their overlords of what was going on, which meant that the great eye of Microsoft suddenly turned upon Open AI's board in wrath, especially since the move might have tanked Microsoft stock before its quarterly report. Meanwhile, many Open AI leaders quit, a majority of the employees signed a letter calling for the board to resign, Microsoft immediately hired Mr. Altman and the other leaders who quit, but then the board panicked and backtracked, and finally the board quit and Mr. Altman returned. Overall, it was definitely a fascinating saga of corporate politics, and since I personally think Open AI is like one of those evil organizations from James Bond movie (I bet they even have an elaborate Spectre style underground base somewhere), it was enjoyable to watch from afar. But this is the blog of a Pulp Fiction Writer or the podcast of a Pulp Fiction Writer, not a technology, business, or AI themed podcast. Why talk about this? Because there is a lesson for fiction writers in this. The board of Open AI is not stupid or was not stupid. They're all intelligent men and women who are leaders in their fields and yet whatever their goals were in firing Mr. Altman, it’s readily apparent that those goals were not achieved and the results were in fact, the opposite of what they had hoped to accomplish since they quit and Mr. Altman remained as CEO of Open AI. And that provides a good lesson for writers of fiction. How can you have characters make believable mistakes without breaking the suspension of disbelief? Because when a character does something stupid solely to advance the plot, it is annoying, isn't it? Like the intelligent hero who suddenly becomes dumb as a brick, or the cunning villain who suddenly uses loses 50 IQ points at a critical junction in the plot? Probably the most commonly cited example is the heroine who goes into the basement with just a candle to reset the circuit breakers because she knows a serial killer or a vampire, or the Terminator or something is after her or when the hero’s plan only works if the villain suddenly becomes much less clever. That's annoying in fiction because it breaks the verisimilitude. Nevertheless, in real life, intelligent people do dumb things all the time, like constantly. Examples are abundant. No doubt you can think of several dozen off the top of your head without even trying. Just as we would break for verisimilitude and your fiction to have your characters be constantly idiotic, it would be just as strange to have them be infallible, high functioning geniuses. So let's have some tips and tricks on how to have your characters believably make bad decisions. Number 1: emotional pressure. A key reason for many bad decisions is emotional pressure, because for most people, emotions almost always trump logic. The most obvious example of this is a high-powered professional who has an affair with someone in his or her office, only to end up resigning in disgrace when it comes out. Once again, examples abound, and you can probably think of numerous cases from the last few years, whether national or local, political figures or people you know personally who work in your organization. We can think of more positive examples of emotional pressure. A man could have pity on a homeless man and give him his lunch, even though this means he might perform badly at an important task at work this afternoon. Or a woman might be trying to save money, only for her love to override her better judgment and convince her to buy a gift for her grandchild. In fiction, you could use this in many, many ways. Both love and hatred are powerful motivators, and so are envy and resentment. A character could take dangerous risks to help someone that he or she loves, or a character could be so gripped by envy that he or she tries to sabotage her rival in a way that turns out to be self-defeating. In romance novels, characters make decisions from emotional pressure all the time. It's one of the staple tropes of the genre. A good example of characters acting from emotional pressure is the scene at the end of the Lord of the Rings when Saruman tries to stab Frodo and then fails. This is objectively a stupid decision. Even if Saruman kills Frodo, it won't improve his position and if he succeeded in killing Frodo, Saruman will be immediately killed by the enraged hobbits. In fact, Frodo at that point is the only hobbit who doesn't want to kill Saruman for his crimes. So killing Frodo would have been quite possibly the worst decision Saruman could make at that exact moment in time, but it makes sense in the context of the story and Saruman’s character, because at this point Saruman has been devoured by hatred and resentment, and cares mostly about screwing with the hobbits, who, as his twisted mind sees it, have robbed him of the chance to become the new Dark Lord of Middle Earth. So long as the character's emotional reality makes sense to the reader, decisions they make in the context of that emotional reality, even objectively bad ones, will not seem like dumb decisions to advance the plot. Number two: acting on bad information. In computer science, there is a principle called garbage in garbage out. The idea is that if you enter bad information into a computer program, the program is only going to generate bad results. This is also very true of human decision making. To make good decisions, you need to have good information. For fiction writers, this means if you want to have an intelligent character make a bad decision, you can only have them act on bad information. For example, a group of fantasy heroes could be on a quest to find a magical sword that will slay the dragon terrorizing the kingdom. According to the kingdom's wizards, the sword is in a ruined castle in the wilderness, except the sword isn't actually there. The castle is controlled by an evil sorcerer who magically enthralls anyone who enters it. The heroes have made a bad decision by going to the ruined castle since they gained a new enemy in the form of the evil sorcerer, but they thought they were making a good decision. But it turns out they were acting on bad information. You can easily use this technique in non-fantasy genres as well. A detective could be misled by a witness and waste time going down dead ends in his investigation until he realizes the truth. In a further novel, the hero could realize that the informants have been deliberately feeding his agency bad information about potential threats. Acting on bad information is also a common technique in romance novels. Usually romance novels have a plot twist, where the heroine can't get together with the love interest for some reason, and it's often because the heroine and the love interest misinterpret each other's motives. Pride and Prejudice is maybe the one of the oldest examples of this, since Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett immediately attribute wrong motivations to each other, and it takes most of the book for them to work through it and untangle things. Number three: unforeseen consequences. This is a big one and one of the major reasons that very smart people make decisions that turn out to be bad, like the example of the Open AI corporate intrigue I mentioned above. The Open AI board members didn't set out to get themselves booted from the company while strengthening Sam Altman's and Microsoft's grip, but that's exactly what happened. My favorite historical example of unintended consequences has to be US Prohibition. The US didn't just randomly decide to wake up and vote to ban alcohol one day in 1920. The Prohibition movement in the US dated back to the early 1870s, which meant that nearly 50 years of work, public relations, persuasion and changing local laws went into what should have been Prohibition’s crowning triumph, the passing of the 18th amendment in 1920. Except it all backfired, didn't it? The Temperance movement wanted to end alcohol consumption in the United States. What they got instead was an explosion of organized crime, increased distract for public authority, the loss of jobs and government tax revenue coming into the Great Depression, and public opinion swiftly turning against Prohibition. The explosion of organized crime was especially ironic, since many Temperance advocates believed, sincerely and firmly, that the majority of all crime was caused by alcohol consumption, and that most of society’s evil could be traced to the consumption of strong liquor. Some local communities actually sold their jails after Prohibition passed, believing that crime would soon drop to near zero. Alas, the causes of societal evil remain multifaceted and cannot solely be hung on alcohol. The 21st amendment passed in 1933, which was the end of national Prohibition in the United States. Prohibition’s legacy continues in the minimum drinking age (another law often ignored), restriction on the time of alcohol sales, and dry counties where you can't legally purchase or consume alcohol, but the concept of national Prohibition in the United States is obsolete. The Temperance advocates didn't actually foresee the consequences of their triumph, and you can use the same principle in writing fiction. A character could achieve what they set out to do, only to find that unanticipated consequences of their success are more severe than the original problem. In a thriller novel, the heroes could take out the leader of the bad guys, only for the leader’s more confident and dangerous Lieutenant to take over. In a romance novel, the heroine could win a lawsuit or a big business deal only to discover that this damages her love interest’s family business. In a detective novel, the protagonist could finally track down the key witness to the murder, or for the murderer’s lethal attention to be drawn to that witness. Number four: Victory Disease. In military history, there is a concept called the Victory Disease. It happens when an army or commander has won so many times that they have become overconfident, lazy, and start making avoidable mistakes. Sooner or later they run into a more serious opponent and an army subject to Victory Disease will make errors that a less complacent opponent will not. You sometimes see this in professional athletics as well. A superstar athlete or winning team gets overconfident, stops training as hard or gets complacent, and then gets their clock cleaned by a hungrier opponent. So Victory Disease is a combination of overconfidence and complacency, and you can definitely make use of this concept to have a character make an understandable bad decision. In fiction, villains tend to be more prone to Victory Disease than protagonists. Nevertheless, having a protagonist with Victory Disease can force them into internal conflicts and character growth. A good example of Victory Disease is in a protagonist is Batman/Bruce Wayne in The Dark Knight Rises film from 2012. When Batman comes out of retirement to fight Bane’s organization, he's so used to winning against criminals and outwitting the police that he doesn't take Bane seriously enough despite Alfred's warnings. This bites Batman hard when he confronts Bane for the first time, and he's forced to undergo character development to get ready to save Gotham City from Bane. You can apply a similar plot arc to your characters. An overconfident character makes a serious mistake and has to recover from it, learning and undergoing character growth in the process. Number five: Fields of expertise. There's a certain kind of public intellectual. They usually have a PhD and all their social media handles, that likes to pronounce upon the issues of the day. They will often say things like “as a scientist, I think” or “as an academic, I think” when commenting upon various issues. What's amusing is that their pronouncements are often wrong or wildly impractical because they've strayed out of their fields of expertise. Like the scientist in question might be, have a PhD in cellular biology and be a world-renowned expert in that field. But knowledge and expertise in one field does not necessarily translate to competence in another. This can result in basic errors that could otherwise be avoided. Academics run into this a lot. Two examples from real life might suffice. A reporter was covering some protests and was alarmed to discover rubber bullets lying on the ground and posted a picture of those rubber bullets to social media. He ended up widely mocked because the objects in question were not rubber bullets, but ear plugs. A minor celebrity went to a city and was horrified to see racist graffiti on the sidewalk and complained about it on social media, only for many commenters to point out that the symbols were not graffiti at all, but markings from utility workers indicating where electrical and gas lines ran underneath the sidewalk. This makes for a very believable way for your characters to make bad decisions. Force them to make decisions in an area where they don't really know what they're doing. Number six: Conclusion. To maintain verisimilitude in fiction, you need to walk a fine line. If your character has suddenly become stupid to advance the plot, that will annoy the readers, but neither can your characters be infallible reasoning machines. Hopefully these tips and tricks will help your characters make mistakes in a believable way that will make your books more enjoyable. So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week. And now, please enjoy a preview of Ghost in the Serpent as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy.

In this week's episode, we share five tips and tricks for finishing your novel during National Novel Writing Month. This week’s coupon is for the audiobook of CLOAK OF SHARDS as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of CLOAK OF SHARDS for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code: NOVSHARDS The coupon code is valid through December 8th, 2023, so if you find yourself needing an audiobook for Thanksgiving travel, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 176 of. The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is November the 19th, 2023, and today we're going to talk about how to finish a novel in November. Before we get into that, let's have Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon is for the audiobook of Cloak of Shards as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of Cloak of Shards for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code: NOVSHARDS and that is NOVSHARDS. You can find the coupon code and the link in the show notes for this episode. This coupon code will be valid through December 8th, 2023. So if you find yourself needing an audiobook for Thanksgiving travel, we've got you covered. Before we get into our main topic, let's also have an update on my current writing projects. I am very, very pleased to report that Cloak of Embers is finished and published and out in the world. You can get it at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, my Payhip Store, and Smashwords. It is selling very briskly, so thank all for that. The initial reactions are very positive, so also thank you for that. You can get that at your favorite ebook retailer and if you need something to read over the Thanksgiving break, we've got you covered. In audiobook news, I am also pleased to report that Dragonskull: Wrath of the Warlock is now out, as excellently narrated by Brad Wills. You can get the audiobook at Audible, Amazon, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, Chirp, Storytel, Spotify, and my Payhip store. And believe it or not, we will hopefully have a three more audiobooks coming out before the end of 2023. Dragonskull: Doom of the Sorceress, that's almost done. Should be wrapped up on Monday and hopefully be coming out not too long after that. The audiobook of Ghost in the Serpent, as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. The audiobook of Sevenfold Sword Online: Creation, I will talk a bit more about that once it is done. Now that Cloak of Embers is out, I'm currently writing on my next book. I am 18,000 words into it and I will talk a bit more about it next time we record an episode in December. So tune in for more news on that.   00:02:10 Main Topic: How to Finish a Novel Now to our main topic: how to finish a novel in November or any other month. I was so busy trying to finish Cloak of Embers is that I totally forgot that November is National Novel Writing Month. Of course, I've been doing this long enough now that every month is National Novel Writing Month for me. The whole point of NaNoWriMo, of course, is to write an entire novel in the space of the month or barring that, to get 50,000 words down of your novel. The entire exercise is to encourage people to learn to finish their novel. This is because finishing the novel is really quite hard, and some writers never managed to get that far. Like there are a lot of people who have started numerous novels, but they always run out of gas about 1/3 of the way through or, they get really excited about writing the first chapter or the real cool opening scene, but can never get past that point. So learning to finish novels is a vital skill if you actually do want to write novels, but it's a hurdle that some people never get over, and no doubt about it, it is a fairly significant hurdle. However, Cloak of Embers is my 146th novel. I had to look it up, which shows how many novels I have written. I can't remember the number off my top of my head. Let's take a look at some of the tips and tricks I've used to finish books in the past. #1: it really does help to plot in advance in the writing world. Writers tend to break down into two camps, those who outline in advance and those who do not. That this is sometimes called plotters and pantsers, i.e. riding by the seat of your pants, though given that pants means something somewhat different in the UK than it typically does in the US, people have proposed the more dignified terms discovery writers or writing into the dark for writing without an outline. People who write without an outline, say that the process of figuring out what happens is part of the joy of writing, hence the term discovery writer. That said, I really do think you can save yourself both a lot of headaches and a lot of doubt if you outline at least somewhat in advance. It does offer many advantages. If you think through the plot in advance, you can potentially avoid any plot holes by working through the story first. Outlining in advance will also let you avoid running into a problem where your characters get stuck in a situation or conversation and you don't know how to resolve it because you can't think of a solution on the spot. Advanced outlining is also more efficient. You generally have to spend less time in rewrites and editing because you are less likely to spend writing time going down blind alleys that will need to be removed from the story later. I've heard people say that they tried out outlining and found it too confining and were much happier once they started discovery writing. The reverse may also be true. If you find yourself running out of gas as you try to write a novel, outlining the plot in advance might help. #2: start short. There was a post on a famous author’s blog where a reader emailed to say that he wanted to write a 12 volume epic fantasy series with like twenty point of view characters for his very first writing project and the author gently suggested that perhaps the idea was just slightly too ambitious for a first project. You see the same thing at the gym after New Year's Day. Suddenly a bunch of new people turn up and they will sprint at maximum speed on the treadmill like for a tenth of a mile before having to stop or load as many plates onto the bar as possible and attempt to deadlift. Except that isn't how sensible exercise works. You should start small and then build on what you have done every week or every two weeks. Trying to sprint an eight minute mile your very first time or attempting a 250 pound deadlift for the first time, means at best you'll just get discouraged and at worst, you might mess your back up if you don't do the deadlifts properly. Thankfully, the chance of physical injury while writing is much lower than deadlifts, though you should still practice good ergonomics. I used to know a college professor who would complain about his back was bothering him if he typed too long and the way he would type is he would sit on the very edge of his seat, lean forward at like a 60° angle, so it was hunched over the laptop keyboard and type that way. Do not type that way, but that was a digression. But it might be wiser to let your first bite at writing fiction be smaller. Maybe a short story, maybe a novella, or perhaps a shorter novel instead of a 12 volume fantasy epic. Perhaps a 50,000 word sword and sorcery tale with a single point of view character. Learning to finish novels, like muscles, is something that is best built up gradually. #3: Persistence. Like many other areas of life, in writing, there is no substitute for plodding persistence in the face of obstacles. Many of the basic writing guides say to start out by writing 1,000 words a day. Even though it might be a bit much if especially if you have a lot of other things going on in your life. If 1,000 is too much, why not aim for 500? Five hundred words a day is very often very manageable. You don't even need an actual computer with a keyboard anymore. You don't open up a Google Doc on your phone and thumb type in 500 words. Some people easily compose thousands of words of text messages and social media updates every day. Why not take out 500 of them for fiction? A little bit every day it builds over time and setting a minimum for yourself can help you get through some of the harder parts of the book to write, which we're going to talk about right now. #4: the middle is always a slog. It's important to understand that no matter how many books you've written, no matter how long you've been doing this, no matter how experienced you are, the middle of the book is always a slog to write. Every single time! Beginnings are fun. You've got all these shiny new ideas in your head and it's time to put them down on the page. The endings are pretty fun too. You've probably had the climactic scenes in your mind's eye for a while, and it's time to write them. The middle, though, that's where people tend to get stuck. If you haven't outlined in advance, that's where you realize you haven't figured out how to get from Point A to Point B or that you've written yourself into a corner or a potential plot hole, even if you have outlined in advance and you have a pretty good idea of where you're going. Sometimes you arrive in the middle and figure out they are outline just isn't going to work and you're going to have to redo it or it is in fact working, but you just have to sit down and actually do the work you're putting in the words, day after day after day. But the ending somehow seems to be getting farther and farther away with every chapter you write. This is simply part of the process.  It's also true of a lot of other things. The middle of a workout almost always seems to be the hardest, or a 300 mile road trip seems to seems like it will take forever somewhere around mile 130 or so. I don't think there's any fancy trick, but to keep going. Plodding persistence always wins out in the end. #5: Done is better than perfect. As I've said many times before, never let perfect be the enemy of the possible. This is a manifestation of my favorite logical fallacy, the Nirvana Fallacy, which is a cognitive error that says that if the perfect outcome is not achievable, then it's not worth doing. This overlooks the reality that 60% of a good thing is definitely better than 0%. Pizza is a good metaphor for this. Obviously you'd like to eat the entire pizza, but a single slice of pizza is still better than no pizza at all. The Nirvana Fallacy is refusing to eat any pizza at all if you don't get to eat the entire pizza. Writers and creatives in general seem particularly prone to this. Like they'll get in the loop of endlessly polishing in the first chapter, but never getting past that point or rewriting their first draft over and over, and attempt to finally make it perfect. But perfection in this life is much like attempting to go faster than the speed of light, it cannot be done and it takes infinite energy to even attempt it. In the case of perfection, the energy you spent trying to make your book achieve perfection could have been better spent on writing and finishing new books. I've never written any book I would consider perfect. I always look back years later and think I should have done this or that differently, but you know what? I still finished those books and a lot of people enjoyed them, even if I think them hindsight, I would change various things. A finished yet imperfect book is better than the perfect one that exists only in the imagination of the writer and will only ever exist in the imagination of the writer. So I think learning to accept I did the very best I could and now it's time to set this finished project aside and move on to something else as a necessary attitude for a writer to develop. Or, as Steve Jobs famously put it, real artists ship, which I am putting into practice myself as I have just published Cloak of Embers and I'm moving on to my next book Half-Elven Thief and we'll share more details about that in the next episode. I hope these tips and tricks will help you finish your book. So that is it for this week. There is not going to be an episode of the show the first week of December because this week is the Thanksgiving holiday and so I'm taking a few days off for that. I hope you all have a happy and safe Thanksgiving and safe travels if you travel anywhere. The Pulp Writer Show will be back the second week of December with a new episode. Thanks for listening to the show. I hope you found this podcast useful. A reminder, you can listen to all back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week or the week after next week, in this case. Goodbye now.

In this episode, we discuss whether or not indie authors should have ebooks, audiobooks, or paperbacks. The episode ends with a preview of the audiobook of DRAGONSKULL: WRATH OF THE WARLOCK, as narrated by Brad Wills. TRANSCRIPT Once again it is time for Coupon of the Week! This week’s coupon is for the audiobook of CLOAK OF IRON as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of CLOAK OF IRON for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code: IRONFALL The coupon code is valid through December 2nd, 2023, so if you find yourself wanting to get caught up with Nadia’s adventures before CLOAK OF EMBERS comes out (hopefully soon!), why not start with an audiobook? 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello everyone. Welcome. To episode 175 of. The pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is November the 12th, 2023, and today we're going to talk about whether or not indie authors should have ebooks. We'll also have a few updates on my current writing projects. Before we get into that, let's do Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon is for the audio book of Cloak of Iron, as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of Cloak of Iron for 75% off in my Payhip store with this coupon code IRONFALL, and that's IRONFALL and you'll be able to see that in the link in the show notes. This coupon code is valid through December the 2nd, 2023. So if you find yourself wanting to get caught up with Nadia’s adventures before Cloak of Embers comes out (hopefully soon), why not start with an audiobook? Speaking of Cloak of Embers, let's have an update on my current writing projects, of which Cloak of Embers is the main one. I am making good progress on editing it and I am very much hoping I can get the book out before American Thanksgiving, which I believe is November 23rd this year (off top of my head). It might slip past that, but I am optimistic I should be able to do that unless something seriously goes wrong. I am also just about 14,000 words into my next book which I will discuss more once the Cloak of Embers is out. We also have quite a bit of good audiobook news. Dragon Skull: Wrath of the Warlock is finished recording, as excellently narrated by Brad Wills. We just have to get through quality assurance and we will end this episode with a preview from the audiobook as well. Dragonskull: Doom of the Sorceress is being recorded right now, as is Ghost in the Serpent, which will be narrated by Hollis McCarthy and so hopefully we will have quite a few new audiobooks for you to listen to very soon.   00:01:57 Reader Comments and Questions Before we get to our main topic, let's have a couple of questions from readers. Our first question is from Wayne, who writes in to ask: Hello, sorry to bother you, just have one question. I have begun the Frostborn series with the Grey Knight. Is there a series of books that lead up to Frostborn that I should read first? I did that with a different book series. I read the second series of books before realizing there was a series of books I should have read before it. Hope I explained that right. Really enjoy your work. I've read all the Cloak and Ghost series. Great stuff. Thanks. Thanks Wayne. I am glad you are enjoying the books. In answer to your question, Frostborn is indeed the first series you should read if you want to do it in chronological order. It would go Frostborn, then Sevenfold Sword, then Dragontiarna, and then Dragonskull. So that would be the appropriate order to read that series if you want to. I intended each series to be stand alone, but I've learned in the years since that it doesn't matter what I intended. Many people still want to read the series in chronological order. Our next question is from Brian, who writes in to ask: Good afternoon, Mr. Moeller. I have been a fan of your writing for some time. Like, especially during the Ghosts and the Cloak series. However, the Cloak and Ghosts crossover is hard to read as there are some discrepancies. For example, Andromache was killed but yet is alive in the crossover series. The coffee house- not too hard to explain, but it is there some books I miss to explain how the crossover comes to be and how the extremely two different time eras come to merge? That question is, kind of in a nutshell, why I didn’t write any more Cloak and Ghost books after the first three.  Thanks for reading the books, Brian, and for enjoying them all. But Cloak and Ghost, the idea I had behind that was that Nadia meets a version of Caina who lives in her world, that's distinct from the main version of Caina in the series. And I thought why not do that? You know, superhero comics do that all the time. There's parallel universes and all that running around, but it turned out to just really confused people. It's been over four years since I wrote the last Cloak and Ghost book, and I still get the questions like the one Brian had on a fairly regular basis, which is why I stopped writing the Cloak and Ghost series, just because it was too confusing for people. And speaking of the multiverse stuff, it's no secret that the Marvel movies have suffered quite a downturn in revenues and viewers ever since they turned to doing more multiverse type stuff, so I think multiverses might be something that is more popular in the writers’ heads than it actually is, which is a lesson I learned four years ago, with Cloak and Ghost and which Marvel and Disney seem to be learning the hard way now. Yeah, I'm not writing any more Cloak and Ghost books just for that reason because it just confuses things.   00:04:46 Main Topic: Ebooks and Paperbacks for Indie Authors? Now on to our main topic of this week: should indie authors have ebooks or paperbacks? Indie author Brian Cohen runs something he calls the Five Day Author Ad Challenge every quarter. It's a good experience for coming to the grips with the basics of Amazon ads, and I've recommended it to a lot of people who've had good results with it. I didn't do it myself this year, but I'm still in the Facebook group and see the posts that come up every quarter. One really caught my eye. A new author was resistant to the idea that she should have an ebook at all. She only wanted to sell paperbacks and not bother with ebooks, which leads to the obvious question. Should indie authors have ebooks? Well, yes, not to be harsh, but the answer will obviously almost always be yes. For any kind of genre fiction, it will be far easier to sell ebooks than paperbacks. The Five Day Author Ad Challenge does have a lot of very new authors and very new authors not infrequently have a clear idea in their heads about how they hope it will go. Often they will talk about how they want to hold their paperback book in their hands, see it on the shelf of the local bookstore and local library, maybe have a table at the local book fair where they can sign books. Sometimes there will be a digression about the smell and feel of a paper book. However, this romantic dream then runs into the cold reality of economics. It's very difficult to sell paperback books. Paperback books are expensive, and because of inflation and supply chains stuff with paper, they're getting even more expensive. The day of the $5 mass market paperback is long past. In the day of the mass market paperback, the author didn't get all that much money, like $0.10 to maybe $0.25 a copy, and sometimes even less than that. Granted, nowadays the margins are better for self-published authors, but the economics still aren't great for paper books. My most recent book, Ghost in the Serpent, is $13.99 in trade paperback on Amazon. If the reader buys a copy of the paperback on Amazon, I get about $3, and if they buy it through another platform, I get a little over $1.00. This is definitely better than the days of a $5 mass market paperback, but it's still very expensive for the reader. By contrast, the ebook of Ghost in the Serpent is only $4.99, and for every sale I get up around $3.50, which is the point. It is much, much easier to sell $4.99 ebook than a $13.99  trade paperback, and I get slightly more money from ebook sale than I do from a paperback one. So genre fiction will almost always be more profitable in ebooks than in paperback for the indie author. I really mean always, but I said almost always to include flukes of fate and acts of God. Outside of genre fiction, it's a little more varied, but still a good idea to have an ebook. Certain kinds of nonfiction sell more strongly in paperback than an ebook. Children's books, especially ones aimed at toddlers and younger children, do way better in paper than an ebook. The reason for this is logical enough. Toddlers and small children often like to throw things. And are you going to give a four-year-old a $399 iPad or a children's book? They're also various specialty forms of nonfiction, cookbooks, technical manuals, and so forth that do well in paperback. Or if you have a book that has a lot of interior pictures, which is often true of cookbooks and other specialty nonfiction. That said, most indie writers will have an easier time selling ebooks than paperbacks, which leads to the next question: should indie authors have paperbacks? Especially the writers of genre fiction I just described above, the ones who will probably sell more ebooks than in paperback? The answer to that is yes, if possible, and it’s usually quite possible. It used to be quite a bit harder to make paperback books, especially the interior. You needed to copy and paste the chapters of your book into a specially prepared Word document and formatting it was a serious pain. Now several software programs have come along that can automate the process for you. The one I use is Vellum, which automatically generates nicely formatted ebook and paperback book files for you. I believe you can do the same thing in Atticus and Scrivener, but I've never tried it. You can either make a wrap around cover for your book or you can use the automated tools included with KDP Print and Draft to Digital Print to make a cover. Most indies use either KDP Print or Draft to Digital Print to make their paperbacks. You can also use Ingram Spark and several other services, but Ingram Spark has a way sharper learning curve and tends to be more expensive. You almost certainly will not sell as many print books than ebooks, especially if you're writing genre fiction. But paperbacks can be a nice bit of bonus income, especially since it isn't all that much additional work to set up a paperback. But that leads to the next question. You've got an ebook and the paperback of your book, should you have an audiobook? The answer to that is, it depends. You know how sometimes you ask an accountant or a lawyer a tax question, and the answer is no, except yes, but sometimes maybe? The reason for that is that U.S. tax law is so immensely complicated that the answer to any question about it can vary wildly depending upon an individual’s or company’s particular circumstances. The same thing is true with indie authors and audiobooks. If you want to sell an audiobook, you will almost certainly need to pay for a human narrator. At the moment, I think Google Play is the only storefront that allows the sale of AI narrated audiobooks, so long as you do it with Google Play's built-in tools, which I've tested and is actually pretty good. Amazon just started testing AI generated audiobooks for sale, though they only just announced it in the first week of November 2023. That said, I suspect you realistically aren't going to be able to charge very much for it. Imagine the reviews along the lines of, I paid $13.99 or an entire Audible credit for this computer voice. One star, do not recommend. People generally don't like AI narrated audiobooks. My experiment with AI narrated audiobooks on YouTube generated a lot of comments along the lines of I like the story, but this voice sucks. That will almost certainly be true for any AI generated audiobook for fiction or nonfiction with a lot of emotion in it, like a memoir. It would probably work for something very dry book about tax law or real estate licensure. Realistically, if you want to make any money from a fiction audiobook, you will almost certainly need a human narrator, and I mean almost certainly in the same sense I meant it above. So when I say it depends on whether or not you should pursue an audiobook, what it depends on is your financial status and business requirements. To get a good narrator, you will expect to pay in the $200 to $400 per finished hour range. You can also get a narrator via royalty share where you don't pay the narrator up front, but then you and the narrator split any royalties from the book for seven years. Generally I found the more experienced and qualified narrators prefer to be paid in the $200 to $400 per finished hour range. If you do pay upfront, depending on your business structure, there's a very good chance that this will be deductible and may help you greatly at tax time, though, as always, this website and podcast is not financial advice and for tax advice, you should consult an accountant qualified for your taxing jurisdiction. It's also important to know that self-publishing audio is bit like regular self-publishing but on hard mode: the mechanics are the same but everything is more difficult. Whether to pursue audio or not is a question that must be left up to the individual author and publisher. So to sum up, should indie authors have ebooks, paperbacks, and audiobooks? For ebooks and paperbacks, definitely yes. For audiobooks, if your circumstances allow for it and it's the kind of work you're interested in pursuing. When I talked about this on Facebook and my blog, I had some interesting comments. So let's read a few of them here. Our first comment is from Jesse, who asks: does make me wonder how many indie authors take a crack at narrating their book themselves these days. Home studios aren't anywhere near as hard as to get set up as they once were, and even a good to mid high end and vocal workhorse microphone can be had for around $300.00 and last you for years. I guess it depends on motivation, but it seems like it'd be doable from equipment standpoint to at least (source: been doing home studio work for a long time). Jesse is right, it is in fact quite possible to put together a pretty good audiobook recording setup for not a significant amount of money. Obviously you need the microphone. You would need a computer with enough storage to handle the audio files and you would need some method of blocking out exterior sound and getting through the good the sound level you're supposed to have. I know during COVID many narrators, who usually go to a studio, and because of COVID, the studios were closed, set up home recording setups where they found they could record successfully in their closet because all the hanging clothes prevented echoes or they were able to build like a wooden framework over their desk and then hang blankets over it and that would prevent echoes enough to the point where they could record. Obviously that would get hot in summer, but that meant you could still work, and some indie authors do record their own audiobooks. The difficulty is that recording your 10 to 12 hour long audiobook is a lot harder than most people think it is. I mean, think about this like twenty minute podcast episode you're listening to right now and think how many words I've flubbed or I've said the wrong word, or I sort of trail off randomly (exaggerated pause for comedic effect) in the middle of a sentence like that. Think of how many mistakes I've made just in this twenty minute podcast episode with my speech, and then imagine having to maintain absolutely perfect speech for like 8 to 12 hours at a consistent tone, not speeding up, not slowing down randomly, just being an acceptable level of audiobook narration is a lot harder and more physically and mentally demanding than many people think it is, so that's the big hurdle, not the equipment. I mean, you probably get the equipment to record your own audio book for around $1000 (maybe less if you get some of it secondhand), which while is a significant outlay of money, it’s not like you know, capital gains kind of investment, but the hard part is not the equipment. The hard part is being able to physically do it and record the audiobook at an appropriate speed for 12 hours or more. The next comment was from M., who writes to say that $200 to $400 range for a narrator seems low to me. I have no experience whatsoever in the field, though. How many hours of work does that translate to? I think the SAG-AFTRA minimum rate for narrator is $325, where if you're a member of SAG-AFTRA Guild, you have to charge a minimum of $325 per finished hour, though that may have changed in the aftermath of the strike this year. Obviously celebrity narrators can command much higher prices. If you see an audiobook that was narrated by a famous actor, you can be pretty sure that his or her agent negotiated a higher rate than $200 to $400 per finished hour. Usually the rule of thumb is that for every finished hour, about two to three hours of prep work goes into it. Because you have all the editing and the corrections you need to do and you just can't sit down with a, you know, a book, open it up and start reading. You need to go through it first, make sure that you know how to pronounce everything and know what the structure of the sentences are and so forth. So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to the Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found this show useful and interesting. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com and many of the older episodes now have transcripts attached. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week. Since we just spent a lot of time talking about audiobooks, it seems only appropriate that we close out the show with a sample from Dragonskull: Wrath of the Warlock as excellent narrated by Brad Wills, and that should hopefully be out before the end of November.

In this week's episode, I look back at some of my favorite classic video games, and also discuss my book advertising results from October 2023. This week’s coupon is for the audiobook of CLOAK OF BLADES as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of CLOAK OF BLADES for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code: NOVBLADES The coupon code is valid through November 28th, 2023, so if you find yourself wanting to get caught up with Nadia's adventures before CLOAK OF EMBERS comes out, why not start with an audiobook? TRANSCRIPT Hey, everyone. Welcome to Episode 174 of the Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is November the 3rd, 2023, and today we're going to talk about classic video games. We'll also discuss October 2023's ad results and made up words that turn out to be not made up after all. Before we get into all that and then an update about my current writing project, it is time for Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon is for the audiobook of Cloak of Blades as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of Cloak of Blades for 75% off in my Payhip store with this coupon code NOVBLADES and that is spelled NOVBLADES and you get that in the show notes. The coupon code is valid through November 28th, 2023, so if you find yourself wanting to get caught up with Nadia's adventures before Cloak of Embers comes out, why not start with an audiobook? You can get the coupon code and the links in the show notes for this episode. Now let's have an update on my current writing projects. I am 107,000 words into Cloak of Embers, which puts me on Chapter 21 of 22 so I'm almost done and I'm hoping to get that wrapped up next week if all goes well. At 107,000 words, I'm not sure how long it will be once I'm done editing and by the time the rough draft is done, but it will almost certainly be either the longest or second longest book that had Nadia as a main character. So that will be something to look forward to. I'm also 9,500 words into the book I'm going to write after Cloak of Embers and I will discuss that a bit more and what I intend to do with that after Cloak of Embers is published, hopefully in November. But we'll see. In audiobook news, Dragon Skull: Wrath of the Warlock is almost done in audiobook, as excellently narrated by Brad Wills and we just have to finish proof listening to it and hopefully we should have that come out before the end of November if all goes well. Brad is also going to start work on Dragonskull: Doom of the Sorceress before much longer, and that will probably (given how the holidays are falling this year) come out in either late December or January, with January being the more likely outcome. In other audiobook news, Hollis McCarthy will soon start the recording of Ghost in the Serpent, so hopefully we'll have more updates on that soon.   00:02:30 Reader Questions/Comments Before we get to our topics today, let's have a few questions from readers. Our first question is from Lisa, who writes to ask: Hello, I just started reading your book series with your character Ridmark Arban and I am wondering what is the very first book to start with. Is it the one called the First Quest or is it a different one to start with? Also I have been looking all over the Internet trying to figure out what the book order is for your character Ridmark Arban and I'm having no luck. In answer to your question Lisa, the very first book with Ridmark Arban would be Frostborn: The Gray Knight. That is the first book in the Frostborn series, and Ridmark is also the main character in Sevenfold Sword and then Dragontiarna, though I would recommend starting with Frostborn: The Gray Knight. And you can find the series reading order on either my website or it should be in the metadata on all the different retailers. And I think we have that set up properly now. Frostborn: The First Quest is a prequel to the main Frostborn series that I put out for free to people to read and enjoy as a bit of back story, but it's a prequel and the actual official starting point of the Frostborn series would be Frostborn: The Gray Knight. Our next question…well, it's more of a comment really is from Juana who writes about the upcoming Cloak of Embers and her opinion of the character of Victoria Carrow. And this is what she thinks Victoria will be A: she's the head of Singularity B: She is a criminal elf. C: She killed Tarlia and took her place or D: She is an anthrophage elder with really good impulse control. In any case, she is bad news and I just don't like her. Ah, as you might guess from that comment, Juana is a longtime reader who has read many of my books. Thanks for that, Juana. She has been very suspicious of Victoria Carrow from the beginning, when she first appeared, way back in Cloak of Ashes back in 2020. Well, Victoria does have a secret and we are going to find out what it is in Cloak of Embers. And during the process of writing this book, I realized that talking about Victoria's secret had an additional meaning that I did not intend but in this sense we are talking about the secret held by Victoria Carrow and not the apparel company. And now for a question a couple of different readers have had over the past few months since Silent Order: Pulse Hand came out. A reader emailed to ask of the word materiel, spelled MATERIEL in Silent Order: Pulse Hand was a mistake and asked if it should have been spelled material, MATERIAL. No, that spelling is correct. Materiel is a real word when spelled with an E. It refers to weaponry, supplies and equipment used for war in the military or to quote the Wikipedia definition: “Materiel are supplies, equipment and weapons in a military supply chain management, and typically supplies and equipment in a commercial supply chain context. In a military context, the term materiel refers to either the specific needs, excluding manpower of a force to complete a specific mission, or the general sense of the needs, excluding manpower of a functioning army. An important category of materiel is commonly referred to as ordnance, especially concerning mounted guns, artillery and the shells they consume, along with fuel and munitions in general the steady supply of ordnance is an ongoing logistical challenge in active combat zones.” Or to put it another way, not only is materiel a real word, it is in fact a topic to which many serious minded military officers have devoted much serious minded thought since a failure to address your military's materiel needs means you're going to lose the war before the first shot is fired. To be fair, as a science fiction and fantasy writer, I make up a lot of words. Grammarly is always so impressed that I use so many unique words but it really isn't fair because I do make a lot of them up. That said, I was a history major, which was not helpful to finding a real job, but turned out to be useful for concept and terms for fantasy novels. Like in Frostborn, I use the terms dux and comes for noblemen instead of duke and count because Latin was the primary language of Andomhaim and the terms duke and count were derived from the Latin words dux and comes. However, given how confused some people were by the terms dux and comes, if I had to do it all over again, I would probably default to duke and count, just to reduce reader confusion. Though urvaalg was one of my better made-up words. No one ever gets confused about what an urvaalg is. So those are the comments and questions for the week. If you have a comment or question you'd like addressed on the show, leave it as a comment on one of my websites and we will see if we can get to it.   00:07:09 Ad Results for October 2023 Our next topic for today is ad results from October 2023. Since it's past the 1st of November, it's good time to look back and see how my ads did for October 2023. I have to admit that October was a pretty weak month for sales for a variety of reasons beyond my control or honestly anyone's control. For one thing, the economy remains bad and inflation is high, especially in the US. For another, the international news in October was very bad, which always puts a damper on discretionary entertainment spending like books. Amazon US was consistently glitchy throughout all of October and still isn't working right as of the time of this recording. I can't prove this, but I think the books category faced strong competition from video games in October, especially Spiderman 2 for PlayStation and Super Mario Wonder for the Switch. Full disclosure, I did buy Super Mario Wonder and I'm playing it and it's excellent. On the plus side, Ghost in the Serpent had a strong start and Silent Order did very well in October on the strength of the Bookbub feature deal back in the first week of September and the lingering halo effect from Pulse Hand coming out soon afterwards. People are generally more willing to start a finished series than an unfinished one, especially in the science fiction and fantasy space. All my ads for October turned a profit, which I am very grateful for. So here's how the Facebook ads did. For Frostborn, I got back $5.44 for every dollar I spent, with 44% of my profit coming from the audiobooks. For the Ghosts. I got back $7.46 for every dollar spent, with 8% of the profit coming from audiobooks. If you take out Ghost in the Serpent, my profit comes to $2.95 with 20% of the profit coming from the audiobooks. For Cloak Games and Cloak Mage, I got back $3.19 for every dollar spent and for Silent Order, I got back $4.45 for every dollar spent. For Amazon ads, the only thing I advertised myself was Dragonskull: Sword of the Squire, which did pretty well. For every dollar spent, I got back $3.41, with 27% of the profit coming from the audiobook. So we see once again, that audiobooks, once you have them, are usually a good additional profit for a long series. For some reason I could never really get the Cloak Games or Cloak Mage audiobooks to sell, which is why I said usually instead of certainly. I think in November I'm going to do things a little bit differently. I'm going to try advertising Frostborn entirely on Bookbub ads, which I haven't used in a while. Facebook has been making some changes to the way targeting works on its ad platform, and I can see those changes making it less useful to advertise books there. Additionally, Facebook has also begun testing a subscription service for an ad free experience, which obviously would make Facebook way less useful for book advertising. The advantage for Bookbub ads is that some of the targeting has already been done for you. Like with Facebook ads, one of the keys to success is to make sure you've targeted your audience correctly. With Bookbub ads, everyone looking at the Bookbub e-mail is already looking for discount books anyway, so some of the targeting work has been done for you already. Anyway, if Facebook is considering pivoting away from ads in favor of paid subscriptions, it will be good to have backup options ready. And as always, thanks for reading. There would be no point in advertising these books if people didn't read them.   00:10:29 Main Topic of the Week: Classic Video Games   So, let's go on to our main topic this week: something fun because it's my podcast and I wanted to talk about something fun. That topic is classic video games. The main way I have played classic video games for the last four years is the Nintendo Switch, which I bought in September 2019. I've mentioned before that I didn't play any console games from about 1998 to 2019. There were several good reasons for this. First, I was really busy. Second, consoles are expensive and I definitely didn't have the money to drop on many games for the 2000s and most of the 2010s. Third, while I did play games, I played on the PC. I remember in 2007 not going out to eat for a while to save up to buy a better video card so I could play Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion on something other than the very lowest video settings. But 2019 marked a major personal milestone, my 100th book. Dragontiarna: Knights was about to come out and a few people asked what I wanted to do to mark this milestone. Maybe take a trip, go on vacation, that kind of thing. Instead, I decided that I wanted a Nintendo Switch. But why a Nintendo Switch? At Easter 2018, my younger brother unexpectedly gave me a Super Nintendo Classic as a present. For a while, at the end of the 2010s, Nintendo intermittently sold two mini consoles, the Nintendo Classic and the Super Nintendo Classic, each one accompanied with recreations of the old style controllers and some of the greatest hits for the respective console. Playing around with the Super Nintendo Classic got me interested in the Switch since the Switch online subscription service also came with emulators for the NES and the Super Nintendo. I have played a lot of NES and Super Nintendo games back in the 1990s, but I only rarely had the chance to finish them. Partly it was because I was busy and partly because the technology to save games back then really didn't exist for either the Nintendo or the Super Nintendo, with a few exceptions. If you ran out of lives and died, or you had to go do something and turn off the console, that was it. Your game was gone and you had to start over from scratch. But after Dragontiarna: Knights was published, I made up my mind about what I wanted to do to celebrate, and I got a Switch. As it turned out, getting the Nintendo Switch 8 months before the great COVID freak out turned out to be a really, really good idea. It gave me the opportunity to beat several games, actually numerous games that I had run out of time to play. The first one was The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim, which I had gotten for the PC back in 2011 and played intermittently ever since, but never found the time to finish. I beat it for the first time on Switch and then I finished Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, which was a spiritual successor to the various Castlevania games of the 1990s. With a combination of Switch Online, save states, and some of the anthology collections available for the console, I managed to finish some of the classic games from the ‘80s and early ‘90s that I never had the chance to finish earlier, like the original Super Mario Games, Super Mario Brothers, Super Mario 3 for the NES, and Super Mario World for the Super Nintendo. I never really got into Super Mario 2 for the NES and never really tried to play it. The Castlevania series: the three Castlevania games for NES, Castlevania 2 for the Game Boy (the first Castlevania for Game Boy really isn't worth playing) and Castlevania 4 and Castlevania Dracula X for the Super Nintendo and I finally got to beat all those. The Zelda series: the original Legend of Zelda for NES (which I never finished) and Link to the Past for Super Nintendo, which is in fact one of the few Super Nintendo games I actually finished back when it originally came out, but I enjoyed being able to play it on the Switch with saved states. Super Metroid, which I never got a chance to play at all in the ‘90s and is deservedly a classic. You frequently see its mechanics turn up in many other modern games. Lest you think I spent all my time replaying the classics, I did finish some newer games as well. The remake of Link’s Awakening was excellent, a good updating of the Gameboy Classic. Metroid Dread was absolutely superb, even though it took me a while to finish some of the boss fights. I also finished Elder Scrolls Blades, which I'm not going to say was a great game, but I still enjoyed it and I am proud to say I beat the final boss without paying for a single micro transaction, though I did buy the soundtrack, which makes for good background listening while writing epic fantasy. I keep meaning to play the remake of Metroid Prime, but I haven't gotten around to it yet. The multiplayer games also turned out to be great fun. I started bringing Mario Kart 8 and some controllers to family gatherings. Turns out nearly everyone likes Mario Kart. They say alcohol is a social lubricant, but Mario Kart is almost as effective and results in a lot fewer hangovers, though I do lose at Mario Kart a lot. Additionally, playing the old multiplayer classics like the original Super Mario with someone who appreciates them is always fun. So I think it's safe to say that I've gotten a lot of enjoyment out of that Nintendo Switch I bought back in 2019. What's interesting is that the Switch is about 7 years old now as of this recording, which is the eternity in technology terms, yet it's still going strong. Microsoft, Sony, and the PC game market have been locked in an arms race for even more powerful hardware and more detailed graphics. By contrast, the Switch was fairly underpowered even for 2017, when it came out. And while it's been updated a few times in the year since, it's still essentially the same device. Pretty much every phone manufactured in the 2020s is more powerful than the Switch, but Nintendo doesn't seem super interested in rushing into their next console, though the rumor mill has been talking about the Switch Two or the Switch Pro for years. In fact, just a couple of weeks ago they released a Super Mario Wonder for the Nintendo Switch, and it was a huge hit and received universal acclaim on Metacritic. This approach makes sense once you know of Nintendo's philosophy of withered technology. This was a strategy articulated by Nintendo game designer Gunpei Yokoi (and I apologize if I pronounce his name wrong), who called it lateral thinking of withered technology. This philosophy described using mature technology that was well understood and cheaply obtained rather than cutting edge stuff to create unique game experiences different than anything else available. I suspect this is a variant of a philosophy you see among successful people in every field. They rely on the boring but practical methods and combine them in ways to create something unique. Or if you dig into the many successes, you will find that the people behind them stuck to the well established fundamentals but did them really well, and that's what the Switch does, isn't it? It's a unique experience. You can plug it into the dock and play it on your TV or unplug it and use it like a handhole console like a super powered Game Boy. I can play on my couch or take it with me to those family gatherings and plug into the TV for Mario Kart 8. It's an idea that seems incredibly obvious in hindsight, but it really wasn't at the time. Dragontiarna: Knights was my hundredth book in 2019, and my most recent book, Ghost in the Serpent, was 145. Maybe when I hit 150 I should get a Switch OLED model, or the mythical Switch 2, if it is come out by then. So that is it for this week. Thanks for listening to the Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show enjoyable. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes on thepulpwritershow.com. And if you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this week's episode, we take a look at whether or not writers should stop writing because of the threat of generative AI programs. This week’s coupon is for the audiobook of CLOAK OF ASHES as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of CLOAK OF ASHES for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code: OCTASHES The coupon code is valid through November 18th, 2023, so if you find yourself wanting to get caught up before CLOAK OF EMBERS comes out soon, why not start with an audiobook? TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 173 of the Pulp Writer show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is October the 27th, 2023 and today we're going to talk about whether or not you should stop writing fiction because of the threat of generative AI. Before we get into that, we will have a Coupon of the Week and an update on my current writing projects. First up, Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon is for the audiobook of Cloak of Ashes, as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audio book of Cloak of Ashes for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code: OCTASHES and again, that is OCTASHES and you can also see that in the show notes. This coupon code is valid through November 18th, 2023. So if you find yourself wanting to get caught up before Cloak of Embers comes out soon, why not start with an audiobook? That does seem thematically appropriate to go from Cloak of Ashes to Cloak of Embers, even though Cloak of Ashes will be book three of the series and Cloak of Embers will be book ten. As you might guess, my current writing project is still Cloak of Embers and as of this recording I'm about 68,000 words into it, though I really want to get to 70,000 by the time I am done working on it for the day. I've had two different 10,000 word days working on this book, which is a very good thing because it's going to be a long one. As I mentioned before, I'm 68,000 words into it and I'm not even at the halfway point of my outline yet and some of the previous chapters are so long, I'm going to have to split them up into smaller chapters. So I am confident in saying that while I don't know exactly how long Cloak of Embers is going to be, I am entirely certain that it's going to be the longest book I will write in 2023. For audiobooks, right now Brad Wills is recording Dragonskull: Wrath of the Warlock, and we are hoping to have that out by December or so. As for what I want to write once Cloak of Embers is done, I have not decided. I knew Cloak of Embers was going to be a long book. I didn't realize how long, so whatever I write next, it depends on how long it takes me to finish Cloak of Embers and how things look at that point in time, but I'm still hoping to have Cloak of Embers out in November, though it does look like there is a good possibility that the book might slip to December. 00:02:26 Main Topic: Should You Stop Creative Work Because of Generative AI? So on to our main topic this week. Should you stop writing or pursuing creative efforts because of generative AI? Without major spoilers, the chief villain of the new Mission Impossible movie from back in May was an evil artificial intelligence. That makes it timely to do another podcast episode about generative AI. I recently saw a long, somewhat maundering social media post arguing that since soon AI would advance to the point that it could spit out a fully completed novel at the press of a button, there was no point in attempting to write any longer. The post’s author claimed it was a black pilled post, though my experience the term black pilled is usually Internet shorthand for “I will use my fears as an excuse to avoid action.” I also saw a New York Times article about a father worried about encouraging his son's creative interest because he feared that AI would soon replace all of that. So that leads to the question, should you stop writing fiction because of AI or engaging in any creative pursuit at all? Short answer, no. Get a hold of yourself. Maybe splash some cold water on your face. The longer, more elaborate answer: One, using fear of AI as a reason not to do something is excuse making. In fact, this is a formal logical fallacy known as the nirvana fallacy, which states that if conditions are not perfect or the outcome of an action is not perfect, then it is not worth doing. The usually cited example of this is that people wearing seatbelts can die in traffic accidents, therefore, seatbelts are not worth wearing. The counterpoint to this is that has been well proven that seat belts reduce fatality traffic fatalities and injuries and an improved but imperfect outcome is better than no improvement at all. Writers in general seem to be strongly prone to the nirvana fallacy. You will see many, many, many excuses for why writers do not want to write. Some of those excuses are, of course, perfectly valid, such as an illness, a life crisis like a death in the family, or a car accident, or something of that nature. But quite a few of those excuses boil down to the nirvana fallacy. Conditions are not perfect or the outcome will not be perfect, so therefore it is better not to start at all. Fear of AI is really the latest excuse to slot into the nirvana fallacy. Two: AI is worse than you think it is. It is regrettable that the various image generations and generators and large language models get saddled with the term AI because there's nothing terribly intelligent about them. They're basically fancy autocomplete, whether for pictures or for words. Granted, further refinements in the technology have made it into very super-duper fancy autocomplete, but there's still nothing particularly intelligent about it. AI is also a lot harder to use effectively than many people think. If you want to get a decent result out of an AI, you need to spend a lot of work refining the prompts. People can make some beautiful images in Midjourney, but for every beautiful image that comes out of Midjourney, there's like 40 billion terrible ones. Every really good image you see that was generated with an AI probably took like a 400 word prompt after several hundred iterations. Getting acceptable fiction out of a chatbot is so much work that it's easier simply to write it yourself. Ironically, if you want to fix it out of a chatbot, ask it about something factual. Also, whenever people try to rely on AI to do something important, bad things seem to happen. A nonprofit website devoted to treating eating disorders got rid of its volunteer counselors and replaced them with a chatbot, only for the chatbot to start dispensing bad diet advice. A couple of months ago, some lawyers in New York got in big trouble when they used ChatGPT for legal research, only for it to invent cases that had never happened. To be fair, the lawyer in question apparently failed to double check anything and ChatGPT repeatedly said in its answer it is a large language model and not a lawyer. As an amusing aside, the morning I wrote this paragraph, I got a text from a teacher I know complaining how much he hates ChatGPT. It's incredibly obvious when his students use ChatGPT to do their homework because the answers are so similar. As it turns out, ChatGPT isn't even good at cheating. The point is that whenever there are situations that involve personal or criminal liability, using AI is a very bad idea. Obviously, writing a is a much lower stakes endeavor, but that leads directly to our next point. Number three: you can't see in the future. Just because everyone says AI is the next big thing doesn't mean that it is. The problem with a lot of tech CEOs is that they all want to be Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs was unquestionably a major figure in tech history, but he has been mythologized. His keynote presentations were masterpieces of showmanship, which means that people remember his career that way, like Steve Jobs strode onto the stage, dramatically unveiled the transformative next big thing: The iPod, the iPad, the iPhone, changed the world, and made billions of dollars in front of an applauding crowd. To be fair, I typed this paragraph when I wrote it on a MacBook Air. But that overlooks the actual history, which is that Jobs failed at a whole lot of stuff. He got booted from Apple in the 1980s. His subsequent company, Next computer, didn't do all that great. And when Jobs returned to Apple in the late ‘90s, the company was in such dire straits that it needed a deal from Microsoft to stay afloat until the eMac and the iMac came along. The triumphant keynote phase of his career was in many ways his second act as an older, wiser man after a lot of setbacks and a lot of obsessive work went into all the Apple products mentioned above. The iPad and the iPhone in particular went through prototype after prototype and were the work of large and skilled teams of engineers. The trouble with remembering the mythology instead of the actual history behind Steve Jobs is that people tried to copy the mythology without doing the mountains of work that inspired the myth. These tech CEOs all want their products to be the next big thing, but the problem is that the product one, often isn't very good and is less of a product and more of an excuse to extract money from the customer and two, isn't actually all that useful. Like regardless of what one might think about an iPhone or an iPad, it cannot be denied that they are useful devices. I refused to use Apple devices at all in the 2000s because they are so expensive (a criticism that, in my opinion, remains valid), but in the mid 2010s, a combination of job changes (since I’d suddenly become responsible for a lot of Mac computers after a layoff) and just the sheer usefulness of many Apple devices meant that I started using them. I still have an iPod Touch I use when I go running or when I do outdoor work, and since Apple doesn't manufacture iPod Touches anymore, I will be sad when it finally dies. By contrast, a lot of new products aren't that good or that useful. The CEO has forgot that to extract money from the customer, you actually have to provide value in exchange. An iPad is expensive, but it does provide value. NFTs are a good example of this phenomenon of failing to add value for the customer. For a while, all the big brains in social media were convinced that NFTs are going to be the next big thing. The idea was that NFTs would create digital collectibles and artificial scarcity. People talked endlessly about minting their NFTs and how this was going to revolutionize online commerce. But I think it is safe to say that outside of a few niches, NFTs have been soundly rejected by the general public. They don't add value. If you buy, for example, a collectible Boba Fett figure, it is a physical object that you own, and if anyone takes it without your permission, you can charge them with theft. By contrast, if you buy an NFT for a JPEG of Boba Fett artwork, you have an entry on a blockchain and there's nothing to stop people from copying the JPEG of Boba Fett. What's the point of the NFT, then? Even if you don't keep the Boba Fett figure in its packaging and give it to a child as a toy, it still provides value in the form of entertaining the kid. Cryptocurrency was another next big thing for a while. Some people were sure that crypto was going to end central banks and government issued fiat currency. Of course, while there are many legitimate criticisms to be made of central banks and fiat currency, it turns out they do a good job of slowing down a lot of the scams that infested the crypto space. The late, great science fiction author Jerry Pournelle used to say that unregulated capitalism inevitably led to the sale of human flesh in the market, and crypto seems to have proven that unregulated securities trading leads inevitably to FTX and crypto marketplace collapses. The Metaverse is a much more expensive version of this. Mark Zuckerberg, worried about the future of Facebook, decided to pivot to his virtual reality Metaverse. Likely, Mr. Zuckerberg thought that the rise in remote work during the peak of the pandemic would permanently change social dynamics and Facebook, if it acted right now, could be to virtual reality what Microsoft was to the personal computer and Google was to search engines. Facebook changed its names to Meta and burned a lot of money trying to develop the Metaverse. However, this plan had two major flaws. One, while some people preferred the new social arrangements during COVID, a vastly larger majority hated it and wanted things is to go back to normal as soon as possible and two, Meta spent like $15 billion to build the Metaverse, but ended up with the worst version of Second Life that required very expensive virtual reality goggles. Meta ended up wiping out like 2/3 of its company value. So while right now generative AI might be the next big thing, but as the examples above show, this might not last. Number four, public derision. Generative AI could also be following a similar track as NFTs and cryptocurrencies: an initial surge of enthusiasm followed by widespread disdain and mockery and retreat to smaller niche. For a while, several big gaming companies were very excited about NFTs and a smaller number were interested in cryptocurrency. They would roll neatly into the growth of microtransactions which the gaming industry really loves, like you could buy a new skin or avatar for your character, and you'll also get an NFT is saying that you had #359 out of 5000, that kind of thing. Digital collectibles, as mentioned above, except the backlash was immense and people widely mocked every effort by game companies to insert NFTs into their product. It's an act too much of previous extract money efforts like microtransactions and lootboxes. Cryptocurrency likewise experienced an increasing level of public disdain. See how crypto bros have been mocked after the collapse of FTX and other large crypto companies. Generative AI is very popular in some quarters but is beginning to experience a growing level of public disdain as well. One recent example was fantasy author Mark Lawrence's self-publishing contest. An AI designed cover won the competition and the outrage was high enough that Mister Lawrence cancelled the cover competition in future years. To be fair, part of the problem was that the artist lied about using the AI on his application form. The Marvel show Secret Invasion used a bunch of AI generated images for its title sequences, and there was a backlash against that. Various professional organizations have come out against generative AI, and apparently one of the key points in the Hollywood writer’s strike and the ongoing actor’s strike is restrictions on AI, though one of the sticking points here is less about AI and more about using AI to enable irrational greed. It seems like these studios want to be able to use an individual actor’s likeness in AI generation forever without payment. It's too soon to say how it will turn out, but it appears that a significant portion of public opinion is on the side of the actors on this. It probably helps that the CEOs of major media companies invariably managed to come across as cartoon villains. David Zaslav of Warner Discovery seems like he's there just to loot the company as efficiently as possible. And Bob Iger of Disney is currently dealing with all the very expensive mistakes he made during his previous tenure as CEO. So if these guys are excited about AI, why should anyone else think it's a good idea? So it's possible that the public derision against AI might push into niche uses, which would be bad news for the companies that spent billions on it. I've found that people in general are not that upset about using AI to get out of unpleasant tasks like writing cover letters or answering emails, but if they are consuming media for entertainment, then they get very annoyed if AI was used and it's gotten to the point where “it seems like an AI created it” has become an insult in negative reviews of various programs. Number five: synthesis. Despite all that I just said about cryptocurrency and NFTs, generative AI is objectively more useful than NFTs and less likely to use all of the money than crypto, though it might handle on the same low level risk of being sued if you use Midjourney for commercial purposes. I mean, most kids who are cheating on their homework, if they had thought about it a little more, rewritten, ChatGPT's response just a little bit, maybe throw in a couple of typos, they probably would have gotten away with it. To use a less unethical example, imagine you're applying for jobs and you crank out thirty different customized cover letters. You can spend all day sweating over a handcrafted letter that some HR drone will go in set for a second before throwing away, or you can use ChatGPT to generate them. There are lots of tedious documents which no one enjoys writing, but are necessary parts of daily life and something like ChatGPT is ideal for them or for that matter, specialized chat bots, ones are specifically designed to rate marketing copy and nothing else. AI Audio will probably end up at a point where it's simply another feature integrated into e-readers. Hit play and an AI voice will read in an accent of your choice while the human narrated version will be a premium product. I think that generative AI will probably settle into a halfway point between AI will transform everything hype and AI will destroy civilization doomer-ism. That's how these things usually go. A new idea comes along: thesis. A backlash to it arrives: antithesis. After some struggle, they settle into a halfway point: synthesis. Then it becomes just another tool. Photoshop and Adobe offers some evidence for this position. Adobe has been integrating its Firefly generative AI stuff into Photoshop with the generative fill tool. If you know anything about Adobe, you know that they are as corporate and litigious as it gets. The company isn't exactly into taking big, bold swings with its products. They've been incrementally updating Photoshop and the other Creative Suite products forever. So if Adobe feels safe integrating generative AI into its products, it's probably not going anywhere for a while. But here's the important point. On social media, you see a lot of impressive images generated with generative fill in Adobe and Photoshop, but if you try it yourself, 99% of what it generates is not very good. Refinement, iterations, and testing are vital. If AI doesn't go away, I think that's where it's going, providing the raw materials for further refinement and improvement. Six: conclusion. As you might guess from the tone of my podcast episodes on the subject, I don't like generative AI very much, and I don't think it adds very much of value, though this might be just my overall grumpiness. If overreacting legislation came along that crippled AI research, I don't personally think much of value would be lost. No one can see the future, as many examples above demonstrate. But overall, I think generative AI is going to be just another tool and one that will require practice to effectively use, actually will probably require more practice to effectively use than people think. Stopping writing or preventing a child from engaging in creative pursuits is a bit like stopping carpentry because someone invented the electric saw and think about how many people you see every day, who obviously don't think things through at all. Encouraging the child in creative pursuits will definitely serve him or her well later in life, regardless of the actual career. So that's it for this week. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this week's episode, I take a look at the movies I watched during fall 2023. We also have a brief digression about historical inaccuracies in crossword puzzles. This week’s coupon is for the audiobook of CLOAK OF WOLVES, as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of CLOAK OF WOLVES for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code: OCTWOLVES The coupon code is valid through November 8th, 2023, so if you find yourself wanting to get caught up before CLOAK OF EMBERS comes out soon, why not start with an audiobook? TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello everyone. Welcome to Episode 172 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is October the 22nd, 2023 and today we're going to talk about the movies I saw in autumn 2023. We also have a brief digression about historical inaccuracies in crossword puzzles. Before we get into that, let's do Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon is for the audiobook of Cloak of Wolves as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of Cloak of Wolves for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code: OCTWOLVES-that's OCTWOLVES and that will also be in the show notes. The coupon code is valid through November 8th, 2023. So if you find yourself wanting to get caught up before Cloak of Embers comes out before the end of the year, why not start with an audiobook? Now let's have an update on my current writing projects. I am 44,000 words into Cloak of Embers, which only puts me in Chapter 6 of 22 so far. So I think we would have to split up some of those chapters into smaller ones. I think Cloak of Embers is going to be the longest book I write in 2023 and I'm hoping I can get it out before American Thanksgiving at the end of November, though it might be long enough that it will slip to December, but we will see. In audiobook news, since I recorded the last episode, Dragonskull: Talons of the Sorcerer is now available. You can get it at Audible, Google Play, Kobo, Chirp and all the usual audiobook stores. Brad is hard at work on Dragonskull…what is the next one? I don't remember off the top of my head. That's how many Dragonskull books I've written. I can't remember the title was off the top of my head, but Brad is hard at work on the seventh one, which is Dragonskull: Wrath of the Warlock, and so hopefully we can get that out before the end of the year. 00:01:56 History Lesson via Incorrect Crossword Puzzle Clue Now for a brief digression into historical inaccuracies in crossword puzzles. Recently, someone I knew was working on a crossword puzzle, and one of the prompts was “Sacker of ancient Rome”-three letters across and the answer was “Hun” and that is wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong! The Huns never sacked Rome. The Huns did, however, sack a lot of the Western Roman Empire. In the 400s AD, the Western Roman Empire had entered its final decline, with a lot of its foreign territory getting carved up into new barbarian kingdoms. The Huns were a group of Eurasian nomads and were indirectly one of the causes of the collapse of the Western Empire. Their migration west had inspired a lot of terrified tribes to flee west as well to get away from them. Those terrified tribes became the barbarian invasions that overran much of the Western empire, but the Huns were still coming from the east. Under the leadership of their king Attila, the Huns became even more formidable, capable of taking walled and fortified cities, which was traditionally difficult for nomadic horsemen to do. Anyway, the Romans and their Visigothic allies had previously repulsed the Huns at The Battle of the Catalaunian Plains in 451 AD. Attila returned the next year and essentially destroyed northern Italy and his army pushed towards Rome. Emperor Valentinian the Third sent envoys to meet with Attila at the River Po and one of those envoys was Pope Leo the First and no one knows exactly what happened next. According to one story, when Atilla met Pope Leo, he saw Saint Peter and Saint Paul flanking the Pope in all their holy radiance with drawn swords in their hands, promising Attila that he would die if he entered Rome. So impressed was Attila that he turned his army around, left Italy, and Leo was credited as the savior of the city. The truth is probably somewhat more prosaic. Attila’s army was running out of supplies, since Italy had already suffered a couple of bad harvests before Attila had burned down most of the northern half of the peninsula, which as you can imagine, did not help. In addition, a serious disease, probably dysentery, was spreading through Atilla's army. The Eastern Roman Emperor had sent an army of his own to attack the Huns’ current homelands in central Europe on the Danube, and until Attila to go deal with that problem. Another account says that Atilla’s advisers feared that Attila might suffer the same fate as the Visigothic Alaric, who died shortly after sacking Rome a little over forty years earlier. There is a good chance that Atilla was superstitious in a way it is hard for the modern mind to grasp, but until the start of modern science and the universities in the Middle Ages, people generally did not distinguish between natural and supernatural causes for events. Considering Alaric’s fate might not have been that outlandish for Attila when it came to his calculations. Pope Leo was also a man of great intelligence and charisma. Perhaps he simply pointed out all these facts to Atilla and the Hunnic king, knowing that he was overextended and potentially in serious trouble, decided that the possibility of divine wrath was an acceptable face-saving excuse to turn around. We'll never know what happened at that meeting, but whatever the reason, Attila turned his army around and left Italy without attacking Rome. The new Eastern Emperor had stopped paying tribute to the Huns and Attila planned to deal with him next, but he died of a nosebleed on his wedding night in 453 AD. Attila’s sons immediately embarked on a civil war with each other and the Hun’s empire fell apart in short order. So the Huns never sacked Rome. Granted a lot of other people did, in fact sack Rome in the 400s AD, but the Huns never did. And that crossword puzzle annoyed me so much that I just spent the last five minutes talking about it! 00:05:24 Main Topic: Autumn 2023 Movie Reviews Now on to our main topic, the movies and streaming shows I watched over autumn 2023. We are well in fall now, with winter just over the horizon and that's means it's time to discuss those shows and movies. As always, we will start from my least favorite and work up to my favorite. So we'll start with The Flash, which came out in 2023. This movie very famously failed at the box office, and it's not hard to see why. It's like the CG artists finally had their revenge on Warner Discovery for being overworked and underpaid because a lot of the movie’s CG looks like something a beginner might crank out in an older version of Unity or Daz Studio. Plus there's all these various serious crimes that the lead actor has been accused of, which makes the main character rather less likeable. Also The Flash, like many modern movies, simply cost way too much money to make, which meant it had to make big money to earn back a profit. If your movie cost $50 million to make, a $200 million return is good news. If it costs $220 million, you're in big trouble. To be fair, the movie was not without its good points. The Flash realizes he can run faster than the speed of light, which means he can travel back in time and attempt to save his mother (since she was murdered earlier), unfortunately doing so breaks the space-time continuum and threatens to destroy Earth and Flash tries again and again to set things right. Michael Keaton does well as an older Batman, and Supergirl was pretty cool. There are also several genuinely funny bits in the movie. However, the movie leaned hard into two of my least favorite plot devices: time travel and the multiverse. The problem with time travel and the multiverse is that with an infinite number of alternate versions of the characters, the stakes ultimately become meaningless. I think it also shows how the superhero genre film has kind of run out of gas. Instead of telling new stories and new plots, all the multiverse movies are just churning up slightly alternate versions of old characters and stories. It's like playing a computer game you've already finished but making slightly different choices this time, like playing as a fighter/mage instead of a fighter instead of a thief/mage, or something. Overall grade: C- Our next movie is Black Adam, which came out in 2023. I think this was slightly better than the Flash, though not by very much. There is a somewhat complicated back story involving the Council of Shazam, wizards, a demon possessed crown, and a magical champion. In the modern day, the story takes place in the nation of Kahndaq, which is clearly meant to evoke modern Egypt and Iraq. Kahndaq is currently ruled by a British mercenary company called Intergang, but don't worry about them. They just disappear halfway through the movie without any explanation. The leader of the resistance against Intergang is an archaeologist named Adrianna, and her son Amon, who is the kind of annoying kid who uses words like “neo-imperialist occupier” with a straight face while outrunning mercenaries on his skateboard. Anyway, Intergang is looking for the evil magic crown and Adrianna tries to stop them. In the process, she actually releases Teth-Adam, the champion of Kahndaq, from his tomb. Adam annihilates the mercenaries chasing Adrianna and then tries to come with term with the fact that he's been asleep for the last 5,000 years. Now that would have been a more interesting movie: a superpowered Bronze Age warrior wakes up and tries to come to terms with the modern age. Or he decides that the decadent modern age needs enlightenment to reach proper Bronze Age warrior values. Instead, we get the Justice Society (I assume they're the store brand/Sam's Choice version of the Justice League), who show up to fight Black Adam. Unfortunately, after they convince Black Adam to stand down, the Crown's evil magic wakes up and chooses a host and only Black Adam can save the world. Like the Flash, this movie had its strong points. The CG was a lot better than in Flash, and Dr. Fate was an interesting character. So was Hawkman. Unfortunately, like The Flash, the plot didn't make much sense and relied too heavily on hooks to the rest of the DC universe. But on the plus side, no time travel. Overall grade: C Next up is Haunted Mansion, which came out in 2023. This movie flopped at the box office, but it wasn't that bad for a movie about a Disney ride. It wasn't a scary movie. It was a scary movie in the tongue-in-cheek way that jack o’ lanterns are scary. Like, the original purpose of a jack o’ lantern in Iron Age societies was apparently to keep malevolent spirits at bay during the harvest. That was serious business back then, but now it's sort of play acting to entertain small children. Haunted Mansion is the same kind of tongue in cheek scariness, overlaid with quite a bit of comedy. The plot centers around a bitter and disillusioned former ghost hunter hired to use his ghost camera to take photos of spirits at a haunted house. The ghost hunter goes along with it, hoping for a quick payday, but quickly becomes ensnared in the curse surrounding the Haunted Mansion. He then has to team up with a crazy professor, a fast talking priest, a medium with good Yelp reviews, and a widowed doctor and her precocious son to defeat the malevolent Hatbox Ghost who rules over the ghosts of the Haunted Mansion. I am not, generally speaking, a big fan of the Disney corporation. But I am told that the movie has many Easter eggs referring to the original ride for people who appreciate that kind of thing. The movie didn't do well in theaters, but I expect it'll have a long afterlife on streaming. Overall grade: B- Next up is Men in Black 3, which originally came out in 2012. The original Men in Black was a near perfectly constructed science fiction comedy. Men in Black 2 was good, but not quite on that level and I think Men in Black 3 falls at about the same ranking. In this one, a lethal alien named Boris the Animal breaks out of a secured lunar prison and embarks on a rampage of revenge against Agent K. To facilitate his vengeance, Boris steals a time travel device and goes back to 1969 to kill a younger K at a critical junction in the timeline. Once Agent J realizes what has happened, he obtains another time jump device and goes back to fix things. As I've mentioned many times before, I don't really like time travel stories. However, this one works because it's pretty funny. To make the time jump work, you literally have to jump off a building of sufficient height to trigger the device. The other comedy parts are good, and Josh Brolin does a pitch perfect impersonation of Tommy Lee Jones as the younger agent K. Overall grade: B Next up is Men in Black International, which came out in 2019. I'd heard bad things about this movie, but it was actually quite enjoyable. Tessa Thompson and Chris Hemsworth star as Agent M and Agent H. Based on the movie’s advertising, I thought Agent M would be an almost tediously infallible Girlboss character with Agent H as her dimwitted sidekick. Fortunately, this turned out not to be the case and both characters had considerably more depth. Agent M is a nerdy probationary agent who desperately wants to prove herself while Agent H is a charismatic, somewhat lazy hedonist who always manages to pull off his assignments in the end. Agent M's and Agent H’s first assignment together is to bodyguard an alien royal who promptly gets himself killed by two mysterious shapeshifting assassins. As things go haywire in the aftermath, the agents realized that the royal had a dark secret, and there's a traitor somewhere within the Men in Black. I thought it was an entertaining movie and probably should have done better than it did. Agent M and Agent H make a great comedy duo and they were also excellently funny bits. Liam Neeson was also good as Agent T, the commander of branch office, and there are no time travels or multiverses in this one. Overall grade: B+ Next up is Ahsoka, which came out in 2023. I would say Ahsoka is good but unfinished, since only two of the major plots get resolved and in such a way that it sets up future adventures. I realized the other the other day that Star Wars is the American equivalent to Doctor Who. The similarities are remarkable. One, both are long running sci-fi franchises. Two: but they're definitely not hard science fiction. Three: both are under the stewardship of large, ponderous, frequently ineffective organizations (whether Disney or the BBC). Four: both have spawned a vast maze of tie in novels and comics and games. Five: both have fandoms that act like religions, complete with a crazy fringe and six: and like religions that break into warring factions, both have fandoms that decide upon a particular era or releases the best one and argue vociferously about which part of the franchise is the best, with almost the same fervor as people arguing about whether Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, or John Calvin had the correct interpretation of the Bible. This isn't to be glib, but to know that the same self-destructive tribal instinct that humanity exhibits in politics and religion also seems to appear in far less serious arenas like football supporters and science fiction franchises, or even in something as silly as game console brands, as a single glance at an online argument about the respective merits of the Xbox and PlayStation will demonstrate. Anyway, that was a philosophical digression. Back to the Ahsoka show. It was better than I expected. Once again I thought that Ahsoka would be another tediously infallible Girlboss type character, but she was nothing like that. Instead she made several serious mistakes, faced enemies who were stronger than her, and had to learn and adapt and grow to survive her challenges. In other words, a compelling protagonist. All the performances from the actors were good, especially the late Ray Stevenson. His Baylan Skoll character really stole Episode 4, and if this was destined to be Mr. Stevenson's last performance, at least it was a great one. Diana Lee Inosanto was great as Morgan Elsbeth, who asked to be one of the single most competent villains in all of Star Wars- evil, but she gets results. I also really liked the way the lightsaber duels are presented. They seem more like something out of a samurai movie. The combatants are careful of their footing and their stances, only to explode into some motion, rather than the more acrobatic flipping and spinning around in the prequel movies. I have to admit, in the publicity stills for the show I kind of thought that the show's version of Grand Admiral Thrawn looks sort of like Elon Musk transmogrified into a Smurf, but that was just a bad angle. Combined with his voice and mannerisms, Lars Mikkelsen’s performance as Thrawn really works. I suspect Mr. Musk only wishes he had this version of Grand Admiral Thrawn’s air of gravitas and authority. The show ends on sort of an Empire Strikes Back style cliffhanger. I hope the story will continue, but I have my doubts. Disney wasn't in great shape even before the writers and actors’ strikes, and I wonder if the company is simply going to run out of financing for ambitious projects like Ahsoka. One more point: the soundtrack by the Kiner family was A+ work, with the Japanese style musical motifs for the lightsaber duels, the long, ominous horns from the Night Sisters, and the blasting pipe organ from when Thrawn makes his return. Overall grade: B+ Next up is Collateral, which came out in 2004. This is a superb neo-noir thriller. Jamie Foxx stars as Max, a hapless LA taxi driver who picks up Vincent, played by Tom Cruise, who claims to be in town to secure signatures for a real estate deal. Vincent offers Max $600 to drive around for the night and in need of the money, Max agrees, except it turns out Vincent is actually a hit man in area to kill five targets, and when Max realizes what is happening and tries to bail, Vincent forces him to continue. I really like this one. Tom Cruise's perpetual intensity works very well in the villain role, and the psychological duel between Max and Vincent was compelling to watch. Vincent claims that his targets are bad people who deserve their fates. But once Max figures out that Vincent's final target most definitely does not deserve her fate, the race is on to save the target's life. The movie did have the overused trope where the LAPD gets mad the FBI is taking over their case, which was a thing even way back in Die Hard. In fact, that was a major plot point in Die Hard, now that I think about it. In real life, the FBI's interaction with local law enforcement mostly involves providing consulting and lab services and local law enforcement is actually often eager to hand a troublesome case over to the Feds because it then becomes somebody else's problem. I also thought the soundtrack seemed a bit off in the first half of the movie, but those are minor quibbles. Collateral was a thoroughly enjoyable thriller. Definitely recommend if you like the genre of film. Overall grade: A. That brings us to the last movie I saw this autumn and I think it would tie with Collateral for the favorite thing I saw this fall and that is A Haunting in Venice, which came out in 2023. This is the third of Kenneth Branagh’s Hercule Poirot movies. I really like the first one he did, Murder on the Orient Express, but I thought the second one he did, Death on the Nile, was only so-so, which was disappointing because Death on the Nile is, in my opinion, one of the best of the Hercule Poirot books. But A Haunting in Venice is on par with Orient Express. The movie takes place in 1947 and Hercule Poirot, soul-sick and weary after the horrors of World War II and all the depths of human evil he has seen in those cases, has decided to retire in Venice. His friend Ariadne Oliver (Agatha Christie’s self-parodying author insert in the Poirot novels) turns up to ask him to help debunk a medium preying upon a grieving mother. Poirot immediately demonstrates the medium is a fraud, but soon afterwards someone tries to kill him, and a few minutes later the medium herself is killed. It's then up to Poirot solve the case, even as the suspects become increasingly convinced that supernatural powers are behind the killing. This movie also had one of my favorite plot devices from the 2009 Sherlock Holmes movie: the rationalist detective confronted by a seemingly supernatural mystery.  Branagh's provision of Poirot is darker, rather more angsty than the book version, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. Tina Fey was also an excellent choice to play Ariadne Oliver. Overall grade: A. So those are the movies I saw this autumn, and check back towards the end of winter, when we'll do a winter 2023-2024 Movie Roundup episode. So that is it for this week. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. It really does help. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this week's episode, I take a look at 10 different types of popular fantasy. A preview of the audiobook of DRAGONSKULL: TALONS OF THE SORCERER as narrated by Brad Wills is included at the end of the episode. It is once again time for Coupon of the Week! This week’s coupon is for the audiobook of CLOAK OF DRAGONS, as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of CLOAK OF DRAGONS for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code: OCTDRAGONS The coupon code is valid through November 3rd, 2023, so if you find yourself needing to listen to something as the days get shorter, we have an audiobook for you! TRANSCRIPT: 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello everyone. Welcome to Episode 171 of the Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is October the 15th, 2023 and today we're going to discuss the different genres of fantasy. Before we do that, let's have Coupon of the Week. This week's Coupon of the Week is for the audiobook of Cloak of Dragons as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of Cloak of Dragons for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code OCTDRAGONS and that is OCTDRAGONS. Again, that's OCTDRAGONS. You can get the coupon code and the links in the show notes. The coupon code is valid through November 3rd, 2023, so if you find yourself needing listen to an audio book as the days get shorter, we have an audio book for you. And before we get into our main topic, let's also talk about my current writing projects. I am pleased report that Ghost in the Serpent is finished and should be out at most of the ebook stores. You can get it right now at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, Smashwords, and my Payhip store. And it should be out in Scribd in a few days, hopefully. It’s selling briskly and very well. Thank you for that. I am excited to see that many people are excited to return to Caina's world. So that makes me look forward to writing the sequel, Ghost in the Veils, which I will probably write after I finish Cloak of Embers. Speaking of Cloak of Embers, that is my current writing project. As of this recording, I am on Chapter 2 of 22 which puts me at 14,000 words into the book and hopefully…hoping to have it out before American Thanksgiving if all goes well, though, it might slip to December depending on how much home maintenance and suchlike I need to do in October and November. In audiobook news, Ghost in the Serpent will be recorded as an audio book starting on November 7th, I believe. So, hopefully it should be out in December-ish in audiobook form. And Dragonskull: Talons of the Sorcerer is finished. It just has to get through quality control and proofing at ACX and Findaway, so it should not be too much longer to hear that and we will include a sample of that audiobook as excellently narrated by Brad Wills at the end of this episode. So that's where I'm at with my current writing projects. 00:02:13 Main Topic Introduction: Different Genres of Fantasy Now on to our main topic. I've written a couple of different kinds of fantasy, so today I thought I'd talk about the different kinds of fantasy and what differentiates them from each other. I should mention this isn't intended to be a comprehensive list nor a rigorously academic one. Genre is one of those topics that invariably seems out to bring out the “well, actually” commenters from the woodwork to argue over the finer points of what exactly constitutes hard science fiction or sword and sorcery. I don't think it is useful to consider genre as a strict taxonomy of stories like phylum and kingdoms and species for different types of animals. My view is that the writer needs to think first and foremost about what will make a good story. The overall kind of story you are writing is reflected by the genre and where there are certain underlying assumptions that the reader will expect for that genre. Genre is merely a useful shorthand of specifying what kind of story the reader expects to get when he or she picks up your book. Like if your cover and title make the reader assume that your book is contemporary romance, the reader will be very surprised and probably annoyed if the book turns out to be a grim detective story. With that in mind, let's take a look at some of the popular genres of fantasy that are predominant nowadays. 00:03:30 Type #1: Epic Fantasy Number one: epic fantasy. Everyone knows what this one is: it's the genre inspired by the Lord of the Rings: big sweeping story with multiple point of view characters and numerous different settings to visit. There will often be large battle scenes or sequences. Usually a lot of traveling is involved. There will often be a large overarching quest that is the main plot or conflict of the story. Almost invariably, the epic fantasy doesn't take place on Earth, but on a constructed world designed by the author. A map is often required. Epic Fantasy also tends to be really, really long, with both long individual books and long series overall. This has had kind of a deleterious effect on the genre in recent years, since sometimes authors run out of gas and can't finish the series, and sometimes publishers pull the plug because the sales just aren't high enough. Epic fantasy also tends, but not always, to have clearly delineated lines between good and evil. If there's a morally ambiguous antihero, he or she will tend to reform, die heroically, or become one of the bad guys. Epic fantasies that I've written include Frostborn, Sevenfold Sword, Dragontiarna, Dragonskull, and the Demonsouled series. 00:04:42 Type #2: High Fantasy Number two: high fantasy. This term tends to get used interchangeably with epic fantasy, but in the strictest sense, high fantasy is fantasy that takes place in a constructed world like Middle Earth or Narnia or the Forgotten Realms. The proper term for that is secondary world. I've done numerous secondary worlds, the setting of Frostborn, the setting of Demonsouled, the setting of the Ghosts are all secondary worlds. Even though Cloak Games/Cloak Mage has other worlds, it takes place primarily on Earth, so it doesn't quite count as a secondary world, which leads neatly to our next type of fantasy. 00:05:17 Type #3: Low Fantasy Number three: low fantasy. As with high fantasy, this is one of those terms that tends to have a mutating definition, like in the original sense low fantasy simply meant a fantasy that took place on our world rather than a constructed world. This obviously can cover a wide range of stories, from literary magical realism and a Gothic ghost story to urban fantasy like the Dresden Files. Low fantasy has also acquired a couple different definitions: fantasy story without an epic plotline or one with a morally ambiguous antihero as the lead. But in the original sense of the word, it was a fantasy story that took place in our world rather than a constructed world like Middle Earth or Westeros. Cloak Games and Cloak Mage would be the biggest low fantasy series I've written. Some of the short stories in my Otherworlds anthology would count as well. 00:06:04 Type #4: Sword and Sorcery Number four: sword and sorcery. Everyone knows what this one is: Conan the Barbarian. You have a protagonist or group of protagonists making your way through a fantasy world fighting evil sorcerers, sinister cultic priests, and tyrannical local nobles. Usually, the protagonists are looking out for themselves or hoping to get rich instead of undertaking a grand high fantasy quest. If the series goes on long enough with the same main character, then eventually the scope might expand in scale. Conan himself started out as wandering vagabond and ended up as King of Aquilonia and in the one and only full length novel that Robert E. Howard wrote, Conan has to reclaim his throne and keep the evil sorcerer Xaltotun from bringing back an ancient dark empire, which is quite a bit more epic in scale than many of the other Conan stories. Sword and sorcery typically has a darker edge to it than epic fantasy. The protagonist might be greedy thieves or raiders, though they will still have the core of honor to them. Of course, a lot of modern sword and sorcery tends to veer over into grimdark, which we will talk about shortly. In my books, sword and sorcery elements turn out frequently in all my epic fantasy novels: Frostborn,  Demonsouled, and the Ghosts. Ridmark and Mazael both spend time as wandering knights, having adventures and Caina in the Ghosts frequently breaks into the strongholds of corrupt lords and evil sorcerers to steal stuff from them. 00:07:17 Type #5: Urban Fantasy Number five: urban fantasy: fantasy set in the modern world of the 20th and 21st century, where you might have wizards and elves and vampires walking around next to modern lawyers, policemen, and politicians. Generally, urban fantasy tends to break down along two different lines. The first is the masquerade, a term popularized by the old Vampire The Masquerade role playing setting. The idea is that there's an expansive supernatural world, but for whatever reason is kept secret for most people who don't know about it. The reasons might be that the normal world might rise up in wrath and destroy the supernatural if its existence came out, or that the supernatural world preys on the normal one like vampires, and prefers to remain secret, or you have to be actually able to use magic to be able to perceive the supernatural world at all. I think the most famous current example of the masquerade world is actually Harry Potter. The Harry Potter books aren't technically urban fantasy, but the book’s division of the world into the Muggles who can't use magic, and the Wizards who do is a good example of a masquerade. The other version is a world where magic exists, everyone is aware of it, and society has adapted to it. This can be played for laughs like you have an elf as head of the neighborhood HOA and a dwarven blacksmith who is running for Congress under the slogan of “hammering government back into shape like iron upon my ancestral forge.” Or it can be played dead serious with rival magical factions holding sway on various parts of Earth or the US government forcing all mages into a secret program and so forth. One variant that a commentator mentioned (commenter Grace) added when I talked about this on Facebook: “I'd alter how you break down urban fantasy slightly differently. Obviously there's the masquerade as you defined it but the other form I see most often is what I call magical apocalypse, best defined by Ilona and Gordon Andrews’ Kate Daniels series. Basically that's (unintelligible word-9:09) genre is that magic came back to the world of the vengeance, changing everything suddenly and at least somewhat disastrously.” That is a good point from Grace, and I used some of that in my Cloak Mage/Cloak Games series where magic returned to Earth quite suddenly in the year 2013 when the elves invaded and conquered Earth. So as I said, Cloak Mage/Cloak Games series are my urban fantasy books.   00:09:29 Type #6: Lit RPG Number six: LitRPG. This is a new genre that has arisen in the last few years. Basically LitRPG are science fiction and fantasy stories told using the conventions of science fiction and fantasy role-playing games, especially MMORPG style games. If you're not familiar with that acronym, it's a massively multiplayer online role-playing game like World of Warcraft, Elder Scrolls Online, Star Wars the Old Republic, and similar games. Of course, characters entering a game world isn't exactly new. Jumanji was basically LitRPG with a board game, and in the new movies from the 2010s, the characters explicitly enter a video game world and have stats and special abilities. In the 1970s, Andre Norton wrote a novel called Quag Keep with some characters get pulled into the Dungeons and Dragons world via magical gaming figurines. I think it's on Kindle Unlimited now if you want to read it. Ender's Game is a science fiction version of the trope where Ender discovers that game he is playing has deadly consequences. I think there are generally two strains of LitRPG. In one, the protagonist is pulled entirely into the game world, leaving Earth behind and lives there completely. In the other, the protagonist is playing the game and trying to balance it with his or her real life, maybe financial pressures, maybe the game has a dark secret, something like that. Both versions lean heavily onto the tropes of MMORPG games. The protagonist selects a character class, levels up, faces bosses, might join a guild or start a stronghold, and so forth. LitRPG is mostly an indie author phenomenon; not many legacy publishers have published LitRPGs. An exception to that might be Ready Player One, but that was only a couple books and that's only really the really high profile example I can think of. Currently the only LitRPG I've written is Sevenfold Sword Online: Creation, but as of this writing I’m 19,000 words into the sequel, Sevenfold Sword Online: Leveling. 00:11:30 Type #7  Cultivation/xianxia Number seven: Cultivation, also known as xianxia Fantasy, which I'm that is as close to the actual pronunciation as I can come. The term is derived from the Chinese word xian, which means immortal being. Cultivation is a relatively new genre in the West but has come over from China thanks to the Internet. It's hugely popular in China but less so in the US, though it does have a devoted fanbase. The idea is that by essentially unlocking or cultivating one's energy, usually called qi, you can gain fantastic abilities of mind and body and become a xian. Some xian are become so powerful that they can conquer galaxies. Sometimes there are rival clans of xian engaged in conflict with each other or who follow different paths in school of training like martial arts schools in a samurai movie. If you’ve ever seen a wuxia film with supernatural martial arts heroes following secret training traditions, it's a lot like that, except with more abilities and a greater scope in the setting. American readers are sometimes surprised at how harsh Chinese written xianxia fantasy can be, but I suspect that's because Chinese culture in general is a lot less individualistic than American culture and is generally less forgiving of victimhood than American culture is, though of course, as with all cultural statements, that can be something of a generalization. I've never written any cultivation fantasy, though elements that do pretty frequently appear in LitRPG since the leveling up in a LitRPG is at least superficially similar to the paths of cultivation in xianxia fantasy. Nadia’s journey through Cloak Games/the Cloak Mage is superficially similar to a cultivator's journey. But I don't think that's a valid comparison because I started writing Cloak Games in 2015 and I never even heard of xianxia fantasy until late 2021. And so therefore I don't think I can say that was an influence. 00:13:26 Type #8: Historical Fantasy Number eight: Historical fantasy: historical fiction with a fantastical twist, like Henry the Fifth was secretly allied with the king of the elves when he invaded France, or the Library of Congress is actually a secret magical society that has pulled the strings of American history from its founding. The degrees of fantasy and historical accuracy can vary wildly between authors in how much research they happen to do. This, of course, can easily blend in with urban fantasy. To return to our Library of Congress example from earlier, if the plot is set in the 1880s, it's historical fantasy. If it's set in the modern era, then it's urban fantasy, though the 1880s plot line can still obviously influence events. I've never written any strictly historical fantasy, though Frostborn assumes a somewhat magical past on Earth, and Cloak Games has the elves arrive and conquer Earth in 2013, which was 10 years ago now, so sheer longevity has given that series an element of historical fantasy. 00:14:20 Type #8: Grimdark Number nine: grimdark. This is less than a genre and more of a tone. Grimdark was largely inspired by George R.R .Martin's a Song of Ice and Fire, and to a lesser extent, Joe Abercrombie’s books. Grimdark books are brutal, bloody, and violent, often explicitly so. Expect most of the characters to die in various horrible ways, often described in exacting detail. All the characters will be morally bankrupt, with those who are not becoming easy prey for those who are. In grimdark, the bad guys wins, but all the characters are the bad guy. I came to dislike grimdark quite a bit because in my opinion it embodies a sort of adolescent nihilism that some people never quite grow out of. This isn't to say that A Song of Ice and Fire didn't do it well, at least in the early books, but its many imitators did it less well. I consciously avoid writing grimdark because I don't like it. That said, it can be done well. The movie Sicario about the US intelligence apparatus playing an underhanded game against the drug cartels is a masterpiece of a film but very, very dark. 00:15:23 Type #10: Space Fantasy Number ten: science/space fantasy. This is a science fiction story with strong fantasy elements. Doctor Who and Star Wars both come to mind as immediate examples, since both have strong fantasy elements that they dress up in scientific sounding explanations. Doctor Who essentially is about a space wizard with a magic space box, who flies around having adventures, preferably in the company of one or more attractive female companions. The show traditionally seems to suffer when it strays from that formula. The proportion of science fiction and fantasy within Doctor Who varies depending upon the writer and the showrunner. Likewise, Star Wars is basically about magic space samurai who fight each other with laser swords and space magic. Another example might be Warhammer 40K, which does have space orcs and space elves fighting each other with space magic, though the bigger influences are probably grimdark science fiction and horror. All three franchises have been around long enough that they sort of created their own genre of space fantasy. Like LitRPG, it hasn't really hit the legacy publishing business, but you see lots of indie books that use science fiction and fantasy to the point where you have mages flying around on starships. I've never really written anything in space fantasy. Even the more supernatural elements of Silent Order like the Great Elder Ones and the Macrobes come from more horror than fantasy and the science fiction elements in Cloak Mage that have appeared in recent books are straight up science fiction that I've added to an urban fantasy setting, not science fantasy type stuff. Though interestingly, Brandon Sanderson's books sometimes come at science fantasy from the opposite end, where the book's magic system is so intricate and detailed that the setting can build a technological society off it. I think his very newest book, The Sunlit Man, is a very good example of that. 00:17:08: Concluding Thoughts Conclusion: so those are ten different types of fantasy that I think are popular nowadays. No doubt I missed some, and they're probably genres of fantasy popular right now that I haven't heard of yet, like I hadn't heard of xianxia fantasy until 2021. That said, for a writer, especially for an indie writer, the main value of genres is to add…is an aid to think about marketing, like my Cloak Games/Cloak Mage series, and mainly urban fantasy. But there's also elements of historical fantasy in it, and more and more science fiction elements, especially in the last few books but it’s mainly urban fantasy, so I designed the covers to look like urban fantasy and I market it as an urban fantasy book. It's good to be conscious of what you are writing. Like Frostborn and the other Andomhaim books are primarily epic fantasy, so I try to stick to the accepted tropes, but I do let other stuff bleed in as I find it interesting, and I think it would enhance the story. And as always, thanks for reading my books, whatever genre they turned out to be. So that is it for this week. Thanks for listening to the Pulp Writer Show. I hope you find the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes of the show on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting platform of choice. It really does help. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this week's episode, we consider eight tips & tricks for writing vivid descriptions. COUPON OF THE WEEK This week’s coupon is for the audiobook of GHOST IN THE SURGE, as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of GHOST IN THE SURGE for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code: OCTSURGE The coupon code is valid through October 27th, 2023, so if you find yourself needing to listen to something while raking leaves, it might be time for a new audiobook! 00:00:00 Introduction, Writing Updates, and Ad Results Hello everyone. Welcome to Episode 170 of the Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is October the 6th, 2023. Today we're going to discuss how to write vivid descriptions. Before we get into that, let's start off with Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon is for the audiobook of Ghosts in the Surge as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audio book of Ghost in the Surge for a 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code: OCTSURGE, again that's OCTSURGE spelled OCTSURGE. This coupon code is valid through October the 27th 2023. So if you find yourself needing to listen to something while raking leaves, it might be time for a new audiobook. Before we get into our main topics or some reader questions, let's have an update on my current writing projects. I am almost done with Ghost in the Serpent. I am hoping actually to have it out a day or two after this podcast episode goes live, then it will be full speed ahead on Cloak of Embers, which it took longer to get to Cloak of Embers than I really wanted. But the Summer of Finishing Things was quite helpful with getting things finished. So now I have time to get back to the Cloak Mage series and Nadia's latest adventures. The audio book of Dragonskull: Talons of the Sorcerer is done, and hopefully that should be turning up on the various audiobook stores before too much longer. So that is where we are with our current writing projects. And since it's still very early in October, let's have a look back at my ad results for September 2023. September was kind of an odd month from an advertising perspective. From the 19th to the 21st, Amazon had their Stuff Your Kindle promotion that tends to mostly revolve around Kindle Unlimited books. So I hadn't planned much for it because I don't have any Kindle Unlimited books at the moment. However, I had forgotten that I had a few Amazon ads campaigns running for Cloak Mage Omnibus One in the spring, and some of those ads showed up on the Kindle Unlimited books. So those ads kicked into overdrive and spent a lot of money, like way more than I really wanted. On the plus side, it balanced out that the Cloak Mage Omnibus One made back $1.22 for every dollar the runaway ads spent, so it all ended well. Well, for my Facebook ads, it was once again useful to see that audio books are helpful for advertising. Once you spend the money on the audiobook, it's worthwhile to advertise the ebook because any sales of the audiobook are essentially bonus profit at that point. So here's how the Facebook ads did: Frostborn, I got back $4.38 for every dollar spent and 38% of the profit came from audio. Ghosts, I got $3.08 back for every dollar I spent and 25% of the profit came from audio. For Cloak Games and Cloak Mage, I got back $3.49 for every dollar I spent and the audiobooks didn't sell well enough to make much of a difference. Silent Order, I got back $7.70. But that’s also partly because Pulse Hand came out in September, but even without Pulse Hand still would have been $3.54. Notwithstanding the adventures with the Cloak Mage ads I forgot about, the Amazon ads I did on purpose performed pretty well. For Dragonskull: Sword of the Squire, for every dollar I spent on ads, I got back $3.57 and 16% of the profit came from audio. So that is how my ads performed in September 2023. 00:03:27 Reader Questions Before we get to our main topic, let's have a few questions from readers. Our first question is from Diana, who asks: Hi, Jon, I'm so sorry to bug you, but my ADHD brain won't let this go, and Google hasn't helped. All the dark Wizards in the Frostborn and Sevenfold Sword and Dragontiarna in the series give each other ironic nicknames, but what is a Theophract? I'm not skilled enough in the English language to figure it out, and apparently neither is Google. Thanks so much for all your books. Thanks, Diana. Glad you're enjoying them. In answer to that, the term Theophract is essentially nonsense. It's basically very bad Greek for a God armor and I picked that name because the Theophract was the apprentice of the warden. So I wanted to hopefully give a subtle indicator that the Theophract was more dangerous than the average dark elven lord. Our next question is from John who asks: Want to start reading about Nadia, but not sure which book started her series out. Could you give me a hand to let me know? The very first appearance of Nadia is in Cloak Games: Thief Trap, which should be free in ebook form on most of the major ebook stores. Our final question this week is from Wesley, who says: Hey there. I wanted to ask if there any books or series outside of your own catalog that you would recommend. I've gone through the majority of your works already and have read the Ridmark saga twice. Well, let's see. For indie books, I would recommend William King's Kormak saga, and the Awaken Online series by Travis Bagwell is the best Lit RPG I've read. For science fiction, Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the Empire trilogy, his Icarus Hunt and Icarus Plot books, and his Conquerors trilogy. The Galaxy’s Edge and Forgotten Ruin series by Nick Cole and Jason Anspach are pretty good. For historical mystery. I really like the CJ Sansome books about Tudor era lawyer Matthew Shardlake, so hopefully that should keep you occupied for a short time. 00:05:22 Introduction to the Main Topic of the Week: How to Write Vivid Descriptions Now let's talk about our main topic this week: how to write vivid descriptions. Let's start off with an anecdote. A long time ago, I was in the process of moving to a new state and attempting to find an apartment. This was very challenging because the rental housing market in the area was limited and expensive. One day during this process, I drove a long way to view a duplex with the rental agent, only discover: 1: that the owner hadn't actually given permission to view the property, so it was all locked up and 2: the property in question was directly next to one of the busiest interstates in that part of the US. But the rental agent I'll give him this, did his best. “I'm going to paint you a word portrait of what this duplex is like,” said the agent. And so I stood there on the front walk trying to hear him shout the description of the duplex over the roar of passing trucks on the nearby freeway. It was right about then and I realized that I was going to have to bite the bullet and buy a house. But that's a story for another day. If you're a rental agent, painting a word portrait is probably not going to help close the sale. But if you're a writer, it's a vital skill. Because it is important to describe things so that the reader can quickly visualize the characters and setting of your story. A common complaint readers have about a book is that it's difficult to visualize the characters or that the author doesn't adequately explain what things look like. With that in mind, here are some tips for creating vivid and memorable descriptions in your books. 00:06:43 Tip #1: Avoid Info Dumping #1. Avoid infodumping. Infodumping is the practice of dropping a ton of information on the reader’s head all at once. The most common example is “As you know, Bob” conversations, where the character tells Bob a lot of stuff that Bob already knows for the purpose of relaying plot vital information to the reader. There are better ways to convey this information in the course of the story. It is also possible to inadvertently use infodumping in descriptions. Let's use an example from the Cloak Mage series: Nadia's favorite dollar store chain, the Dollar Commandant. And here it is: “The Dollar Commandant. The store occupied a parcel of land facing the state highway. The parking lot was assault and had room for exactly 40 vehicles, currently held four pickup trucks, three cars, and two minivans. The Dollar Commandant store stood one story high, 150 feet wide, and 400 feet long. Glass doors opened into the store’s interior. Hanging over the store’s front doors was a painting of the story the store’s mascot, a grinning, grinning mustachioed man wearing an elaborate military uniform and a large hat with a plume on.” After hearing that, do you have an idea of what the Dollar Commandant store looks like? Yes, you probably do. But was that description somewhat tedious to listen to? Also yes. When writing a novel, it's always best to avoid tedious bits or to cut them out entirely. And if you do that for every single piece of description, people may have a hard time finishing your book. They may not be able to articulate why they found your story boring, but infodumping and descriptions would be a big part of it. I also repeated the word store way too many times in a single paragraph. You can also end up info dumping with character descriptions. For example, here's Nadia visiting the Dollar Commandant: “Nadia walked across the parking lot to the Dollar Commandant store. She was a Caucasian woman of mixed Russian and Scottish ancestry who stood 5 feet and three inches tall and weighed 120 pounds. She had gray eyes, red tinted brown hair, and was built like either a marathon runner or a distance swimmer. Today she wore steel toe boots, black jeans, a red sweater, and a black wool peacoat.” Long time readers will know that Nadia usually dresses in the coat because her magic tends to drain away her body heat, which causes some odd reactions in summer. More on that below. Once again, you probably have an idea of what Nadia looks like from the description. However, once again this description was just somewhat tedious to listen to. Why is this a problem? It's bit like extra drag on a car, something that increases the wind resistance, like a damaged side panel jutting out a little bit isn't much of a problem, but probably should be addressed at some point. Too much slows the code down decreases gas mileage, and can even make the car undrivable. Too much tedious description will slow down your story and make it harder to read, much like too much wind resistance on a car. The exception to the scene is where or when you would expect a character to engage in a clinical description. For example, a law enforcement officer sharing a description of Nadia would say something like “Caucasian female, 5 foot three, 120 pounds, mid 20s, last seen wearing a black coat and black jeans.” Or let's say a commando leader had to plan a raid on the Dollar Commandant store for some reason and then he would likely offer a detailed description of the building to his followers as part of the planning process. 00:09:50: Tip #2: Avoid Laundry Lists Number Two: avoid laundry lists. A subset of infodumping is the laundry list technique of character description. This happens when you describe a character by listing off what they're wearing. For example, Nadia at the Dollar Commandant again: “Nadia stood in the checkout line. She wore black wool peacoat, red sweater, black jeans, and heavy boots. Her brown leather purse was slung across her chest, her hand grasping the strap.” Again, this is a bit tedious, or if we were to describe the Dollar Commandant cashier in the same way: “The cashier sat on the metal stool behind the counter, a large woman wearing a blue Dollar Commandant polo shirt, enormous hoop earrings, silver and gold bracelets, and red leggings.” Both descriptions are basically a laundry list of what the characters are wearing without any other details to engage the senses. As writers, we seem to default to laundry list descriptions whenever a character appears. As with infodumping, there's a time and a place for that kind of description, but the problem is that it is boring and doesn't offer much to hold the reader's attention. So how to make descriptions more interesting? Let's take a look at a few methods for writing more vivid descriptions. 00:10:53 Tip #3: Engage Two or More Senses Number three: engage two or more senses. A rule of thumb for descriptions that will serve you in many situations is to try and engage two or more of the senses whenever possible. Humans, with some exceptions, are primarily visual creatures. Sight is generally the main sense through which we perceive the world. However, the other four senses are constantly running and providing additional information, often on a subconscious level. This means that you can immediately punch up your descriptions by including information about the additional senses. For example, compare this description of the Dollar Commandant store to the one we heard before: “Nadia stepped through the doors and into the Dollar Commandant store. The blast of the air conditioning hit her in the face, accompanied by the faint odor of toilet bowl cleaner, and she shivered inside her coat. Cluttered aisles of low cost merchandise stretched all the way to the back of the store. A woman in a yellow sundress and flip flops held a sleeping toddler as she sorted through a bin holding plastic beach toys. At the registers, a bored looking cashier sat on a stool and did not look up from her phone. Nadia headed for the hardware aisle, the cheap green carpet rasping against her boots.” While this may be technically less precise than the first description, it probably created a more vivid picture of the Dollar Commandant store in your mind. The reason is that we managed to engage three senses at once: sight: the description of the cashier, smell: the air conditioning and the toilet bowl cleaner, and hearing: the rasp of the cheap carpet. Perhaps it brought to mind similar stores to the Dollar Commandant that you may have visited. To use another example, let's redo the description of Nadia above. In this example, the cashier, whose name is Maxine, looks at Nadia for the first time: “Maxine sighed and put down her phone as the customer stepped to the register. She was buying beef jerky and freeze dried fruit of all things. The women was short and wiry and pale, wearing a black wool peacoat that was way too heavy for the weather. Even in the air conditioning, she ought to have been sweating like a toilet tank and smelling like a sweat sock. Instead, her face was dry and she didn't smell much of anything at all.” In this case, Maxine notices that Nadia isn't sweating, and the absence of odor is what draws her attention. Of course, the description also used similes, which takes us right up to the next tip for improving descriptions. 00:13:02 Tip #4: The Right Amount of Metaphor and Similes Number four: the right amount of metaphor and similes are your friends. Human communication is basically symbolic, even language itself is a series of symbols intended to convey a specific meaning, like the word laptop is a string of letters which represents a specific sound that humans can make and…in the English language, that specific sound represents a portable computer. So the human brain runs on symbols, which means you can use symbolism in the form of metaphors and similes to help augment your descriptions. Quick rule of thumb: a metaphor is a comparison that uses the verb is in the description. For example, “The Dollar Commandant is a dumpster.” In this sentence, the Dollar Commandant store isn't literally a dumpster, but the speaker is comparing it to one. A simile, by contrast, uses the word like in the description. “The Dollar Commandant looks like a dumpster.” In both cases, the speaker is expressing disdain through the Dollar Commandant through the use of figurative language, just in slightly different ways. The judicious use of metaphors and similes can enhance your descriptions. For example, here is Nadia again: “Nadia walked across the parking lot to the Dollar Commandant store. She's a short, lean women in a dark coat with eyes like cold grey coins and a smile that is a little too hard to be friendly. The coat was too heavy for the summer day and also loose enough to conceal a shoulder holster.” In this description, we can use a simple way to help describe the way that Nadia sometimes unsettles people. Or to make it more vivid, we could describe her through Maxine, the cashier's eyes. “The woman stepped up to the register, and Maxine sighed and put down her phone. The customer was buying beef jerky and freeze dried fruits of all things, and Maxine looked her over: short, wiry, and pale and wearing a heavy coat that looked way too hot, but it was an expensive coat, maybe a present for her husband to judge from the wedding ring. Probably some rich girl slumming it in at the Dollar Commandant. Maxine started to speak and the woman's eyes caught her attention, pale and gray and bright like coins in the freezer, and sharp as a knife. Maxine swallowed her smart remark to resolve to get the woman out of the store as fast as possible.” Careful use of metaphors and similes can improve your descriptions. You don't want to do overdo it, of course. Her eyes were like coins, cold and bright. Her skin was pale as moonlight upon ice, her red tinted brown hair was like the sunset upon a mahogany board. Her teeth were white and even, like, perfectly spaced mints. Too much of that sounds like florid love poetry, or maybe the Song of Songs from the Bible where King Solomon compares his beloved's hair to a flock of goats in the mountains, which was probably more flattering in the early Iron Age Levant than it is today. 00:15:31 Tip #5: Mix and Match to Create a Vivid Description Number five: mix and match. To create a really vivid description, you can mix and match the techniques we've already described. Try to engage at least two of the senses and mix in a metaphor or simile or two. Let's have Nadia walk into the Dollar Commandant store again. “Nadia walked through the doors. The air conditioning hit her like a slap in the face after the summer heat, and everything smelled faintly of toilet bowl cleaner. Cluttered aisles stretched to the back of the store, their shelves laden with a hodgepodge of low cost merchandise. A bored cashier sat behind the register, eyes on her phone. The woman in a yellow sundress and flip flops held a sleeping toddler in one arm, her expression intent as she dug through a bin of plastic beach toys. It looked like the sort of place where Nadia could walk out with half the store merchandise under her coat. And so long as she was quiet, the cashier wouldn't look up from her phone.” With this we can create a more vivid description. We have similes, the slap in the face and the looks of the place. We also have engagement with two of the senses, the feel of the cold air and the smell of the toilet bowl cleaner. This will also work with people, of course. Let's take another look at the scene where Maxine notices Nadia for the first time. “The customer put some beef jerky and freeze dried fruit on the counter, the packaging crinkling and rustling, and Maxine blinked and put down her phone. The woman smiled at her from the other side of the counter, short ,wiry, and pale. She wore a stark black peacoat of all things, and her smile was unsettling. Combined with grey eyes, it made Maxine think of a shark.” Once again, we have engaged two senses, sight and hearing. We also have an indirect metaphor where Nadia makes Maxine think of a shark. How much description you use is up to you, of course, but in some situations may need to use more, which we'll discuss right now. 00:17:06 Tip #6: More Description is needed in Science Fiction and Fantasy Number six: more description is needed in science fiction and fantasy. One advantage of anything set in the modern world is they can often get away with using less description, since people immediately know what you're talking about. For example, consider this sentence: “The police officer walked into the McDonald's, the lunchtime crowd easing away from him.” Almost certainly you immediately had a clear picture of the scene. You know what a police officer usually looks like, and you've probably been in or worked at a crowded fast food restaurant during the lunch rush. You could quickly use this to establish the scene and move on to the more interesting parts of the story. If a specific detail requires more elaboration, like the police officer is there to arrest one of the employees or customers, you could spend more time describing the scene, but the point is that for things set in the roughly contemporary world, you can often get away with using less description because the audience will be familiar with the things you are talking about. However, with fantasy and science fiction, you often don't have this option because you're describing strange and fantastical things that do not exist in the real world. Consider this sentence: “The Orcish warrior walked into the tavern, all eyes turning to face him.” Enough people have seen the Lord of the Rings movies and played World of Warcraft or Dungeons and Dragons that most people will probably have a vague mental image of a hulking green skinned guy walking into a fantasy tavern. Of course, is it a Warcraft style orc come to get a drink? A savage but honorable warrior? Or is it a Tolkienian orc, a corrupted servant of the dark power? It’s when you would start to get really specific or start inventing new concepts that you have to use more description. Let's take another example from the Cloak Mage series, the anthrophage. In the books, anthrophages are carnivorous monsters that haunt the shadow lands and Nadia winds up fighting them quite often. Since the concept of an anthrophages is something I made-up for the series, I needed to spend a bit more time describing the creature so that people will know what I'm talking about. “The anthrophage prowled toward Nadia. The miserable thing was roughly human shaped, but gaunt, the muscles like bundles of piano wire beneath its mottled gray hide. Black claws jutted from its fingers and toes, and a row of dark spines ran down its back. Yellow eyes glared up at Nadia over a fang filled mouth and a black crater of a nose and the rotting grease smell of the creature’s breath came to her nostrils.” That probably gives you a good idea of what an anthrophage will look and smell like. As with the orcish warrior in the tavern you mentioned above, fantasy and science fiction has moved enough into the mainstream that many people at least have a vague idea of what an orcish warrior, an elven wizard, and a dwarven blacksmith look like, or at least enough not to be totally lost. Someone who only reads, like Jason Bourne style thrillers might get a bit lost picking up a fantasy novel, but if you're writing fantasy, odds are they aren’t your target audience anyway. However, the more original and unique your concept, the more time you will have to spend describing it, especially if you get really strained with your concepts like, say, the McGuffin of your science fiction book is a thousand sided crystalline prism that exists in multiple universes simultaneously and causes everyone who looks at it to simultaneously see their greatest fear and deepest desire, you're definitely going to have to spend some words describing this thing. 00:20:14 Tip #7: Infuse Characterization into Descriptions Number seven: infuse characterization into descriptions. It's a kind of rule of thumb in law enforcement and investigation that if five different witnesses see a car accident, you will get five completely different and often contradictory accounts of what actually happened. This is because human perception is quite fallible and can vary based on a thousand different factors, an annoying reality for investigators. But you can use it to your advantage in descriptions by infusing characterization into them. What do I mean by this? How a character describes something in the narrative can also give valuable insight into the character. We've talked about how to make descriptions less boring, and this is an excellent way to do it, engaging multiple senses and using metaphors and similes will make descriptions more vivid, but adding characterization will further intensify the description and also help you illuminate the character. For example, imagine a homeless man sitting on the curb outside of a gas station. How a character describes the homeless man will probably provide an insight into the character. A woman who has previously been attacked or robbed by a homeless man would react with fear and describe him in threatening terms. A police officer would note details about potential criminal violations and threat assessment. A charity volunteer or social worker might note the man's poor condition and health problems. A covert field operative might realize that the homeless man is, in fact another agent in disguise, or is being paid to act as a lookout for the operative’s enemies. A necromancer would consider the homeless man's viability as a potential undead minion. I am a fantasy writer mostly, after all. Let's go back to Maxine, the cashier of the Dollar Commandant. If the scene is written from her point of view, we can use her description of Nadia to get a grasp on Maxine's character. For example, let's say Maxine hates her job and is kind of lazy. “She put down her phone with a sigh and looked at the customer. A short, wiry, woman stood on the other side of the counter. She wore an oversized black peacoat, her sharp gray eyes watching Maxine. A small pile of beef jerky and freeze dried fruit sat on the counter, placed there while Maxine had been watching her phone. That coat was way too hot for the weather. Probably some skinny little rich girl who exercised way too much, Maxine decided with disdain, and so was cold all the time, which meant that Maxine had to ring up her stupid jerky.” That gives us a good insight into Maxine while describing the scene. By contrast, let's say Maxine is kindlier and mostly contented with her life. “She put down her phone and smiled at the customer. A short, wiry woman stood on the other side of the counter. She wore an oversized black peacoat, her sharp features arranged in a polite smile. A small pile of beef jerky and freeze dried fruit sat on the counter, placed there while Maxine had been looking at the new pictures of her grandchildren. That coat was way too hot for the weather, and the woman inside it looked almost underfed. Maxine wondered if the poor girl was sick or had some kind of circulatory problem.” Or let's say that Maxine is actually neither of those things, but is a high end criminal and is working at the Dollar Commandant as part of the scheme that will allow her gang to clear out the safe deposit boxes at the bank across the street. “She put down her phone and smiled at the customer, maintaining the role of a genial cashier, but a prickle of alarm went down her back. An oddly dressed women stood on the other side of the counter, short, wearing oversized black peacoat, black jeans, and steel toed work boots. The coat was more than big enough to hide a shoulder holster, and it was hot enough that the woman should have been sweating beneath the coat, but she wasn't. The women had cold gray eyes and a sharp face. Maxine known some killers in her time, and they all had eyes like that. Had the gang been tumbled? No, they were far enough along that the police would have shown up by now. Maybe it was just a coincidence. Maxine realized that she had frozen for too long and then smiled and started running packages of beef jerky and freeze dried apples over the scanner, resolved to get this customer out the door before she noticed anything amiss.” Any metaphors and engaging multiple senses can make the descriptions more vivid, but adding characterization to them will make them even more vivid, reveal insight into your characters, and also help move the plot along. 00:24:06 Tip #8: Keep it as Short as Possible And finally, number eight: keep it as short as possible. How much description should you use? As much as you need, but no more. I'm aware that is something of a tautology, but it's true. You should use as much description as you need to convey what you want to describe, make it as vivid as possible, and then no more. The reason for this is that you are telling the story and you do need to get on with it at some point. Remember our wind resistance metaphor from above? Too much description will slow things down and you might have the reader paging ahead to when the action resumes. The classic example of this is a romance novel where the heroine and love interests have an…encounter, and then there are pages and pages of surrendering and taking and opening and metaphorical soaring and so forth. Other genres have their characteristic weak points with description as well. A fantasy novel might spend too much time describing a fight scene or a science fiction novel could spend too much time describing an alien creature. Thriller authors sometimes like to show off their research a little too much by describing the protagonist’s firearms in pages and pages of loving detail. Always remember that you are telling a story and it's important to get on with the story. It's good to have vivid descriptions, but you don't want to get bogged down with them. That rental agent who painted a word portrait of the duplex didn't close the sale. But hopefully these tips and tricks will help you to paint vivid word portraits in your books. So that is it for this week. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this week's episode, we take a look at the perils and advantages of audiobook production for indie authors. A preview of DRAGONSKULL: FURY OF THE BARBARIANS (as narrated by Brad Wills) is included at the end of the episode. It’s time for a new Coupon of the Week! This week’s coupon is for the audiobook of GHOST IN THE FORGE, as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of GHOST IN THE FORGE for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code: GHOSTFORGE The coupon code is valid through October 7th, 2023, so if you find yourself in need of a good listen as we advance into fall, perhaps it’s time to get a new audiobook! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00- Intro and Coupon of the Week Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 169 of the Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is September, the 22nd, 2023 and today we're going to discuss whether or not indie authors should produce audiobooks. Before we get to our main topics, let's do Coupon of the Week. This week's Coupon of the Week is for the audiobook of Ghost in the Forge as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of Ghosts in the Forge for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code, GHOSTFORGE. That coupon code is valid through October the 7th, 2023. So if you find yourself in need of a good listen as we advance in the fall, perhaps it's time to get a new audiobook. You can get the coupon code and the link to the store in the show notes. Let's have some updates on my current writing projects and some questions and comments from readers, and then we'll get to this week’s main topic. 00:00:59- Writing Updates I am almost to the end of Chapter 15 of 20 of Ghost in the Serpent, which means I'm just about 75% of the way through the rough draft, so I'm hoping I will wrap that up soon, probably before the end of September, but possibly in the first week of October. The audiobook of Dragonskull: Fury of the Barbarians is finished and is currently processing through all the stores, so hopefully we'll be able to announce that soon. And in fact, we're going to include an excerpt from Dragonskull: Fury of the Barbarians at the end of this episode, so you will be able to listen to a sample. Dragonskull: Tales of the Sorcerer is also going to be started. I think we're going to start recording that on Monday if all goes well, so hopefully we should be able to get that out and available before the end of the year. And once Ghost in the Serpent is finished and published, the next project will be Cloak of Embers, which I hope to start writing in October. That is a neat segue into questions from readers. 00:02:01 Reader Questions Our first question this week is from John, who asks: This is great news. I've been wanting to read more about Caina and her friends, and now we're finally going to get a new series with her. I just checked and there is no pre-order available yet, so please let me know where we can get this one. I don't usually do pre-orders because setting the logistics of it can be kind of a hassle but if all goes well, Ghost in the Serpent should be out sometime in October 2023, so not too much longer. Our next question is from Michael, who asks: Have you tried Starfield, Jonathan or do you intend to at some point when you have the time? I was surprised at just how much like Skyrim in space it is. I have in fact tried Starfield. I have Xbox Game Pass for the Xbox I got last year and since Starfield’s in Game Pass, I went to install it and give it a try. Michael's right, it is very much like Skyrim in space where instead of a sword and magic spells, you have a laser gun in the spaceship. Though if you get an axe, you can fight with it like it's a sword. I haven't had much time to play it because I've been focused on trying to get Ghost in the Serpent finished, but I should have more time to play it soon, I think. Our final question this week is from Godfrey who asks: I love all your books that I've read so far. Still a few to go. I'm slightly confused. How about the audio availability of your Cloak Games and Cloak Mage series? Both these series, which are some of my favorites, only appear to have audio available for the first few books. I'm wondering therefore, if there are plans to issue the rest of each of these two series as audiobooks. Thanks for the kind words, Godfrey. I am glad you enjoyed the Cloak Mage and Cloak Games books and in answer to your question, this is a perfect segue into the main topic of the week, whether or not indie authors should produce audiobooks. 00:03:45: Main Topic of the Week I had a conversation the other day about how indie authors sometimes try to produce audiobooks only to give up because the audio books don't sell or don't turn a profit. This is quite understandable. Audiobook self-publishing is like the hard mode of ebook self-publishing. Everything about the process is slower, harder, and more expensive than publishing ebooks, especially the more expensive part. As I've logged before with a bit of work, it's possible to produce an ebook entirely with free software. Audiobooks, if you want to hire a really good narrator, are going to cost between $200 and to $400 per finished hour. So, some basic math will demonstrate the difficulty. At 10 hours long, an audio book of your novel might cost you around $3,000 to produce. If you sell it exclusively via ACX, which means Audible, Apple and Amazon, you will probably get an average of $5 per sale, which means you have to sell about 600 copies to turn a profit. If you sell it through wide distribution, which means you can sell in stores other than Apple, Audible, and Amazon, you will probably get around $2.40 for an ACX sale. Though what you will get on with other stores can range from anywhere to like $1.00 in the library services to almost $6.50 on Chirp and Google Play, depending on your sale price. So just on ACX sales alone, you would need about 1,240 sales to get back your money. Therefore, if you are an indie author and you are thinking about audiobooks, it's a good idea to take a hard look at your finances and business plan and think about whether it's really a smart idea or not. All that said, I have turned a profit on several of my audiobook projects, Frostborn number six through eleven have all made back what I spent on them, and so have about six of the eighteen Ghost books. I'm pretty sure they'll all eventually earn back what I spent. I am unsure if the Cloak Games or Cloak Mage books will earn back. To refer to Godfrey’s earlier question, so that's why I haven't done any more of them for a while. With all that in mind, here are some….actually, how many tips are these?…with all that in mind, here are 9 tips I found that make audiobook production profitable. 00:05:56: Tips for Audiobook Production #1: Deductions Depending on how you have organized your publishing business, you may be able to take the production cost of your audiobooks as a business deduction on your taxes, which could reduce your total tax liability, i.e. how much you owe the government when you file taxes. Note that I am not an accountant or a lawyer and you should obtain tax advice from an accountant qualified for your jurisdiction and legal advice from a lawyer licensed to practice in your jurisdiction. That said, the whole idea of deductions sometimes gets sneered at by people ignorant of how taxes actually work, like it's some sort of trick which people use to buy themselves caviar but in most taxing jurisdictions, you can deduct business expenses from your taxes. Though what qualifies as business expenses will vary depending on where you live and what sort of business you actually have, basically business deductions are the governments way of saying spend this income on something on our list of approved expenses to benefit the economy or we're going to take it as taxation, so in my specific situation and business structure, audio production is a deductible expense, which is very beneficial when it comes time to file taxes for the year, but again, consult with a qualified accountant regarding your specific situation. Of course, there are still taxes on audiobook payments. I have to file 1099 Forms for my narrators, which means they have to pay taxes on the payment as income. When I file taxes and then any sales of the audiobook count as taxable business income, to say nothing of the state sales taxes the customer pays when buying the audiobook. Uncle Sam has centuries of practice of getting his cut and he's very, very good at it. In my frank opinion, it's wisest just to figure out what you legally owe, preferably with the help of a qualified accountant, and paying that. A lot of otherwise smart people have brought themselves a lot of woe by ignoring that obvious truth. 00:07:35: Tip #2 #2 Finishing a Series I've noticed that in fantasy and science fiction, readers really dislike an unfinished series. I had originally planned to make Silent Order open end with sort of an adventure of the week format, but that really didn’t work out. I think you could do a more open-ended series structure in genres like mysteries, thriller, and regional crime, but science fiction and fantasy readers have come to expect a complete series arc with a definite and satisfying conclusion at the end. Audiobook science fiction and fantasy listeners have that as well, but it's even more intense, selling just one audiobook that isn't part of a series is an uphill climb. I have noticed a definite uptick in sales once an audiobook series is complete. Listeners really like to be able to start a series and just listen on straight through to the end. That said, getting to a finished audio book series is a lot of work and money. Frostborn was 15 books long. The Ghosts and Ghost Exile together were 18 books. The last few books, and though all those series were longer than usual, which means they were more expensive to produce. So if you've written a really long series, getting the entire series in audiobook can be a huge commitment of time and money. As an example, the first Frostborn audiobook I self published was Frostborn: The Dark Warden in late 2018, and the final book finally came out in June 2022. The final audio book finally came out in June 2022, almost four years later. Why the delay? Money ran short on occasion or I didn't have time to work on it or there were health difficulties and then COVID happened in the middle of all that, but now the series is complete and is consistently one of my best sellers. Audio books number one through five in the Frostborn series were produced by Tantor and then I did number 6 through 15 myself. 6 through 11 have all earned back where I spent and I expect 12 through 15 to reach that point sometime towards the end of 2024. So it was worth it to put them all out, but man, it was a lot of work to get there and I didn't even do the actual narrating. I paid someone else to do it. That said, if you write shorter series of books than I do, putting them out into audio will be obviously less expensive and less effort. 00:09:37: Tip #3 #3:  Ebook advertising Basically, if the ebook of your book sells well, then odds are the audiobook is going to do well as well. I've experimented a lot with this, but I haven't found very many very good ways of directly advertising audiobooks. More on that soon. It's easier to advertise ebooks than audiobooks, at least in my experience. So rather than trying to advertise audiobook, it’s generally better to advertise the ebooks attached to the audiobooks. As an example, I'm advertising The Ghosts Omnibus One at $0.99 right now. For every 10 or so sales of the ebook, I seem to get one sale of the audio book. Of course the ebook gets  about $0.35 a sale while the audiobook does roughly between $5 and $5.90 per sale, so the audiobooks really do help with the profitability of any advertising, especially on a discounted ebook. Interestingly, this means that if you have an ebook series that is also available in audiobook, that means it becomes easier to profitably advertise the series, because you will also have money coming in from the audiobooks. I've had a couple of months where 40% of the profit from advertising Frostborn and The Ghosts came from the audiobooks. Though as we've said, getting the entire series in audiobook can be a significant challenge. 00:10:47: Tip #4 #4: Bundles One thing I found that works well for audiobook sales is bundling. Like, The Ghosts Omnibus One which I mentioned above, is a bundle containing Child of the Ghosts, Ghost in the Flames, and Ghost in the Blood along with the short story Ghost Aria. This lets me have the nice quartered cover with four different titles on it so that it looks very good on Audible. Audible is basically the reason ebook bundles work so well. There have been some changes in recent years with the addition of Audible Plus, but Audible still mostly works as a subscription credit system. That means you subscribe to Audible and you get your credit a month, which you can then use to buy an audiobook on the store. Since you have the credit, it makes sense to get the longest possible audio book you can for your one credit to maximize the value. The Ghost Omnibus One was the first bundle I did in March 2020. I wasn't expecting much to happen because a lot of other stuff was going on in March of 2020, as you might recall, but the Ghosts Omnibus One was 39 hours long, which made for an attractive value for your credit. It did really well and was my first audio book title to sell more than 1,000 copies in total. I've since had good luck with other bundles. The rest of The Ghosts and Ghost Exile series, and then the Malison complete series audiobook. 00:12:04: Tip #5 #5: Going Wide. It might be worthwhile to go wide with your audio books, which means having them available on platforms other than Audible, Amazon and Apple. ACX, Amazon's audiobook creation platform has been nasty hook to it. If you set your audio books exclusive to ACX you can get 40% royalties, but if you go non exclusive which is what Y means in this context you get 25%. Sometimes depending on promotions and so forth and the weird way ACX's accounting works, in practice it turns out to be around 12%. For a lot of writers, it’s worthwhile to go exclusive with ACX because the money will be better and Audible, Amazon are the dominant market in audio book publishing. That said, it is in fact, possible to make more money at the other stores. Google Play, Chirp, Kobo, and Spotify all offer better royalty rates than ACX, even if they don't have the number of users that Audible does. Going wide also allows you to offer direct sales, i.e. selling off your own Shopify or Payhip store or other similar e-commerce platform. Part of the reason I can offer 75% off audio books for my Coupon of the Week is because even with the massive discount, I still make almost as much as I would with a non exclusive sale off ACX. Another advantage is that you get your audiobook into the various library services. The way most of these work is that the library or library system most likely gets access to a big catalog of books and ebooks and audiobooks and the library system only gets charged if someone actually checks out one of the titles. The rate per checkout for the author is pretty low. It's usually around $1.30 USD, but somebody was checking your audiobook out from the library probably wasn't going to buy it themselves, and the $1.30 is still better than nothing. We've mentioned earlier how if an ebook sells well, the attached audio book will probably sell as well. If you have a lot of ebook sales on non Amazon stores, then it is definitely worthwhile to think about going wide with your audiobooks. 00:13:50 Tip #6 Number 6: Chirp Deals Additionally, going wide offer is access to the one effective way I found of directly advertising audio books, Chirp deals. Chirp is owned and run by Bookbub. If you're familiar with Bookbub, you know they send out a daily e-mail newsletter containing links to free or discounted ebooks and authors and publishers pay for spots in those newsletters. I myself have done it many times. However, Bookbub could never promote audiobooks because Audible was the dominant force in audiobook publishing, and Audible doesn't let authors or publishers set the price for any audiobooks. To get around this problem, BookBub started its own audiobook store, Chirp Books, where they could sell audiobooks. Chirp offers a daily e-mail newsletter with a list of discounted books, and I've had good results with Child of the Ghosts, Ghost in the Cowl, and Cloak of Dragons. The reason those three audiobooks worked well is because they all have a long tail of sequels: 8 each for Child of the Ghost and Ghost in the Cowl and 5 after Cloak of Dragons. Usually for a Chirp deal, the first audiobook in the series is $0.99 and then I set the second and third books to $2.99 for the duration of the $0.99 promotion on the first book, which lasts a month. Obviously I will sell the most copies of the $0.99 audiobook and get about $0.30 a pop for those sales. But I get just under $1.50 for each of the sales on the $2.99 books and some lights them and goes on to get the entire series through. So the later titles in the series can generate like $5.50 per sale depending on price. This works so well that Cloak of Dragons has actually made more from its Chirp deal than it did from the entire time it has been on ACX. So if your audio books are wide and you have a series of them, is definitely worthwhile to apply for Chirp deal. That said, if you just have one or two audiobooks, you probably would not get much benefit from it. 00:15:46: Tip #7 #7 Time and Chance. The more audio titles you have across more platforms, the more likely it is that something will take off unexpectedly or do unexpectedly. Well, I had a good example of that in July. My payment from Findaway Voices was usually high. I dug into the data and found out that the Ghost series had experienced a very good month on Storytel. It's one of the stores you can accessed through Findaway Voices distribution. They're based in Sweden and mostly distributed in European and Asian countries. I honestly had only a vague idea that Storytel existed at all. But because my audio books were available there, I had a very good audio month in July, thanks to Storytel, sales. Granted, “plan on getting lucky” is not good planning and should not be in a business plan. However, for good luck to happen, it takes time and effort. Luck is like lightning and the more lightning rods you build, the better the chance of catching some lightning. It's just that audiobook lightning rods take a really long time to build. ACX famously offers royalty share audio book productions where instead of paying the narrator, you split the royalties from the audio book for seven years. If you pay for production, it's not unrealistic to project seven years or so to make your money back. Like, I started on Frostborn audio books in the fall of 2018 and finished the series in audio four years later in the summer of 2022. And like I mentioned above, 6 of the 10 books recorded in that time have turned to profit, which is actually really good in terms of the time frame. 00:17:12: Tip #8 #8: Beware of reviews. If you're new to the audiobook space, one thing to watch out for is the overall hostile tone of the negative reviews. I think some indie authors have gotten spooked by negative reviews that were weren't actually indicative of how the audio book was selling or was perceived. I have the feeling that the easier form of media is consumed, the nastier the reviews. Like, a book takes some amount of mental effort to read, but it's less effort to listen to than an audiobook and even less effort than watching a movie or playing a video game, so you are more likely to find over the top negative reviews. The easier form of a media is to consume, which is why you find things like people posting 7 hour video reviews of why they hate Starfield, or the PlayStation or something. I have an additional theory that this is one of the unfortunate side effects of social media. Negativity always gets more likes and clicks so some people become even more negative to get the likes and clicks, which sets up a vicious cycle. Anyway, what this means in the audiobook space is that you can have most perfect book ever written, narrated by the most beautiful and charismatic voice ever to speak a human language, a voice that would have made kings and emperors listen enraptured in ancient days, and people will still leave long angry reviews because they didn't like the way weather was pronounced. So when you publish your audiobook, be aware that it's going to get some negative reviews and don't panic when you do. I'm afraid it's simply inevitable and part of the process. Your audiobook will not be for everyone. The challenge is connecting your audiobook to the audience that will appreciate it, which is why we were talking about marketing so much. 00:18:40: Tip #9 #9 Selling AI audiobooks is even harder. Because audio audiobook production is expensive and difficult, and AI technology has advanced so much in the last few years, people have been experimenting with creating and selling AI generated audiobooks. This will not be the solution to the challenge of audio production. People seem to either love AI or hate AI, and I definitely have a strongly negative personal opinion about generative AI. That said, it won't be as amazing as its advocates think, nor as dire as the doomsayers believe. People who hate AI or love AI both have a vision where someday you'll be able to type in a prompt like: Lit RPG book where Luke Skywalker and Sherlock Holmes team up to Sauron on Muppet Treasure Island, and the AI will spit out a perfectly crafted book, movie, or game that matches that prompt. But this is as much a fantasy as Lysenkoism or the Whig theory of history, or Rumpelstiltskin’s attempting to generate infinite wealth by spinning straw into fake gold. As much as people like Bob Iger and David Zaslav would like to get rid of all those annoying actors or writers and replace them with AI, the technology isn't good enough, and the courts and the legislatures generally don't seem to be in favor of copywriting AI generated material. But that's a larger discussion beyond the scope of this podcast episode for the specific area of my audiobooks. The problem is that the AI can generate a voice that sounds almost like a perfect human voice, fluently reading the text. This has the unfortunate side effect of triggering the uncanny valley effect and making it difficult to listen to the audiobook for a long period of time because the voice swiftly becomes boring. You know the voice narrating the drug side effects at the end of commercials, where it's like Zinoplav can cause blah blah blah. Imagine listening to that voice narrating a nine hour romance audio book. The performative aspect of audio books is hard to quantify, but it is undeniably real and undeniably has a strong effect on the finished audiobook. I experimented with AI audiobooks on YouTube a bit over the last two years. Google Play came out with a program where you could automatically convert one of your ebooks to an AI narrated audiobook. Since I never had any intention of turning Silent Order into audiobooks, I felt comfortable experimenting with the program for that series since it wasn't screwing anyone out of a job. I didn't think the results were good enough to sell, but I did post them on YouTube for free, though, to be fair, I did make some money from the attached ads. What did I learn? First off, there isn't a lot of money in it. In the time I've had AI narrated audiobooks on YouTube, I made about 60% of what it would cost to turn Silent Order: Iron Hand into a real audiobook. Second, people really, really hate AI voices, like intensely and with a passion. They hate them, if a brief glance at the YouTube comments for those audiobooks will reveal, this is one of the things that the Pro AI advocates never seem to accept. People generally hate AI generated stuff. Like, people have no problem using generative AI to write their homework assignments or doing unpleasant writing tasks they don't want to do, like writing cover letters. That kind of thing. But when it comes to actually consuming entertainment media, most people hate AI like this. This sounds, looks, reads, like an AI did it has become a common insult online. 00:21:55 The Marvel show Secret Invasion got a lot of flack because they used AI generated images for the opening titles. Though to be fair, that show had a lot of other problems, so I don't really think AI is a way to lower the cost of audiobook production or to generate a viable audiobook for sale. I think the eventual use of the technology will be to integrate with ereaders. Like say you want your phone to read a book aloud to you. You'll select the voice and accent you want and the e-reader app will read a book to you. In fact, you already can do that on many devices, just with voices that aren't quite as advanced. In my opinion, I think that's a big win for accessibility for visually impaired readers and listeners. But I don't think it's going to replace human narration. 00:22:37 Conclusion Producing audiobooks can be very satisfying and help you reach an audience that otherwise wouldn't encounter your work, but they're definitely not a get rich quick scheme, and they are unquestionably a whole lot of work. If you're an indie author, should you turn your books into audiobooks? I'm afraid the answer has to be individualized. You have to take a good, honest look at your finances, business structure, and goals, and decide if audio production audiobook production will work for you or not. That said, it is nice when you get the emails from listeners saying they listen to the entire series on a cross country drive or while doing something difficult and unpleasant. And with that in mind, thank you all for listening to so many of my audio books. 00:23:18 Conclusion So that is it for this week. Thanks for listening to the Pulp Writer Show. I hope you find the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave for review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe, stay healthy, and see you all next week. And now we'll close out the show with the sample of Dragonskull: Fury of the Barbarians as narrated by Brad Willis. 00:23:44: Audiobook excerpt of Dragonskull: Fury of the Barbarians

In this week's episode, we take a look at some of the fantasy worldbuilding decisions that went into the FROSTBORN series. I also discuss finishing the original HALO trilogy on the Xbox console. It’s time for a new Coupon of the Week! This week’s coupon is for the audiobook of GHOST IN THE STONE, as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of GHOST IN THE STONE for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code: GHOSTSTONE The coupon code is valid through September 29th, 2023, so if you need to listen to something while raking leaves, it might be time to get yourself a new audiobook! TRANSCRIPT: Hello everyone. Welcome to Episode 168 of the Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is September the 15th, 2023 and today we're going to discuss fantasy worldbuilding in the Frostborn series. We'll also talk a bit about how I finished the Halo trilogy and comments on last week's episode and some updates on my current writing projects. But before we get to all that, let's first have Coupon of the Week for this week. 00:00:28 This week's coupon is for the audiobook of Ghost in the Stone as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of Ghost in the Stone for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code GHOSTSTONE. Again, that's Ghost Stone spelled GHOSTSTONE. It will also be in the show notes. The coupon code is valid through September 29th, 2023. So if you need to listen to something while raking leaves, this might be a good time to get yourself a new audiobook. 00:00:57 What I am working on right now is Ghost in the Serpent, the first new Caina book in two years and the first book of new Ghost Armor series. I'm currently 36,000 words into it, which puts me on Chapter 8 or 9 of 20. I can't remember which, I'll double check and we will talk a little bit more about that later in the show. Once Ghost in the Serpent is out, I'm hoping to have that out in October and then I will start in the next Nadia book Cloak of Embers. I haven't done a Nadia book since April, which is a bit of a time delay, but I wanted to spend the summer finishing things. As I mentioned with The Dragonskull Series and The Silent Order series and now both of them are done. So it is time to start something new, which would be the Ghost in the Serpent and Ghost Armor series in this case. 00:01:46 In audio book news we are doing audio book proofing for Dragonskull: Fury of the Barbarians right now and hopefully that will be wrapped up this coming week and then we can get the audiobook out before too much longer. 00:02:01 Before we get to our other topics, I wanted to read a comment from longtime reader William about last week's episode about finishing The Silent Order series, and William has to say: It's hard to put a number on it, but writing different series and different genres probably helps bring in new readers. Silent Order was the first of your series that I started reading specifically because of a post on William King's blog about your experiment with Eclipse Hand followed by Cloak Games, Demonsouled, The Ghosts and eventually Frostborn. Even if Frostborn and its sequel series at your best sellers (and they are), I might never have picked up the Gray Knight if I just stumbled across it on Amazon. An example would be Games Workshop, which started out making a lot of odd games and spin offs aside from its two massively popular miniature war games. These both help pick them new players and encourage writers to explore new themes which fed into and enriched the main games. Naturally, they didn't sell as well as the main games, and occasionally they didn't sell very well at all. So gradually the marketing and sales department managed to shut down any such projects, and for a decade or so, their two main games grew staler and sales stagnated, and then they started trying to diversify their offerings again, as well as improve community outreach and other initiatives and sales improved. The post he's referring to was one about Eclipse Hand, where you'll remember if you listened last week's episode, I had written Silent Order Eclipse Hand entirely with free software like Ubuntu Linux, Libre Office, Office Writer, Sigil, and so forth, just to prove a point that it could be done and I did. So it it's funny how there are many different ways that readers can feed into your books. And that's one of the reasons I wanted to persist with that Lit RPG series, which I'm working on the side right now in hopes of, you know, bringing in new readers. But that reminds me of a verse from the Book of Ecclesiastes, where it's cast your bread upon the waters and in seven days it will return to you. There's a couple different interpretations of that passage, but one of them is that sometimes it's good to take chances on things because you don't know how it will come back to you later. And so if you have any other comments or questions that you would like answered on the show, leave a comment or question on my website or Facebook page, and we'll see if we include it. 00:04:18 And now some more information about Ghost in the Serpent. When I mentioned that my next book would be Ghost in the Serpent and that got both an enthusiastic response and a few questions. So let's answer them here. When will Ghost in the Serpent come out? Hopefully October if all goes well and nothing drastic comes up. When in the series’ timeline does Ghost in the Serpent take place? Just about a year after Ghost in the Sun, which you will recall was the last Caina book I wrote back at the end of 2021. How many books will the Ghost Armor series have? I am planning for six. Will there be an audiobook for Ghost in the Serpent? We are hopefully planning to record Ghost in the Serpent in November, if all goes well. And do you need to reread the previous Ghost books first, before reading Ghost in the Serpent? The answer is, if you want to. The truth is, I can try to make Ghost in the Serpent as stand alone as I want, and I will try to, but people will still want to read the previous books anyway, like I had to laugh when I saw some of the coverage for the Ahsoka TV show with the show’s creators insisting that you didn't need to watch Star Wars Rebels or the Clone Wars first to understand the show. Meanwhile all these content mills are coming out with articles like 27 essential Rebels episodes to watch before Ahsoka. So if you've never read any of the ghost books, the first book, Child of the Ghosts, is free on all ebook platforms, and the bundle of the first three books, The Ghosts Omnibus One, is only $0.99 in U.S. dollars on all platforms at the moment. Next question was when are you going to write another Nadia book?  After Ghost in the Serpent is done. It will be called Cloak of Embers and will hopefully come out in November or December. Finally, what will Ghost in the Serpent be about? Well, you'll just have to read and find out. One preview: we never did find out why the surge someone send Kylon back to New Kyre. 00:16:48 One amusing thing that happened recently was that I accidentally finished both Halo 2 and Halo 3 on the Xbox. I've mentioned before that I didn't play any console games at all from about 1998 to 2019, so I missed out on the entire Halo series, but in 2022 I got an Xbox and after I used it to beat Skyrim, I started in on the Halo Series and I beat the original Halo single player campaign in October of 2022. This year I fired up Halo 2 and started playing through the main campaign. I sort of got distracted for a while in May, but I came back to it in August and picked it up again. I kept plugging away at the main campaign and to my surprise I suddenly beat it. Halo 2 ends on something of a cliffhanger, so I could see why Halo 3 was such a big deal back in 2007. Naturally, I had to keep going, and since Halo 3 is included in the Master Chief Collection, which is included in Xbox Game Pass, I started up on Halo 3. Apparently in its first week of sales back in 2007, the game made more than $300 million, which is like major motion picture territory, and in my opinion, Halo 3 totally deserved it. There are some amazing levels in that game, like the bit where the Master Chief has to take down the two giant enemy next simultaneously or the final level when Master Chief and the Arbiter have to escape the collapsing Halo with Master Chief driving the warthog and the Arbiter running the machine gun on the back, it's like Mario Kart, but with firearms. I think the original Halo remains my favorite because of its relative simplicity. There are only so many weapons and so many enemy types, but the game puts them to good use. I have to say console gaming is a very different experience than PC gaming, I said I didn't play any console games at all, from about ‘98 to 2019, but that isn't to say I played no games, I just spent a lot of time PC gaming in the 90s and 2000s and in the 90s, that meant fiddling with autoexec.bat and config.sys and making sure emm386.exe was configured properly. Oh, and making sure the sound card was configured to use a different IRQ than the other devices on the system. Granted, if you were born in the 90s or the 2000s, you probably have no idea what I was talking about just now, but if you know you know, whereas with the console you just download the game and it almost always works. Very different experience! Though I have to say my favorite part of Halo has to be the parts where you get a tank and start blasting away at the enemy. Very satisfying. We had a couple of good comments about Halo when I posted about it on Facebook. Reader Jeremiah says: My son and I played the Master Chief collection together and of course use the skulls which he had previously collected such as infinite ammo, etcetera. I forget which Halo game it was, might have been 3 but not sure. One of the skulls allowed you to practically fly by jumping and holding that button down. You had a blast on that. You'd crash into a wall going fast and die, or just slide past all the enemies and keep on going. I think that's one of the reasons why Halo is so enduringly popular, much like Mario Kart is because it gives such good multiplayer experience that hopefully you can build some positive family memories around. Our next comment about that comes from JK who says: I used to do PC game phone tech support in the late 80s and had to actually talk people through editing their autoexec.bat and config.sys files. Well my hat is off to you, JK. That sounds extremely difficult. By the time I started doing tech phone support, that was in the age of Windows 98, Windows 2000, and Windows Millennium Edition, I don't know if any of your listeners out there remember Windows Millennium Edition, but it was deeply terrible and broke frequently, so I spent a lot of time dealing with phone support with Windows 98 and Windows Millennium Edition, especially Windows Millenium Edition, but that was still less complex and less aggravating than trying to talk someone through fixing their autoexec.bat file over the phone had to have been. 00:10:12 Now on to our main topic this week, a question about fantasy world building in the Frostborn series. This comes from reader Paloma, who asked a question about Andomhaim: A question: The Magistri get married and have families, but I don't remember any Magistrius in the books having any woman or man, though it's hard to think like that with mentality of the Middle Age world with them, I hope not that the men in this situation are like monks because I hope Joaquin has someone amazing in his future. In answer to that question, we're going to talk about it for a while. In the Frostborn world, the Magistri can get married. Minor spoiler if you read the Frostborn: The Shadow Prison, the Magistrius Camorak marries a widowed baker after the Frostborn War after she essentially bakes her way into his heart. The Magistri were founded at a time when Andomhaim’s population was low and so everyone of every station of life was encouraged to have children. A few of the first Magistri wanted the Order of the Magistri to become a monastic religious order that happened to wield magic, but there was sufficient opposition to the idea that it didn't happen. They sort of compromised halfway where all magic users in Andomhaim would be required to join the Magistri, but could still have possessions and get married. That said, the Magistri do tend to get married at a much lower rate than the nobles and commoners for three reasons. First reason is that Andomhaim has an overall suspicion of magic. It's much stronger among the commoners than the nobles, but it's still there among the nobility. A lot of people remember that a significant portion of the Order of the Magistri sided with Tarrabus Carhaine and the Enlightened of Incariel during the Civil War, and the Frostborn series. There are many, many stories about Magistri going bad that have worked their way into the folklore of Andomhaim. The evil wizard is as much of a stock character in the songs and tales of Andomhaim as it is in modern day fantasy novels. This isn't entirely fair to the Magistri, of course, but the belief is there, though people who have been healed of serious injuries by the healing spell of the Magistri often they have a much higher opinion of the Order. The second reason is money. Magistri can get a stipend from the Order or from the noble in whose court they serve and they can't hold land. So though the Order as a whole can hold estates to support itself, marriage in Andomhaim, especially between nobles and wealthy merchants, is usually more about property and producing heirs than romantic love. Since the Magistri don't bring any property to a marriage, that's often a nonstarter, especially among nobles. Commoner Magistri like Camorak are much more likely to get married. The third reason is that Magistri frequently becomes so enamored of their studies that they simply don't have time for marriage and very little interest in pursuing one. Magic, to paraphrase an old comedy sketch, is one heck of a drug, which is one of the reasons why Magistri do go bad. They become so obsessed with magical power and learning more secrets that they lose their connection to the rest of humanity. That said, it's not terribly common for male Magistri to have mistresses in the form of “housekeepers” and so forth. It's a bit like the Western Church during the Middle Ages. One thing that perpetually vexed clerical reformers in the Western Church throughout the Medieval period was how many priests had common law wives and concubines. Remember that life in the Middle Ages was frequently very harsh and while the village priests often would work lands and farm alongside the rest of the peasants, he nonetheless had had better income and more prestige than many other villagers. Becoming the priest’s “housekeeper” was often a more attractive prospect than the other available options. In fact, in some reasons, this arrangement became so frequent, so common that a frequent effort of clerical reform was attempting to keep a priest from passing his office down to his eldest son via his common law wife. In Andomhaim, the church has evolved to a structure more similar to the Eastern Church during the Middle Ages. Priests could be married, but bishops and abbots were expected to be unmarried and be celibate. While less frequent than the Magistrius with a housekeeper, female Magistri sometimes become the mistresses of the nobles in whose court they serve. It's a frequent enough occurrence that the beautiful young Magistria and the grim Lord whose eye is caught by the beautiful young Magistria are stock characters in these songs of Andomhaim like the evil wizard described above. Though, depending on the personality of the individual Magistria, bard who sings one of those songs within her earshot might gain a lifelong enemy. The Swordbearers, by contrast, are much more popular than the Magistri. Partly this is because they integrate in Andomhaim social structure more easily. Swordbearers can and frequently do hold land. Constantine Licinius is a Swordbearer and a dux of the Northern Land and Ridmark Arban is the Commons of Castarium and the Constable of Tarlion. And they're both Swordbearers. Since Swordbearers are supposed to protect the people of Andomhaim from dark magic and knights and nobles are supposed to protect the people of their lands, the two roles to use rather neatly. While both commoners and nobles have become Magistri and Swordbearers, there's something more aspirational about becoming a Swordbearer, a wandering knight who wields the sword of white fire against monsters. Knights of the Soulblade, of course, can get married even though they are more likely to leave widows and orphans than the Magistri. And consider the Swordbearers and the Magistri from the perspective of common peasant who doesn't know any of this, a Magistrius or Magistri would be a remote, aloof man or woman wielding abilities you don't understand, and that he or she might have gotten them from the devil. You've heard stories about how Magistri can serve dark powers. Maybe they can heal injuries, but at what cost? But then an urvaalg starts, probably around the forest near your village. It kills three of your cows, and it also kills the blacksmith’s son and two of the Lord’s men in arms. Nothing can kill the monster. And everyone locks themselves in their houses at night, fearing that the beast will come out of the darkness for them. Then a grim taciturn warrior arrives at your village, maybe alone, maybe with a few trusty companions with a sword of white fire. He kills the monster that's been terrorizing your village and leaves its head mounted on stake. And then he also kills one of the village elders. Apparently the elder had been controlling urvaalg with dark magic, using it to attack his rivals’ livestock, and in some cases, his rivals themselves. With that done, the sword bear moves on to his next quest. So both the Magistri and the Swordbearers are feared. But the Swordbearers are more respected. However, because of the violent nature of a Swordbearer's career, the Magistri in general tend to live much longer. 00:16:29 So I hope that provides a good explanation of some of the worldbuilding behind the FROSTBORN series, and that is it for this week. Thanks for listening to the Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this week's episode, I celebrate finishing the 14th and final book of the SILENT ORDER series by looking back at the writing of the series over the last six years. This week’s coupon is for the audiobook of GHOST IN THE STORM, as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of GHOST IN THE STORM for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code: GHOSTSTORM The coupon code is valid through September 29th, 2023, so if you find yourself needing entertainment as we proceed deeper into the school year, perhaps it's time to get a new audiobook! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Coupon of the Week Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 167 of the Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is September the 8th, 2023, and today we're taking a look back at writing the Silent Order series and a retrospective of the last six years. First, let's start off with Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon is for the audiobook of Ghost in the Storm as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of Ghosts in the Storm for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code GHOSTSTORM. That’s GHOSTSTORM and you can find the link and the coupon code in the show notes. This coupon code will be valid through September the 29th, 2023. So if you find yourself needing entertainment as you proceed deeper into the school year, perhaps it's time to get a new audiobook. 00:00:50 Writing Updates What have I been working on? Brand new-wise, as you can probably tell from the title of this episode, Silent Order: Pulse Hand is done and it is published and you can get it at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, Smashwords, and my Payhip. So the series is complete and the last book is now available and it's selling briskly. And thank you all for that. Now that that is done and my Summer of Finishing Things is finally finished with Dragon Skull and Silent Order being finished, I have started on the Ghost Armor series and the first book will be Ghost in the Serpent. And I am 10,000 words into it as this recording. And if all goes well, I'm hoping that will be out sometime in October and the audiobook of it before the end of the year. Starting a new series like this involves a fair bit of world building, and there's one good trick to know if you've picked a good name for a fantasy character. You Google it and you get 0 results. I do always Google character names before I commit to them. Sometimes you accidentally pick the name of someone who's been some sort of notorious criminal or controversial political figure, so it's best to avoid that, which I have to admit is less of a problem with fantasy names. However, when inventing fantasy names, you do occasionally stumble on a name that means another language, something like “very impolite term for women who sells carnal favors to the lowest echelons of society.” And you definitely don't want your character named after that, so it is always wise to Google. In audiobook news, the recording is underway for Dragonskull: Fury of the Barbarians. I expect we will start proofing chapters soon and I am looking forward to sharing that with all of you once it's done. We have one reader question this week from Wilson, who says: When are you coming back to the Third Soul series? Also Sevenfold Sword Online is calling you, lol. In answer to that… How to phrase this? I'm not saying no to doing more than Third Soul, but I don't have anything planned at the moment. I wrote The Third Soul, what would become The Third Soul now, 14 years ago, back in 2009? And so if I was to do it today, I would want to do many things differently. So if I did do something in The Third Soul, it'll probably be a slightly improved version of the setting with new characters, which, as I said, I'm not saying no to, but I don't have any current plans to do so. I am working on the Sevenfold Sword Online book. I'm on Chapter 2 of…actually, I don't know how many chapters it will be, but probably in the upper teens. But I am about 5,000 words into it. And I think that will probably be the either last book I published in 2023 or the first book I published in 2024, we'll see how the rest of this year goes. 00:03:40 Silent Order Retrospective Now, on to this week's main topic, a retrospective back on the Silent Order series, which seems suitable because as I said earlier, my Summer of Finishing Things has finished. The Silent Order of science fiction series is finally complete after 14 books, 769,000 words and six years. In fact, September 2023 marks the six year anniversary of when I published the first five books in the series. Like I did with Dragonskull, the other series I finished in summer 2023, I thought I would take a look back at the end of The Silent Order series in the Internet's favorite favored format, a numbered article and or podcast episode. Minor spoilers follow for The Silent Order series, but no major ones. 00:04:22 #1 The Protagonist When I started thinking about The Silent Order way back in 2016, I had just read the original James Bond books by Ian Fleming for the first time. I decided that I wanted to write about a spy, but in space. I also wanted to write a character who is essentially the opposite of James Bond, so the name was a play on that from James Bond to Jack March. The inspiration was that bond stays in place, but march is moving forward. Unfortunately though, I didn't realize it until the books were published and people started pointing it out to me, this meant that Jack March had the same initials as I do, which led to occasional accusations of him being an author avatar. This was definitely not what I had in mind. If anything, the closest match to my personality in any of my books would be The Sculptor from Frostborn: The Dwarven Prince, a curmudgeonly technician prone to occasional ranting. I did make March a contrast from James Bond, at least the literary version. Bond is gregarious, charming, drinks way too much, and has a different girl of the week. Well, every weekend, sometimes every day. March is grim, taciturn, very professional, and gets annoyed at the thought of a girl of the week. His fight against The Final Consciousness is personal in a way that various nemeses in the books rarely were. I believe Ian Fleming originally intended to make the Soviets the overarching big bad of the Bond books, but after tensions eased marginally between the West and the Soviets in the 60s, he switched to different villains and eventually settled on Specter and Blofeld. 00:05:56  #2 The Setting Specifically, Calaskar. March works for The Silent Order, part of the intelligence agency of the Interstellar Kingdom of Calaskar, which has seven core systems and several hundred minor colonies of varying sizes around the solar systems it claims. Calaskar is more culturally conservative than its neighbors, especially Rustaril and Raetia. But not terribly repressive. An American from the 1950s would find it rather relaxed, while an American from 2023 would probably find it stifling and conformist. It was a thought experiment on my part. How would a technologically advanced, yet relatively stable society look in the distant future? Of course, Calaskar isn't always stable. Where Rustaril and Raetia used to be part of the Kingdom but broke away and went in very different directions. It helped that March was born inside the empire of The Final Consciousness and so able to look at Calaskaran in society with a critical eye. He does think it tends toward the conformist and the parochial, but it doesn't have the brutality of the labor camps of The Final Consciousness, the social decay of Rustaril, or the vast gap between rich and poor of Raetia and the Falcon Republic. 00:07:08 #3 The Final Consciousness The Final Consciousness, also known half mockingly as The Machinists, is the overarching villain of the series. They're basically space communists combined with some of the crazier transhumanist ideas. The initial inspiration was the first few original James Bond books, where the Soviets and SMERSH were the chief adversaries. Further inspiration for the final consciousness came from college professors and crazy tech million. Years, sometimes college professors and academics will propose the most appalling things, like we need to reduce the Earth's population to 1 billion people, or everyone should be housed in giant cities and not allowed to leave, or children should be taken from their parents at birth to be raised in impartial institutions. The academics are always super unclear about how to do that and glide over little details like, how exactly the population will be reduced from 9 billion to one or how will they be encouraged to move into giant cities. These various tech billionaires also provided additional inspiration for The Final Consciousness. If you will forgive something of a generalization, it seems that if you become a billionaire in America, there's a non trivial chance you're going to turn into a transhumanist weirdo, like you'll want to put computer chips in people's brains, or you'll spend all your time worrying about the singularity and artificial intelligence. Or you'll spend 18 hours a day exercising and taking experimental treatments and claim to have the body of a teenager when you're 43, when to the unprejudiced eye, you actually look like a very fit 42 year old. The Final Consciousness is what you would get if all these people had unlimited resources to put their very bad ideas into practice. What they ended up with was a tyrannical hive mind ruling over an essentially enslaved population. The hive mind, believing itself to be the final stage of human consciousness and evolution, was driven to expand and destroy all the obsolete societies around it. That did not match the self perceived perfection of The Final Consciousness. Since Machinists tried and failed to militarily conquer Calaskar they turned instead to infiltration and subversion, which touches off the plot of The Silent Order series. Of course, the hive mind was built on the technology of the Great Elder Ones, an extinct alien race, who turned out to be not so extinct after all. 00:09:16 #4 The Great Elder Ones In a lot of science fiction, you have sort of elements of Lovecraftian cosmic horror working their way in, and that's where The Great Elder Ones came from. I had the original idea of The Great Elder Ones way back in the late 2000s, long before I discovered self-publishing. I was thinking about a fantasy series in a world that had an early modern level of technology. The study would have a communist revolution which would create the inevitable dictatorship and secret police state that always seems to follow communist revolutions, but the twist would be that the secret police organization was actually a cult worshipping a dark power, and they plan to use the mass loss of life associated with revolution to fuel a summoning spell to bring their dark power back to the world. I abandoned that ideas as unworkable and unlikely to sell, but I returned in the relationship between The Great Elder Ones and The Final Consciousness. Of course, Silent Order is science fiction, not fantasy, so it was cast in science fiction terms. The Final Consciousness used the surviving technology of The Great Elder Ones to build their hive mind, but that made them vulnerable to manipulation and control from The Great Elder Ones. The Great Elder Ones have been locked outside this universe by their ancient enemies, but plan to use The Final Consciousness is pawns to allow them to return and destroy the universe like they originally intended. 00:10:32 #5. The First Five Books I originally started writing Silent Order: Iron Hand on New Year's Eve in 2016. My original plan was to actually write the first four books, and once they were done, release them once a week until they were all out. I ended up writing a fifth book because of a news article I read. Originally I planned to go straight from Silent Order: Axiom End to Silent Order: Fire Hand. However, I read an article in mid 2016 arguing that an iPad made for better productivity tool than a Linux desktop. I found this implausible. In the seven years since then, the iPad has become better as a productivity tool, and since you can get a keyboard case and cast it to a bigger screen, but it's still really expensive and it's a lot easier to hook up an ergonomic keyboard and a big ‘ol monitor to a Linux System than to an iPad. It's substantially cheaper too. So to make a point, I wrote, edited and published Silent Order: Eclipse Hand entirely on Ubuntu Linux. Back then I still wrote about technology and Linux on a regular basis, so it fit neatly into my workflow. I also designed the cover entirely on GIMP on Ubuntu. More on that soon. All five books were ready to go in September 2017, and then I published the first one at the end of September, and the rest in October of that year. The initial plan was to put them in Kindle Unlimited since science fiction was very popular in Kindle Unlimited at that point. However, this disappointed enough people that I abandoned the initial plan and switched to wide distribution, which means books were on in addition to Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, and Smashwords. This series had a good start and I thought that it would be an open-ended series with a new adventure of the week with every boo. More soon or why this didn't quite work out. However, moving the books out of KU proved a wise decision. For all of 2023, as of this recording, only 49.1% of Silent Order’s total revenue came from Amazon, the rest came from the other retailers. If that was a parliamentary democracy, they could make a coalition against Amazon if they wanted. There's no way KU page reads could have made-up that difference, especially since the Kindle Unlimited payment rate per page is quite a bit lower than it was in 2017. 012:55 #6: History I set the Silent Order books a long, long way into the future. Like roughly 100,000 years from now. I did this for a couple of reasons. First, it's always a little painful when you read older science fiction, you come across a sentence like mankind had its first hyperspace flight in 1996, or the protagonists have a problem but need to conserve computer power because they only have so many data space/data tapes. The phenomenon of one's futuristic science fiction becoming dated is called zeerust, and something I wanted to avoid if possible in Silent Order. Second, having the series take place 100,000 years into the future left a lot of wiggle room in the setting’s back story. It meant that things could be lost, forgotten, or distorted for most of the series. No one is entirely sure exactly where Earth was, because the information has been lost after 100,000 years of human expansion into space. Obviously that kind of thing can be useful for plotting. In the Silent Order back story, there were five United Terran Empires that ruled over mankind for thousands of years at a time, but they all collapsed for various reasons. It also meant there could be lost technology plots as all the Terran empires had technological expertise that was lost when they collapsed… genetic engineering and high level AI and so forth. Third, it let me disconnect Silent Order from a lot of contemporary disputes here in the early 21st century. One of the tricky parts of writing near future science fiction is that it's easy to have the books take a stance on the immediate crises of the day, which can annoy a lot of readers. Having the books set so far into the future means that from the perspective of characters, years the various concerns of the 2020s seen as academic and as dusty as, for example, the Investiture Controversy or the dispute between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines seems to us today. So to someone in Jack March’s time, the 2020 election and all its upheaval, or the coronavirus pandemic would be as distant and academic as the Investiture Controversy is to us today. 00:14:55 #7 Technology One complaint about the books was that Jack March regularly used a gun, a chemically propelled kinetic firearm, or that he often used a handheld computer he called the phone. Like, why didn't he always use a laser pistol or a particle gun, or have some sort of hyper advanced neural implant that functioned as a phone? Isn't this science fiction, for heaven’s sake? Of course, that's a bit like asking why in 2023 you're still using a knife to cut your bread when instead you can use a high end laser cutter. The answer, of course, is that the knife is cheap and reliable and fulfills this technological niche so perfectly that even though there are more advanced alternatives available, it would be costly and pointless to use them. I think chemically propelled firearms fulfill that niche as well. People forget this, but firearms have been around for over 800 years. King Edward the Third used cannons in the opening battles of the 100 Years War, which started in 1337 A.D., quite a long time ago. Obviously firearms have been refined and improved considerably since that time, but the basic principle remains the same: metal tube, metal projectile, chemical propellant. Even in Jack March's time, a chemically propelled firearm offers many advantages. It doesn't require electricity and can be built without computer parts, meaning the weapon is immune to an EMP effect. Additionally, it is much less fragile than a more advanced weapon. The AK47 could famously still fire even after being dragged through a stream or left in the dirt for a while. Granted, it may not be terribly accurate, but it could still fire. With 100,000 years’ worth of small improvements in material science, You couldn't 3D print a working firearm in your basement. It wouldn't even be made of metal and therefore much harder to detect. When March uses a phone obviously it would be more advanced than anything available today, but the word phone is a convenient shorthand to refer to personal data, mobile computing and communication device, and I settled on that instead of using a more science fiction-esque word like data pad or personal terminal. I didn't want to call it a communicator because that brings Star Trek to mind. Besides, one the cardinal rules of writing is to never use a long word when a shorter one will suffice. 00:17:02 #8 The Covers If I remember right, I ended up redoing the covers for the Silent Order series five times in total. The first set used a combination of a stock photo spaceship and a stock photo planet along with the custom font I paid for. After a while I had stock photos of people holding weapons against space background, but that really didn't work, so I switched down for a new set of stock photos of spaceships and planets. I was bumping up against the limits of what I could do with stock photos and GIMP. The difficulty of stock photos is their limitations. What you see is what you get. Ask anyone who's done any design work of any kind, and you'll probably get stories of searches for stock photos that turned up many pictures that almost good enough, but not quite. Then the COVID hysteria came around and I used some of the free time that generated to take a Photoshop course. I managed to produce a fourth set of covers, ones that used human figures and looked quite a bit better than the previous set of covers. However, shortly after that I saw Penny Arcade cartoon that has solidified my opinion on science fiction cover. They needed planets and they needed spaceships, and they needed to be in proximity. I redid the covers one more time. Suddenly, on five years after the final look of the series, which featured a spaceship, a planet, and in close proximity planets and spaceships was indeed the way to go. The series has had its best sales with the final set of covers. 00:18:29 #9 False Ending Despite my best efforts, Silent Order never sold as well as my fantasy books, and after eight books I wanted to do something else. Originally, as I mentioned, I planned for the series to be open-ended and ongoing. However, in the years since I've learned that in fantasy and science fiction, especially indie fantasy and science fiction, that really doesn't work. Like if you're John Sanford or Jeffrey Deaver, Jonathan Kellerman, JD Robb, or CJ Box, you can write books where your protagonists essentially has an adventure of the week or year, given traditional publishing schedules, without an overarching plot to the series. However, that's a different genre than fantasy and science fiction. And in traditional publishing, it's basically a different business model. I think because of certain well-known authors in fantasy literature who haven't finished their series, readers in the indie fantasy and science fiction space expect completed series with an overarching plot that gets resolved and quite a few of them refused to read an unfinished series at all. So I decided to wrap things up with Book Nine, which was Silent Order: Ark Hand in 2018 and give the series an ending with Jack March settling down on Calaskar. I intended to stop there and did stop there for three years. But people kept asking when I was going to write more in the series and I did feel I left too much unfinished with the Pulse and the Great Elder Ones. So in 2021, I decided to pick it up again, thinking it would take one or two more books to wrap up the series with a further ending. It turned out to be 5 more books for 14 total. I thought it was going to be 15. But after I finished #13, I thought 14 and 15 would be better combined as a single book, which is how we got Pulse Hand. 00:20:00 #10. Thanks, Chat GPT It only took six years to write the series, which isn't all that long, but technology has changed quite a bit during that six years and insane AI was a feature of the books dating all the way back to Silent Order: Wraith Hand, which I wrote back in 2017. I first introduced the character of Thunderbolt, another insane AI when I wrote Silent Order: Royal Hand in 2021. Though she wouldn't appear in the books until Thunder Hand in 2023, between the writing of Royal Hand and Thunder Hand, ChatGPT, Mid Journey, Bing Chat, and all the other generative AI tools entered the mainstream. This was a tremendous boon to me. Not because I used them for the writing. My overall opinion of generative AI remains that it's bad. And if it's not meaning the strict legal definition of plagiarism, then it's at least sitting on the same couch as plagiarism, but because of all the tales of AI meltdowns that made it into the mainstream press, like when Microsoft rolled out Bing Chat AI and it famously would go on unhinged rants, threatening people, dissolve into incoherent logical loops, and insist that factually incorrect information was the truth and threatened anyone who doubted it, and otherwise have all kinds of glitches that range from hilarious to deeply disturbing. I read those articles with great amusement and delight and based Thunderbolt’s personality off them. Of course, Thunderbolt has rail guns and their own automated fleet of space warships, so when she has breakdowns, it's a little more concerning. So nearly seven years after I had first had the idea, the Silent Order series has come to its conclusion, its proper conclusion this time. I do hope that you found the ending satisfying. 00:21:26 Conclusion I'd also like to thank Silent Order readers for the enthusiasm for the series in ‘22 and 2023. After I settled on the final cover design, it sold better than it ever has, but still doesn't sell nearly as well as my various fantasy books. That was one of the reasons I was going to stop after Book 9, but the sheer enthusiasm people had for the books and the nagging sense that it wasn't quite finished led me to write 5 more. So thank you all for reading and for coming along with Jack March on this long, long journey. And if you've never heard of Silent Order or if you're one of those people who only reads completed series, the first book is free on all the ebook platforms, so why not check it out? You get Silent Order: Iron Hand for free at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Google Play, Kobo, Apple Book, Scribd, and Smashwords. So that is it for this week. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this week's episode, I take a look back at the movies I watched over the second half of summer 2023. I also provide writing progress updates and answer reader questions. It’s time for a new Coupon of the Week! This week’s coupon is for the audiobook of GHOST IN THE BLOOD, as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of GHOST IN THE BLOOD for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code: SEPGHOSTS The coupon code is valid through September 22nd, 2023, so if you find yourself dealing with the Back To School blues, it might be time to get yourself a new audiobook! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Welcome and Coupon of the Week Hello everyone. Welcome to Episode 166 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is September the 1st, 2023, and today we're talking about Summer Movie Roundup: Part 2, specifically the movies I saw over the second half of the summer. However, before we address any of our topics or even discuss spreading projects, let's do this week's Coupon of the Week. Long time listeners remember that I used to do Coupon of the Week but I stopped around March 2023 just because I was running out of time. But I have been able to revive it, and this week's coupon is for the audiobook of Ghost in the Blood as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of Ghost in the Blood for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code, SEPTGHOSTS. Again, that's SEPTGHOSTS and the coupon code will be in the show notes for this episode. That coupon code is valid through September 22nd, 2023. So if you find yourself dealing with the back to school blues, I think it might be time to get yourself a new audiobook. 00:01:15: Writing Progress Updates/August Ad Sales Now let's have an update on writing progress. I'm pleased to report I am done with the rough draft of Silent Order: Pulse Hand, the 14th and final book in my Silent Order science fiction series. As part of my Summer of Finishing Things, I am in currently in the second round of edits for it, and if all goes well, I am hoping it will come out sometime before September 10th. We will see how the upcoming week goes in terms of progress. After that is done it will be full speed ahead on Ghost in the Serpent, the first book in the new Ghost Armor series and the first Caina book I've written in two years. I am also working on the side. I finally have time to do it again. I am finally working on Sevenfold Sword Online: Leveling. I'm on Chapter 2 of what will probably be 16. And I'm thinking that will probably be the last book I published in 2023. But we will see how the rest of the year goes. Since it is the end of August and the start of September, let's take a look back at my advertising results for August 2023, like we usually do at the end of the month. For Facebook ads, here's what I got back for every $1.00 I spent advertising the series on Facebook ads. For The Ghosts, for every dollar I spent, I got back $3.12. For Cloak Games, for every dollar I spent, I got back $3.62. And for Frostborn, for every dollar I spent, I got back $4.39. I should also say having a complete series in audiobook really, really helps with the profitability of running an ad. Like for August 2023. It looks like about 38% of the Frostborn revenue came from the audio books, and for Ghosts it was about 36%. Obviously, the challenge with that is that having a complete series in audio book, especially when you write in long series like I do, is an enormous amount of time and expense. It can also take a long time for the audio books to earn back their investments. Like, Brad Wills narrated Frostborn number six through 15 for me and so far, number six and #11 have actually earned back what I've spent on them and #12 is getting close. I would have to double check the math, but for the 18 Ghost Books Hollis McCarthy narrated for me, I think about seven of them have earned back the investment so far. I do have complete confidence they will all earn out within a few years. It also helps very much that for my specific business and tax circumstances, audiobook production does count as a business expense and therefore is a tax deduction. I really didn't do anything with Amazon ads in August because Dragonskull: Sword of the Squire was an Amazon monthly deal in the UK for 99 Pence, which is, you know, about, give or take $0.99 in USD, but I expect I'll do more within September, once Sword of the Squire goes back up to $4.99 USD. And as always, thanks for reading and listening to the audio books. There would be no point in advertising if you did not. 00:04:08: Reader Questions/Comments Before we get into this week's main topic, let's have some questions and comments from readers and listeners. Edward writes in to ask: I just wanted to say how fantastic the end of the Dragonskull series was, although to be honest, I’d like to read about Niara and Calliande meeting for the first time. At the end of the book, it says there was a preview for the last next series in The Last Shield, I can only find on Amazon The Final Shield same thing, just a small mistake. Thank you for your time and especially for all your wonderful books. Thanks, Edward. I'm glad you have enjoyed them all and to answer to your question, that was a small mistake I made. The story is called The Final Shield. For some reason when I was writing it, I kept transposing it as The Last Shield and I had to go back and double check a bunch of times and it looks like looks like I missed a spot, so I'll have to go back and fix that. But the story in question, that is a preview of the Shield War series I will right next year is The Final Shield. In fact, I almost said The Last Shield, but no, it's The Final Shield. Our next question is from Jake who says about the final book of the Silent Order series, bittersweet. I hate it when a series ends. Hopefully there'll be more in the new series. Space holds so many mysteries. Thanks. I'm glad you have enjoyed the series. I'm not actively planning to write anything more in the Silent Order series. But neither am I saying no to the possibility. In the few years, or maybe even a few months, I may have the urge to write some science fiction again. And if I do, I will probably go back to the Silent Order setting, because after 14 books it's a very well developed setting. Our next question is from T who writes in to ask: Hello, sorry to bother you. I've been reading your books since high school. I don't know if I missed the newsletter. Are you not doing any more Ghost series books? Thanks for reading, T. I'm glad you have enjoyed the books and to answer your question, that was a very convenient timing for your question because next week in fact, I am planning on starting Ghost in the Serpent, the next book…first book in the new Caina series. I gave her a bit of a break since I finished writing Ghost in the Sun since 2021 because I wanted to stop and think of it about what I wanted to do next with the character and I last time arrived at the conclusion. So I will be starting on that next week. Our final comment is from Michael who says about Dragonskull: Love the series and just read The Final Shield. Was wondering when you would venture to this storyline. So excited for new series. Have fun writing. I'm so glad I chanced upon your free The Gray Knight Book book. So that started me on my journey of so many of your stories. Thank you for amazing stories that helped me to escape reality sometime. Thanks, Michael. I am glad you have enjoyed books and that they help you to escape reality. Sometimes we can all do that at times. It does reinforce my point that giving away the first book of your series for free is a good idea. Because I've had a lot of people tell me they got into Frostborn when they came across Frostborn: The Gray Knight for free and that sort of drew them into the whole universe of Andomhaim and all the books. There, so that's it for questions and comments from readers for this week. If you have any questions or comments you'd like asked or answered on the show, send them in to me via e-mail or leave a comment on my blog or Facebook posts and hopefully we'll get to it. 00:07:31 Summer Movie Roundup 2: The Sequel So on to our main topic for this week. Summer Movie Roundup 2: The Sequel. Alas, the trees in my yard are already losing their leaves, which means that summer is almost done. That means, however, it's time to do the second half of my Summer Movie Roundup where we rate the movies and TV shows I watched over the summer, and this time we're going to go from worst to best. So I'm afraid starting out with the worst thing I saw in the second half of the summer was Secret Wars. I would describe it as dour, plotting, and very confusing, Marvel's attempt to do a gritty spy novel but with space aliens, and it didn't really work. All the actors gave good performances, especially Ben Mendelsohn, Kingsley Ben-Adir, Olivia Coleman and Emilia Clarke. Don Cheadle is really good as a villain as you know, if you've seen this hilarious Captain Planet parody. But again they seem like characters in a gritty spy novel, not characters in any Marvel TV show about shape shifting space aliens. It was annoying that Nick Fury got the Last Jedi treatment in this. He went from mastermind super spy to a bumbling old man who single handedly causes all the problems in the series. Every single one of them with his incompetence and his effort effortlessly replaced by a competent younger woman. Honestly, if furious, exasperated Skull allies decided to eliminate and replace him with one of their own. You really couldn't blame them. Disney seems to really love this “legacy character is now a loser” storyline since they did it with this and Star Wars and Indiana Jones. If Disney had made Top Gun Maverick: Maverick would have been a bitter old man unwillingly dragged out of retirement by resentful recruits and the movie would have lost $100 million instead of making 1.4 billion. Honestly, it feels like the Marvel Cinematic Universe had a satisfying ending with Avengers Endgame and an excellent epilogue with the Tom Holland Spiderman movies (especially No Way Home) and Guardians of the Galaxy 3, which we'll discuss more in a bit. But most of the TV shows feel like DLC cranked out to squeeze a few more bucks out of a good game fading from the public consciousness. Overall grade: D minus Next up is Battleship, which originally came out in 2012. And I saw this movie for a very idiosyncratic reason. I listened to the Halo Game soundtrack a lot on Spotify, and after it does, after I listened to it, Spotify autoplays and decides to recommend the Battleship soundtrack to me for all reasons. And then I saw that the Battleship movie was on Prime. So I thought, what the heck, let's try it. You could tell this movie had been in production hell for a while. It's ostensibly based on the board game Battleship, and while the connection is there, you kind of have to squint and have a few drinks first to notice it. The movie was as dumb as Secret Invasion, but much more entertaining. The first third of the movie plays like some sort of wacky comedy. Aimless loser steals a chicken burrito to impress the girl at the bar. But it turns out the girl is the admiral's daughter. So he joins the US Navy to impress her. This apparently works because after the time jump, he's a Lieutenant and they want to get married…he wants to get married to the Admiral's daughter, who is, in fact a physical therapist at the Naval Hospital in Hawaii. Except Lieutenant Loser keeps screwing up and threatening his naval career. Then space aliens invade. If you've ever played the original Battleship game, you'll recall that it does not have any space aliens, but this movie does. For some reason, aliens who have mastered interstellar flight and impenetrable force fields land their ships in the ocean and engage in naval combat. All the other senior officers get wiped out, so Lieutenant Loser suddenly finds himself in command. And since the alien ships are impervious to both radar and sonar, the US Navy has to track them using water displacement on a grid, just like the game of Battleship. Meanwhile, the Admiral's daughter is helping a double amputee acclimate to his artificial legs when they discovered that the aliens are preparing to phone home from Hawaii and they need to stop it. That would have been a much more interesting movie :Wounded war veteran is recuperating at a hospital, only aliens invade. Since he is the only one with leadership skills, it's up to him to save the day. It also was interesting in the movie when a group of retirees take a museum ship to fight the aliens since that's the only ship they have left. That also would have been a better movie than this one. Overall grade: D minus but C plus for the bits with the wounded veteran and the retirees, because those honestly were the best parts of the movie. Next up is The Amazing Spiderman 2, which came out in 2014 and which I saw for the first time this year. Honestly I think this movie got a bum deal. It's actually pretty good. You'll recall that Sony panicked and rebooted their Spiderman series after this, which led to the Tom Holland Spiderman series as part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But I really think they overreacted. I saw the first Amazing Spiderman movie last year and thought it was so-so, sort of like a gritty reboot for Spiderman. I expected The Amazing Spiderman 2 to be worse based on its reputation, but instead I really liked it. It had an entirely self-contained story arc and had good character growth for both the villains and the protagonists. This was the first version of Harry Osborne who seemed kind of scary and not just like a loser punching bag for his evil dad. So with that in mind, it was nice that Andrew Garfield…the Andrew Garfield version of Spiderman got a proper send off in Spiderman: No Way Home. Overall grade: A minus. Next up is Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume 3, which came out this year in 2023. It's a rule of thumb in writing and screen writing in particular that if you want the audience to hate a character, show the character being cruel to an animal. Boy, does Guardians 3 lean hard into this! The villain, The High Evolutionary, regularly experimented on animals and raised them to sentience and then killed them if they fail to meet his increasingly insane expectations of perfection. Of course, The High Evolutionary also committed genocide fairly regularly for thousands of years, but that mostly happens off screen. There was a minor Internet controversy about animal cruelty in film when this movie came out, but I think it was overblown because 1. All the animal cruelty is the work of the villain. 2. This is shown to be shown to be unambiguously morally bankrupt. 3. It's mostly shown off screen through montages of worrying surgical instruments, and the results of The High Evolutionary’s experiments, a rabbit with cybernetic spider legs and so forth. Anyway, the plot of the movie is that Rocket Raccoon was The High Evolutionary's most brilliant creation, a technical genius without equal and The High Evolutionary wants him back so he can dissect Rocket’s brain and use that genius to chase his elusive perfect society. The Guardians team up to rescue Rocket. It's a very dark movie for all the reasons mentioned above, but it has numerous moments of genuine humor, and it achieves an increasingly rare feat :a satisfying ending in a superhero saga. All the characters experience growth in the arcs and achieve resolution, even if it is somewhat bittersweet. Overall Grade: A minus Next up is Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning, Part One which came out in 2023, which I actually saw in the theater. Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning: Part One is an excellent example of a high quality action movie. I think we can all agree that Tom Cruise is kind of a strange dude. But his devotion to his craft is both inspiring and very unsettling. However, in the early 2010s, he seems to have embraced the role of action star, and he's been running with it, often literally, ever since. The Mission Impossible movies are as implausible as the Fast and Furious series, but they somehow maintain a greater air of verisimilitude. Perhaps Mr. Cruz's insistence on doing as many of his own students as possible really does help with that in this movie. Ethan Hunt’s up against an evil artificial intelligence called The Entity. It's up to him to find the two halves of the key that can control the evil artificial intelligence. Many action sequences follow, and I'm looking forward to Part 2, which should come out next year unless the Hollywood strikes affect that. Overall grade: A. And now for the best movie I saw in the second half of the summer: Oppenheimer, which came out in 2023 and which I saw in the theater this year-a biopic about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb done in Christopher Nolan's non-linear style. In my opinion, I think Oppenheimer is tied with The Dark Knight and Inception for Nolan's best movie. All the cast gives stellar performances. For a movie that is about historical events, meaning the ending has already been spoiled by default, it has a remarkable degree of tension. It's a great portrait of Oppenheimer, a man who helped build the atomic bomb so the Nazis wouldn't get it first, is later horrified by the consequences of what he has done, and yet still loves his work, loves being known as the father of the atomic bomb, and probably would’ve done it all over if given a chance. Oppenheimer's nemesis, Lewis Strauss, is usually portrayed as a villain in popular American history. In real life, he did numerous admirable, charitable things that his rivalry of Oppenheimer overshadowed in the public consciousness. But the movie is also an excellent character portrait of Strauss, an egotistical man who is underhanded and very petty but is nonetheless absolutely convinced that he is doing the right thing to serve his country and finds Oppenheimer both personally and morally offensive. Moral ambiguity is a phrase that gets thrown around a lot, but Oppenheimer actually does manage moral ambiguity quite well. All the characters have no good choices, only an array of bad ones and the resulting consequences. I would give it an A+, but I think the nude scene was pointless and I don't approve of nudity in film in general. Overall Grade: A, almost an A plus. Final thoughts on the movies I saw this summer: I didn't get around to seeing Barbie, though I don't disapprove of the idea of a Barbie movie and I thought the whole Barbenheimer thing was hilarious, but I don't go to the actual movies all that often. I took a day…half day off to celebrate publishing Dragonskull: Crown of the Gods so I could see Oppenheimer during that half day. I expect I'll see Barbie on streaming at some point. Oh, let's be honest: I'm definitely the Christopher Nolan target demographic and not the Greta Gerwig one, though Gerwig’s adaptation of Little Women was excellent. What's amusing is that Warner Discovery released Barbie on the same day as Oppenheimer to screw with Nolan, since Nolan fell out with Warner during the pandemic and went to Universal instead. The goal, obviously was to try and bury Oppenheimer. What actually happened was the Barbenheimer meme. And Barbie made well over a billion dollars, and Oppenheimer did like 750 million by the time of this recording. Some executive at Warner was probably like, “We wanted revenge, and all we got was a lousy billion dollars.” Now I have to admit I am old enough that I can think of a few people I would like to have revenge on, but if God came down from heaven and said, “You can have either a billion dollars or revenge,” I think I would choose the billion dollars. So that is it for this week. Thanks for listening to the Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this week's episode, I take a look back at the DRAGONSKULL series, and discuss what it took to complete a 9-book epic fantasy series. TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction, Writing Updates, and Reader Questions Hello everyone. Welcome to Episode 165 of the Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is August the 25th, 2023 and today we're going to talk about how I finished the Dragonskull series with a look back. Before we get to our main topic, let's have an update on my current writing progress and some questions from readers. Right now I am working on Silent Order: Pulse Hand. I am pleased to report I am 55,000 words into it, which puts me on Chapter 13 of 16. I am at the climactic scene of the book, and indeed the entire series, because this is the final book in the series as part of my Summer of Finishing Things, and so hopefully that should be out sometime in September if all goes well. Once Silent Order: Pulse Hand is finished, I will start in my next book which will be Ghost in the Serpent, the first book of Caina’s New Ghost Armor series and hopefully that will be out in October. In audiobook news, recording is underway for Dragonskull: Fury Of the Barbarians. If all goes well, I think we'll probably have that out in October sometime. But we will see how the next couple of weeks go. Our first question this week is from Michael who asked: Concerning the Dragon Skills Series, are you going to do all nine books as a pack? It would be great to purchase once rather than scroll through nine different titles. Unfortunately, no. That would just not be financially viable, I'm afraid. Later this year I am going to put together a Dragon Skull Omnibus One so I can have a nice, big four pack with three books and a short story, both in ebook and audiobook format, but I don't have a plan to do a complete series bundle just because I would have to charge so much. It would not be a cost savings for you the reader, and it would still be cheaper to buy the individual books. Our next question is from Guy who asks: Hey, Jonathan. Have loved the Silent Order series and can't wait to see how it ends. I know I’ve asked this before so please forgive me, do you have any other plans to revisit the Demonsouled series? They are awesome. Also, will we see more of Gareth Arban, another amazing series? Thanks, Guy. I'm glad you've enjoyed all those books and answered your question. At the moment, I have no current plans to go back to the Demonsouled series, but I'm not ruling it out entirely. We will just have to see what the next few years bring. In answer to your other question, we will see more of Gareth in the Shield Wars series, which I'm going to start next year, since that is also in the world of Andomhaim. Our next question is from Justin, who asks: I expected the Silent Order series to go to 15 books based near your past writing. 14 will be collecting the spoiler and reporting back, 15 would be the final act. And answer to that question, I did originally plan for Silent Order to be 15 books. However, as I was looking through the outlines of book 14 and book 15, I thought these look a little thin on their own and I'd have to you pad them out a bit with some extraneous subplots, and as you get towards the end of the series, especially a really long series like Silent Order, you don't want to be adding in subplots, you want to be, you know, having subplots be resolved as you narrow the focus down to the conclusion and the resolution of the main conflict. So I looked at those two outlines I thought either I would have to pad these out a bit or I could combine them and make one slightly longer book to finish off the series. And I thought, yeah, I'm going to do that because that's what I'm doing right now. And I think it's going well and I think and I'm hopeful that readers will be satisfied with the ending to the Silent Order series. We will find out next month. Our next question is from Rob, who asks: Did I imagine the new Ghost Series, Ghost in the Serpent? I've been trolling,but I can't find it. Rob asked this on Facebook, which has this very irritating habit of not showing things in chronological order and sometimes disappearing posts, even if you looked at them already. But in answer to Rob's questions, you did not imagine a new Ghost series. After Silent Order: Pulse Hand is done, I will be writing Ghost in the Serpent, the first book in the Ghost Armor series. Hopefully that’ll be out in October and hopefully the audiobook will be out before the end of the year because I have a spot reserved with the narrator to have her recorded in November 2023, if all goes well. And our last question this week is from Jerry, who asks: How did I miss you continuing on with the Silent Order series?  Last I read was book eight. What Happened with Book 9 and did not get published on Google Play Books? The last one I read, Jack retires and lives with the professor lady. Thanks, Jerry. I'm glad you enjoyed the books and in answer to your question…there's a couple of answers. I had originally planned to stop with Book 9, Silent Order: Ark Hand, but I decided that the series was incomplete at that point and so I ended up writing five more books. The fifth and last one of which I am writing right now. For a while there was a metadata error on Google Play where the series order of the books was not displaying correctly. I believe that has since been corrected and all 13 books in the series I've written so far should be available on Google Play and the 14th one I fully intend will be there in a few weeks. So those were the questions this week. If you have any questions you'd like to have the answer on the show, please leave a comment on my blog or Facebook site. And if I see it and I have time, I will make sure that gets included on the show as a question. 00:05:28 Main Topic: A Look Back at Dragonskull Now to our main topic this week, a look back at Dragonskull, which seems appropriate because after two years, nine books, 731,000 words, and 10 short stories, the Dragonskull series is finally complete. Thank you all who came along on the quest of the Dragonskull. I hope it was an enjoyable journey for all of you who've read it. So, it's time to take a look back at the writing process of the series. We'll do this using the Internet's favorite form of communication, a numbered list. Note that this podcast episode will have minor spoilers for some of the nine books, so if you haven't read them all, it would probably be a good time to stop listening to this episode and go read the rest of the Dragonskull series before you continue onward. 00:06:12  #1 Deciding on a New Series. After I finished writing Dragontiarna: Warden way back in summer 2021 (almost two years ago to this recording in fact), I knew I wanted to write another epic fantasy series. I just wasn't sure what I wanted to do. I did know that I wanted it to be different than Dragontiarna. If you will recall, Dragontiarna had five main point of view characters over the 10 books, Ridmark, Niall, Tyrcamber Rigamond, Moriah Rhosmor and Third, along with a bunch of secondary point of view characters and writing that got to be really challenging towards the end since it's generally best to include something of an arc for every main POV character in a book. So after writing Dragontiarna, I wanted to write something a bit less complicated for my next series. Of the nine Dragonskull books, the first five, with the exception of the epilogue, are entirely from Gareth Arban's point of view. I also wanted to write a series with a more focused scope and stakes, like in Dragontiarna the fate of the Cosmos was at stake, and you can't do that with every book and every series. You can't have the character of saving the Cosmos every book. Dragontiarna sometimes had major battles taking place simultaneously on two different worlds, and so I wanted to write something with a tighter focus for the new series. I thought for a while about starting the new series in an entirely new setting. I do intend to do it at some point, but not this year and probably not in 2024. Since Andomhaim and neighboring realms is such a big place, I decided to set the new series there and visit locations that we didn't see too much of in Frostborn, Sevenfold Sword, and Dragontiarna, the Qazaluuskan Forest and beyond. So that was the start of Dragonskull. 00:07:52 #2 Choosing a Main Character I wanted to try a younger main character this time around. Ridmark by the time of Dragontiarna was a middle-aged man and by the time most people reach his age, they are usually are who they are going to be. By contrast, a younger protagonist has more developing and maturing to undergo, which means that there is an opportunity to tell a different kind of story than you can with a middle-aged protagonist. I settled on Gareth as the main character and decided to start the series when he was 17. Now most of us, when we were 17,  1: know nothing, 2: think we know everything and 3: usually undergo a variety of unpleasant experiences to cure some points 1 and 2. Naturally, this provides excellent opportunities for storytelling. In Gareth's case, he thought he knew what it took to be an honorable knight but he got some of the particulars wrong. In hindsight, I think it took too long for him to develop. If I could do it all over, I probably would have had that pivotal scene at the end of book two rather earlier than it actually took place in the series. 00:08:52 #3 The Villain The main villain was Azalmora, though of course we had numerous other villains over the course of the series. I actually happened upon Azalmora 's name by accident. In the first draft of The First Sorceress, which was her first appearance, her name was Azurmara, and then I was editing and I mistyped her name and came out with Azalmora instead. I thought that sounded much better, so by happy accident I changed her name to Azalmora. She turned out to be a pretty great villain: disciplined, intelligent, and self controlled, which of course makes it easier to write the protagonist, since the villain doesn't make obvious mistakes, so they have to be willfully blind not to exist. #4 Improvising the Norvangir As you might recall, if you read my website for any length of time, I usually outline everything in advance and I did the same thing with Dragonskull. I did however, improvise the Norvangir entirely. In the original outline, Gareth and Company would meet the Ghost Path Tribe of Halflings after leaving the Qazaluuskan Forest. The closer it got to that point, however, the more bored I became with the idea, since I felt like you would just be digging up an obscure point above Frostborn: The Skull Quest. At that time, I happened to watch a National Geographic or possibly PBS documentary about how the Vikings came to North America , specifically, Canada, substantially sooner than anyone originally thought, and an idea took hold. What if a group of Vikings accidentally sailed into a mysterious mist that was actually World Gate and ended up in the world of Andomhaim? I liked the idea enough that I rewrote the series outline to accommodate it, and thus the Norvangir were born. I do wish I got in the Ghost Path Halflings into the story, but once I had swapped in the Norvangir it seemed like an unnecessary side quest at that point. 00:10:30 #5 Improvising Niara Niara was always in the outline for the series from the very beginning. I wasn't entirely sure what her personality would be like, though. Early on, I envisioned her as much more somber and stoic. As the books went on and the character developed, the stoicism remained, but the somberness was replaced by a combination of the love of fighting, stubbornness, and a violent charisma. When Niara is convinced that she is in the right, she absolutely will not back down and will cheerfully fight anyone who tries to force her to change her mind. I found that happens quite a bit when writing fiction. You envision s character one way, but then you actually write them and they start interacting with the setting and the conflict and the other characters, and they turn out quite a bit differently than the way you originally thought. 00:11:12 #6: The End I've realized that when writing a series, you need to have a definite endpoint in mind. Like, if you're JD Robb, John Sanford, or Jeffrey Deaver, you can write a long series of open-ended novels about the same detective. But that doesn't really work in fantasy. The reader expectation is that there will be an ending, a fairly epic ending, at some point. I've tried writing a fantasy series with an open-ended plot line in mind. But it never seems to work, so the ending is important both for the individual books and definitely for the entire series as a whole. I think I arrived at a satisfactory ending for the series. The key to a proper ending, of course, is that it needs to provide emotional resolution to the conflicts previously raised in the story. Fantasy as a genre has a bad reputation for unfinished series. Mostly this is the fault of the publishers, with a few notable exceptions. They'll contract a writer for trilogy or five book series, and then cancel it after the second book only sells 80% of the copies of the first one. On occasion, it is the writer’s fault. The writer just bit off more than he or she can chew or got excited with a new idea it, didn't really plan it out or think it through. So I hope the ending for Dragonskull is satisfying, and if it isn't, remember that disappointing ending is much better than no ending at all. 00:12:28 #7 What's Next? Dragonskull is over, but there is more stories in the land of Andomhaim and neighboring realms. If all goes well, I will start on Shield of Storms, the first book in the Shield War series, sometime in the sometime in the first half of 2024. And finally, I would just like to thank everyone who came along for the Dragonskull ride. I'm glad so many of you enjoyed the books and that series has been my best selling one for the last two years. So once again, I would like to express my gratitude to everyone who has read, bought, and enjoyed the books and shared them with your friends. Thank you very much. It is very appreciated and you are the best readers in the world. So that is it for this week. Thanks for listening to the Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found this show useful. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave for review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this week's episode, I recall reading THE SILMARILLION for the first time as a teenager, and discuss how it later influenced MAGIC THE GATHERING. TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Welcome and Writing Updates Hello everyone. Welcome to Episode 164 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is August the 13th, 2023 and today we're going to discuss The Silmarillion and how it connects to Magic the Gathering and we'll also answer some reader questions and have an update on my current writing projects. First up, let's have an update on my current writing projects. I'm pleased to report that Dragonskull: Crown of the Gods, the final book in the Dragonskull series is now out. You can get it at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, Smashwords, Scribd, and Payhip on my own store. It came out officially yesterday actually, and it's been selling very well very briskly. So, thank you all for that. It is also the 9th and final book in the Dragonskull series, so those of you who refuse to read the series until it's complete, you can now buy all nine Dragonskull books immediately and enjoy them. I also released a bonus short story called The Final Shield that is a preview of the next Epic Fantasy series I will write in Andomhaim in the year 2024. So if you want a preview of that series, you can check out The Final Shield. My newsletter subscribers will have gotten that story for free and I'll be doing a follow up e-mail in a week or so. So, if you sign up for the newsletter right now, you will get a free ebook copy of The Final Shield next week. Now that Dragonskull is finished as part of my Summer of Finishing Things, the next thing I will write will be Silent Order: Pulse Hand, the 14th and final book in the Silent Order science fiction series. I'm going to start that tomorrow as a matter of fact and hopefully have it out towards the end of September. 00:01:49 Reader Questions and Comments So, let's have some questions and comments from readers. Our first question is from James, who asks: I do have a question. I understand it's very expensive to create an Audible book. Are there any plans to make an Audible version for the last set of the Ghost Night Book series? At the moment, no. The Ghosts is completely in audiobook. Ghost Exile is completely in audiobook, and when I start writing a new Caina series after Silent Order: Pulse Hand, I'm going to start doing that one in audiobook right away. But at the moment, I don't have any plans to do a Ghost Night audiobook series. Things may change later, but for now I don't. Our next question is from Andy, who asks: For Dragonskull: Doom of the Sorceress, you seem to do a soft open, e.g. publish the table of contents on Wednesday and then late Friday I was able to download the book on iBooks. I'm hoping the same for The Crown of the Gods. Well, this is what I do when I publish a book: The first day I will publish it everywhere on all the platforms: Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, Smashwords, Payhip, and then through Smashwords, should get on Scribd eventually, and then I leave alone the rest of that day. So the day after then I will start an Amazon auto target ad to start getting word out. The day after that I will post links. So the second day after I publish I will post links for the book on Facebook and other social media and then the day after that, ideally the third day after publishing, is when I will send out the newsletter letting everyone know that it's been read, so that way, usually by then, by the third day, it's finished processing on all the platforms and I can then send out a newsletter out letting every reader I have on every platform know that it's available on their platform of choice. So that's usually what I do. For the table of contents, I post that when I get to a certain phase of editing, and at that point I'm almost done with the book. So once I have posted the table of contents, it's not too much longer until the book will be done and I will be ready to publish. Our next question is from William, who asks similar questions: I've been listening to some of your works through Audible. I started listening to Frostborn: The Gray Knight. It seems like I'm missing some of the story. Your website says Frostborn: The First Quest is the first book, but I can't seem to find it on Audible. Is it in a bundle that I'm not aware of, similar to The Ghosts: Omnibus One? What books or series should I read before that one, Frostborn or is Frostborn its own universe? Thanks for listening, William. I'm glad you enjoyed the books. To answer your questions, Frostborn is its own universe, completely distinct from The Ghosts. Frostborn: The First Quest is a prequel novel I wrote before the main series of Frostborn, and we've never done that one in audio because it is not part of the main story and you don’t actually need to read Frostborn: The First Quest to understand what's going on in the main story. So that’s sort of a bonus material that's out there. Potentially someday, we might do Frostborn: The First Quest in audio, but I don't have any plans to do that right now. And I should mention that the complete Frostborn series is in audio as is the two sequel series, Sevenfold Sword and Dragontiarna. They're all available in audio and you can get them all on Audible. Our next question is from Paloma, who asks about the Dragonskull and Frostborn series. A question: the Magistri get married and have families, but I don't remember any Magistri in the books having any spouses with them. I hope that is not the men…and the men and women in the situation are like monks. So I hope Joaquin has someone amazing in his future. That is an interesting question, but in the setting of Andomhaim, the Magistri can in fact get married. If you've read the Frostborn series, you might remember at the end the Magistrius Camorak does get married to a widow at the end of Frostborn: The Shadow Prison. So it is perfectly normal for the Magistri in Andomhaim to get married. That said, they tend to get married at a much lower level than the rest of the population in Andomhaim. This is partly because a lot of the commoners and many of the nobles in Andomhaim have a deep suspicion of magic and only tolerate the Magistri because they're useful or sometimes not at all. Sometimes the Magistri themselves also get very either wrapped up in their studies to the point where they don't have time for spouse and children, or they become so in love with their own power and prestige and authority that they, you know, don't have any interest in pursuing relationships. Because the nobles are more common…or more comfortable with the Magistri than the commoners, it's not entirely uncommon for a Lord to have an affair if he happens to have a female Magistria assigned to his court. And this doesn't happen like terribly often, but often enough that it's the subject of several popular songs that the nobles and the Magistri aren't too fond of Andomhaim. So that is the bit of world building there, that the Magistri can get married and do, but not as often as the rest of the population in Andomhaim for the reasons we just mentioned. And finally, we have a comment from Bill about last week's episode about dealing with bad reviews. And Bill had this to say: Love this episode and you are 100% correct. Don't respond. Do not engage. Some people are just spoiling for an argument. Sometimes I've wrote a review and thought, you know, for your point, and sometimes I felt, well that guy totally missed the point. But most of all, don't let negative reviews get under your skin. What you write is not going to appeal to everyone. We live in this amazing paradox. There are more books than ever, and readers have access to all the books ever via online services. So why waste your time reading something you don't like and then taking the time and effort to complain about it? Sounds like some people need a hobby. Not every author’s works are going to appeal to every single reader. That's OK. There is tons of other great stuff out there. The important thing is that your work will appeal to some readers, and those are folks you should cherish. That's what matters and pays the bills. So wise words from Bill there and a good reminder that it's never a good idea to engage with negative reviews online. 00:07:54 The Silmarillion and Magic The Gathering: Arena So now it's time to transition to our main topic, The Silmarillion and Magic the Gathering, and we're going to talk about how The Silmarillion and Magic The Gathering: Arena, the free app are related. If I remember correctly, I first read The Silmarillion when I was either 17 or 18. I got it at the small town bookshop in the small town where I grew up. The book shop alas, no longer exists and the storefront is now occupied by a place selling kitchen fixtures. I still have the specific copy of The Silmarillion that I bought. It was the gold mass market paperback that showed the fall of Númenor on the cover, and the cover blurb said it was the history of the Elves of Middle Earth. Since I had read the Lord of the Rings when I was 16, I was definitely interested in trying The Silmarillion. Reading the Lord of The Rings gives us a sense of the vast history behind the story, a history that had been going on long, long before Bilbo ever met Thorin Oakenshield and found the ring in the goblin tunnels beneath the Misty Mountain. At the end of Rings, there are bits and pieces of that history in the various appendixes, but it had never been fully explained. So, I thought The Silmarillion might be an intriguing read, and at 17 or possibly 18, I was already very interested in fantasy worldbuilding, which as we know, would serve me well in later…later in life. Now it must be said, The Silmarillion is kind of a difficult read. Like, it starts off with the creation myth and then has a long section where the Valar ordered the world and then explains who each of the Valar are in great detail and the elves don't even show up for a while. In terms of the text, it feels like a combination of reading an ancient chronicle like Xenophon or Tacitus combined with the Epic of Gilgamesh and the historical books of the Bible, specifically the ones where every chapter starts with King Whoever did evil in the eyes of the Lord, more than all his predecessors combined. So in terms of reading, The Silmarillion is a heavy lift. But what did I think the first time I read it? In all honesty, The Silmarillion blew my underdeveloped adolescent mind. It was one of the first fictional things I read that was truly epic in scope, like some parts of it, I just didn't get, but I had just enough historical knowledge at the time to grasp from the inspirations. Like, the Valar were kind of like the Greek and Roman gods without the jerkish behavior, Melkor/Morgoth was an analog for the devil, Numenor was inspired by Atlantis, and so forth. As you get older, some, in fact, many of the memories of adolescence tend to get hazier, but I can still clearly remember reading portions of The Silmarillion in that gold mass market paperback for the first time, the music of the Ainur, Fëanorand the Silmarils, Melkor and Ungoliant, the Battle of Tears Unnumbered, Fingolfin’s duel with Morgoth before the gates of Angband, Beren and Lúthien Tinúviel, Turin and the Dragon Glaurung, The fall of Gondolin, The voyage of Eärendil, and finally the War of Wrath when Eärendil casts the Great Dragon Ancalagon The Black from the sky into the towers of Thangorodrim and Morgoth is finally overthrown. And then at the end, Maglor, in his despair and grief after so much suffering, casts the final Simaril into the sea, and forever wanders Middle-earth, singing of his regret. All these amazing, epic, and tragic scenes are cached in the imagination. I mean, I can't remember what I had for lunch yesterday, but I do remember reading The Silmarillion for the first time. About that time I started digging around in my school's library and I found some of the various history of Middle Earth books that Christopher Tolkien had published from his father's copious notes. Among them was The Lays of Beleriand, which included an epic poem Tolkien wrote about the quest of Beren and Luthien, but never got around to finishing. The poor guy enjoyed puttering so much that is probably astonishing that he finished the Lord of the Rings at all. I don't generally enjoy poetry, but since I already knew the story of Beren and Lúthien, and I was able to follow along with the poem and the sheer craft and skill that blew my mind. Like, I never have had any interest at all in writing poetry, but this was amazing. The Silmarillion, like the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, is one of those books that will endure the test of time and become part of sort of the cultural canon like Sherlock Holmes, Romeo and Juliet, Ebenezer Scrooge, and so forth. Let's jump forward many years to 2023, when I started playing Magic The Gathering: Arena. The game received a Lord of the Rings themed expansion pack, which I started playing in June, once it made its way onto the app. It's a point of pride with me that I've never spent any actual U.S. dollars on the game, but I've won enough matches that the in game gold starts to accumulate and the only thing to spend the in game gold on is in game card packs. So I've gotten more and more and more of the Rings themed Magic cards. One of those cards is the Tale of Tinuviel, which is an enchantment card that distributes its effects over three turns. On the first turn, you pick a creature to be invulnerable for the next three turns. On the second, you can pick two creatures to have life link to the end of the turn. And on the third, you can bring back one of your previously killed creatures. It's a powerful card, which is fitting, since in The Silmarillion, Lúthien forces Sauron to flee and puts Morgoth and his entire court to sleep long enough for her and Beren to escape from Angband within the Silmarils. Anyway, the very first time I played the Tale of Tinuviel card, I was losing the match pretty badly, but I played the card and turned things around just long enough for me to win three turns later. It was an interesting experience, since it brought back the memories of reading The Silmarillion and the Lays of Beleriand from the first time, all those years ago in a previous century. And amusingly, I played a match right before I recorded this podcast and I won because I used the Tale of Tinuviel yet again. So that's it for this week. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe, stay healthy, and see you all next week.

In this week's episode, we offer some tips and tricks for writers dealing with bad reviews. We also look at how Facebook and Amazon ads performed in July 2023. TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Progress Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 163 of the Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is August 4th, 2023, and today we're going to discuss how to handle bad reviews. Before we get into that, let's have some updates on my current writing projects. I am making good progress on editing Dragonskull: Crown of the Gods, and if absolutely everything goes well, hopefully the book should be out by the time episode 164 of this podcast comes out, so I'm hoping we'll be finished sometime in the coming week after August 4th. I have also written a bonus short story that I will give away for free in ebook form to newsletter subscribers when the book comes out. It is called The Final Shield and that will set up some of the stuff that I have in my next epic fantasy series because while this is the last Dragonskull, it will not be the last book…epic fantasy series I write in the realm of Andomhaim. I think there are many more stories to be told there, so The Final Shield will set up some of the conflicts that will take place in the new series, so look forward to reading that when that comes out. We are about halfway through listening to…proof-listening to Dragon Skull: Curse of the Orcs, so hopefully that will be coming out in audiobook in a few weeks, if all goes well. And then once Dragon Skull: Crown of the Gods is done, it'll be time to write the final Silent Order book, Silent Order: Pulse Hand and I'm hoping to have that out sometime in September if everything goes well. 00:01:35 Ad Results for July 2023 Before we get into our main topics and some reader questions, let's see how my ads did for July 2023. First up, let's look at the Facebook ads. As usual, this is what I got back for every dollar I spent on the ads. For Frostborn, including the audiobooks, with every dollar I spent on ads, they got back $7.82. For Ghosts, including the audiobooks, with everything I spent…with every dollar I spent, I got back…$4.17. For Cloak Games and Cloak Mage, for every dollar I spent I got back $4.57, which doesn't include the audiobooks. And for Silent Order, for every dollar I spent, I got back $4.88. And since there are no audiobooks for Silent Order, that obviously does not include audiobooks. Unfortunately, Cloak Games and Cloak Mage never really sells enough audiobooks to really move the needle. But other than that, everything was going well in Facebook ads this month. This is also the only reliable way I have found to promote audiobooks: advertise the ebooks, and if you sell enough ebook copies, eventually the needle will move on some audiobooks. For Amazon ads, the only thing I'm advertising right now is Dragon Skull: Sword of the Squire. Remember, that for an Amazon ad to work, it needs to generate a sale for every 6-8 clicks on the ad. For Dragonskull, for every dollar I spent, I got $4.00 back and I had a sale for every 0.74 clicks. So that was performing well. Now, if you've been listening to the show, you might remember that in past months, the Dragonskull Amazon ads made more, but the reason it generated less per dollar spent was because the book was on sale for $0.99 for Bookbub, so Sword of the Squire made less, but overall the Dragonskull series as a series made more money, so it was a pretty good month for advertising. 00:03:20 Reader Questions and Comments Before we get to our main topic, we have a couple of questions from readers this week. Our first question is from Ken, who says: I'm listening to Dragonskull Book #3 on Chirp. Will the rest of the series be available soon on this platform to listen to? As I mentioned earlier in the show, #4 is about halfway done and should be out in next few weeks and after that, we do we do plan to continue putting out more Dragonskull books as long as the budget and everyone’s health holds up. So hopefully sometime next year we should have all nine up on the Chirp store for you to listen to. Our next question comes from Doug who says: Is there character art available (other than book covers), like concept art? Also for the races, monsters, landmarks, castras, and so on? Unfortunately not. I do quite a bit of Photoshops for both book covers and for Facebook ads, but I've never really commissioned any official art. The book covers and Facebook ads are meant to evoke the feel of epic fantasy, so that when the reader looks at the book cover or the ad, they know immediately, that it’s for epic fantasy. So I've never really commissioned independent art to use for the book. But thanks for reading. 00:04:31 Introduction to Today’s Topic: Handling Bad Reviews Now on to our other main topic of the week, which I'm afraid is a topic that comes up pretty often in the writing online community space. It's how to deal with bad reviews. It's time for that doleful yearly tradition, or though, honestly, that tends to happen every few months: New author freaks out about a bad review and then the Internet falls on his/her head. The latest freak out, the one that inspired this episode, involves BookTok, a subset of the TikTok video social media app which, in my opinion, just combined the least desirable features of YouTube and Twitter and somehow make them worse. Anyway, to sum up, a BookTok person gave a new author a mostly favorable review, but complained that the ending was predictable. The author took this personally and shot back, which resulted in the traditional Internet rage pile up and the author’s book contract cancelled. Granted, at least this time the author didn't drive to the critic's house and attack the critic with a wine bottle. That actually happened once. Or otherwise show up in critic’s house or workplace. If you are a writer, there is one rule and one rule only you must follow with bad reviews: Never ever, ever respond to reviews. In other words, you just got to suck it up and move on. I know what I'm talking about, I'm afraid. I have been doing this for about 12 1/2 years now and I've gotten every kind of bad review under the sun. Here are just a few of the negative opinions that people have either 1: written in bad reviews or 2: taken upon themselves to e-mail to me personally or send via Facebook Messenger: The book is badly written. The book is an insult to the English language. I hate the main character. The main character had no flaws. The main character had too many flaws to be believable. The main character was too self-loathing. The main character really should have been more self-loathing. My wife is an English teacher and she was laughing at how bad this book was. This book was Christian propaganda. This book was anti-Christian propaganda. There was too much profanity, there was not enough profanity. The book was too long. The book was too short. Things that happened in previous books were referenced in this one. Somehow the author insidiously wrote this book to deliberately insult me on a personal level. I am annoyed that the main character was not near to his children. I am recently divorced and I hate this book because the main character reminds me of my ex who was the literal embodiment of the devil and the ultimate source of all evil in the cosmos. The main character’s romantic choices were wrong. I emailed the author detailed criticisms with this book and he never responded. Clearly, he hates his readers. Too much violence, not enough violence and of course, others related to that vein. There is also for a while a guy writing like 3,000 word reviews on his blog about how much he hated my books. He stopped eventually and I hope he found a girlfriend. So for all the stuff listed above, I only very rarely responded, and only when it was something simple and factually inaccurate that I could easily and quickly point out, like someone complaining that the book wasn't available on Google Play when it really was, that kind of thing. Overall though, I avoid responding on the Internet to anything even remotely negative. And to be fair, after 12 years of publishing, I don't feel the need to respond. I don't feel much of anything at bad reviews other than a moment of vague annoyance, like when you see someone driving inattentively. Like when you’re a new writer, bad reviews really do sting. But I haven't been a new writer for a long, long time now. Silent Order: Thunder Hand was book #142 and after 142 books, I can't even remember what I actually wrote half the time, let alone the opinions people might have had about it. By the time I get to book four or five in a series, I have to spend a lot of time searching the previous books with Control+F to remember important details. I am always grateful when someone enjoys the book and indifferent when someone does not. But for the new writers who haven't yet written so much they can't remember everything they've written, here are some tips and tricks to help you deal with bad reviews.   00:08:21 Tip 0: Pen Name If you're just starting out, maybe you should write under a pen name. Like if you haven't published anything yet, then you're just starting out, that might be something to consider. I didn't obviously, but I'm told for people who do, it's useful element of psychological compartmentalization (that's hard to say!), but anyway, all the bad reviews are for pen name, not you and that way you can shrug them off more easily. Now to the rest of the tips.   00:08:50 Tip #1: You aren’t Obliged to Have an Opinion Number one: you aren't obliged to have an opinion about a bad review. Social media creates the illusion that you have to have an opinion about everything. This is especially true on Twitter, where everyone has a hot take about the latest events of the day, like there's a news event of some kind whether serious like the war in Ukraine, or trivial, like a celebrity says something dumb, and many social media users feel the need to express an opinion about it. For what is most of that, if not indulging in the vice of gossip? It's talking about people you've never met and with whom you have no relationship. That learned reflex from social media, I think, transfers to some writers who have meltdowns over reviews. Someone posted a bad review of my book. I need to share my opinion about that bad review on social media. But you don't. In fact, I think training yourself not to share every opinion you have on social media is a skill many people would find beneficial. Just because someone didn't like your book doesn't mean you're obligated to respond to a bad review. Indeed, you aren't even required to have an opinion about their opinion. To quote the Book of Proverbs, even a fool, when he holdeth his peace is counted wise and he that shattered his lips is esteemed a man of understanding.   00:10:03 Tip #2: Don’t Respond to Negative Emails Tip #2: Don't respond to negative emails. Generally, I try to respond to all reader emails unless it's negative and I don't want to engage. Sometimes you get emails or Facebook messages from someone and you can tell they're just spoiling for a fight, especially if you get an angry e-mail complaining about the book on Monday, don't respond, and they get an even angrier e-mail on Wednesday complaining that you still haven't responded. Arguing with people over the Internet is almost nearly always an enormous waste of time. If it's a concrete problem that's within my power to fix, like corrupted file, reader can't find the book and so forth, then I’ll respond. Otherwise, it's just not worth the energy and getting into an argument over the Internet is always more of a time and energy sink than you might anticipate.   00:10:51 Tip #3: Don’t Engage in Reader-Oriented Spaces Tip #3: Don't engage in reader-oriented spaces. Generally, I think it's best for writers to stay out of reader- oriented spaces, especially if the writer’s work is being reviewed or otherwise discussed in that space. Now, what do I mean by reader-oriented spaces? I mean a place like Goodreads, a site that's devoted to book reviews, or a YouTube book reviewer’s comments section, or the feed of a BookTok video creator. Those areas of the Internet are devoted to readers discussing books, and it's never a good idea for an author to inject themselves into the conversation there. It's especially a bad idea if the writer’s book is the one actually being discussed, because that sort of discussion can spiral out of control very quickly. So if you're a writer, it's best to avoid Goodreads and Booktube and BookTok. If you really must engage there, it's probably wisest to create an account under a different name and never ever mention your books. 00:11:43 Tip #4: Read the Other Reviews Tip #4: read the other reviews. If a bad review really gets under your skin, it might be worthwhile to read the other reviews the person in question has posted. This is easy on Amazon or Goodreads. You just click on the viewer's name and you'll see their profile page along with all of the other stuff they've reviewed. Often you'll discover that the reviewer just hates everything. Or you'll see that the reviewer dislikes something you strongly like or likes something you don't, which gives you an easy way to discard their opinion. On a more serious note, you'll sometimes see that the reviewer is in chronic pain, and bad reviews are a way of lashing out. A while back, a study found that many of the high volume Internet reviewers are homebound and frequently dealing with high levels of chronic pain. Like if you click on their reviewers profile on Amazon and see that they're also reviewing adult diapers, compression socks, orthopedic shoes, and back braces (sometimes with excruciating detail), they've probably got a lot of other problems to deal with,  which shows once again that it's best not to engage with bad reviews because you never can tell what someone else might be going through. 00:12:43 Tip # 5: Delete and Block as Necessary Tip #5 delete or block as necessary. Bad reviews are one thing. But if someone makes a nuisance of themselves on your social media pages or keeps emailing you, go ahead and block them. I haven't done that done…this all that often, but I have done it. It's not something I'll do right away. Sometimes online writing lacks nuance and you can completely misinterpret what someone was saying, or there are technical difficulties. Once I have a Facebook comment along the lines of, I hope your head gets chopped off. 5 minutes later, the second-half of the comment came through: because it makes up for what you did to that character lol lol, great book. Looking forward to the sequel. So that can sometimes happen. But if someone is consistently unpleasant, I'll just block them. Accepting that bad reviews exist is a necessary state of mind for a writer. Tolerating bad comments on your own social media and website is not. The block button is there for a reason.   00:13:32 #6: Plod Onward Number six: plod onward. The best writing advice is to keep writing. If you do that long enough, eventually you will build a much thicker skin to criticism. You will learn not to take any bad reviews personally and move onward. There are few substitutes in life for sheer plodding persistence. Hopefully, if you are a new writer, these tips will help you learn to handle bad reviews without a public Internet meltdown. So that's it for this week. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this week's episode, we discuss writing dialogue in fiction, and share eight tips & tricks for writing better dialogue. TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction, Writing Updates, and a Reader Question Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 162 of the Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is July the 26th, 2023. And today we're going to discuss some tips and tricks about how to write dialogue. You may notice that I'm recording this a few days earlier than usual. There's some things coming up in the next few days I want to get a jump on, so I'm getting the episode recorded early so I can still get it out. First up, some updates on my current writing projects.  I am now 72,000 words into Dragonskull: Crown of the Gods, which puts me at Chapter 16 of 20 of the book, so I am past the 75% mark and I'm hoping to wrap up the rough draft soon, possibly the week this episode will come out. After that I will write the bonus short story that I will give away for free to my newsletter subscribers. I think it's going to be called The Final Shield this time, and if all goes well, Dragonskull: Curse of the Orcs, no, Dragonskull: Crown of the Gods will be out sometime in August. Dragonskull: Curse of the Orcs is the audiobook that I am currently proof-listening to and that should hopefully be out towards the end of August or possibly September. Once Dragonskull: Crown of the Gods is out and published, the next project will be Silent Order: Pulse Hand, the final book in the Silent Order science fiction series. So it'll be exciting to get to that to finish the Dragonskull and the Silent Order series back-to-back. You might remember, on last’s week show that I had a 10,000 word day, while writing Dragonskull: Crown of the Gods, and I'm pleased to report that I've had a second 10,000 word day while writing Dragonskull: Crown of the Gods, which makes sure makes my second 10K word day of 2023. Since I had only one of those in 2022, this is very gratifying. If I remember right, I had nine in 2021 and 22 of them in 2020. Well, there wasn't much else to do in 2020 except write, which I’m sure we can all recall it quite well. Before we get to our main topic of writing dialogue, we have a question from reader Judy, who asks: Are you finished with Caina? And the answer to that is no. After I write Silent Order: Pulse Hand, the next book I'm planning to write will be Ghost in the Serpent, the first book of the Ghost Armor series and hopefully that will be out sometime this fall, if all goes well. 00:02:19 Introduction to Main Topic: Writing Dialogue Now on to our main topic of the week: writing dialogue. The thing about writing dialogue is that it's often tricky because the way people talk is frequently very, very different from clear and lucid prose. Conversations are often rambling and incoherent, even to the participants. The tricky part when writing fiction is that 1: you're writing a story, and you need to move things along and 2: you want the dialogue to be comprehensible so people don't abandon reading your story. However, you don't want your dialogue to sound like two computers exchanging precisely written and grammatically accurate factoids. How to strike a balance between these points? Here are some tips and tricks for writing interesting dialogue: 00:03:02 Tip #1 Speech Should Reflect the Character Who is Speaking Number One: Remember that speech shouldn't sound like prose, and it should reflect the character who is speaking. Consider the following sentence: Maura parked her car at the gas station on the corner of 48th and Truman. Now if she needed to convey that information in dialogue, you just repeat that like this: “I parked my car at the gas station on the corner of 48th and Truman”, said Maura. However, unless the character tends to speak very precisely, most people will not talk that way. It will probably sound more like this: “Yeah. Parked over at the gas station on 48th”, said Maura. “You know, the one across from the dry cleaner.” Or depending on Maura’s personality, it might be more like this: “You know that gas station where Jenkins threw up in the aisle?” said Maura. “Parked the car there. Yeah. I didn't go inside. Places is a dump. They may not have cleaned up the puke yet.” Dialogue as we know is often a reflection of personality. If Maura was a law enforcement officer setting a trap for a bank robber, she might say like this: “Parked at the gas station on 48th and Truman”, said Maura, “Ready and in position. No sign of the suspect.” But if she was a criminal who had left stolen merchandise in the car for her contact pickup, you might say like this: “Car’s at the gas station across from the dry cleaners”, said Maura. “The one where Jenkins threw up after the 5th vodka martini, you remember. Stuff’s in the trunk.” Dialogue will generally be less precise than clear prose and should reflect the character’s personality whenever possible. 00:04:29 Tip #2: Avoid Info Dumping Number Two: avoid info dumping. One common technique is to use dialogue to convey information about the story to the reader. This can be done well, or it can be done clumsily. Science fiction and fantasy writers, alas tend to fall into this trap all too often because we have exotic concepts to explain to the audience, but you can see the problem very easily when it's done badly. Let's use a modern day example. Jenkins and Maura are about to fly on a plane departing from an American airport, and Maura has never flown before, so Jenkins needs to explain how a TSA security check works. In real life, the conversation would probably go like this: “So what am I supposed to do here?” said Maura Jennings sighed. “Didn't you read the PDF I sent you?” She rolled her eyes. “Fine”, said Jenkins. “Look, you put your stuff in these plastic tubs and then you take off your shoes and go through the scanner. Since you're wearing a tank top and TSA guys are usually pervs, you're going to get the enhanced pat down.” He feigned groping his own chest. “Don't be a jerk.” Now a writer succumbing to info dumping would probably have the conversation go like this: “So what am I supposed to do here?” said Maura. Jenkins turned to her. “As you know, Maura, in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the United States Congress passed the Aviation and Transportation Security Act, which created the Transportation Security Administration, which henceforth would have authority over civilian airport security on United States soil. Initially part of the Transportation Department, the TSA was moved under the authority of Homeland Security when that department was created in March of 2003….” You see the problem? No one actually talks that way in real life. The problem comes in when writers use infodumping and dialogue as a shortcut to worldbuilding. Fantasy and science fiction writers succumb to that temptation a lot, but we're not the only ones. Thriller writers, mystery writers, and romance writers whose protagonists have a lot of back story tend to fall into the shortcut as well. The better way to deal with this is with just enough information in the dialogue for the conversation to make sense, but to leave out enough that the reader is interested in finding out what is going to happen. Humans are innately curious. This is why when someone mentions something interesting that you've never heard before (like for example, your new boss is recently divorced and now engaged to the departmental secretary), the conversation immediately moves in that direction. But if two fictional characters mention something the reader hasn't heard before, they aren't obliged to explain it to the reader immediately, which will help hold their interest. For example, let's go back to Jenkins and Maura: “You've seriously never been on a plane before,” said Jenkins as Maura collected her stuff from the TSA's plastic tubs. “Nope”, said Maura, her frown edging towards a scowl. “Why not?” “Tyler was always going to take me to LA”, said Maura. “Where are we going next?” Her expression said further questions would not receive any answers, so they continued to the gate. In the story, if this is the first mention of Tyler, it adds a bit of mystery. Who is Tyler and why is Maura mad at him? If this is a romance, Tyler could be her ex. If this is a mystery or a thriller novel, Tyler could be a fellow criminal or another law enforcement officer. Not only is this closer to the way that real people actually talk, it provides a bit of a minor hook to keep the reader interested in the book and to keep the reader reading on. 00:07:40 Tip #3: Subtext Number Three: One of the most incredibly annoying things about human conversation is that people rarely say what they actually mean, and the surface topic of the conversation is often unconnected with the real meaning of the conversation. This is called subtext. One of the most common examples is Sherlock Holmes and his archnemesis Professor Moriarty playing chess. Holmes and Moriarity are discussing the game, but that's just the surface conversation. They're really talking about their rivalry. Or a Mafia thug walks into a shop and tells the owner that these rickety old buildings really need to have fire insurance. The Mafia guy isn't talking about the fire code or actually selling insurance. He's giving the subtle warning to the owner that he needs to pay protection money or his business is going to start suffering “accidents.” This can take place in less fraught circumstances. Like for example, a woman is angry than a man has been promoted over her at work. Rather than address the issue, she might start complaining about the contents of the vending machines, or insisting that every new project is doomed to failure. The contents of the vending machine or the scope of the project are irrelevant. The subtext to her complaints is that she's not happy she wasn't promoted. Communication breakdown can occur when the person speaking thinks their subtext is obvious and clear, but the person listening (listening, that's hard to say), but the person listening misses it entirely. Let's have some examples. Say Maura and Jenkins both worked for MegaCorp and Maura thinks the current district manager is incompetent and wants the job for herself. “Profits are down, production is down, and turnover is way up,” said Mora. “This can't keep going on.” “Uh-huh”, said Jenkins. “And I suppose you have a great idea about how to fix it?” Maura put her hands on her hips and glared at him. “Well, what if I do? Someone needs to step up and fix things.” In this conversation, Maura isn't flat out saying “I want to be the district manager.” She's just saying that things aren't going well and they need to be fixed. Indeed, she doesn't mention the district manager job at all. But it's immediately obvious to Jenkins (and hopefully to the reader), that Maura wants the job. If Jenkins misses the subtext, it might cause a conflict with Maura: “Profits are down, production is down, and turnover is way up,” said Maura. “This can't keep going on.” Jenkins shrugged. “The economy is bad. Inflation's up. Can't do much about that.” Maura folded her arms over her chest and glared at him. “Maybe we need some new leadership.” Jenkins groaned. “From where? We would need another search committee.” “An internal hire would be a better choice.” Jenkins laughed. “The people who already work here are idiots. If we did an internal search for a district manager, we'd probably end up with one even dumber than the one we already have.” Maura scoffed, shook her head, and stalked off. Jenkins watched her go, wondering what had annoyed her so much. Maybe those high heels were pinching her toes. So subtext can be a way to make dialogue more interesting to the reader, which leads us to the opposite of this technique: 00:10:40 Tip #4: The Character is Imagining a Subtext That Doesn’t Exist Number Four: the character is imagining a subtext that doesn't actually exist. This happens all the time in real life, where people impute meanings to your speech that you didn't actually intend. Examples are myriad and you can no doubt think of several you have personally experienced from off the top of your head. For example, say someone invites you to a movie and you declined to go, saying that you don't feel up to it, maybe your stomach is upset. You have a headache, your knees hurt, or you're simply exhausted or broke and don't feel like going, but if you felt better or had more money, you would go to the movie. Except the person who invited you takes it as a personal insult, even though that wasn't your intent and not the subtext at all. The person who invited you imagined a subtext to your answer that did not exist.  This also happens a lot on social media, where a lot of the visual and auditory cues that usually accompany conversation are absent. No doubt you like me, you can think of many examples. A great example from fiction is from J.R.R. Tolkien's Unfinished Tales, which is a collection of side writings and alternate drafts from when Tolkien was working on Lord of the Rings. In one section, Gandalf the Grey is speaking with Saruman the White, and they're discussing the problem of the One Ring. As they talk, Gandalf is smoking a pipe and blowing smoke rings. And Saruman (who by this time has fallen to Evil and is seeking the ring for himself) thinks that Gandalf is taunting him with the smoke rings, but Gandalf is doing no such thing. He still thinks of Saruman as a friend and trustworthy ally, and he just wants to smoke a pipe as they discuss the problem. The smoke rings are just to tease Saruman a little since Saruman has been giving Gandalf a hard time about smoking. At this point, Gandalf doesn't even know that Bilbo Baggins’ magic ring is actually the One Ring. In his pride and paranoia, Saruman is imagining a subtext to the conversation that doesn't actually exist. Imaginary subtext often occurs when one character knows something that the other does not, but is unaware that the other character doesn't have this information. Let's have an example. In this version of Maura and Jenkins, Maura has arranged for the district manager of MegaCorp to get fired so she can get the job, but feels guilty about it. Jenkins is unaware of her machinations. “So, we're getting a new district manager?” said Jenkins. “Well, security just escorted the old one out the door, so yeah,” said Maura. “I wonder who the new one will be.” “An absolute moron,” said Jenkins. She glared at him, but he didn't notice. “Only a complete idiot would take over that job. Someone with more ambition than brain cells.” “Oh, very clever,” said Maura. “You've just been waiting to say that. Why don't you let me know how you really feel?” “What?” said Jenkins, surprised at your irritation. “What did I say?” As we can see in that example, Maura felt insulted, but Jenkins’ intent wasn't to insult her, merely to observe that anyone stepping into the thankless job of district manager would regret it. But Maura thought Jenkins was talking about her and took it personally. 00:13:33 Tip #5: Profanity is Overrated. Number Five: profanity is overrated and everyone swears all the time in modern fiction, but it happens so often that profanity has become stale and overhead. It's like garlic salt or maybe cayenne peppers: a little bit goes a long way, and it's usually less than you think. Like, profanity might have been shocking 40 or 50 years ago, but most people swear constantly now, and writers tend to use profanity as a crutch, so it's best to go against the current and dial back the profanity. If you use a lot of profanity in your books, you're not being shocking or subversive, you're just being boring like everyone else. A good example might be The Avengers: Endgame movie. In the movie at a climatic moment, Tony Stark says, “And I am Iron Man.” However, in the original script, the line was apparently “F you Thanos.” Wouldn't that have been so much more boring? It sounds like something someone would say in a minor traffic accident or an argument about the building’s shared dumpster: “Stop putting your ****** recycling in the trash can, Thanos!” But apparently one of the producers thought up the line at the absolute last minute, convinced the directors and the actor, and they shot it as a reshoot. It was a good decision, in my opinion, because the line is so much better. It perfectly fits how Stark’s character always needs to have the last word and is an excellent callback to the first Iron Man movie from 2008. So it's best to be intentional with the use of profanity and not to use it as a crutch. An otherwise straightlaced character swearing in a moment of crisis could demonstrate the seriousness of the situation. Alternatively, you could have a character who swears a lot, except when he gets really angry, when he calms down and stops swearing entirely-it's the people who calm down and get calm and focused when they get angry you really have to watch out for. An observation after 12 years of self-publishing: no matter the level of profanity you have in your books, someone will be annoyed at you. If you have no profanity at all, people will complain that's unrealistic, especially if you're writing about soldiers and workmen and other people who traditionally curse a lot. Alternatively, if you have any level of profanity, people will complain about this as well. Like I recently got an email from a reader expressing gentle disappointment that Nadia swears so much in my book, Cloak of Dragonfire. But here's the thing: I tone it way down for the book. In my head, Nadia swears like an angry drill sergeant, or maybe a roofer who just accidentally shot himself in the foot with his nail gun, especially when she gets angry. But for the reasons I listed above, I don't like to overdo it, so that's a good reminder that no matter what you write, someone will be annoyed, so you might as well write as you think best. But overusing profanity is, in my opinion, just lazy. 00:16:14 #6: People Very Often Don’t Answer Direct Questions Number six: people very often don't answer direct questions. If you listen carefully to real life conversations, you will notice that people rarely answer questions directly and often go off on tangents unconnected to the question. There's a quote from Lord of the Rings that illustrates the point perfectly, and short enough that I'll just read it here. The quote comes from pages 611-612 of the single-volume THE LORD OF THE RINGS hardback edition published in 1991 by Houghton Mifflin: ”Are we riding far tonight?” Gandalf asked Merry after a while. “I don't know how you feel with the small rag-tag dangling behind you but the rag-tag is tired and will be glad to stop dangling and lie down.” “So you heard that?” said Gandalf. “Don’t let it rankle! Be thankful no longer words were aimed at you. He had his eyes on you. If it is any comfort to your pride, I should say that, at the moment, you and Pippin are more in his thoughts than the rest of us. Who you are; how you came here, and why; what you know; whether you were captured, and if so, how you escaped when all the orcs perished—it is with those little riddles that the great mind of Saruman is troubled. A sneer from him, Meriadoc, is a compliment, if you feel honoured by his concern.”  “Thank you!” said Merry. “But it is a greater honour to dangle at your tail, Gandalf. For one thing, in that position one has a chance of putting a question a second time. Are we riding far tonight?”  Gandalf laughed. “A most unquenchable hobbit! All wizards should have a hobbit or two in their care—to teach them the meaning of the word, and to correct them.” This quote is almost a perfect example of what I was talking about. In this conversation, Merry wanted to know how much farther they were riding tonight. Gandalf, his mind still occupied by the recent defeat of Saruman at Orthanc, ends up talking about that, which Mary mentioned as a joke. But Merry points out that Gandalf failed to answer the question, and Gandalf laughs and concedes the point. Here's another example with Maura and Jenkins. In this example, Maura has just become the new district manager of Megacorp and is very pleased with herself. Jenkin needs her to sign off on the Busywork Reports for the month, but Maura is still too happy with her new job and is going off on tangents. “Since you’re district manager now, mind just signing off on those Busywork Reports?” said Jenkins, dropping the sheaf of papers on Maura's desk, which was entirely too large and expensive, he thought, given that it held only a laptop computer and Maura’s new nameplate. “Assuming you're not too busy rewriting the dress code.” “Oh, that's just the start,” said Maura. She rose to her feet and paced to her windows. They looked impressive, but they faced the western parking lot, and Jenkins knew for a fact he got unpleasantly hot here during the afternoon. “There are going to be big changes around here, big changes. First thing, we're getting rid of all the deadwood. No more two hour lunches. No more days off so people can have a mental health day with their dogs or whatever.” “That's great,” said Jenkins. “But can you do that after you sign the Busy Work Reports?” Maura gave him an irritated glance. Now you can use this technique in a couple of different ways. It could show what someone is intending to do, as Maura’s example indicates. You can also use it to show if someone doesn't actually want to answer the question, since the person being asked will keep locking onto new tangents and changing the topic to avoid the question. 00:19:06 Tip #7: Avoid Phonetic Dialects #7: avoid phonetic dialects. This might be a personal preference, but I strongly dislike when writers use phonetic dialects in dialogue. This is when the reader mutilates spelling to create an illusion of a dialect or an accent. For example, let's say Jenkins was about to say this: “Well, I reckon it's my it's time that my dog is hankering for his dinner,” said Jenkins. “Well, Ayuh reckin it’s a-time fer me dahg to be hankerin’ fer his dinnuh,” said Jenkins, his voice covered with the accent of a writer attempting to create an illusion of a dialect and failing miserably.  Really, I find that very annoying and I'm not the only one. It's lazy writing. It borders on indulging in stereotyping, which is another kind of lazy writing. Since a stereotype is just a symbol used to represent a person so you since you don't have to do so, you don't have to do the hard work of describing that person. Phonetic dialect is also really hard to read, since your brain has to interpret the odd spellings. HP Lovecraft had a bad habit of doing this, and perhaps the single worst example I've ever read is at The Color at the End of Space, an otherwise excellent story. When the farmer attempts to explain the sinister alien force that invaded his farm and Lovecraft does his best attempt at a rural New England farmer accent and fails miserably. JK Rowling writes the excellent Cormoran Strike private investigator novels, but she occasionally uses phonetic dialect to represent the various different regional UK accents and it's just annoying. If you want to represent a regional accent, in my opinion it's better to do with patterns of speech, vocabulary and perhaps regional slang than with phonetic spellings. 00:20:42 Tip #8: One More Thing #8: One more thing. One curious feature of human conversations at the main point doesn't often arrive until the conversation is nearly over. Doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals notice this a lot. During an interaction with the patient, the main point, the actual reason for the visit, often won’t come until the end of the conversation, usually presaged with “oh, one more thing.” This is usually true if the ailment in question is sensitive or somehow embarrassing. You see this in police procedurals and mystery novels quite a bit. The detective will be talking with the suspect or witness about something else entirely, getting them into a conversational rhythm and then drop the main question- when was the last time you saw Maura and Jenkins talking together, for example. And what were they doing? Let's have an example. In this example, newly promoted district manager Maura is asking Jenkins about Megacorp's most important account, which the company is in danger of losing: “So,” said Maura, fiddling with the paper clip holder on her oversized desk. “How are things in your department?” Jenkins shrugged. “About the same? No one really misses the old manager. Though people are just loving all the new dress code memos.” “Right, right,” said Maura, still sorting through the paper clips. “It's important that we represent a professional appearance. No more showing up to work in jeans or cargo shorts.” Jenkins smirked. “Yes, that will increase profits, won’t it? Good to know that we are prioritizing the important things.” The sarcasm went right over her head. “Look, um, said Maura, and she stopped playing with the paper clips and folded her hands on the desk. “The government account. We need to talk about that.” “Ah”, said Jenkins. “I suppose you didn't call me in here to talk about the dress code after all.” In this example, Maura is worried about the big account, but can't bring herself to ask Jenkins about it right away. You can use this technique frequently or occasionally to indicate if a character is nervous or what the main thing they're worried about is, since they won't bring it up till the end of the conversion. So hopefully, those eight tips and tricks will help you write more realistic and entertaining dialogue for your readers. So that's it for this week. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this week's episode, we take a look at what fantasy writers can learn about worldbuilding from the Willow streaming series. I also discuss how I wrote 10,000 words in a single day for the first time since January 2022. TRANSCRIPT: 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 161 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is July the 21st, 2023, and today we're going to discuss some lessons in fantasy worldbuilding from the recent Willow streaming series on Disney Plus. Before we get into all of that, let's have some updates on my current writing projects. I am almost halfway through the rough draft of Dragon Skull: Crown of the Gods, and in fact, after I finished recording this, I’m going to work on it a bit more and then I will be over halfway through the rough draft of Dragon Skull: Crown of the Gods. If all goes well, I'm hoping to have that out towards the end of August sometime. That is, if you'll recall from previous episodes, part of my Summer of Finishing Things. Dragon Skull: Crown of the Gods is the final book in the Dragonskull series, and I'm going to follow it up with a Silent order: Pulse Hand, which will be the…excuse me, the final book in the Silent Order science fiction series. In other news recording is underway for Dragon Skull: Curse of the Orcs. I think I mentioned that in previous episodes, it is being narrated by Brad Wills and if all goes well, it'll be out towards the end of August or sometime in September. I'm also very pleased to report that on Wednesday, July 19th, I wrote 10,000 words of Dragon Skull: Crown of the Gods in a single day. That is my first 10,000 word day of 2023, and in fact the last time I wrote 10,000 words on a single day was back in January 11th, 2022 when I was working on Cloak of Iron, and since then in the Nadia series I've written Cloak of Iron, wrote Cloak of Shards, Cloak of Spheres, Cloak of Masks, and Cloak of Dragonfire. So it's been a while since I wrote a 10,000 word day. If I remember right, I had eight 10,000 days in 2021 and then I had twenty-two 10,000 words days back in 2020. But that was during peak COVID when there was nothing else to do. And I did write the entire Wraithshard series that year. Here the tricky thing about 10,000 word days is that 1: I can't have anything else major I need to do that day. And 2: everything has to go exactly right during the day. Like, if I have a phone call to make or home maintenance to do or a podcast to record, or something unexpected comes up unexpectedly, that means it's not going to be a 10,000 word day. So for the first time since January 2022, both conditions one and two aligned on the same day and I had a 10,000 word day. Hopefully I'll have at least one more in 2023, but we'll see how the rest of this year goes. 00:02:33: Reader Questions/Comments Before we get to our main topic this week, we have a couple of questions from readers. Charles writes in to ask about the Dragonskull series: How long have most of the Dragonskull books been? Most of the Dragonskull books have been between 80 and 90,000 words, with like around 83,000, 84,000 words being the sweet spot, and I think Dragon Skull: Crown of the Gods will end up somewhere in that neighborhood as well. So I think that's a good length for a book. I think overall the best length for a novel is between 80,000 to 100,000 words, with some exceptions of course, because that way the reader gets an entire story and hopefully doesn't feel cheated, and hopefully that is not a strain on the sanity of the author because I found if you're writing a long book, once it gets over 100,000 words, it gets harder and harder to write. Our next question is from Juana, who says: Come on, write the next Cloak book. Enough with the other series, please. Marshall Worldburner deserves some actions. Though I suppose that is less of a question and more of a declaration. But in answer to the implied question there, once I'm done with my Summer of Finishing Things and the Dragonskull and Silent Order series are complete, the next thing I am going to write is a Caina book which I believe will be entitled Ghost in the Serpent. And then after that I will write a Cloak of Embers, the final…no, excuse me, not final (definitely not final!), but the next Nadia book in the sequence. So before the end of the year, we will have some more Nadia, if all goes well.   00:04:04: Main Topic: Fantasy Wordbuilding Lessons from Willow on Disney Plus Well, now let's move on to our main topic for this week's episode: fantasy worldbuilding lessons, specifically fantasy worldbuilding lessons derived from the Willow streaming series that came out on Disney Plus towards the end of the end of November 2022 last year. I tried watching it, and I got so annoyed with it that I gave up after the first episode. I couldn't quite articulate my annoyance at first, so I thought about it and then realized it connected with one of my favorite topics: fantasy world building and we're going to spend the rest of the episode discussing that. My annoyance with the Willow series reminded me of an e-mail I got when Dragon Skull: Fury of the Barbarians came out in October of 2022. A reader was annoyed that I used the phrase lean in, assuming I'd used it in the modern parlance of giving additional effort to a certain task. The use of the phrase lean in that way 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 into the work 2: working for the most unscrupulous companies in the world and 3: having the personal wealth to hire domestic servants. But perhaps I'm snarking on the book somewhat. Anyway, back to our 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 leading into a sore blow to lend it extra power while fighting a muridach. Probably I should have phrased it better so there would be no misunderstanding with my readers. However, I can understand the annoyance of the reader who emailed me. It would be massively jarring to have such a cliched concept as and one so stereotypically 21st century and as trite as leaning in appear in a fantasy novel. That would be very annoying. And 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. Now, this should have been an excellent setup for a conflict. However, the concept of an arranged marriage in the show is so removed from anything connected to reality that it becomes pointless. One of the keys to understanding medieval history, and indeed most preindustrial history, is the idea of food scarcity. Now 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 preindustrial 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 would contribute to a plague. Medieval Europe from about 1100 to 1300 AD, didn't have that many famines, though did have some. 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 onward. 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 that the concepts of will of the people and of 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 and God's representative on Earth. A king or 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 which could result in a famine, and all the problems we discussed previously. 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 bound up into it, an arranged marriage between royal families was as serious a meeting, as serious an event as a meeting between the President of the United States and the head of the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Examples of this are manifold and here are a few of the more prominent ones: King Henry the Second of England ended his reign at war with his sons because he fell out with his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine. Henry the First 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 the Fourth of France died without a son, which directly contributed to the Hundred Years’ War that devastated much of France. King Edward the Fourth of England marrying Elizabeth Woodville in a fit of passion caused the War of Roses to restart after Edward's early death. Henry the Eighth’s relentless quest for a male heir didn't cause a civil war, since Henry had the ultimate long term survival trait for a monarch: ruthless paranoia. But it did set off the English Reformation in all the social chaos and upheaval that it brought. By contrast, his father, Henry the Seventh, brought an end to the War 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 in royal families was a significant cause for all the conflicts and loss of life described above. But the Willow series doesn't have any of this with its arranged marriage. 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 Coexist bumper stickers on their ox drawn wagons. The queen is forcing 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 tomboy and generate conflict for the plot. Now I'm not saying that all fantasy needs to be filled with Game of Thrones style Grim Dark, but you can get a very tense plot with just say, like 15% of the reality of the stakes of a medieval arranged marriage. Indeed, if you've been reading this blog for a long time or listening my podcast for a long time, you know and you know that I enjoy taking cheap shots at Game of Thrones, a petty vice that I try not to indulge in too often. But I will say this for the House of the Dragon, the spin-off series of Game of Thrones: House of the Dragon does get the very serious stakes and the lethal dynamics of the medieval succession crisis mostly right. Perhaps we should count ourselves fortunate that Henry the Eighth did not have access to dragons. Another dissonant note in the show is how pointedly egalitarian everyone is. In the 21st century, we live in a very egalitarian age where billionaires and politicians feel the need and the social pressure to make gestures to show that they really 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 wide variety of professions. Compare this to the way that, say, Louis the 14th of France, dressed where his clothes were so magnificent that helping him get dressed in the morning was considered a great honor. If the President of the United States gave a press conference addressed as Louis the 14th 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 to the Constitution of the United States. So egalitarianism is so ingrained in modern life that most people assume it's the natural order of things and take it for granted. Now I want to be clear, this is not a bad thing. Overall, I think an egalitarian society is better than the sort of society where, for example, you could be executed for accidentally making eye contact with your social superior. Now what does this have to do with Willow? The princess’ brother, the charming, roguish prince, is conducting a romantic affair with one of the servants in the kitchen. This, of course, is so common to be unremarkable. Even today, it's fairly common for married CEO or high-ranking politician to have an affair with one of the staffers in his or her offices. Hardly commendable, but that's true of a lot of things connected to human nature. What's odd is how the charming, roguish Princess affair is treated, exactly like a modern teenage romance, complete with bouts of squabbling and hurt feelings. It's portrayed like the poor girl from the wrong side of the tracks dating the richest and most popular boy in high school. In real life, in real medieval history, a prince who had a commoner 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 earlier? She was technically very minor nobility, but she was of low enough rank that when King Edward before married her, several of his most powerful supporters immediately turned against him and nearly deposed him. It didn't help that Elizabeth had a large and very greedy family and had immediately began enriching themselves as fast as possible when she became queen. For that matter, the prince’s mistress could have been cast off at any time with no recourse. But remember the food scarcity we described earlier? Being the prince’s mistress was a lot better than working in the fields or in a tavern. It could have been a reflection of the 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 his 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 teen romance in the background while Mean Mom forces plucky, rebellious Princess Tomboy to marry for ill defined reasons, and the only backlash the prince’s girlfriend from the kitchen 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 is potentially an 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 married politicians and business leaders who got caught having affairs with subordinates, 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 dating a student, for example (even if both are technically of age) or a military officer seen as subordinate or someone higher in rank. So what lessons can fantasy writers learn from all this? I think one of the appeals of most fantasy fiction is that's different and an alien place from Earth. Conan's the 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 is an element of the fantastic. Your neighbor might be Harry Dresden or an exiled elven noble living in disguise on Earth 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 they're just…can't just be 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 cancelled without a second season and Disney is pulling the show from its streaming service as a tax write off, I think it's fair to say the show did not work for a lot of people. All the characters were basically 21st century people LARP-ing as fantasy characters. Even that could have been interesting. You could have a 21st (sic) character transported into 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 a bloodline succession. And if the rightful heir is not seated upon the throne, famines and plagues will visit the land, and orcs will come down from the frozen north, seeking man flesh 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 making your setting unlike the modern world. When I talked about this on Facebook, longtime reader William had an interesting comment about it, and William said: I think the strange thing about the Willow series is that it has a perfectly good premise, but it's like some executive decided to rebrand it from a family adventure story like the original movie to make it more appealing to teenagers or some similarly nebulous target youth audience in exactly the kind of comically ham-fisted way that show…that shows and movies make fun of when ridiculing movie executives with an inflated opinion of themselves. I think it is very likely that William may be correct here because the original movie, which I had watched again in 2021 and 2022, is actually quite good. It's. It's a bit weird in places beyond that, and George Lucas was very obviously copying the plot of his Star Wars movie because Queen Bavmorda was like the Emperor,  General Kael was a bit like Darth Vader, Willow was a bit like Luke Skywalker, Madmartigan was a bit like Han Solo and so forth, but it was still a good movie and a good family adventure story in a way that the series was not. But like I said earlier, the series provides lessons in fantasy worldbuilding for fantasy writers to avoid. So that's it for this week. Thanks for listening to the Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this week's episode, we take a look at Meta's new Threads social media platform, and investigate why dragons in the CLOAK MAGE series never seem to eat people. TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction, Writing Updates, and Reader Question Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 160 of the Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is July the 14th, 2023. And today we're going to look at Threads versus Twitter. We're also going to discuss why dragons in the Cloak Mage setting don't actually eat people, with a few exceptions. First up, let's have some updates on my current writing projects. I am pleased to report I am 17,000 words into Dragonskull: Crown of the Gods, which puts me on Chapter 4 of 20 if I remember right. Still hoping to have that out in August, though it might slip to September. We'll see how the next month and half goes.  In audiobook news, Brad Wills is now recording Dragonskull: Curse of the Orcs for us. He also is on Chapter 3 of 20, I believe. And if all goes well, that should be out towards the end of August or sometime in September. And then once Dragonskull: Crown of the Gods is done, my next project will be Silent Order: Pulse Hand, the 14th and final book of my Silent Order science fiction series as part of my Summer of Finishing Things, since I hope to finish both the Dragonskull series and the Silent Order series. Before we get to our main topics for this week, Reader Joachim has some questions about Silent Order: Thunder Hand: I finished both the free story as well as the book. You always build up the power of the main character very carefully, so you don't need to cut back. I noticed you use metric units instead of US measurements. Why? Thanks, Joachim. I'm glad you have enjoyed the books and have read this far into the series. In answer to your question, as of right now, I believe on Earth in 2023, more people use the metric system than the US measurements of miles and in feet and yards, so 100,000 years in the future, probably there will be more descendants of the people who use the metric system. So that's why I use the metric system in the Silent Order books, because I figure eventually that will probably be standard in the future, since I think only the US is the only large country that uses standard measurements at first and pretty much everyone else uses the metric system. 00:02:12 Main Topic #1: Twitter vs Threads Now for Main Topic #1: Threads versus Twitter. A reader emailed to ask if I was going to get a Threads account. The short answer is yes, but only if they come out with the Web client, since I won't install the app on any of my mobile devices. The longer, more detailed answer is that Threads is Meta’s new micro blogging site. Basically it's a clone of Twitter, however much they might strenuously deny that since Twitter seems to be entering a death spiral. Twitter wasn't exactly in great financial or technical health when Elon Musk took the company private. And Mr. Musk's decisions after acquiring the company do not give the appearance of having improved the site’s reliability. I haven't posted very much on Twitter recently, simply because the login page isn't working half the time, which means that usually isn't worth wasting the time to try. To be fair, I didn't use Twitter all that much anyway, even though I've been on there since 2009. To really have effective engagement on Twitter, you need to post like 30 or 40 times a day and reply to lots of people. And I simply don't have the time or interest for doing that. To be honest, I suspect most people listening to this would prefer that I write the final Dragonskull book instead of wasting time on Twitter. All that said, it’s pretty clear that Twitter is not in good shape as a company at the moment. Maybe Mr. Musk and his team will turn things around. Or maybe they won't. To snark a bit, if Mr. Musk ends up destroying Twitter, I think it will be for the greater civilizational good. Twitter was frequently a malignant place, whipping up angry mobs who attack random people, which has had negative effects in many areas of life. We all have no doubt encountered examples where someone had a Twitter mob go after them or misinformation spread about them on Twitter and that is never good. Twitter’s oversized cultural importance and prestige I think was a bad thing, and the reduction of its cultural hegemony is only in my opinion, a good thing. This leaves an opportunity for someone to come along and seize Twitter's market. There have been various attempts to replace Twitter both before and after Mr. Musk bought the platform, but Threads is so far the only one to gain any really major traction. This is somewhat unfortunate, since Threads is owned by Meta, which is the current nom de plume of Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook, which already dominates pretty heavily in the social media market. Longtime readers and listeners will know that I am not a fan of many of the things Meta has done as a business or many of the business decisions that Mr. Zuckerberg has made. However, even I must concede that Meta probably has the most experience of actually managing and maintaining a functional social network. As many people have found out the hard way, managing a social network is hard and making it profitable is even harder. One of the regrettable truths of the Internet age is that managing an online community of any size requires a heavy hand, or else it quickly degenerates into a cesspool of crackpots, crazies, and people posting images of various perversions, ranging from mildly disturbing to outright horrifying, to say nothing of seriously illegal. There are privacy concerns about Threads, which are frankly all the same as the other privacy concerns for Facebook and Instagram, but Meta’s business model is at its core collecting data to sell to advertise, and since I advertise on Facebook, Meta already knows a lot about me anyway. I won't install the apps on my tablet or phone, though. Half the privacy concerns from social media come from some of the apps on mobile devices. There are still privacy concerns from using the sites on a desktop web browser, but not nearly as many. I'm old enough that whatever I have to do anything online, I prefer to do it on a desktop computer with a mouse and keyboard, or a laptop if I'm feeling lazy. So I never installed the Facebook or Instagram apps on any of my devices I have, which has turned out to serve me well. So to sum up, if Threads comes out with a web client version, I'll use it, but I won't install the mobile app, and if it doesn't come out with web client or Threads ends up crashing and burning, I won't lose any sleep over its absence from my life. 00:06:08 Main Topic #2: Reader Question from Cloak of Dragonfire (Spoilers) And now to our other main topic of discussion this week, a question from a reader that requires spoilers from Cloak of Dragonfire in order to answer it. So if you haven't read Cloak of Dragonfire yet (though to judge for my sales chart, a very large number of you have. Thank you!), stop listening to this episode right now and go read Cloak of Dragonfire instead. So, spoiler alert after this point of the episode. Anyway, a reader asked how I came up with the idea in Cloak of Dragonfire that eating a sapient being would have an effect on Dragon similar to the consumption of methamphetamine in a human. It came about because I was thinking about fantasy world building (one of my favorite topics) and an obvious question arose. In the setting of Cloak Mage, why don't the dragons just eat people? I mean, seriously, why not? The logical answer is that there is a cultural taboo or legal prohibition against it. However, lots of activities are taboo or illegal, and people still partaking them all the time. The dragons of course, don't really want to kill humans, since that reduces their number of potential admirers, because what the dragons really want is to be surrounded by a circle of devoted admirers in awe of their magnificence. But that comes back to a cultural taboo again. Some dragons with darker inclinations, like Tarthrunivor or Ferruinvar might buy a private island, stock it with a dozen people kidnapped from surrounding countries, and have themselves a hunting party like the Boyars’ Hunt in Ghost in the Ring. But what if there was a more serious reason the Dragons didn’t do that? While I was working on Dragon Skull: Wrath of the Warlock, which I wrote before Cloak of Dragonfire, I was thinking about this and I happened to click over to YouTube, which for some reason was displaying a lot of official clips from Breaking Bad that day. Breaking Bad, if you are not familiar with it, is about mild mannered chemistry teacher Walter White, who receives a fatal diagnosis. And desperate to provide for his family after his death, decides to serve manufacturing and selling illegal methamphetamine. During the series, Walt descends from a man trying to provide for his family into an evil man in love with the power of money his drug dealing brings him, and in a tale as old as ancient Greece, his hubris soon brings about his nemesis and bring his downfall. I have to admit, I didn't like Breaking Bad all that much. It's too dark for me, but it is a superbly executed example of story structure with an emotionally satisfying ending. Methamphetamine is very, very bad for you, and you shouldn't try to use it, or make it for that matter. But while I was thinking about that, the answer came to me. What if eating a sapient being had the same effect on a dragon as methamphetamine did on humans? For the world building to work, the effect had to be in a dragon similar to methamphetamine, because another drug like fentanyl or heroin wouldn't have worked for the worldbuilding. A depressant style drug would just made for a stoned lassitude-prone dragon, which would hardly be a threat to any characters. But dragons are more innately magical than elves or humans in the world of Cloak Mage and can change shape with ease. Their bodies, therefore, are more easily controlled by their minds than in humans and elves, which means that if they knowingly choose to eat a sapient creature, it has an immediately deleterious effect on them. Addiction takes hold swiftly, usually followed by homicidal mania within a few months. Interestingly, this only happens if the dragon knowingly consumes a sapient creature. Due to their intensely magical nature, it has to be a choice freely made without compulsion. If a dragon unknowingly ate a sapient creature like some orcish warlord is making ground meat out of captured dwarves, nothing would happen. It has to be a conscious and uncompelled choice. Ferrunivar and Tarthrunivor are much darker or more ruthless dragons than Varzalshinpol. Compared to Polvimrandur and Delaxsicoria, who are all basically pretty cheerful, but Tarthrunivor is old enough to have the self-discipline to keep his ruthlessness and darker impulses in check, and would view consuming a sapient creature as an unforgivable folly, though he has been tempted by the idea. Ferrunivar, by contrast, was much younger and much less self-controlled. He also considered himself an artist, and artists often enjoy doing avant-garde that shock their elders. Think of how many musicians, actors, and artists came to a bad end through the use of drugs, which, as it happens, is how Ferrunivar met his downfall. Anyway, I hope that was an interesting look into the creative process behind Cloak of Dragonfire and why the dragons in the Cloak Mage series do not eat people. So that's it for this week. Thank you for listening to the Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful and enjoyable. If you liked it, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. It really does help. Until then, I hope you all have a safe and pleasant week and see you all next week.

In this week's episode, we look at the use of the passive voice in fiction, and discuss whether or not it is bad. TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 159 of the Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is July the 7th, 2023, and today we're going to look at the passive voice in fiction writing and whether or not it is always a bad thing or just sometimes a bad thing. First up, some updates on my current writing projects. I am pleased to report that Silent Order: Thunder Hand is completely finished. I am going to actually start publishing it immediately after I finish recording this podcast. So by the time this goes live on Monday, July 10th, the book should hopefully be available at your favorite ebook store of choice so you can get it there. I did also write a tie-in short story to go with it that will go out for free for my newsletter subscribers. I settled on Excision as the title of the short story and my newsletter subscribers will get it for free when the book comes out. In the six years that the Silent Order series has been out, the overwhelming evidence of the sales data is that cover images with spaceships and plants convert on them much better, so all the books have spaceship/planet themed covers. But I do enjoy making the character based covers and since I'm giving the short story away for free anyway, a character based cover is on it, even though there is still a planet and a spaceship in the background of course. I've also come to really dislike single colored text on book covers, so I've stocked up on a lot of different stock photos of textures that I can apply to text. The texture on the text of Excision is a photo of a piece of sheet metal with the levels and the colors adjusted. Anyway…all that is a digression. Silent Order: Thunder Hand should be out by the time you listen to this and my next project will be the final Dragonskull book as part of my Summer of Finishing Things. It will be Dragonskull: Crown of the Gods. I am hoping to start that on Monday if all goes well. And when Dragonskull: Crown of the Gods is finished, I will also be writing…I will then be writing the final Silent Order book, Silent Order: Pulse Hand. That's the title of the final book. And I think this podcast episode is actually the first place I am mentioning that anywhere. So if all goes well, Silent Order: Pulse Hand will be out in early fall. And then the Dragonskull and the Silent Order series will be complete. And so…hopefully I will have finished the things I set out to finish in my 2023 Summer of Finishing Things. So now, without any further ado, let's get on to our main topic of the week: Is passive voice actually bad? 00:02:30: Main Topic of the Week: Is Passive Voice Actually Bad? If you listen to any writing podcasts or read any writing websites or watch any writing YouTube channels, one of the most common pieces of proverbs, one of most common pieces of advice, is to avoid passive voice. But what does that mean and why is passive voice bad? Is passive voice actually bad? Let's find out. Like good philosophers, let us first define our terms. To put it in the simplest terms possible, 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 a subject, ate is the verb, and the pie is the object. That is how active voice works. Passive voice, by contrast, flips it around so that the object is actually 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. Now both sentences have identical meanings. Either way, Jenkins is getting his pie. So why is active voice better than passive voice? 00:03:52: #1: Passive Voice is More Work to Read So, Number One: passive voice is more work to read and this is just a fact of 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 difficult to read, it is very likely 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 the late, great science fiction author Jerry Pournelle said, fiction writers are trying to separate Joe from his beer money (or Josephine from beer money), and if anything reduces the odds that Joe or Josephine will spend beer money on your book, that is a bad thing. You want to have the clearest possible prose that you can write. 00:04:42 #2: Bad Habit Reason Number Two: Bad habit. Passive voice in general seems like a bad habit in writing to which people naturally gravitate. Like in many fields of endeavor, you will find that there are bad habits that newcomers need to be trained out of, or learn not to do. For example, 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's loaded, if there's a round in the chamber, and if the safety is on when they pick it up. 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 the smiley face…like how the 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, or at least many minds, naturally want 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, in my opinion, mistaken. Passive voice is a bad habit that the writer needs to avoid because too much of it makes prose harder to read than necessary. 00:05:52: #3:Air of Diffidence Number three: the 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. That's simple mathematics. Less quantifiable but still apparent, is that 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 his sword through the orc's neck, sending the creatures head rolling away across the flagstones.” Now this sentence would be much worse if you phrased it 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.” That's 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 40% 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 40%.” That's much worse. It sounds much less confident and you are much less likely to persuade your reader of your argument. I think some of the tendency towards passive voice is a side effect of schooling. Back when people are in high school and college, writing assignments usually involve: “write a three page essay” or “write 1,000 words about various topics.” So if you've ever graded student essays, you'll know that they're very good at padding things, which is why the sentences are totally, completely, massively, heavily, seriously, grotesquely, laboriously, and stupendously overridden 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 in the habit. 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. 00:08:10 #4 Passive Voice Does Have its Uses And finally, argument number four: passive voice does have its uses. The title of this podcast episode was basically “passive voice is bad,” but that's hyperbole. Passive voice is ultimately a tool, and it has its proper time and proper place, just not as often as beginning writers tend to 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 overpromoted sales rep”, or “the car was parked across the street” is fine, it's just fine. Sometimes you 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 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 artists fall into that trap. For example, a certain major fantasy author wasted hundreds of pages of the fifth book of the series describing an extremely long and very tedious river journey. So there is nothing wrong with using some passive voice to lay down some necessary info and then to get on to the more interesting parts. The trick is not to overuse these sentences and then to shake things up. For example, “It was Friday.” That's perfectly serviceable, but we can eliminate the passive voice and get the sentence to do some characterization for us. Consider this sentence in contrast: “At 8:00 a.m. on Friday, Jenkins had already eaten his third Egg McMuffin with the fourth waiting on his tray.” This lets the reader know that important information. It was Friday and eight in the morning but it also includes some character details about Jenkins. It's even better if you wrap some sensory detail into it: “At 8:00 a.m. on Friday, Jenkins unwrapped his fourth Egg McMuffin, the greasy paper crinkling under his sweat-damp fingers.” The sentence accomplishes the same thing, but includes two senses: touch and sound. Let's try another one: “His girlfriend was an overpromoted sales rep.” That's a perfectly fine sentence, though it depends on what follows. This sentence, I think 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 in for more character details about Jenkins and Maura, like this: “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 has served her so well in sales had covered over her complete inability to understand the 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 this 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 30 or 40 other discarded bottles. Hadn’t it 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 30 or 40 other discarded bottles, the sour order of the dregs coming to his nose. Hadn't it 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. So, that's it for this week. I hope you found the discussion about passive voice to be helpful. Thanks for listening to the Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this week's episode, I look back at how my ads performed in June 2023, and discuss & review recent movies that I have seen. TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction, Writing Updates, and Reader Question Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 158 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is June the 30th, 2023, and today we're going to look back at ad results for June 2023 and see how my ads did for my books this month. And we're also going to take a look back and review some movies I've seen recently this summer. Before we get into all that, let's say I have an update on my current writing projects and one reader question this week. First off, I am very pleased to report that the rough draft of Silent Order: Thunder Hand is finally done. I am not going to lie, this one was hard to write, not because of the book itself (which was delightful), but because I had so much going on in real life. I haven't had this hard time with a book since Mask of Spells way back in 2016. Delays for this book include getting sick twice, having a wisdom tooth removed, filling out a lot of paperwork, calling skilled professionals with help about the paperwork, check getting lost in the mail, and my laptop died and so forth and so on. But I'm always yammering on about persistence, so it was a chance to practice what I preach. I got the rough draft done in the gaps around all the urgent stuff that kept happening. Next step is a short story. I haven't decided on a title yet, but I'll probably call it Excision, and I'll give it away for free to newsletter subscribers when Thunder Hand comes out. I do know that the story will take place on the planet of Antioch Three, which if you've read Silent Order: Wasp Hand and Silent Order: Royal Hand, you know that Antioch Three is the single unluckiest planet in the entire series, and once the editing is underway, I will share the cover image. I also finally was able to get a new laptop and it's currently sitting on the desk as I record this, installing every update ever. So that's probably going to take a couple hours on it yet. We have one question this week from listener Michael, who says about last week's podcast episode: Excellent as always, was glad to see it return. Thanks, Jon, and an important question related to the hiatus: Did you successfully get the siding on your house replaced? That is a good question and yes, I did. It was loud and expensive and inconvenient. But it is all done and it looks very nice now and hopefully we will not have any extreme weather events for a while that will require a new roof or new siding or a new anything. Fingers crossed. 00:02:12 June Ad Results Now, since it's the last day of the month, let's take a look back at June and see how my Facebook and Amazon ads performed for the month. For Facebook ads, for the Frostborn series I got for every dollar I spent, I got $4.45 back. For the Ghost series, for every dollar I spent, I got back $5.79. For Cloak Games and Cloak Mage series for every dollar I spent, I got back $5.42 and finally for the Sevenfold Sword series for every dollar I spent, I got back $2.15. So overall a pretty strong month for Facebook ads. I think in July I will stop advertising Sevenfold Sword and then advertise to Silent Order since hopefully Silent Order: Thunder Hand should be coming soon with the final book in the series following in a few months. And given that I'm planning to write a new Caina book in September/October (I already booked the narrator for it), it's gratifying to see the Ghost series doing pretty well. Now let's see how the Amazon ads did. I advertised Dragonskull: Sword of the Squire in both Amazon and US and Amazon UK. And as a reminder for an Amazon ad to work, you need to get at least one sale for every six to eight clicks on the ad. For the Amazon ads, I advertised Dragonskull: Sword of the Squire in both the US in the UK store. And for the US, for every dollar I spent, I got back $7.17 and I had one sale for 0.87 clicks and for Amazon UK, I got back $5.07 back for every dollar I spent and one sale for every 1.65 clicks. So a strong month on Amazon ads as well. I think we can attribute that especially to Dragonskull: Doom of the Sorceress coming out at the start of June (well, actually, I think was the first week of June) and that helped drive interest to the rest of the series, which would of course help the ads. I've talked before about how there's kind of a chicken and egg problem with Amazon ads sometimes, but this is a nice way to get inside that loop. I think one of the big challenges of my books is I can only advertise so many of them at once because I have so many of them. As of Dragonskull: Doom of the Sorceress, I have 141 novels, but it's impossible to advertise all of them at once, especially on Amazon, so I need to pick and choose based on the opportunities available at the time, like BookBub deals or a book coming out in the series that month like with Silent Order, etcetera. And as always thanks for reading those books, everyone. 00:04:36 Main Topic: Movie Review Roundup Now on to this week's main topic: reviews of recent movies I have seen. I had a couple of emails asking, hey, when are you going to do another Movie Review Roundup episode? I’m pleased people actually listen to those. So let's take a look at some of the movies I watched so far this summer/late spring. The first one is Ant Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and I have to say this is the weakest of the three Ant Man movies. I have to admit, lately, Disney and Marvel give the impression of an empire in rapid decline, or perhaps a bus with the wheels falling off. There are any number of theories as to why this is happening: The Disney Corporation's massive debt load, the time bomb of the Hulu/Comcast deal, backlash over the company’s embrace of certain political positions, the company losing its creativity and running out of IP can cannibalize, Bob Chapek's mismanagement, Bob Iger's mismanagement, the US cultural war making it impossible to appeal to a fracture mass audience, all the popular Marvel characters died after retiring, Disney's near infallible gift for alienating its top talent, Disney Plus cannibalizing most theater sales, Disney Plus losing a billion and a half dollars in a year, superhero genre fatigue or overworked visual effects artists getting fed up. Maybe it's a combination of all those things. Or perhaps none of them, then the real explanations remain mysterious anyway. All that as an aside, I think Quantumania has two problems. First, the previous two Ant Man movies worked because they were generally humorous heist movies. The villains were fairly comedic: the corrupt CEO in the first one, the corrupt weapons broker in the second, and the secondary villain of the honest but awkwardly earnest FBI agent in the second. Quantumania has Kang the Conqueror as a villain, and he's super serious and brooding, making him a bad fit for an Ant Man movie. Given the actor who played Kane's recent troubles, Marvel probably regrets choosing Kang as their next Big Bad of their movies to replace Thanos. Second, there was just way too much CGI. When the Ant Man family gets zapped to the Quantum Realm, everything becomes CG. You could tell the poor actors were trying really, really hard to emote on the  green screen soundstage. Peter Jackson's The Hobbit trilogy fell into the same trap. The Lord of the Rings trilogy holds up so well because so much of it was done with practical effects. The same cannot be said for The Hobbit or Quantumania. One minor point was that Ant Man's daughter Cassie started out as a very annoying character. That's just what we need: another teenage daughter of a rich man come to tell us how to live from a position of smug self-righteousness. She does get better in the second half of the movie, though, once she's been through some adversity. Overall grade C minus maybe D plus if I'm feeling cranky that day. Next movie I saw was Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. I admit I had my doubts about this, but it was really good. The biggest mistake that a Dungeons and Dragons movie could make was taking itself too seriously since Dungeons and Dragons, if you think about it for more than 5 minutes, is kind of ridiculous. But Honor Among Thieves hits the right balance of tongue in cheek humor without losing a sense of internal logic or suspenseful stakes. The characters often act exactly the way you expect a Dungeons and Dragons party to act, including hilariously bad decisions at times (right up in the first five minutes of the movie no less). The plot is the disgraced bard Edgin, aided by his best friend, the barbarian Hoga, wants to reconnect with his estranged daughter, who has been in the care of her former thieving colleague named Forge. However, it turns out that Forge has been lying to Edgin’s daughter about her father for years, and he has the backing of some seriously dangerous and evil wizards. Adventures and hilarity both ensue. Some of the amusement comes from the fact that the chief villain thinks she's in a serious, grim dark fantasy movie, but she's actually in a comedic Dungeons and Dragons adventure. There is some computer graphics, actually, there is quite a lot of computer graphics because of monsters and dragons and so forth, but it was used quite a bit better than in Quantumania. Like, it made better use of the technology. The characters would be riding through a landscape and they would have a fantasy setting in the background, that kind of thing instead of it being entirely green screen. I heard some people argue that the movie didn't do quite as well at the box office as anticipated because of all the many ways Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast have alienated their core audience via sketchy behavior. I don't doubt the part about sketchy behavior, and I've talked about it on this podcast before, but I think the real problem is that Dungeons and Dragons is now more mainstream than it’s ever been, but it's still not big enough to support a $150 million budget movie. All that aside, Honor Among Thieves was an excellent movie and I enjoyed it. Hopefully it gets sequels with the same team, but that I have to admit that seems unlikely. Overall grade: A. The next movie I saw was Master and Commander, which I believe was back from 2003 and it was pretty great. It's based off the Aubrey and Maturin historical novels of Patrick O'Brien set during the Napoleonic War. Aubrey is the captain of the HMS Surprise while Doctor Maturin is the ship's surgeon and Aubrey's confidant. The HMS Surprise is sent to defeat a French privateer ship called the Acheron, but the Acheron’s captain outwits Aubrey and escapes. Aubrey sets the Surprise after the Acheron to the growing worry of Maturin and the other senior officers, who fear that his mission is becoming a dangerous obsession. The movie manages to capture the grim reality of life aboard in 19th century British warships, such as many amputations, bad food, fourteen year old boys acting as officers because of their birth, et cetera, without wallowing in grim dark the way modern historical fiction often does. It builds to a slow burn when Aubrey at last has a chance to outwit the Acheron’s captain. Honestly, the slower pacing of the movie reminded me a bit of a 1980s movie: slow build up and more leisurely character scenes than a lot of modern movies have, but no shortage of action despite that. Definitely recommended. Overall grade: A. Next movie I saw was Fast X, the 10th main Fast and Furious movie. The Fast and the Furious movies are what you get if the screenwriters take logic out back behind the barn and shoot it. And I mean this in a complementary way. In the first movie, Dominic Toretto and his team were basically seeing stealing DVD players in East LA. 20 years and 10 movies later, they're flying cars in space, battling international terrorists, and Dom has apparently acquired the superpower of suspending the laws of physics whenever he drives a car. In other words, glorious over the top spectacle. You don't come to a Fast movie to contemplate the mysteries of the universe.  No, you come to watch our plucky group of ethnically diverse, bantering heroes drive cars real fast and flip off the laws of physics while battling megalomaniac villains. In this installment, the son of the evil drug lord from back in Fast 5 (the best of the movies in my opinion) returns and squares revenge on Dom and his family. Jason Momoa ably plays Dante as an affably deranged psychopath, though when he gets really ticked off the games stop and the charm mask drops. Sadly, Fast X ended on a cliffhanger, so hopefully the sequel will get made. Overall grade: B. The next movie I saw was John Wick Chapter 4. First things first: Jon Wick books are ridiculously, over the top violent. Director Oliver Stone, who recently made a minor bit of news when he complained about the unrealistic violence in the John Wick movies, which I think is the point of those movies since John Wick is about the fantasy of violence, the way that Hallmark movies are about the fantasy of true love. The reality of violence is quite a bit different from the fantasy I'm afraid. Though thankfully the reality of true love is also quite a bit different from the reality of violence. Anyway, enough philosophical rambling. If you don't like movie violence, then John Wick is definitely not your cup of tea. But I do think the John Wick movies have achieved something near impossible. They reached the same high level of quality in tone across all four movies. I mean, think about how many movie series you've seen where the sequels peter out or the fourth movie isn't very good or, you know, the first movie and a half were good and then it all falls apart. Not with John Wick. All four movies are about to the same level of quality, I think. The series has two great strengths: the elaborate fight scenes and the intricate world building of the underworld. In real life, as we all know, criminals tend to do what they want until they screw up and get arrested, or wind up getting killed by their rivals. In John Wick, the criminal underworld is governed by elaborate and byzantine rules with brutal punishment for any infractions. The underworld in John Wick is more like almost like an urban fantasy novel where vampires are hiding in plain sight and they are governed by all these elaborate and intricate rules that keep them from interacting with normal humans too much. Anyway, John Wick 4, gives the story of Mr. Wick a satisfying ending with the door open a crack if Keanu Reeves decides he wants to do more of them. In this final installment, Wick finally has a chance to get out from under the thumb of the High Table, the sinister council that could rules over the criminal underworld. But to do it, he will have to face his old friends and defeat them. As an aside, every country John Wick visits must experience a drastic reduction in crime, like every underworld goon and assassin in the country comes after Mr. Wick, and then he kills them all. Like, personally! After John Wick visits the country, it must be impossible to hire an assassin there because John Wick killed them all on his way through. Overall grade: A plus. And finally, I would say the best movie I've seen so far, this summer and late spring would be Across the Spiderverse. And it is an absolute masterpiece. It maximizes what a superhero movie, an animated movie, and a multiverse story can do. And I generally don't even like multiverse stories, I have to admit, back when I saw the first movie Into the Spiderverse back during COVID (I think it was on Netflix), at first I wasn't enthused with the idea of seeing the movie. An animated movie about a multiverse? No thanks! But I watched Into the Spiderverse and it was really good. I mean, I think it's one of the best movies I saw during COVID. So I made the effort to see the sequel in the actual theater. The animation in Across the Spiderverse is not only gorgeous, I think it pushes the limit of what animation can actually do in terms of storytelling. Like, there's this…every different universe that the main character has visited is animated in a different style, which I think is more helpful for a multiverse story than a live action. And speaking of multiverses, I suppose it's amusing that of the four movies about multiverses that I actually liked, three of them were Spiderman movies: Spiderman: No Way Home, Into the Spiderverse, and Across the Spiderverse (the fourth multiverse movie I liked or at least respected being Everything Everywhere All at Once). It is very regrettable that it seems that the working conditions for the animators and the movie were apparently awful. But as we mentioned with Quantumania and the visual effects service, that might be a problem across the film industry as a whole. Which, to be fair, generally has a lot of problems. It doesn't seem like a great place to work in general, especially with the writer’s strike right now. Though the flip side of that is as I get older and see more of the world, I have yet to encounter anyone who says, you know my profession is respected the exact right amount and I think I get paid the exact right amount, so I don't think anyone's happy with their job when it boils down to it. But once again that is a rambling digression. So, that is it for this week. I hope that if you're looking for something to watch, this will be a helpful guide and that the ad stuff was interesting. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this week's episode, The Pulp Writer Show returns and answers a lot of reader questions about Frostborn, The Ghosts, and writing in general! A preview of the audiobook of DRAGONSKULL: BLADE OF THE ELVES (as narrated by Brad Wills) is included at the end of the episode. TRANSCRIPT: 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 157 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is June the 26th, 2023 and today we are coming back from podcast hiatus and we're going to answer a whole bunch of reader questions. Before we answer reader questions, let's get caught up on what my current writing projects have been since we did our last episode back at the start of May. Since then I finished Dragonskull: Doom of the Sorceress and that's now been out for a couple of weeks at all the stores. You can get it at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, Smashwords, and Payhip, and it's been selling very well. Thank you, everyone. And it's gotten good reviews. It's the second to the last book in the series, and we'll talk about that a bit more. My current project right now is Silent Order: Thunder Hand which will be the thirteenth book in the Silent Order series and if my math is right, right now I am about 80% of the way through the rough draft. I am really hoping I can finish it this weekend, though, we'll see…not this week this week though. We'll see if life events permit that or not. Once that is out and published, the rest of the summer and early fall of 2023 is going to be the Summer of Finishing Things. In other words, finishing two very long series. After Silent Order: Thunder Hand is out, I am going to write Dragonskull: Crown of the Gods, which will be the ninth and final book of the Dragonskull series, so that will bring that epic fantasy series to a conclusion. Once that is done, I am also going to write the fourteenth and final book of the Silent Order series as well. I had originally planned for fifteen books in the Silent Order series, but I was looking at the outlines for 14 and 15 and I thought, these are looking kind of thin. I'm going to have to add some subplots and then I thought, you know,  why pad it unnecessarily what I can tell the story I need to tell and end it effectively in a single book? So that's what I'm going to do. I'm hoping….hoping, fingers crossed, I can get Dragonskull: Crown of the Gods out in August and Silent Order the final book out in September. But we will see how things go for the rest of the summer. In audio book news (today as a matter of fact), Dragonskull: Blade of the Elves is now out in audiobook, as excellently narrated by Brad Wills. You can listen to it at all of the various audiobook stores: Audible, Google Play, Chirp, Kobo, Apple Books, and the others, and I think at the end of this podcast episode I will include a preview from Dragonskull: Blade of the Elves so you can listen to that. 00:02:51 Reader Questions Our first reader question (and these are reader questions that have come in over the last two months while the podcast has been on hiatus), but our first reader question is from Richard, who says: Hi, Jonathan, do you have any plans on doing the Cormac Rorgan series? I really thought it an interesting and engaging story. Thanks, Richard. I'm glad you enjoyed those two books and in answer to your question, unfortunately, no, I don't have any plans to continue at the moment. The reason is that in the two weeks it's been out, Dragonskull: Doom of the Sorceress has made about eleven times more than the last Cormac Rogan did in its entire first month, so there's only so much time in the day, and it seems like it would make more sense to spend that time working on Dragonskull and other series. But if I can find the time, I would like to continue the Cormac Rogan series. It's just there's so much more demand for the other books. Our next question is from Bob, who asks: Great to see the release of Cloak of Dragonfire. I bought it right away. First, I'm a big fan of all books about Ridmark Arban and now his kid, Gareth. I can't wait until the next several stories. Second, are you going to come out with any more books about Caina and the Ghosts? I'm a big fan of your work. Please don't retire yet. Thanks, Bob. I am glad that you have enjoyed the books and glad that you read them all. I am both too young and too poor to retire. So no worries on that front. In answer to your question about Caina and the Ghosts, I am planning to start a new series with Caina this autumn after I finished my Summer of Finishing Things. The series will be called the Ghost Gate and the first book will be called Ghost in the Serpent. More details to come when I start working on it. Our next question is from JLH, who asks about Cloak of Dragonfire: Bought it, read it, loved it. Do you know how many books will be in the series? Thanks, JLH. I'm glad you enjoyed the Cloak Mage series. In answer to your question, I am not entirely sure how many books will be in the series. I have the later books loosely plotted out, but I've been rearranging things. I can say it will be double digits and it will be less than 20 and Cloak of Dragonfire was #9. So double digits, less than 20. So that means it will definitely be more than 11 but less than 19. So that is where we will be with that. Our next question is from Jamie, who asks: Hi Jonathan, currently reading the Dragontiarna series, only on the first one of the series. Is there a previous series with Ridmark in his early years before getting the soulblade or anything? Loving it so far. Thanks, Jamie. I am glad that you are enjoying the Dragontiarna series, and in answer to your question, I am very pleased that I have good news for you. There are many books about Ridmark Arban before the Dragontiarna series. The first series is called Frostborn with Ridmark as the main character and that has 15 books. The sequel series after that is called Sevenfold Sword and Ridmark is again the main character there, and that has 12 books. So if you like the Dragontiarna series, there are 27 other books you can read about Ridmark Arban’s early years. Our next question is from Mike, who asks about the Ghost series: Are there any symbols for the Ghosts, the Kindred Assassins, or the djinni, like how there is one for the magi? That is a good question, Mike, and in answer to your question. No, there is not. There is not a symbol for the Ghost or the Kindred Assassins, but there is one for the magi. The reason for that is that the Imperial Magisterium in the empire is a public organization, and so…however, the Ghosts and the Kindred assassins are secret organizations and therefore do not have a symbol, as that would rather make the secrecy part more difficult. For the djinn, they are non-material creatures and have no interest in material things and therefore have no symbol. Various cultures in Caina’s world have assigned them symbols at various times, but that would depend upon the regional and national context and so forth. Our next question is from Robert, who asks: First, I would like to thank you for the books I have read so far. Very good. The reason that I am writing is that I have finished the Dragonskull series and I'm in the middle of the Frostborn series and I am sure I have the order wrong and would like to start from the beginning of the series. As it is, I read like it is like I should have the information from a previous book. Again, thank you for the books. Thanks for reading Robert. I am glad you have enjoyed the books so far. In answer to your question. The reading order for the Ridmark books: The first series there would be Frostborn, then Sevenfold Sword, and then Dragontiarna and then Dragonskull. I intend each one of those series to be stand alone and you should be able to read each series without having to read the others. But people…do not always see it that way, since each reader brings their own interpretation to the books. Our next question is from Jeremy, who says: I wanted to personally let you know that I have rapidly become a fan of your books. I'm reading both the Dragontiarna and the Frostborn series at the same time. I'm an aspiring writer myself and very motivated from reading your work. The fact you have self published and become such a well-rounded writer just inspires me. Ridmark is easily my favorite character so far. I just wanted to thank you for making the world you created that I enjoy so much. I recommend your books to my brother. He is also a writer. Again, thank you for the world you created. It's truly marvelous. Thanks, Jeremy. I am glad you have enjoyed the books and thanks for the kind words. And this goes to show that some people do can read the Dragontiarna series first and go on to enjoy the Frostborn books and I hope Jeremy goes well with his writing endeavors. Our next question is from Juana who says: Just finished Cloak of Dragonfire. Loved it. However I just can't warm up to Victoria Caro. She wasn't in this book, so this is a two birds, one stone kind of communication. Something is just too calculated about her. You made her likeable enough by giving her a bad life, similar background to Nadia, et cetera, but it's just too pat. Nadia better watch her back, both sides, and her front. The undead even warned Nadia. Good plot device, by the way. Well, you have me firmly hooked, anyhow. I gave Cloak of Dragonfire five stars on Amazon. I like Tyth and Shrike’s subplot. Joanna Starkweather is basically a computer. How vulnerable is she to being reprogrammed by an enemy? Thanks to all your time and attention to my communication. Thanks Juan, and glad you have enjoyed the books and in answer to your questions, we shall have to read and find out. I will say that Victoria does have a big, big, big, big secret, which is of course fairly obvious if you've read the books and Nadia is going to find out what that big big secret is in the next book, Cloak of Embers, which I am hoping to get to in autumn 2023, so later this year. So as Brandon Sanderson apparently says on his YouTube channel quite a bit, we will have to read and find out. Our next question is from Jim who asks: Can you tell me which book Nadia meets the Knight of Grayhold? That would be, if I remember right for the first time, Nadia meets the Knight of Grayhold for the first time back in Cloak Games: Frost Fever, which I believe I wrote back in 2015. So it's been a while. Our next question is from EB, who asks: Will Nadia ever find out or is it not important at all who sealed off Earth from the Shadowlands or Earth's umbra? I forget which, so that Morvilind had to break the barrier to allow the elves to flee to the earth. Also, I like how you included the xortami as one of the races in Cloak Games thus connecting Cloak Games and Cloak Mage with Frostborn and subsequent series. Also, in Cloak of Ashes, Nadia thinks about the difference between a Shadowlands domain and a Shadow lands domain, specifically the Shadow Waypoint and Grayhold. She thinks that the Master of the Waypoint can leave and return but the Master of Grayhold is bound to Grayhold. However, this is untrue since he showed up at the Morans’ house. He talked to Nadia before during her trip to Venomhold, the Cloak Games: Shatter Stone. Thanks for reading, EB, and in answer to your questions, the reason that Earth was sealed off from the Shadowlands originally was not a nefarious plot or artificial, that was just the natural state of Earth at the time, and that was why Morvilind had to break through. It's like how the islands are naturally surrounded by water and are therefore harder to get to. So that is why Earth was sealed off from the Shadowlands. In answer to your question about the Knight of Grayhold, he never actually left his domain in the book. The scene you're talking about where he shows up at the Morans’ house before the trip to Venomhold, he's actually sending an illusionary projection of himself. So he was physically within Grayhold yet, but he was sending out a projection of himself to, excuse me, to talk with Nadia. EB had a follow up question to that and EB says: do all planets have an umbra? Like, does Neptune or a gas giant like Jupiter have an umbra or only plants have been inhabited by intelligent species? Also, if you're willing to spend the time in the deep Shadowlands and could survive like maybe with dozen dragons, could you travel outside of our galaxy? The answer to both questions is yes. Every planet has an umbra. Not every planet’s umbra is inhabitable by oxygen-breathing people from Earth. If you went to like Jupiter's umbra, you would die swiftly from gas pressure and poison like you would in the atmosphere of Jupiter. You could travel outside our galaxy through Shadowlands. However, there's 100 billion stars in our galaxy, and most of them have worlds. So traveling outside the galaxy would be quite an endeavor. And I don't think that's something that will feature in the books at all, just because the scope of it would be wrong for the series. CT asks: Can I ask for the site you use to get city names and character names? There really isn't a website I use. What I'll do is, I'll look for sources in ancient and medieval history, find the name I like, and then maybe change around a few letters to make it sound more fantasy-ish. But that is where I get most of my names from, at least for characters in Andomhaim and Frostborn in fantasy settings. When I write the Nadia books and they're set on Earth, I can have a character named Bob and no one will blink an eye, but if I have a Bob in Andomhaim that would sort of ruin the verisimilitude. Next question is from JE who asks: Hello. Just wondering if there is a time frame on the next Caina novel. The next Caina novel, as I said earlier on the show, will be Ghost in the Serpent and hopefully will come out this autumn if all goes well. JE had a follow up question to that and he says: I had a question about the Umbarian Order. In one of your books, you mentioned that there are five provosts for the Order, Rania and Talmania are two of them. One rejoined the Empire and “retired”. Do you have any other two ever get named or something planned for a later book? The reason I never bothered to name the other two is that Rania and Talmania arrange for them to be murdered as rivals to their power, which is one of the reasons why the Umbarian Order could not mount an effective war against the empire once they got past their initial successes was because they spent all their time plotting against each other, which is not conducive to winning a war. I have to admit, I base that behavior off a certain academic departments I encountered in the wild over the years. Just imagine tenured faculty with sorcerer's powers who don't like each other. And that's a good description of the Umbarian Order. Our next question is from Margaret, who asks about Cloak of Dragonfire: Almost done and really enjoying it. So how many more in the Dragonskull series? And what book will be your #142? More Nadia or something else? It's all great stuff. Thanks Margaret. I am glad you're enjoying the books. In answer to your questions, there will be one more book in the Dragonskull series for total of nine and book #142 will be Silent Order: Thunder Hand which should be out in July, if all goes well. SF asks: I just started my journey on Frostborn, on book three now, so I have a ways to go. Are there any other Frostborn omnibuses other than just the one of the first three books and prequel? Thanks for reading, SF, and in answer to your question, no, that's the only omnibus edition I put together as sort of a loss leader to help people find of the series but I not planning to do any other Frostborn omnibus editions. Our next question is from RS, who asks: Did you get the idea of Singularity from The Big Bang theory? I first heard the concept of the Singularity, which is this philosophical idea that eventually processing power of computers will go off the charts and computers will become these, like God-like artificial intelligence. I first heard of that idea in the 2000s when I was studying for various text certification exams and some people, you know, go on like forum boards and look at and, you know, look at the posts of other people who had taken the test and some of them were very excited about Singularity. So that's where I first heard the concept. Later in the mid 2000s/2010s, around 2015, 2016 years after this, I first started watching The Big Bang Theory. It was on syndication and would turn up on reruns at night. And I was I was amused when they were talking about the concept of the Singularity, so that was funny. Our next question is from RA, who says: First off, thank you for your books, they have given me hours and hours of pleasure and escape for many years. Now I have read and still am reading your books. I would love to buy them all now, but I just have to wait till I can afford them. Disabled pensioner-me and motorbike plus kangaroo…bad combination. I usually buy them two or three at a time. Second, your master reading order could possibly do with updating. Sorry to be the nag LOL. I went to look at the order so I knew which of the Dragonskull’s next but could not find it. I'm pretty sure it's not there, but I've been known to do a manual search ones right in front of me, but I still can't see it. I would appreciate the copy of the order if you can spare the time. Thank you. And answering that question, Thanks RA. I'm glad you are enjoying the books. Sorry about your unfortunate encounter with the kangaroo and I hope the books have been comforting in the years since that. And in answer to your question, yes my website is drastically out of date and it needs urgent updating. However, I have hired someone to take a look at that problem and they are going to be starting in August, so hopefully my update…my website will be much more up-to-date in the future. Our next question is from Jacob, who asks many years ago I read your Frostborn series as you released the novels, but my life got busy (trust me, I understand) and I had to stop around book 8 and I'd like to get back into them, but I don't think I have time to read the first eight books, get reacquainted with the story. Are there any good summaries anywhere that you know of? I also heard you wrote more books about Demonsouled. I'll have to look into those, too. Thanks, Jacob. I am glad you are able to….I’m glad that you have enjoyed books and that you have time to get back into them again. It is funny how reading comes in phases in people's lives. I know someone who finished a master's degree and during that time she didn't read any fiction at all for like two years. And when she was done was so burned out with reading she didn't want to read anything at all. But you know, a couple of months passed and now she's reading 5-6 books a month over the summer. So really is one of those things that comes and goes in phases in people’s lives. In answer to your question, I don't think they're super good summaries anywhere. I could suggest reading the Amazon ads for the books….I mean….the Amazon reviews for the books you've already read that might trigger the memory, though I have gotten reader complaints that the characters refer back to previous events that happened too often, so maybe this is for the advantage of readers like Jacob who can read the book and be like, Oh yeah, I remember that happened back in book 4, that thing that they're talking about. Our next question is from Andrew, who writes to ask: I am merely writing to say that I have enjoyed your work, though your terrifying productivity means I have sampled only a fraction of it. Dragonskull is the only series I'm close to caught up on, and a few books into to the Frostborn and Sevenfold Sword. I did have a question which you have probably answered elsewhere, for which I apologize. What made you decide to have Andomhaim be Christian? This is not criticism. I think it actually works well, as disorienting as it was when I first encountered the expression baptized orc in both your work and others. The Red Knight by Miles Cameron, for example. The behavior of knights and other medieval folk make a lot more sense in a Christian context than in either areligious or vaguely polytheistic environment that is more commonly found in fantasy these days. It is just that it is not a common decision by authors, whether for fear of actual Christians or for the prejudices of the chattering class who tolerate religion only insomuch as is foreign. And I'm curious what led you to it. Thanks Andrew. I am glad that you are enjoying the books. And in answer to your question, it's two parts. The first half is the reason that Andomhaim was Christian was because it was the least amount of work for me at the time. I was setting up Andomhaim as a fantasy setting and I thought about doing the traditional fantasy setting that's polytheistic where you have all the different gods running around and I thought, no, no, that just seems as stilted and artificial and very like, you know, fake fantasy. I mean, it's not to say that can't be done well. But I thought, you know, I don't want to do this. It would make more sense and feel verisimilitude again (that's one of my favorite words for fiction: verisimilitude) would feel more real if it was based off medieval Christianity instead of some sort of made-up polytheistic religion like the typical Dungeons and Dragons fantasy. The second half of it is you're entirely right, knighthood, as we think of it, was an invention of the Middle Ages. It was hugely influenced by Christianity, sort of grew out of the medieval…the early medieval barbarian war bands, the companions of the chief or king. And because of the endemic violence in like medieval France in the, like 800s or 900s A.D., the church undertook various efforts to try and Christianize the ideal of knighthood, with movements such as the Peace of God, which tried to determine the only places and the people that were valid targets for warfare. For example a true knight according, to the Peace of God, would not attack peasants. He would not attack priests, monks or nuns. He would not burn down monasteries and that and another movement called the Truce of God, which tried to establish that no fighting would take place on holy days. Now these two movements in the medieval period tended to be more successful in the symbolic sense instead of the actual sense. But they did create the ideal of a Christian knighthood where that, a true knight, unless a true knight was only a true knight if he was, you know, a pious son of the church and followed the tenants laid out by the Peace of God and Truth of God and all these other rules that grew up to codify knighthood because in the early Middle Ages, knighthoods were basically a bunch of thugs employed by lords to keep order in their territories and to make war against their rivals. Early medieval knights had much more in common with essentially mafia enforcers than we think about. In the modern age, when we think of knights with, you know, King Arthur and the Round Table, that was an invention of the later Middle Ages as the ideal knighthood became more Christianized and sort of a tamed compared to its more brutal origins in the early medieval period. As this digression may have proved, I was a graduate student in European medieval history for a while before I realized there was absolutely no money in that and went into IT instead. But it did turn out to be useful for later in my life, when I became a writer and provided a good source for inspiration for stories such as Andomhaim and making the knights be Christian. Now I want to emphasize that it is possible through a very good fantasy setting with polytheistic deities (like the first one immediately off top of my head, that I think of is Robert E Howard and Conan and that's a very polytheistic setting). Like J.R.R. Tolkien was famously a devout Catholic, but he managed to have his cake and eat it too. In the Lord of the Rings, there was a one creator god overall Iluvatar, but to govern the world in his name he created the Valar who were kind of like the Greek gods without all the debauchery and also kind of like archangels. So I do want to emphasize that you can create a very interesting fantasy setting using a polytheistic pantheon. It's just not what I chose to do for Andomahim and given how popular Frostborn has been, I think the decision was the right one and it worked out pretty well. And now our last question this week is from Ryan, who writes to ask: I have always wondered how you have exact percentage of your progress in a book. Do you always have a fairly definitive endpoint that lets you calculate your progress? Every time I write, I have rough ideas of where I'm at, but I can never say 58%, just saw that and it made me curious. He's responding to a post I made where I said I was 58% of the way through Silent Order: Thunder Hand. In answer to that question, I’m never exactly sure how long the book is going to be, like I usually have a good estimate at this point, it's going to be like 80,000 words, 90,000 words, whatever. But I do chart out….excuse me….not chart out, outline out and plot out the chapters in advance so I have an outline I'm working from and so I know in advance that each book is going to be like 20 chapters, 24 chapters. And so if I'm 10 chapters through a 20 chapter book, I know that I'm 50% of the way through, even if the actual length may vary. So that is it for this week's show. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful, or at least interesting. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week. I'm hoping to be able to do weekly podcasts again for a while unless something goes wrong.

In this week's episode, we take a look at plot complications and how you can add them to your novel. We also discuss the SUPER MARIO BROTHERS movie. The Pulp Writer Show will be on hiatus until the second half of June 2023. TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Projects Updates Hello everyone. Welcome to Episode 156 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is April the 28th, 2023. And today we're going to discuss introducing plot complications into your story. We'll also talk a little bit about the recent Super Mario Brothers movie. Before we get into our main topics, let's have an update on my current writing projects. I am pleased to report that Cloak of Dragonfire is done and ready to go. By the time this podcast episode goes live, hopefully the book should be live on Amazon and it should be appearing very shortly on the other stores as well. So I hope you will be able to enjoy that book and now that Cloak of Dragonfire is done, my next main project will be Dragonskull: Doom of the Sorceress, which I hope to have out in January. In audiobook news recording for Dragon Skull: Shield of the Knight is all done. We just approved everything and paid for everything this morning, so that should be coming out to the audiobook store of your choice sometime in May, if all goes well. So that is where I'm at with my current writing projects.   00:01:10 Reader Comments We have a few comments from readers this week. Our first comment is from William, who says: Good afternoon, sir. I just started listening to the Dragontiarna series on Audible. I am up to book #3. I have not been able to stop and listen every moment I can. Ridmark is a wonderful hero. I found the series in my Audible Plus membership as free listening for books 1 through 2. I have purchased the rest of them. Unbeknownst to me, there are series with Ridmark before this one. I'll be listening backwards as of listening to the history of his Ridmark and his champions. I cannot wait; my listening will be taken up for months to come. I'm already engrossed in the world. I wish there was a wiki I could look at when things were mentioned, but alas I will just need to listen more. Thank you so much for all the hard work, thoughts and creativity you poured into these stories. They are incredibly fascinating and I'm extremely excited to continue listening, knowing there's so much more to go. Thanks, William. I am glad you have enjoyed all the stories. Dragontiarna…actually, the first publisher’s pack of Dragontiarna, Dragontiarna number one and two, which I believe is Dragontiarna: Knights and Thieves, you can listen for free on Audible if you are an Audible Plus member. Audible has a different tiers of membership now, and if you're in the highest one you can listen to the Audible Plus library at no cost yourself. All three series with Ridmark as the main character (Frostborn, Sevenfold Sword, and Dragontiarna) are available in audiobook. Sevenfold Sword books are like the Dragontiarna ones, they are doubled up into bundles that have two per book. Frostborn, all the titles for Frostborn are individual ones, since I don't have any bundles of that, but the entire Ridmark series, all 37 books of it, you can listen into audio from beginning to end for nearly 350 hours of finished listening enjoyment as excellently narrated by Steven Crossley, Brad Wills, and Steven Brand. Our next comment ties into that quite a bit from Justin, who says: With the Jerry Pournelle quote and Jerry Pournelle said we're basically after Joe's beer money and Joe likes his beer, so you had better make sure that what you give him is at least as pleasurable to him as having a six pack of beer would be. I think that's excellent advice for writers and other creative people. We want you to enjoy what we've written or created, and it should at least give you as much enjoyment as a six pack of beer. In fact, I’m going to look something up real quick. According to Google, the average cost of a six pack of beer in the US, depending on where you live, is between $6 to $9 right now and Cloak of Dragonfire will be only $4.99, so it costs you even less money than a six pack of beer. But I think that’s something writers, authors, and movie makers forget to their peril, that if the audience doesn't enjoy what you're bringing them, then they're going to go elsewhere and buy things that are more enjoyable, like a six pack of beer. 00:04:00 Movie Reviews for Super Mario Brothers and Ghosted Speaking of things that are enjoyable, let's talk about two movies I saw this past weekend. The first was Super Mario Brothers. I mentioned that I tried to see it the weekend before this in the local theater, but it was sold out. So this weekend I drove to a larger theater the next town over. Once again it was sold out, but this time I arrived early enough to get one of the last seats. Amusingly, I think I might have been the oldest person there, but I've been playing Mario games since before a lot of the audience had been born so I felt justified in that. But that explains why Super Mario Brothers is probably going to pass the billion dollar mark, doesn't it? There are people with multi generational good memories of playing the original game or Mario Kart or Mario Party or whatever and the movie taps into that. Of course, a billion dollars wouldn't happen if the movie was bad, which it wasn't, and it managed to land in the sweet spot of referencing all the games without getting bogged down in the details, the animation looked just like the more modern Mario games but with more detail, and it had a coherent plot that followed the rules of story structure and didn't cheat. Granted, ultimately, Mario is about a mustachioed Italian plumber who uses magic power ups to fight a warlord dragon turtle who is obsessed with a princess who rules over a kingdom of anthropomorphic talking mushroom people, which doesn't make a lot of sense when you lay it out like that. Anyway, I definitely recommend Super Mario Brothers if you played a Mario game in the last 35 years. The second movie was Ghosted. Ah, how to describe it? Think of the plot of a stock Hallmark movie. Stressed career women can't find love, travels to a small town, meets a down to Earth yet handsome man (usually wearing a sweater). They click. Something unexpected happens in the second act driving them apart, but they reconnect to help save the small town’s baking festival or charming artisanal hotel or ecologically friendly horse ranch or whatever. Now imagine the same formula, but the stressed career woman is the CIA's top assassin and the small town’s baking festival is actually a deadly bioweapon that various sinister organizations are trying to obtain. The end result is moving as a mixture of romantic comedy, His Girl Friday from the 1940s, and a Jason Bourne movie. I won't say it's brilliant cinema, but the weird fusion of separate genre elements manages to hold together for the most part, again, by following the rules of proper story structure. Definitely a solid B movie where you can turn off your brain and enjoy with some popcorn. 00:06:13 Introduction to Main Topic: Plot Complications Now let's go on to our main topic of the week, how to introduce complications into the plot of your story. You might have heard of Murphy's Law, which in its most common form states that anything that can go wrong, will go wrong and at the worst possible time. We've all experienced that at some point in our lives, and it's never pleasant when that happens. But for writers of fiction, Murphy's Law is a tremendous storytelling tool. Unexpected complications are the difference between short stories and novels, allowing you to extend your story to novel length. Indeed, you can help determine your novel’s eventual duration by deciding how many complications your characters will face as they try to resolve their conflicts and defeat their antagonists. Complications are also methods of providing additional narrative tension and plot hooks in your stories since your readers will want to know what happens next. What do I mean by complications? Specifically, I mean, anything unexpected that happens during the character’s attempt to resolve the story’s conflict. These complications can be either events that happen out of the blue or unintended things that happened as a result of the character’s efforts. For example, think about a man driving to the post office to put his gas bill into the mail. The problem and conflict is the need to pay the gas bill and the action the man takes to resolve the conflict is driving to the post office. There are several potential complications. Man gets into an accident, his car breaks down, the post office is closed or on fire, the character is attacked by alien bounty hunters, he's attacked by orcs, and so forth. Obviously, the appropriate complication would depend on the story’s genre, though it would be pretty funny if rampaging orcs turned up in what was supposed to be contemplative literary novel. Unexpected complications can both make a book interesting and extend its length. Additionally, there are several ways you could use unexpected complications to make a story more compelling, and we'll explore some of those methods now. 00:08:02 #1: Avoid the Idiot Plot First: avoid the idiot plot. It's common advice for writers to avoid an idiot plot, but what does that mean? An idiot plot refers to a character doing something stupid or making a foolish decision specifically to advance the plot. This is especially annoying if a character was previously established as clever or intelligent, but suddenly becomes conveniently stupid at a time that allows the plot to continue. Alternatively, this can refer to an entire book whose conflict only works because the characters are idiots who make poor decisions. The classic example is a character in a horror movie who makes foolish decisions when stalked by killer or a monster: running alone into the woods, going into the darkened basement with a flickering candle, and so forth. Obviously, people under stress make bad decisions that seem like a good idea in the heat of the moment, and you can include that in your fiction. The danger to the story comes when the decision is so bad and so transparently designed to advance the plot that it breaks the reader's suspension of disbelief. The examples from horror fiction in the last paragraph are well known. Every genre has its examples of convenient, bad decisions to break the plot. Romance novels have characters who break up for reasons designed to artificially induce drama and prolong the tension between the lead and the love interest. Thriller novels have the protagonist foolishly leaving the hostage alone in the abandoned building while he goes out to have a look around. Mystery novels have the detective overlook the obvious, which is especially bad if the mystery is obvious to the reader. Fantasy novels have the protagonist ignore good advice from the wizard mentor and almost get killed. Science fiction novels have the characters do things like touch the glowing green space ooze with their bare hands. It's a good idea in both real life and in fiction never to touch glowing ooze with your bare hand. But as we mentioned above, people often make bad or irrational decisions while under stress. It would likewise break the suspension of disbelief if your characters always made the right decisions in moments of conflict. Police officers, soldiers, emergency medical technicians, and other people with dangerous and stressful jobs undergo lots and lots of training to ensure that they can keep their heads in a fraught situation, training that most people simply don't have. It is unrealistic to expect characters to act like seasoned veterans in crisis unless they actually are seasoned veterans. The key to remember is that the plot requires a character to act like an idiot at the critical moment, then it will probably annoy the reader. People frequently make bad decisions in the heat of the moment, but those decisions almost always seem like a good idea at the time. That alone won't break the reader’s suspension of disbelief, but if the entire plot hinges on a character acting like an idiot, indeed, if the plot grinds to a halt if a character doesn't act foolishly, especially an uncharacteristic way, that will almost certainly annoy the readers and land your story in idiot plot territory. But how to add complications to your story without having to resort to idiot plot techniques? One good way is for your character’s decisions to generate unexpected consequences, and we'll explore that more in the next section. 00:10:56 Unintended Consequences Number two: unintended consequences. The Central Intelligence Agency of the United States is the source of the term blowback, which began as an informal way among CIA officers to describe a covert operation that had unplanned and unintended consequences, consequences that might even end up undermining the goals of the original operation. You can find many examples of blowback or unintended consequences throughout both modern and ancient history, but my favorite example because it so clearly illustrates the point is the American experiment in Prohibition from 1920 to 1933. During that time, the 18th Amendment to the Constitution made it illegal to produce or sell alcoholic beverages in the United States. Prohibition was the culmination of decades of work by Pro Temperance social reformers, dating back to the end of the US Civil War. And in many ways, the passage of Prohibition was their crowning achievement. However, that crowning achievement backfired. A booming black market for alcohol emerged, fueling the rise of organized crime and more powerful, centralized law enforcement to fight the mobsters. When the Great Depression began, public support for Prohibition dropped and many cash strapped state and local governments wanted to use liquor taxes as a new source of revenue. Prohibition was repealed in 1933 by the 21st Amendment to the US Constitution and local restrictions on liquor sales have eroded ever since. The point of including the story of Prohibition in this podcast isn't to debate the morality of alcohol consumption, but to illustrate the rule of unintended consequences. The goal of the Pro Temperance movement was to end alcohol use in The United States. And Prohibitions should, on paper, have accomplished that. Yet the rise of alcohol related organized crime was an unanticipated consequence and its widespread disregard for the law helped undermine its moral authority. In the end, the net effect of Prohibition was the total opposite of its stated goal. Drinking was even more firmly established in American culture and state and local governments were unlikely to turn away from a new source of taxes. However, in the interest of historical accuracy, it is important to note that the Pro Temperance movement did win many smaller and lasting victories, even if it failed on a national level. The establishment of the minimum drinking age was a result of the Temperance movement and state and local laws banning alcohol sales on Sundays or after a certain time of the night can trace their origins back to Prohibition. But to return to the main point of this podcast, which is fiction writing, you can use the example of Prohibition to create unintended consequences and backfire decisions in your stories. These will generate new problems and conflicts for your characters; the complications and unintended consequences will push the story in new directions and create entertaining and attention-grabbing plot twists. Let's go back to the example of the man who drives to the post office to mail his gas bill. Any number of potential complications could ensue from the simple task. If you're writing a mystery novel, the man might stumble across a crime in progress from a dead body in the street outside his house. In a romance novel, the man might meet a woman at the post office, starting a potential love affair. On a more prosaic level, any number of complications that we've already mentioned might occur: the character getting a car accident and suffering engine difficulties, arrive at the post office to find it as closed for gas leak, and so forth. Every genre has ways of introducing unintended consequences to the story. In a fantasy novel, the hero might save his village from orcish raiders only for the victory to draw the attention of a far more powerful orcish warlord. In a mystery novel, a detective could question a witness and the killer could decide to murder the witness to prevent damaging testimony. In a romance novel, the heroine could go on a date with her love interest, only to enrage her employer, who views her love interest as a business rival. In a science fiction story, a miraculous new technology might have dangerous side effects, a drug to cure an illness could result in unintentional telepathy or other mutations. Unintended consequences will help make your story more interesting as they present new problems for your characters to solve. 00:14:56 #3: Making the Conflict Worse Number three: making the conflict worse. A specific kind of unintended consequence can make the stories conflict work even better. Your character sets out to resolve their conflicts, but their actions unintentionally make the conflict worse, like how Prohibition helped encourage long term drinking in the United States. In his classic book The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis talked about how opposing evils, instead of canceling each other out, tend to aggravate one another. You can use this to help drive your story forward. In real life, we can all think of people who set out to solve problems, only to inadvertently make them worse. In fiction, this is an excellent way to add tension to your story. Earlier in this podcast, we discussed the idea of the idiot plot where the story only functions because the characters make unrealistically stupid decisions. The opposite of this is an idea I usually refer to as the fog of war. The term fog of war was originally used by German military writer Carl von Clausewitz to refer to the uncertainty that cloaks any sort of battlefield situation. A commander must make the best decision he can with the best information he can gather and even when a commander makes the best possible decision based on the available facts, it can still lead to disaster and defeat. Obviously, war is a dangerous and fluid situation that can change quickly, so it's easy to see how a course of action that seems like an excellent idea at the time can nonetheless lead to catastrophe. In fiction, you can use the fog of war to both advance the plot and add tension to the story. This is an excellent way to avoid the idiot plot trap because your characters can make intelligent and well reasoned decisions that nonetheless blow up in their faces because they didn't have all the information or factors beyond their control alter the outcome. It can also have the effect of worsening the original conflict. Rather than resolving the conflict, the conflict is now even worse than before. Fantasy is my favorite genre, so we'll use some fantasy themed examples. We already used the example of a village carried off into captivity by orcish raiders with protagonists pursuing them to rescue his neighbors. Let's say the protagonist assembles a plucky band of allies, and together they rescue the villagers from the orcs. That would seem to resolve the conflict, but perhaps the orcish raiders are now furious at the slight to their honor and decided to wipe out the village entirely to avenge the defeat. Or the orcs are in service to a powerful evil wizard who decides to take matters into his own hands or maybe the fighting accidentally awakens the slumbering dragon, who decides to clear both the human and orcish intruders off his land. In all these examples, unintended bad consequences spring from protagonist’s decisions and actions. The same complications could unfold in a mystery plot. A detective must investigate a man killed by multiple gunshot wounds on an abandoned farm. The investigation reveals that the man was killed in a drug deal gone bad and the police department decides to set up an ambush to arrest the entire drug ring, except the ambush goes wrong and multiple officers are killed as the direct consequences of the investigation or the detective realizes that someone within the police department is working for the drug gang and push tipped them off about the ambush. Romance books thrive on the protagonist inadvertently making things worse. The normal plot for most romance novels is the heroine and the love interest want to get together but there's some serious obstacle like family divisions, money, she's a public defender and he's a police officer, etcetera, standing in their way. In the romance genre, the conflict usually gets worse when the heroine tries to overcome the obstacles and aggravates it. Perhaps she and her love interest find themselves on opposite sides of contentious legal case or the heroine and her love interest’s families are business rivals, and her love interest’s family wins a victory over her family's business. Your protagonist can inadvertently intensify the conflict, but if the story’s conflict has a villain or antagonist, you can't expect them to take the protagonist’s challenge sitting down, which leads us to the next point. 00:18:39 #4: Pushback Number four: pushback. If your story’s conflict revolves around an antagonist or villain, it would not be realistic to have the villain ignore the threat posed by your protagonist. Indeed, having the antagonist react to your protagonist is a superb way to enhance the rising action portion of your story. Having the villain push back against the protagonist’s actions is more realistic, adding to a sense of verisimilitude. It will make the villain’s character in the story more dynamic. The form this takes varies depending on the genre of the story and the specific character of the antagonists. A ruthless antagonist will take more immoral actions than an antagonist who has a strong moral or ethical code. For that matter, it's possible to have an antagonist who isn't really a villain. If your protagonist is falsely accused of a crime, he could be pursued by an honest detective. The detective would have scruples that, for example, a drug lord would not. And even if the detective was not completely honest, he would still be bound by the laws governing investigations and would need to at least attempt to follow them so evidence would not get thrown out in court. There are many ways that antagonists can react and attempt to shut down the protagonist’s efforts to resolve the conflict or to act to resolve the conflict in the antagonist’s favor. To return to the previous example of a fantasy novel where orcish raiders carry off the protagonist’s neighbors as captives, let's say the protagonist rescues his neighbors. The leader of the orcs is unlikely to accept this. He might chase the rescued villagers intending to recapture them. He might gather more allies or warriors for another attack on the village. Or as we mentioned previously, the orcish leader could serve a powerful wizard or a stronger warlord and the leader could appeal to his overlord for help. Pushback from your antagonist will help add tension and drama to your story. Like any of your protagonist’s actions, the antagonist’s decisions can have unintended consequences, even set back the villain’s cause, which will add an additional element of tension. Indeed, the villain can even be undone by reacting when he might have been better advised to do nothing. In the Sherlock Holmes story The Adventure of the Norwood Builder, the villain is defeated when he deliberately leaves a bloody thumbprint at the crime scene in hopes of further framing his victim of murder, but Holmes notes the incongruity and the sudden appearance of the thumbprint, which leads to the villain’s undoing. However, to have a compelling story, the conflict must be resolved and in the end, despite however the plot has been thickened, the conflict must be resolved in the end. 00:21:01 Announcement: Podcast Hiatus during May/June 2023 So I hope that is helpful and gives you good tips and tricks for thickening the plot of your novel. So that is it for this week. I should mention that the podcast is going to go on hiatus until the end of June. There's a couple of reasons for that. I have quite a lot of family stuff I need to do in May and June, and I also in that time want to finish Dragonskull: Doom of the Sorceress and the next Silent Order book. However, the main reason we're going to go on hiatus for a few weeks is that starting next week, the siding on my house is going to be replaced. If you have never gone through this process before, you know that it can take a while and is often quite loud. So rather than try and dodge around when the siding work is being done and trying to find time for recording the podcast when I have many other things going on and people are actually pounding nails into the side of the house, I am simply going to put it on hiatus for a little bit and come back to it at the end of June, if all goes well. So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all in June.

This week's episode marks my 12th anniversary of self-publishing. I look back on 2 million ebook sales during that time, and reflect on lessons learned. TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 155 of the Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is April the 21st, 2023, and today we're going to reflect on 12 years I've spent self-publishing and the 2 million ebooks I have sold in that time. First up, let's have a look at where I'm at with my current writing projects. Editing is underway for Cloak of Dragonfire. I'm making good progress and if all goes well, I really want that book to be out sometime in the first week of May, which is coming up soon, so I shouldn't dally. That book will also be accompanied by a short story that my newsletter subscribers will get for free called Iron Drive. So if you want a free ebook copy of that short story, sign up for my newsletter. In audiobook news, I'm proofing Dragonskull: Shield of the Knight right now. Hopefully that will be out sometime towards the end of May, if all goes well. Ghost Exile Omnibus Three is now available. You can get that at Audible, Amazon, and Apple Books. It is almost 45 hours long, making it the longest audio book collection I have ever put out. So if you get it off Audible, that is excellent value for your credit right there. And once Cloak of Dragonfire is done and out, my main focus will be the next Dragonskull book, Dragonskull: Doom of the Sorceress. So that is where I'm at with my current writing projects. 00:01:25 Reader Questions Let's have a few questions from readers before we get to our main topic. Our first question comes from Jenny, who asks: At the end of Child of the Ghosts, Maglarion says Caina has survived for seven years after she was rescued by the Ghosts. At the beginning of Ghost Aria, it says it's only been five years since. Is Aria set before the first book? Close, but not quite. Ghost Aria is a short story that is set during the first book. Child of the Ghosts takes place over a seven year span of Caina's life and Ghost Aria takes place during the time about halfway through the book, when she's working with Theodosia at the Grand Imperial Opera. So it's not a discontinuity or anything like that, it's just the Ghost Aria takes place during the events of Child of the Ghosts. Our next question is from James who asks: Are there or were you planning on writing sequels to the Malison series? Technically, I already have. All ten books of the Dragontiarna series are kind of a sequel to the Malison series since they take place both in the world of the Malison and Andomhaim from Frostborn and Sevenfold Sword, though I haven't written any sequels that are set exclusively in the setting of Malison. That said, I haven't entirely decided what I'm going to do once the Dragonskull and Silent Order are done, so returning to the world of Malison is a possibility that I am considering for the new epic fantasy series I will write once Dragonskull is done, hopefully later this year. 00:02:56 Main Topic: Reflections on Self Publishing So now on to our main topic this week. This month, April 2023, marks the 12th anniversary since I started self-publishing. If my math is right, by the end of March, I have also reached 2 million ebooks sold. 12 years! That's a long time. That's honestly the longest consecutive time I've ever done anything. The longest traditional job I've ever held was for 10 1/2 years. Like, in the US, you can only be President for maximum of eight years, barring a technicality where a Vice President who becomes president and then is reelected twice. And I think only six UK Prime Ministers have ever held that office for longer than 12 years. 2 million ebooks is also a staggering figure. Thanks for reading, everyone. I'm grateful to still be on the road, so to speak, after 12 years. Since I'm a writer, I will mark this milestone in the most writerly fashion possible: a rambling, freeform essay. Let's look back at some of the things I've learned over the last 12 years. Learning to finish books is the most important skill a new writer should learn. Occasionally I get asked whether a new writer should be working on their social media presence or website or mail list or whatever, and inevitably they haven't finished a book yet. Writers have a bad habit of lapsing into endless rewrites or activities that are technically writing related, like working on the website, but don't help finish the book. So if you're a new writer, learning to finish things is the first skill you should learn, and since you do have to regularly finish things to be a writer, this will help you learn if you really want to be a writer or not. The second most important skill is learning to finish the series. This is harder, though. Nothing beats plodding persistence over the long term. A little bit every day adds up over the long term, and something I've learned quite forcefully since I've bought a house, no matter how well constructed a house, if water damage is not addressed immediately, it will destroy the house in the end. So if to stretch this metaphor even further, let's say the house is artistic resistance and water damage is your effort. Even if you do just a little bit every day, it will add up considerably if you keep at it. You should do the best job you can with your book, but perfection is only attainable by God, so you shouldn't beat yourself up trying to reach it. Comparing yourself to other writers is a waste of time. No matter how well your books sell, there will always be another writer’s books who sell even better than yours, even if you find the reasons incomprehensible. Likewise, if your books sell, there will be people who find that fact baffling and even enraging. Story ideas matter much less than their execution. Like, I've published 139 books, Cloak of Dragonfire will be 140 and I still have a million story ideas. It's just finding the time to write them. If you have a hard time thinking of story ideas, just think of the conflict and expand it from there. Alternatively, if you're the kind of writer who thinks of interesting settings and characters and doesn't know what to do with them, just apply a potential conflict to them. The easiest way to sell books is to write in series and discount the first few books in the series. Acquiring the patience to write in the series is a different challenge entirely, as we mentioned above. It's easiest to stick to a single genre if you want to make money. I started in epic fantasy with Mazael, Caina, and later Ridmark, and since then I've tried to expand to four other genres: urban fantasy with Nadia's, science fiction with Silent Order, LitRPG, and mystery. Urban fantasy was really the only one that worked out of the gate. And it took a while for Silent Order to get traction. Mystery and LitRPG kind of flopped for me. So if you write long enough, you'll inevitably want to try a different genre, but be aware that it probably won't sell as well as your main one. The longest book I wrote was 146,000 words and the shortest, about 40,000 words. How long does a book need to be? As long as necessary to adequately tell and resolve the story. Anything longer is useless padding and anything shorter will just leave your readers feeling cheated. Change just keeps on happening. When I started out, I uploaded Demonsouled to Amazon KDP, Barnes and Noble PubIt, and Smashwords because that's all there was at the time. Now there's Kobo Writing Life, Google Play Books, ACX, Findaway Voices, Payhip, Book Funnel, Book Bub, Shopify, and a ton of other new services and platforms. There are also a lot of software tools that didn't exist back then: Vellum, Atticus, Book Brush, and others. My process for turning a finished manuscript into a properly formatted book is completely different than what it was 12 years ago. There is also all the generative AI stuff, which will turn out to be either a big deal or a scam for people easily parted from their money, like all those people who bought Bored Ape NFTs. Now, to be fair, I was very hostile to Amazon ads and Facebook ads when they first came along, and now I use them all the time. Speaking of Amazon ads, I wonder how long Amazon will remain the dominant force in self-publishing. Without Amazon pushing ahead with Kindle, self-publishing as it is now probably wouldn't exist and I wouldn't be recording this podcast. That said, the wheel of fate never stops spinning, does it? Amazon right now kind of reminds me of Internet Explorer in the summer of 2004, absolutely dominant in in its market. Yet Summer 2004 was the first time ever that Internet Explorer usage dropped as Mozilla Firefox started to emerge on the scene. It didn't seem significant at the time, it was a drop of about like 1/10 of a percent from 95.2 to 95.12, or something close to that. Yet it never went back up. And 20 years later, Microsoft has abandoned Internet Explorer. Microsoft is no longer the hegemon of the technology space as it was in the 1990s. You can kind of see the same little cracks starting to form in the Amazon Empire: how Amazon ads has made the overall shopping experience on the site worse, all the problems with Audible, labor relations trouble, first ever layoffs, increasing antitrust scrutiny, and increasing ease of individualized ecommerce platforms like Shopify and Woo Commerce, and so forth. In fact, when I wrote this out to record on April 17th, 2023, Amazon ads hadn't really been working properly for the last several days. Of course, Microsoft isn't the hegemon of technology anymore, but it's still a powerful cloud computing company that happens to make client software for its products, and Amazon is likely on a similar trajectory. Eventually no longer dominant, but still powerful. Jeff Bezos himself said that Amazon will one day be disrupted, which might be why he went off to build rocket ships. I think Cloak Mage will be the last really long series that I write. The trouble with double digit or more series length is that the readership drops a little with every book and it gets harder to draw new people in. I think in the future, I'll stick to series that run about 5 to 6 books long with seven as the absolute maximum, if the story merits. Though I might write multiple five to seven book series with the same main character, if the character is compelling enough. Audiobooks are harder to sell than ebooks. To use a video game metaphor, audiobooks are self-publishing on hard mode. If you do a royalty share contract on ACX where you split your royalties with your narrator, the contract lasts for seven years, which is not an unreasonable amount of time for a self published audiobook to earn back its costs. To put it in context, since 2018 I have recorded Frostborn 6 through 15 (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) in audiobook, and of those ten books, number six through 10 have paid back their production costs and are now turning a profit. Of the Ghosts audiobooks (as excellent narrated by Hollis McCarthy), the first five or six have paid off their costs and reached profitability stage. I'm confident that all 10 Frostborn audiobooks will earn back their production costs and will earn back their production costs and turn profit, but it will take a few years to get there. I freely admit that the biggest business reason I do audiobooks is so I can take the production cost as a tax deduction. Given how expensive audio book production is, if you don't have a solid business plan for selling them or good business reason for producing them, it's probably best to avoid audiobook production until you have either a good business plan or a good reason. Not everyone will like your stuff. I had an amusing reminder of that recently. A reader mentioned that he liked the new covers for one of my series so much better than the old ones and wondered when Amazon would update to the new ones. I was curious because I had updated those covers some time ago. Then I realized that I had forgotten to update my website with the new covers and the reader in question thought the old covers were actually the new ones that he liked much better than the “old ones.” But there's no denying that the new covers sell better than the old ones. The fact is, not everyone will like your writing and sometimes will be eager to tell you at length about it. That's fine. Always bear in mind that you're not obliged to respond to anyone who's annoyed. I try and respond to most emails, but if one gets annoying, I'll let it past. There are something like 1.5 billion English speakers in the world. And if one of them doesn't like your book, well, there are a few more to go through yet. Always be grateful for your readers. Remember, the economy isn't very good. Money is tight, and yet people will still spend money on your books. Be respectful of that. So in that vein, thank you all for reading the last 139 novels I wrote. I hope you stick around for however many more I end up writing. So that's it for this week. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting platform of choice. It really does help. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this week's episode, as promised I take a look at the beta of Adobe Firefly, and share my thoughts on it. I also discuss phishing scams and answer a common reader question about the GHOST NIGHT series. TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello everyone. Welcome to Episode 154 of the Pulp Writer show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is April the 14th, 2023, and today we're going to discuss Adobe Firefly generative AI, which I mentioned on a previous episode of the show. We'll also talk about phishing scams and discuss common reader questions about the Ghost Night series. First up, a progress update on my current writing projects. I am as of this recording on Chapter 18 of 21 of Cloak of Dragonfire which puts me at 92,500 words, so I am almost done and I think I am probably going to finish up a Monday or Tuesday of next week. Then I will write a bonus short story to give away for free to my newsletter subscribers. I already know what the short story is going to be, just haven’t decided what to call it yet and then it will be full speed ahead on editing and if all goes well, we should have Cloak of Dragonfire out and available for you to read in the first week of May. Then I will be focusing once that's done on the next Dragonskull Book, which will be Dragonskull: Doom of the Sorceress, which I am hoping to have out in June if all goes well. We have some exciting audiobook news. Ghost Exile Omnibus Three is out in audiobook form and get it Audible, Amazon, and Apple Books. It is a box set of the last three Ghost Exile novels: Ghost in the Throne, Ghost in the Pact, and Ghost in the Winds and it comes to 44 1/2 hours long. That's not a mistake. It is 44 1/2 hours long. It is the longest single audiobook bundle I have ever released. Just for comparison, I looked it up and according to Google Maps, if you drove nonstop from New York to Los Angeles across the entire breadth of the continental United States, and you drove without stopping, it would take 41 hours. This audiobook is 44 hours, so if you are going to drive from Los Angeles to New York or vice versa anytime soon, we've got you covered. You get that at the audiobook stores I just mentioned. Recording is also underway for the second Dragonskull Book, Dragonskull: Shield of the Knight. We are hoping to have that out this summer. That will be excellently narrated by Brad Wills and of course, Ghost Exile Omnibus Three was excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. So before we get into our main topics, let's have some questions from readers. Our first question is very relevant to things we just discussed is from Sonya, who asks: Hi, Jonathan, I am wondering if you are still writing the Ghost series and what is the best audio format to listen to them. I have really bad double vision now. I would love to enjoy the story again. Thank you. Hi Sonya. Thanks that you have enjoyed the book and sorry that you are having a health trouble with your eyes. That is always difficult to go through. In answer to your question, the entire Ghost series and Ghost Exile series are both currently in audiobook. The bundles (in fact, the bundles that I was just talking about) are only available on Audible, Amazon, and Apple Books. But the individual titles, you can get them on those three audiobook retailers, and you can also get them at Kobo, Google Play, Scribd, Chirp, and a whole bunch of other stores. In fact, if you live in Europe, you can get them off Storytel. I had a very good month from Findaway Voices in March because the Ghost books did so well on Storytel that month. Also the individual titles are also in the various library catalogs, so if you have a local library that can lend electronic audiobooks, it might be worthwhile talking to the librarians at your local library and see if they can add the audiobooks to their catalog, because that way you can then listen to the audiobooks at no cost to yourself (minus, of course, whatever you pay in local taxes that funds the library). Our next question is from Todd who asks: I hope you had a happy Easter and look forward to Cloak of Dragons. But my question is about your covers. My apologies to the visual artist, but I have to say how much more like the versions on your website than the ones that originally came with the books. To me it was just something uncanny valley about the original covers, which has changed on the new covers. My question is whether you will at some point push an update to the books that will update the covers, or if there is a different way to make that happen. As always, thank you for your writing. I enjoy it a lot. Thanks, Todd. I did indeed have a happy Easter and hope you did as well. In answer to your question, I have updated the covers for all the Cloak Mage books. If they’re still showing the old version on your Kindle, what I would suggest doing is deleting the downloaded file from your Kindle and then downloading a fresh copy to your device and that should push through the new cover. It's interesting, the taste in covers because Cloak Mage has had two different sets of covers. And I've had emails from people who very strongly prefer one set over the other, and it's never consistent. But that said, the series generally sells about 20% better with new covers than they did with the old ones. So that is the direction I'm going to go in. Our next comment is from Diana, who says: Good morning. I felt compelled to let you know how much I love the Frostborn/Dragontiarna series. I decided to start from the beginning based on your reading order with the short stories and now I'm on Storms and there's only one to go. Even though I've read at least part of each of your series and like them all, I'm very anxious for the end of this series. And I'm wondering if there will be more to tell about Ridmark, his kids, Third, or even Niall. I'm not expecting a response. I'm not asking for any spoilers. I'm actually feeling pretty awkward just sending this, but I am a fan and I recommend you to my other reader friends. Even though I adjust the gory or adult parts to be age appropriate, I even read them to my kids, ages 5 and 11. Even though the oldest says he doesn't want me to read to him, he tends to start listening in when I read to his brother. We're fans and I love your work and I appreciate you working as hard as you do. Have a great weekend. Thanks, Diana. I am very glad you enjoyed the book so much. In answer to your question, the epic fantasy series I'm currently writing, Dragonskull, the main character is Gareth Arban, who you may remember is Ridmark’s oldest son and he is the main character in the series and it revolves around his adventures. I love that your kids enjoy the books because that ties into another interesting topic is that people occasionally, sometimes they ask me if my books are appropriate for children or not, and my answer is always it depends on you and it depends on your kids, because something that might be appropriate for like one particular 11 year old kid might be wildly inappropriate for a different 11 year old kid. Because it's interesting if you know, you watch a kid grow up from the time he or she is a baby to adolescence/adulthood, you pick up pretty quickly that some things about the kid are just…he or she are just born with them. You know, psychologists like to talk about nature versus nurture, but sometimes you just tell right away with the baby whether a baby is going to be a very outgoing person or whether the baby will be very shy or adventuresome and so forth, and I suppose I've rambled a bit there but to return to the main point, I am glad you liked my books. I'm glad your kids enjoyed my books. And if you are wondering whether my books would be appropriate for your kids, the answer is it depends, and the first book in most of my series are free, so you can download them at no cost to yourself and decide for yourself. Our next question has come in pretty regularly from several people over the last couple of weeks, so I thought I'd talk about it here. I should note that this is going to have spoilers for the ending of the Ghost Night series, the most recent series with Caina as the main character. So, if you haven't read to the end of Ghost Night, probably stop here and jump ahead like 3 minutes or so on the podcast (transcriptionist note: precise time stamp is listed below). If you have read them or you don't care about spoilers, listen on. 00:08:14-9:37 Reader Question: Spoiler Section for Ghost in the Lore Lately, I've gotten a couple of questions about the Ghost Night series that spoils the ending of Ghost in the Lore. Specifically, a few people emailed to ask about the villain Rania Scorneus, specifically one: why she didn't appear in Ghost in the Sun, and two: will she be coming back in future books? For Point #1, Rania Scorneus basically noped out, as the modern parlance goes. She had been killed, the Umbarian order had been military defeated, and she was widely known and hated throughout the empire. But now everyone thinks she's dead and Rania doesn't see any reason to correct them. With her cloning alchemy, she's effectively found a method of immortality, so long as no one destroys her alchemical laboratory. So why not let everyone keep on thinking that she's dead? Rania can wait until most of the people who know about her die of old age and she can spend that time profitably at arcane research, experimentation, and study and also in preparing a covert network. Then in 50 or 60 years when Rania Scorneus is simply a footnote in the historical record, she can act. Trying to conquer the empire through sheer sorcerer's might was clearly a failing strategy, given how the Ghost Night series ended, so perhaps subversion and coercion will work better a second time around. As for Point #2, will Rania come back in future books? Well, when I write a new Caina book after Dragonskull is done, we will find out one way or the other. 00:09:37 (End of Spoilers for Ghost in the Lore) Public Service Announcement about Phishing Scams So now I'm on to sort of a public service announcement, a serious problem I almost had with Facebook ads but managed to avoid: phishing messages designed to trick you into giving up login credentials to a fake website are an ongoing scourge of the Internet. Now, most of us who are experienced Internet users can spot phishing messages a mile away, but there is something important to remember about phishing messages. It doesn't matter how sophisticated or well written the fake message is. What matters is whether or not it hits one of your psychological or emotional weak points. Because no matter how technologically knowledgeable or experienced you are, we all have psychological or emotional weak points and a really effective phishing message is one that mashes one of those buttons. A few examples may demonstrate the point. Like, say you're running a low balance in your checking account and you get a message from your bank that you're overdrawn and overdraft fees are now applied. Or you have a teenager and you get a message saying that his or her number has gone over the data cap limit even after you've told the kid again and again to stop wasting data. Or you're waiting for a test result from the doctor and you get a message that you need to log in immediately to see these urgent results. Now in all three of these cases, the messages are fake. The messages might even be badly written and have obvious errors in them. But if the message hits an emotional sore point, the emotional reaction will override critical thinking and you might click and log in to all the fake links in the email before your brain can catch up to your emotions. This almost happened to me yesterday. I got an email from “Facebook Ads” claiming that my Facebook ads account had been suspended for undisclosed violations. My immediate reaction was massive annoyance. As I've mentioned before I, along with many others, had lots of problems with my Facebook ads account getting banned randomly in 2020 and 2021. It's gotten better since then, possibly because Facebook burned up about 3/4 of its company value attempting to build a bad copy of Second Life they called the Metaverse and can't really afford to be so ban-happy with advertisers anymore. Turns out businesses need revenue. Who knew? Nonetheless, I was very annoyed at this email. This nonsense again? But, I didn't click on any of the links in the email. I had the Facebook Ads manager open in another tab and I checked it. Everything was firing along just fine and indeed my ads were getting a good cost per click that day. So after a second of confusion, I realized what had happened. I had almost just been phished. It's a good reminder to always be cautious on the Internet and to always practice good data security. Never click on links in an email from an unknown sender. Never open attachments from unknown email senders. Keep separate passwords for every account. Use two factor authentication whenever possible and avoid doing anything involving personal data on public Wi-Fi and similar practices to that. These basics aren't terribly flashy, and there's no such thing as perfect security, but practicing the basics will highly increase your odds of avoiding trouble. So that is your public service announcement about phishing for the week. 00:12:41 Main Topic: Adobe Firefly/Generative AI Now on to our main topic of the week: Adobe Firefly generative AI. I mentioned on last week's episode that I was able to get into the beta for Adobe's new Firefly image generation tool. I have been very critical of generative AI, so I want to give it a fair shake because it is important to be fair about things, especially things you are not disposed to like. I mentioned before that Firefly might address some of my concerns about generative image AI basically, stealing images across the Internet for training data. So here are my thoughts after experimenting with Adobe Firefly for a bit. First things first, Firefly is a lot more user friendly than something like Midjourney or Stable Diffusion. Midjourney is basically like the command prompt of image generation, more powerful and more versatile than the GUI version, but not quite as simple to use. The graphical interface of Firefly is pretty friendly. It has a right hand sidebar with a lot of buttons for adjusting the output of your image generation prompt. You can choose to create a photo, a graphic, or an artistic image. And there are numerous drop-down menus allowing you to adjust lighting and layout and so forth, which in other image generation programs usually require specific prompts you have to know to enter into the prompt line. That said, like other generative programs, you have to adjust the prompt a great deal to get exactly what you want. The image I attached to the post on my website when I discussed this were human faces designed to look like some of my characters, and it took a lot of prompting with slightly rearranging words each time to get something even remotely close to what I wanted. It is a lot easier to use Firefly to generate things other than human faces, but this is true of anything. Any artist or CG artist will tell you that faces are the hardest things to do correctly because the human eye and subconscious can instantly spot anything that's wrong with the face, even if the conscious mind can't quite articulate what's wrong. Because of that, I suspect generative AI would be a lot better at generating individual assets than completed scenes. Like when I make a book cover in Photoshop nowadays, it can have between 40 to 60 layers. People who really know what they're doing often have a lot more. If I wanted to use Firefly to make a completed scene that seems suitable for a book cover, it will look terrible. But if I use it to make, say, a sword and then modify that sword heavily with appropriate adjustment layers in Photoshop, that would look much better. People familiar with this topic have demonstrated that Midjourney is more powerful and versatile than Firefly. Computer scientist Jim Fan did a thread on Twitter where he used the same prompt in both Midjourney and Firefly and compared the results. Midjourney usually performed better. That said, this test inadvertently demonstrated one of the strengths of Firefly. Jim Fan used Deadpool, Pikachu and Super Mario in his prompts and Midjourney performed better at producing images of Deadpool, Pikachu, and Super Mario. However, the reason for that is that Firefly has been trained on Adobe stock photos and public domain stuff, and Deadpool, Pikachu and Super Mario are heavily trademarked and copyrighted characters owned by Disney and Nintendo, which means Firefly hasn't been trained on any legitimate images of them. Midjourney, by contrast, was trained with a massive data scrape of the Internet and the legality of that for use in image generation isn't an open question since Midjourney, as of this recording, is getting sued about it. To put it mildly, Disney and Nintendo have lawyers who make the Nazgul from Lord of the Rings look warm and cuddly, and that shows the advantage of Firefly. If you're commercial artist and use an AI generated image of Deadpool or Super Mario on your client’s project, obviously you are running the risk of getting sued. However, even if you're not using trademarked characters, Midjourney might have been trained on something that will get you sued, whereas the risk for that with Adobe Firefly is much lower. Where something like Firefly would really shine, I think, is in replacing stock photos. I've spent a lot of time looking for exactly the right stock photo for a certain project because while you can do a lot in Photoshop, it's much less work if you get a stock photo that's at least initially somewhat close to what you want the end result to be. Typing 20 or 30 slightly different prompts to get what you want for a specific asset might one day replace scrolling through 20 or 30 pages of stock photo thumbnails. That said, it's still easier to use something like DAZ or Blender to produce assets, because you can control the output exactly in a way that you simply cannot with image AI. But it's not always possible to get what you want in DAZ or Blender. To sum up, Firefly is easy to use. Careful sourcing of the images in its training data (if Adobe is telling the truth about that) addresses many of the ethical concerns I have about generative image AI. However, I would still exercise great caution in using AI generated images for anything, especially a commercial project. The legality of it all is still very unsettled, and as I mentioned earlier, there are several different court cases dealing with it at the moment. So I personally would wait until it pans out before using a generated image for anything commercial. Adobe’s approach to Firefly might not be able to generate high quality images of Deadpool high-fiving Super Mario or something, but it does seem more ethical and less likely to result in nasty lawsuits. And as always, a reminder that I am not a lawyer and nothing I just said is legal advice. When I talked about this on Facebook, we had an interesting comment from reader Lynette who said: I am a photographer and therefore work with Photoshop and Lightroom. It's cool hearing about a new Adobe program. I've heard nothing about it yet here in South Africa. P.S. The thing that stood out to me from your post was the amount of layers you use in a Photoshop project. Your PC must be insanely powerful for it not to stall or come almost to a standstill using so many layers at once. Oh yeah, you’re a gamer, so you probably have a gaming laptop with large RAM and a great graphics card. To the best of my knowledge, Adobe Firefly the beta is only available in the US at the moment unfortunately, and you have to sign up with an Adobe account to get into the beta. I signed up about ten days before I got in, I think. In answer the second half, I don't actually do any graphic design on a laptop. Back in 2020 when I started really getting into Photoshop, I managed to get my current PC then (my current desktop PC, I should say) and it has a 64 gigabytes of RAM and an NVIDIA GTX 1660. And when I get heavily into graphic design, things do still slow down quite a bit, unfortunately. That is, I have to admit, the one advantage writing has over (actually, that's a pretty big advantage)…writing has over graphic design because I can write an entire novel and do it quite comfortably on a laptop that costs less than $300.00. But whereas if you try to use Photoshop on the same laptop, it will probably catch on fire because the Photoshop system requirements are so high. And it keeps getting…Photoshop is one those programs that keeps getting a little bigger and a little more resource intensive with every new version that comes out. So that is it for this week. Next week we will actually return to a writing topic instead of talking about generative AI. So thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platforms of choice. (Stumbles wording a bit) I should try, you know, diction lessons, it might help. Anyway, stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this week's episode, I take another look at generative AI tools and consider what they might mean for writers. I also take a look at March's ad results and discuss the very excellent board game HEROQUEST. TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Reader Updates Hello everyone. Welcome to Episode 153 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is April the 6th, 2023, and today we're going to talk a bit more about generative AI and writers. We're also going to see how my ads did for the month of March and talk about a board game I've been enjoying lately. I'm recording this a few days earlier than usual because I want to take a couple days off for Easter, though the show stood still should still come out at the usual time. First up, writing progress. As of this recording, I am 72,000 words into Cloak of Dragonfire. I think it's going to end up around 100 to 110,000 words long, so not too much left to do in the rough draft. If all goes well, I'm hoping to have that out in the first or possibly second week of May. I passed the 10,000 word mark of Silent Order: Thunder Hand, and I also finished writing the first chapter of Sevenfold Sword Online: Leveling, which will be the second book in that series and Silent Order: Thunder Hand will be the 13th book in the Silent Order series. Both those books will probably come out sometime this summer once Dragonskull is finished, so I only have two more books to write in Dragonskull and I want to do that and finish that series before I really do anything else. In audiobook news, Dragonskull: Sword of the Squire is out and you can get it at Audible, Amazon, Apple Books, Google Play, Kobo, Chirp books, Scribd, and probably a few others that I am forgetting off the top of my head. Oh, my Payhip store as well. Initial reviews are good and I'm glad everyone is enjoying that. In other audiobook news, I uploaded Ghost Exile Omnibus Three which will be a combination of the audiobooks of Ghost in the Throne, Ghost in the Pact, and Ghost in the Winds. And if you've read those books or listened to the audiobooks, you know they're long and the combined omnibus version of those three books will be over 45 hours long. So that is good value for your Audible credit. That should hopefully be out sometime before the…excuse me…sometime before the end of April. 00:02:12 Reader Questions/Comments Before we get into our main topics for the week, let's have a few questions and comments from readers. Our first comment is from Scott, who says: I've just started reading your Dragonskull series. I must say they are brilliant. I've just read the latest, Wrath of the Warlock, and finished it in three nights. Love your characters in these books and can't wait until summer when you bring the next episode of this amazing story. Love your work and really looking forward to your next book. Thanks, Scott. I am glad you're enjoying the Dragonskull series and if all goes well, hopefully the next Dragonskull book, Dragon Skull: Doom of the Sorceress will be out in June, if all goes well. Our next question is from James, who asks: How many words in all the books you've published? I had to look at some spreadsheets and figure it out, but I believe for all my 139 novels combined (Cloak of Dragonfire will be the 140th), I have published 12.1 million words of fiction in novel form. I don't know how many in short stories, but assuming roughly 5,000 words is a short story for an average, it would probably be another half million. So we know for sure, it's at least 12.1 million words of fiction I have published in novels in the last almost 12 years. Our final comment of the week is from Wayne, who says: Concerning the fact that I'm going to be publishing Cloak of Dragonfire soon and I am hoping to write another Caina novel before the end of the year, Wayne says: This is great news, really looking forward to more of Nadia Moran's adventures. I have read all the Cloak books and I'm on Ghost in the Ashes now. Nadia is my favorite, but gotta love Caina, really want to read the Cloak and Ghost novels, but not sure what point, so just wait until I finish The Ghost series. Thanks, Wayne. I'm glad you have enjoyed both Nadia and Caina's adventures. About the Cloak and Ghost books, you can probably read those…if you read all the Cloak books, you can read those whenever you want. They're not canon for either the Ghost series or the Cloak series. It's just a little experiment I wrote, where I thought it'd be interesting if Caina met Nadia and they went off and had adventures together. 00:04:21 Facebook and Amazon ad results for March 2023 So let's take a look back and see how my Facebook ads have performed for March 2023…actually, my Facebook ads and my Amazon ads. First up, let's start off with Facebook ads. And here is what I got back for every dollar spent on Facebook ads. For the Frostborn series, for every dollar spent, I got back $4.74, which includes the audiobooks. For The Ghosts, for every dollar spent, I got back $3.05, and that also includes the audiobooks, especially the omnibus edition audiobooks. For Cloak Games and Cloak Mage, for every dollar I spent, I got back $2.06, and for Sevenfold Sword, for every dollar I spent, I got back $2.21, so that is a pretty good showing for Amazon ads this month. I need to take some time to adjust them, but I probably won't have time to do that ‘til I finish the rough draft of Cloak of Dragonfire, which should hopefully be soon. For Amazon ads (and these are for Amazon US ads), remember that for every six to eight clicks, you need a sale for the ad to work. If you're not getting a sale for every six to eight clicks, then it is time to adjust the ads. But here is how we did on Amazon US. For Dragonskull: Sword of the Squire, I got one sale for 0.68 clicks and $8.43 back for every dollar I spent, which is just exceptional. Thank you for reading that, everyone. For Cloak of Dragons for every 3.38 clicks, I got a sale and I got back $1.73 for every dollar I spent, which is not as good as like, but much better than last month. And for the Demonsouled series, I sold a copy of Demonsouled Omnibus One for every 3.59 clicks and for the entire Demonsouled series as a whole (which I measured that way because it's in Kindle Unlimited at the moment), I got back $3.64, which is the best that Demonsouled has ever done while I've been running it on Amazon ads. I was pleased enough with how the Amazon ads performed that I'm finally going to break down and try them properly for Amazon UK, so I will report back on how that goes next month.   00:06:24 Thoughts on the game Heroquest Now, before we get into our main topic of generative AI, let's talk about something fun: Heroquest the board game. Back at Thanksgiving 2022, my brother recommended I read Game Wizards by Jon Peterson, a business history of the early days of Dungeons and Dragons. It was an absolutely fascinating book, and I've talked about it many times on both my blog and my podcast. It's honestly one of those books that I think every small businessperson should read, even small business people who wouldn't touch Dungeons and Dragons with a 10,000 foot pole. There's a lot of valuable business lessons to be learned from the various self-inflicted misfortunes of TSR. There is also quite a lot about related history in the book. One of them was that for a while in the 1980s while TSR was at its peak, a lot of people tried to jump on the fantasy gaming bandwagon with varying degrees of success. One of those companies was Milton Bradley, which teamed up with Games Workshop to release a board game called Heroquest, which distilled down Dungeons and Dragons to its dungeon crawling essentials. It also tied in Games Workshop’s Warhammer Universe. The game did quite well and numerous expansions were released through the late ‘80s and early to mid ‘90s. But eventually Milton Bradley stopped producing the game and it vanished into relative obscurity. Milton Bradley let the trademark lapse and then someone else bought it and it passed through a couple of other hands. So we fast forward to 2020 when Hasbro brought the trademark and then in 2021 they brought the game back via crowdfunding campaign. Then in 2022 I heard about it for the first time in Game Wizards and then in January 2023, I was sufficiently intrigued to pick up a copy of the core game via Amazon since it happened to be on sale at the time. It’s quite an enjoyable game. I would describe it as a Dungeons and Dragons-lite. It's boiled down to the essence of dungeon crawling, one my favorite genres of both games and literature without a lot of excess baggage or the tedium of listening to someone describing their tiefling bard’s 15,000 word tragic back story. You have four characters with different abilities: the barbarian, the dwarf, the elf, and the wizard. You lead them on various quests against the forces of the evil wizard Zargon. The game’s board is modular and using the pieces of furniture included with the game, the board gets reconfigured into different dungeons for each mission. A good selection of monsters comes with the games: goblins, orcs, evil fish people people, a variety of undead and dread warriors which are renamed from Chaos Warriors in the original so Hasbro doesn't get sued by the famously litigious Games Workshop. All the miniatures that come with the game are excellent and detailed though they are unpainted, more on that to come. The handiest part of modern Heroquest is the companion app. Given the complexity of modern board games, quite a few of them now come with companion apps. Heroquest’s companion apps essentially runs the monsters for you, which is quite useful, though you still need to keep track of quite a bit of information, which you'll want to do since gold coins and various treasures are supposed to carry over between quests. The barbarian looks formidable charging into battle bare chested, but he's actually more formidable once you get the poor guy some armor. So, I thoroughly enjoy the game. I came across it as a middle-aged adult, but I found it as a kid that would go nuts over it. On the rare occasions I have a Saturday afternoon free, I'll relax and run a dungeon. Each one of the dungeons only takes about an hour or so. Now, for an amusing aside: whenever I discuss Heroquest, people invariably suggest that I should get into miniature painting. Once I started reading about Heroquest, I discovered that there is a large community dedicated to painting gaming miniatures, complete with YouTube channels devoted to the topic. It is very unlikely I will take this up as a hobby because I hate, hate painting. It is one of my least favorite homeowner chores, and I rather doubt that I would enjoy it even more with tiny brushes. Like, after I paint the porch for the summer, that's totally what I want to do to relax: come inside and paint something else, but for fun. No, I'm just going to enjoy Heroquest with my unpainted miniatures, and whenever I talk about Heroquest, quite a few people mentioned that they too enjoy it. Reader JD wrote in to say: I grew up with the original Heroquest game. That was great. I had advanced Heroquest with its jigsaw like board pieces. I moved on to playing Dungeons and Dragons, but ended up buying both Heroquest games on eBay for a bit of nostalgia. You can get the older version on eBay for varying amounts of money depending on the condition, but the new game is available at…you can get it off Amazon pretty cheap. Well, not pretty cheap. It's about $100, but sometimes it does go on sale and get it for a little cheaper than that. Another comment comes from Genelin (I think I pronounced it right), who says: I owned the original Heroquest board game as a kid, but I never actually got to play it because I didn't know anyone who's interested in stuff like that. As much as I'd love to try out the new one, the situation hasn't changed. I've got nobody to play with. Well, the good news is that you don't need to find people to play with, you can use the app. Because the app will run the game for you and then you control all four of the characters, so you no longer need to recruit people willing to put up with one's interests in order to play Heroquest. 00:11:20 Main Topic: Recent Developments in Generative AI for Writers Now on to our main topic this week: recent developments in generative AI for writers. If you've been listening to the show or reading my blog for a while, you know that I am generally very critical of generative AI for a variety of reasons that I'm going to recap shortly. But here is a sentence I’d never thought I would say, but it's possible Adobe of all people might have done something to address my concerns about AI generated art. This is because before I started using Photoshop during COVID in 2020, my previous history with Adobe Products was long, troubled, and unhappy, including but not limited to: my computer crashing in 1994 the first time I tried to install Adobe Reader, many, many, many tech support difficulties related to Flash Player in the 2000s, many more tech support difficulties related to maintaining Adobe Creative Suite programs in a computer lab, and all the many times that Adobe Updater crashed while trying to install updates to update Adobe Updater. If you've lived through that, you know what I'm talking about. If you listen to my previous podcast on the topic of AI Art, my chief concern is the ethics of it. I remain unconvinced since doing anything other than salami slicing plagiarism. The counter argument is that the AI isn't copying, it’s learning patterns. My counter-argument to that is that a machine is incapable of learning, just applying a more refined formula that generates better results and it does that by copying a million different images and generating the average of them. That's why if you go to the most of the AI image generators and type in a prompt like “Magic the Gathering plains cards,” it will generate an image as an average of all the Magic the Gathering playing cards in the data set, including weird symbols where the card would have text because a MGT playing card is statistically likely to have text in that portion of the card. It's not creating a new image, it's not learning anything, it is just averaging suitable images from its training data. However, Adobe recently announced plans for a beta of an AI image generation tool they called Firefly. According to Adobe, their AI has only been trained on public domain images and stuff within the Adobe Stock Collection that they have the rights to use. If you're thinking that public domain means the photos will be low quality, remember that every photograph taken by a U.S. Federal employee in the course of their duties is in the public domain. So there is a vast amount of high quality public domain images to use for training. Adobe also claims that it is working on the payment scheme for people whose images were used in the training. I mean, obviously this is not a perfect solution. Pirated stuff does sometimes turn up on Adobe Stock and well, everywhere else on the Internet. And it's entirely possible Adobe is lying through their teeth in a “technically legally true” way about some of this. That said, and this is a clever approach, most of Adobe's customer base is image and video editing professionals, and they were the angriest about the potential abuses of AI art. Adobe doesn't really have enough goodwill among its customer base to afford yet another viral uproar, but since all the big brains claim that AI is the next big thing, the company needs to compete in the space to survive. So it was a smart move to let others rush into that space first and then announce their own solutions that addresses some of those concerns. Anyway, I signed up for the beta of Firefly, and I actually just got in right before I started recording this. I will test it out and share my thoughts next week. If it does work and the promises are true, Firefly is the sort of general generative AI product I feel I could probably use in good conscience. What I'd most likely use it for would be to generate assets I would include in my book covers and Facebook ad images. I’ve already used various stock photo sites in DAS 3D for that, so it would be another tool in the toolkit. Doubtless fiddling with the generator to find the exact correct prompt would be no different than scrolling endlessly through stock photo results or trying to get another rendering in DAS to make the output look right. On a related note, a reader asked if I was considering using generative text AI like ChatGPT to help with my writing output. Short answer? Absolutely not! Longer answer: Reason number one, at this point it would feel like committing fraud and cheating readers. Like, if you buy a book that says Jonathan Moeller on the cover, the implicit promise is that Jonathan Moeller wrote the book, and if you're buying that book, you want it to be written by Jonathan Moeller. That means you've decided you like my writing, warts and all (and I appreciate that) and have decided to pay actual money for it. So, buying a Jonathan Moeller book that was actually written by an AI is a bit like a restaurant offering French fries that are allegedly 100% potato but actually turned out to be tofu, soybeans, and sawdust. Granted, if I did write a book with AI and the cover said by Jonathan Moeller and Chat GPT, that would be different, but I don't want to do that anymore than I want to eat a French fry made out of sawdust. Reason two: generative AI still kind of sucks. I have to admit that when I listen to people who are very impressed with and enthusiastic about AI, I kind of wonder about their credulity. It's like a wizard cast a spell on horse manure to make people think it was the finest pepperoni pizza and people are wolfing down this horse manure and praising the flavor while the horse looks on in bemusement. A lot of excitement has been generated from the fact that you can tell ChatGPT to write text in the style of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle or whatever other author you want. But what comes out when you use a prompt like that tends not to be very good, especially when compared to the original. Granted, in certain applications, horse manure is actually highly valuable. It's just not pepperoni pizza. In past blog posts, I've joked that generative AI is the infinite crap generator. Maybe it's more accurate to say that generative AI is the most likely random crap generator, but occasionally not, and you have to iterate a whole lot with your prompt and results to find something that isn't crap. You can use it to write things, but then you have to wade through a lot of crap to get there first and then edit it and then put it all together, at which point you might as well just write it yourself for less hassle. And that brings us to the third reason: copyright. As in this writing, the copyright situation around generative AI is highly unsettled, but trending towards negative. The official position of the US Copyright Office is that AI generated images can't be copyrighted, though legislation might end up changing that at some point. Someone tried to copyright an AI-generated comic book and the copyright for that was revoked and then revisited to say to that while the image themselves could be copyrighted, the arrangement in human written text could. And this case is ongoing, with the creator of the comic book and her lawyers going back and forth with the Copyright Office in the US about what is copyrighted in her AI generated comic book. There's also the ongoing lawsuit Getty Images has against several of the AI models, and that no one can predict at this point how that's going to all settle out. So overall, the opinion of the current authorities is that machine generated art cannot be copyrighted, and presumably that is true with machine generated text. So for those three reasons, I won't be attempting an AI written book anytime soon. Perhaps in another ten years, writing a novel will involve typing like 1000 different scene prompts into an AI generator and then editing the various outputs together. That said, I really doubt it, though. So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting platform of choice. It really does help. Until then, stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this week's episode, we look at the hit piece WIRED magazine published about popular fantasy author Brandon Sanderson, and four lessons this offers for indie authors. TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello everyone. Welcome to Episode 152 of the Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is March the 31st, 2023, and today we're going to talk about four lessons for indie authors from the recent hit piece Wired magazine did on Brandon Sanderson. If you hear a faint drumming that is in the background, I'm afraid that is the sound of rain hitting the roof. It is raining quite forcefully here. It seems like this year, March has come in like a lion and is leaving like a wetter, angrier lion. But before we get into our main topic, let's have some updates on my current writing projects and a few questions and comments from readers. First up, the first audiobook in the Dragonskull Series, Dragon Skull: Sword of the Squire, is now available at most of the audiobook stores. You can get it as of right now at Audible, Apple, Amazon, Kobo, Google Play, Scribd, Chirp Books, and my Payhip store. So that was the first one. Nine hours long, excellently recorded by Brian Wills. And get it there. And we are just starting work on the next one, Dragon Skull Shield of the Knight. For books and not audiobooks, I am 51,000 words into Cloak of Dragonfire, which puts me on Chapter 9 of 21, though I'm pretty sure it is going to be more than 21 chapters because some of the chapters I've already written have turned out to be quite long and I will need to split them up in the editing process. If all goes well, I am hoping to have that book out sometime in early May, if all goes well. Then after that's done, I'll start on the next Dragonskull book, Dragon Skull: Doom of the Sorceress. 00:01:52 Reader Questions/Comments Let's have a couple of comments and questions from readers. Our first question is from Helen, who asks: Hi, Jon. Probably quite a random question, but did you ever return to the Third Soul world? I just finished reading both omnibus sets and suddenly thought that must there been any more. Did this world get left behind? Just interested really no pressure to write a new one. Thanks, Helen. I'm glad you enjoyed those books. I am sorry to say that I never did return to the Third Soul world. The problem is I think I wrote the initial Third Soul stuff all the way back in oh, 2008, 2009. I'm pretty sure it's 2009. So that's 14 years that have passed and I look back in now and I think, oh, I should have done this different, I should have done that different. So if I ever do return to the Third Soul world, that would probably be as a reboot or a different set of characters or continuity at this point, just because so much time has passed and it is a very interesting world. I'd like to explore some of the concepts there more, but I'm afraid I just never quite got around to it. Our next comment is from Ryan, who writes: been looking forward to the next Nadia book for a while. Super excited to see where the series goes next. On a side note, I recently started reading Silent Order. Not entirely sure why I never gave you a try before, but now I had something caught my eye that I realized you do with all your series. The first book was free. So I said why not, right? The second book was $0.99. That's almost free, so why not? That wasn't until after I already purchased the third book that I realized it was $5.99. I'm not complaining that you’re making a living, just marveling that works so well, even though I know you did it before. Anyway, keep all your books coming. I haven’t read one I didn't like yet. Thanks, Ryan. I'm glad you have enjoyed the books and that you are enjoying the Silent Order series. I do use that sort of funnel pricing for a lot of my series where the first book is free, the second book is $0.99, and then the third one and all the ones after that are full price ($4.99 USD and then whatever the equivalent is in your country of residence). The reason I do it is, as Ryan observed, it works and I also I also think it's fair that way because between the free first book and the $0.99 second book, people usually have two full books to read and for not a lot of money to decide whether my work is worth your time and money or not. I am always grateful that as many people continue reading after the second book as they do. 00:04:09 Main Topic of the Week: Wired Article About Brandon Sanderson So our main topic this week is that the big news in the world of traditional science fiction and fantasy publishing over the last week of March was that Wired magazine ran a hit piece on popular fantasy author Brandon Sanderson. The thesis of the article was Sanderson's fans love his books, which are written at a 6th grade level and this is bad, which as a thesis is weak for reasons which we will explore more shortly. Additionally, the article included numerous odd personal insults aimed at Sanderson, his family, his employees, the state of Utah, Mormons, and fantasy readers in general. The tone of the article was like Brandon Sanderson decided to run for the President of the United States and the journalist in question considered this a bad thing and so proceeded to write a hit piece to make him look sinister. Many formerly popular governors and senators who decided to run for president have been surprised to find themselves on the business end of this treatment from previously friendly journalists. The most famous example I can think of off the top of my head was probably Senator John McCain in 2008 when he ended up running against President Obama. Except Sanderson isn't running for president or any elective office. He's just selling his books and his merchandise to people who want to read the books and buy the merchandise. There are much worse ways to get rich, and despite the journalist’s best efforts in the article, Sanderson comes across pretty well, a friendly guy with nerdy hobbies who likes his work and doesn't have any nasty dark secrets like a cocaine problem or a secret dog fighting ring. The fact that the journalist found this “lame and boring” is probably more reflection on the journalist than the subject of his article. Well, the reaction to the article was almost universally negative, which was interesting. The negative reaction broke down in five main ways. The majority were fans of Sanderson's books, who, as you imagine, were outraged. However, a substantial minority was lefty leaning science fiction writers and readers who often aren't fans of Sanderson's books, or Mormons in general, but were still annoyed because the article was so bad and stumbled into attacking all fantasy readers in a couple of different places. Another substantial minority were people who had never heard of Brandon Sanderson's books, but noticed the article trending on their social media feeds and were taken aback by how bad and one sided it was. A much smaller minority who thought the article was interesting but seriously flawed. And finally, the usual Internet crackpots connecting the article to unrelated topics like the CIA, various former presidents, the Russia/Ukraine war, etc. The long term result of this article, of course, will be nothing whatsoever. The Brandon Sanderson publishing juggernaut will continue unhindered. Wired magazine will remain a shadow of its glory days in the ‘90s and a semi-failing subsidiary of Conde Nest and the Internet outrage machine will move and has already moved several times to new outrages of the day. For indie authors, however, I think there are four important lessons to take away from the article and the reaction to it. Lesson #1: never, never, never, never, never, never talk to journalists, but especially American corporate journalists. Remember the business model of 21st century American corporate journalism is not to inform readers and viewers, serve as the watchdog of democracy, hold the powerful to account, or any of the other mottos journalists post on their Twitter bios. The business model is to stir up controversy to generate clicks on Facebook and YouTube ads. We have all seen many such examples of people getting thrown into the meat grinder to generate ad clicks or sensationalized stories that turned out to be total fabrications. There are of course journalists with integrity, but they're rather rarer than one might hope. Still, it's best to avoid talking to a journalist unless you're very familiar with their work already. And with that in mind, all reporters have a gift for seeming you like your best friend while mentally planning how to make you look like history's greatest monster in their article or news segment. If a reporter specifically approaches you to write a story about you or claims to “want to get your side of the story,” the odds that the journalist has integrity are about the same as you finding a magic ring that grants wishes without those wishes going horribly wrong in an ironic like yet darkly amusing manager. Come to think of it, a magic ring that grants wishes that go horribly wrong is a pretty good metaphor for media attention. However, there are always exceptions. The day I published this, Esquire magazine released a profile of Sanderson that was far more even handed and balance than the one that Wired, which was an interesting example of good journalism versus bad. Still, I still recommend you should always remain cautious about speaking with journalists. Lesson 2: writing clear, unobtrusive prose is unambiguously a good thing. All the big brain experts agree that the US has problems with literacy, with many adults struggling with both reading and writing. Actual teachers I've spoken to agree that the COVID reaction made this problem much worse. The kids who spent two years in the various lockdowns with remote learning lost two years of development and are therefore two years behind where they should be, which means at this point it's going to have a lifelong impact. With all that in mind, how is writing books that are easily accessible possibly a bad thing? I've gotten a few emails from readers who said that they used to hate reading but my books drew them in and got them into the habit, which is always nice to hear. If Sanderson is doing that on a larger scale, isn't that a good thing? All the big brain experts say that literacy is vital for pretty much every aspect of modern civilization, so shouldn't we encourage anything that gets people reading more? I mean, there are lots of popular books I don't like, but I don't bash people for reading them. Heaven knows I have tastes that don't agree with everyone. I spent a lot of 2022 playing Elder Scrolls Blades, which is not exactly considered a masterpiece, but I still enjoyed the game. There is a time and place for beautiful, complex, evocative prose, but it's far less often than its advocates think. Clear communication, in my opinion, is often more important than beautiful communication. Writing books that are easily accessible is not a bad thing and is in fact helping to address a serious problem. The third lesson: Writing clear, unobtrusive prose that doesn't get in the way of the reader is much harder than you think it is. I think the unspoken assumption when people criticize simple prose is that the writers who use simple prose do so because they can't write complex prose, but I think the truth is that communicating clearly through the written word is much more difficult than many people believe. Regrettably, there are many people who couldn't write a coherent sentence with the fate of the world depended upon it, and you've met some of them. In fact, you've probably met many of them. Think of how many times you've gotten an email from your boss or your employer, and you have no idea what they're trying to say in the email, or how many coworkers you you've had who couldn't write a lucid email, or you've gotten a complaint from a customer, only it's so incoherently written that you can't figure out what they're trying to complain about. Or you get a text message from someone and can't figure out what they meant. Were they being sarcastic? Were they making a joke? Are they really an angry? It's hard to tell. I've written before about how well the reasons Ulysses S. Grant was an effective commander during the US Civil War was his ability to write clear instructions for his subordinates that left no room for misinterpretation or ambiguity about what Grant wanted done. Given that the Civil War was long before modern telecommunications and Grant’s subordinates couldn't call them up on their cell phones and ask what he wanted to do, this was obviously a vital skill. Hopefully none of us will have to command one side of a major industrial power’s civil war. But even without such fraught stakes, in the 21st century,clear communication is just as useful of a skill. So people sometimes like to bash on clear, simple prose, but writing clear prose that effectively conveys the writers intended meaning is much more difficult than people think. It's a highly valuable skill, even if you're not a fiction writer. And the 4th lesson is that consistently taking the High Road can really pay off in the long run. Sanderson posted a response to the article on Reddit and it was basically: please be nice to the guy who wrote the article; he tried his best. But the overall response to the article reminding me of one of the most debated parts of the Bible, the parable of the shrewd manager, which goes like this: “Jesus told his disciples there was a rich man whose manager was accused of wasting his possessions, so he called him in and asked him, “What is this I hear about you? Give an account of your management because you cannot be manager any longer.” The manager said to himself, what shall I do now? My master is taking away my job. I'm not strong enough to dig and I'm ashamed to beg. I know what I'll do so that when I lose my job here, people will welcome me into their houses. So he called in each one of his master’s debtors. He asked the first, “How much do you owe my master?” “900 gallons of olive oil,” he replied. The manager told him, “Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it 450.” And then he asked the second, “And how much do you owe?” “1000 bushels of wheat,” he replied. He told him, “Take your bill and make it 800.” The master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly, for the people of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own kind than are the people of the light. I tell you use worldly wealth to gain friends for yourselves so that when it is gone, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings.” Jesus was clear about a lot of things, but this wasn't one of them. What does this parable mean exactly? People have been arguing about the interpretation for 2,000 years. We could be pretty sure Jesus Christ was not endorsing accounting fraud, even though that's what the shrewd manager is essentially doing. Like does it mean you should dismiss worldly things to focus on the spiritual or that you should store up treasures in heaven? Or you should use worldly wealth to perform good deeds, or that you should do good deeds as zealously as the shrewd manager was dismissing his master's debtors, or that you should use wealth to make friends for yourself in your hour of need? I even wrote this parable as a joke into one of the Dragonskull books. Gareth notices that the priests of the Church of Andomhaim prefer to avoid preaching on this parable and focus instead on ones with easier applicability to everyday life: the Good Samaritan, Lazarus and the rich man, or the sheep and the goats. Now back to our original point. Over the course of his career, it seems that Sanderson has tried pretty consistently to take the High Road: making friends with other authors, releasing a lot of a lot of free YouTube podcast content about writing, and bringing out more books and merchandise for his constituency. A well timed hit piece can destroy someone's reputation, or at least put a serious dent into. It seems the opposite has happened here. Sanderson banked up enough goodwill from his peers and his readership that the Wired article just sort of bounced off. In fact, the Esquire magazine piece I mentioned above mentioned that neutral observers were put off by how hostile the Wired article was. You all too frequently see authors, tradpub and indie, engaging in bad behavior: rounding up review mobs, abusing trademarks, sabotaging each other, making false reports against each other on the publishing platforms, and so forth. In fact the day I finished writing this, some newish book service got in trouble for fabricating endorsement quotes from high profile indie authors. Now, if Sanderson had spent the last twenty years doing all that kind of stuff, when this, uh, Wired hit piece arrived, it all would have come out. But he didn't. And so it didn't, and his reputation will probably survive the Wired hit piece intact. So it seems weighing aside any moral or spiritual views, if you look at it from terms of pure practicality, it seems better to take the High Road over the long term. That way, when a crisis like a media hit piece arrives, it is much less likely to do significant damage. So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to the Pulp Writer Show. I hope you find this show useful and interesting. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting platform choice, whether that's Apple, Google, Spotify, wherever you listen to your podcast through; the good reviews really do help. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this week's episode, I take a look back at DRAGONSKULL: SWORD OF THE SQUIRE. I also answer reader questions and talk more about Magic The Gathering. At the end of the show, we share a sample of the upcoming audiobook of DRAGONSKULL: SWORD OF THE SQUIRE, as excellently narrated by Brad Wills. You can get 25% of the audiobook of DRAGONSKULL: SWORD OF THE SQUIRE at my Payhip store with this coupon code: SQUIREAUDIO https://payhip.com/b/QX1Ti TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 151 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is March the 24th, 2023 and today we're going to look back on the writing of Dragonskull: Sword of the Squire, the first book in my Dragonskull series. We'll also talk a bit more about Magic: The Gathering yet again and answer quite a few reader questions. Before we get into all of that, let's have some updates on my current writing projects. First off, I am very pleased to report that Dragonskull: Wrath of the Warlock is out and is now available at all stores. Get it at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, Smashwords, and my web store at Payhip. Initial responses have been good. It's been selling quite briskly, so I would like to thank you all for buying that and reading it. The next Dragonskull book will be Dragonskull: Doom of the Sorceress, which I am pleased to report in almost 140 books, is the first time I ever used doom in a book title. That will probably be out in June or July/sometime in the summer, and then after that we will have the final book of the series. I have not decided what the title of that one will be yet. Now that Dragonskull: Wrath of the Warlock is out, next up my main project will be Cloak of Dragonfire. As of this recording, I am 18,000 words into it, which puts me on chapter three of probably 21, though I have a feeling some of these chapters are going to get long and split up when I edit them. I hope to have that out in May. I hoped to have that out in April, but it wasn't until March 23rd that I was finally able to make that my main project so I'm pretty sure Cloak of Dragonfire is going to be out in May if all goes well. Recording is done on the audiobook of Dragonskull: Sword of the Squire, which prompted the topic of this podcast episode. We'll talk about that more in a little bit and that is already available in my Payhip store and it should be turning up on all the other audiobook stores pretty shortly. So that is where I'm at with current writing and audio book projects.   00:02:06 Reader Comments/Questions Now let's have some questions and comments from readers. Our first comment is from James, who writes to say: love your Frostborn, Sevenfold Sword, and Dragontiarna series. Awesome. The new LitRPG book really brings in a new generation. They're going to want to read the source material for it. Please keep it going. Loved it. Great concept. Thanks, James. I'm glad you liked that book. Not as many people read the LitRPG book Sevenfold Sword Online: Creation as I might have wished. But those who did read it seemed to have enjoyed it quite a bit, and the sequel Sevenfold Sword Online: Leveling is currently one of my side projects and I'm hoping I can get that out before the end of 2023. Our next question is from Charles who asks: I have a question. I know some authors put names of fans in their books. Do you do that? I do not at this time, since I'm always careful about writing about real people, because you never want to make them look bad or, you know, give the name of someone in real life to like an insane superpowered serial killer or something like that. That said, I've written and talked before about how I don't have a Patreon, but if something seriously changes in the self-publishing landscape like Google Books goes out of business, that kind of thing, I might start one. And if I do start a Patreon, one of the things I would do is also put the names of patrons into books as sort of a reward as you know, like side characters, but I don't have a Patreon at the moment and no plans to start one unless something drastic changes, so that's not something I do at the moment. Our next question is from LW who asks, have you considered continuing the saga of the Shield Knight and the Keeper and freeing the Heptarchy nation from the seven priestesses? Ridmark and Calliande are not that old yet. That's a possibility. Once Dragonskull is done, there's going to be two more books and that series is going to be done and I haven't fully decided what I'm going to do. Actually, I should say I haven't decided at all what I'm going to do after that is done. I know I'm going to write another epic fantasy series and it will probably be set in the Frostborn/Sevenfold Sword/Dragontiarna/Dragonskull universe because I've put so much work into it at this point, but I haven’t decided who the main characters would be or where in that setting it would be set, that kind of stuff. So we will see what happens. Derek writes to ask: how long is the wait for the next Dragonskull book? Hopefully this summer, if everything goes really well, it should be in June 2023, though, depending on how things go the next couple of months it might slip to July, but I'm hoping for June if everything goes well. Our next question is from CL who asks about word processors and he says: I'm about to get a tablet and try writing a book. Is there a good app you'd recommend? Honestly, every book I've ever written has either been written in Microsoft Word on a PC, Microsoft Word on a Mac, or LibreOffice on a PC that's either running uh, Windows or Ubuntu. So I have never written a book on a tablet unless you count the Microsoft Surface tablet. But I've always written using that as essentially a laptop with the keyboard cover. That said, I do know people who have written their books in Pages on an iPad and in Google Docs on Android. Microsoft does have pretty good mobile versions of Office now that you can install on both Android and iPad. So if you want, you can use a tablet with either like Pages on iPad or Google Docs on Android or one of the Microsoft Office apps and you can write it on a tablet that way. In fact, there have been people who have written entire books on their phones as they take like, you know, a 90 minute commute on the train to New York or London or something like that every day and they just, you know, sat there with their phones and thumb typed out an entire novel. So good for them that they can do that. For myself, I've always, if I was going to write on a tablet I would need a Bluetooth keyboard. At that point, you're basically turning your tablet into a laptop, so why not just get a laptop? You get a pretty decent cheap laptop that can run word processing software for $300- $400, and then you can do everything you need on the fairly cheap laptop, which is less expensive than a tablet and you can actually do more with a laptop that you can with the tablet in most circumstances. So that comes down to personal taste, but those are the options available for writing on a tablet if you want to do that. Our next comment is from Scott, who says concerning the chapter titles and this is in response to a comment I made saying that one of my favorite parts of outlining my book and finalizing the publishing process was finalizing the names of the chapter titles since they’re like, you know, Chapter One, something goes wrong. Scott says: I often hold against the author when the Table of Contents is merely a list of numbers. What possible use is it to the reader to just have numbered chapters? As a reader, I use the Contents to return to chapters I may need to review or to clarify for better understanding. The titles need to be distinct rather than recognized, but not so obvious as to provide spoilers. I would expect that the writer who works from a fixed outline would find it very helpful in editing and revising. If it was good enough for H.G. Wells and so many classical authors, it should be good enough for the rest. Good ideas and practices aren't old fashioned. I agree with Scott here. Back in the bad old days before self-publishing, agents and editors often had very specific submission guidelines, and one of those guidelines was that they would often reject any manuscript that came into them with chapter titles. So when self-publishing came along, I very much enjoyed being able to pick chapter title for books. Like in Child of the Ghosts, Ghosts in the Flames, Ghost in the Blood, I originally wrote those with an eye towards trying to get them traditionally published (or just published as it was back then, before self-publishing) and so they didn't have chapter titles. So when I self published them, I took great enjoyment in picking out the chapter titles for the various chapters. So that is what I have to say about that. I enjoy chapter titles. We have a very complicated, but a good question from Wayne who writes in to ask: I know this is a lot to ask, but I have most of your books, including the short story anthologies. The following are books that I do not have and before buying them, I want to make sure that they are not hidden away in one of your six short story anthologies that I have purchased. The Final Waystone, Ghost Shadow, Ghost Candle, The Traitor’s Tale, The Bone Quest books One through Six, the Sworn Knight books One through Five, Silver Drive, Iron Image, Dragon Pearl, Wraith Wolf, Mask Gaze, False Flag, Rail Gun, and the Otherworld Series books, 10 and 1. Are those no longer available? I plan on reading your books in order that in the order that you have listed to include the short stories and want to ensure they have all that available. First of all, Scott, thanks for reading all those books. I'm glad you enjoyed them. And then in answer to your questions, the Final Waystone isn't in a collection yet. Once I published that in 2023, when I do at the end of 2023, the short story bundle for 2023, which I've gotten in the habit of doing. It will be in that one. I don't believe Ghost Shadow or Ghost Candle are in any of the anthologies yet. The Traitor’s Tale was never in any of the anthologies because it's very spoiler heavy since it spoils a character who comes in Frostborn Book 7, so ever since that I've tried to shy away from that. That's one of the difficulties of writing a long series where you include a short story with every book is that by the time you get to, like Book 12 or Book 7, it's difficult to write short stories that don't include spoilers. So that's why The Traitor’s Tale was never in any of the anthologies. The Bone Quests got repackaged into a short novel called Frostborn: The Skull Quest, and if you sign up for my newsletter, that's one of the three free books you get as a reward for signing up for my newsletter. The book is also available for $2.99 USD on all the ebooks stores. The Sworn Knight series is about Mazael, and I believe that all five Mazael short stories are in a bundle called The Sworn Knight, which is also available for sale on all ebook platforms. I really need to update the cover for one of these days, but I’ll get around to it eventually. Silver Drive, Iron Image, False Flag, and Mask Gaze aren't in any of the short story collections. And finally, other worlds, Otherworlds-all those short stories, I took them off sale, bundled them together in the Otherworlds anthology of short stories I wrote back in like the 2000s and early 2010s before self-publishing came along and that is the only place that is available now. So I hope that answer clarifies things. And I understand the confusion. Back last month when I finalized my taxes, I took some time to calculate how many short stories that I had actually published, and so I figured out that since I've been self-publishing, I have written and published 106 short stories, which is a lot to keep track of. So that's the reason I started doing those anthology bundles and have an anthology series now so that it's easier to get them all in one place.   (Timestamp for Ghost in the Sun Spoiler in Reader Question: 00:11:35-00:12:47) Our next question I should mention has spoilers for Ghosts in the Sun, so if you haven't read Ghost in the Sun, which is the last Caina novel I've written so far, you’d want to skip ahead like 2 minutes in the show or so. So here is the spoiler question for Ghost in the Sun from Godfrey who asks: I've just finished Ghost in the Sun, which I believe is the last book in the truly epic series. However, once I missed it, Rania Scorneus is still alive at the end, which I'm slightly confused about as she was another antagonist of Caina. So I'm wondering what happened to her. Cheers from Philham UK (sorry if I mispronounced the town, I've never been to the UK or Philham in particular). In answer to your question, what happened was Rania had decided, to use the popular phrase, just kind of nope out of things for a while. While because of the specific alchemy process she discovered at the end of Ghost in the Lore, she is functionally immortal until someone personally kills her, and everyone thinks she's dead at the moment. So what she decided to do was to spend the next several decades studying and working on her sorcery skills. And then by the time everyone who knows about her is dead of old age and she's completely forgotten, she's gonna start building her power base again without any hindrance. I am planning to write another Caina book this year once Dragonskull is done, so this may or may not be a plot point when we get there, but we'll see. So that's it for questions and comments this week. Thanks to everyone who sent in a question. And if you want a question answered on the show, just leave a comment on my Facebook page, your website and we might address it on the show.   00:12:58 Magic The Gathering Arena Next up, let's talk a little bit about my new favorite hobby, Magic The Gathering Arena. Whenever I talk about Magic The Gathering Arena, some of the comments are invariably critical about Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast, which is fair, because the company has done some pretty sketchy stuff throughout its history. But there's one thing that I do appreciate about Magic the Gathering that I think the game captures quite well: the randomness of fortune, the whims of chance, if you prefer. The randomness of the game it is, in my opinion, a good metaphor for the randomness of life. An anecdote may illustrate the point. If you're unfamiliar with the rules, in a standard Magic the Gathering match, both players start with 20 life points and whoever knocked down to zero life points first loses the game. Recently I was playing a match and I had three life left and my opponent had 18. I thought about conceding the match and getting on with the day, but I promised myself that I would clean up the kitchen after this match, so I decided to procrastinate a bit more until I officially lost the game. Yet the next card I drew completely changed the vector of the game and I ended up winning with 33 life and inflicting enough damage on my opponent to take his life score down to -22 in the final attack. So I went from, to put it in terms of a simple score, I went from being behind by 15 to winning by 55 and now I suppose this demonstrates the value of three different things in life. #1: Hanging on in the face of adversity. #2 Random chance is just that, random and today's misfortune might turn to tomorrow's good luck. Medieval people sometimes portrayed fortune as a wheel endlessly turning from good luck to the bad. #3: Good luck or bad, you still have to try your hardest, because if I had not played that game changing card at exactly the right time, and with exactly the right creature, I still would have lost the game. Once again this has gotten to be a weirdly philosophical discussion for a game about battling space wizards.   00:14:54 Reflections in Writing Dragonskull: Sword of the Squire Now let's continue on to our main topic of this week (15 minutes into the show): reflections back on writing Dragonskull: Sword of the Squire, which was the first book in the Dragonskull series. What prompted me to talk about this was that recording on Dragonskull: Sword of the Squire (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) is done, and if all goes well, it should be available at all audiobook stores in a few weeks, and it's up in my Payhip store right now. The 7th book in the Dragonskull series, as I said before, it just came out and it's been two years since I wrote Sword of the Squire. Since I had to listen to the entire audiobook before approving it (this is best practice and it can come back to bite you if you don't), it was interesting to reflect back on writing the book. Sword of the Squire always does well for me. When I calculate my ad results at the end of the month, it always performs amazingly well on Amazon ads. The rule of thumb is that for an Amazon ad to be profitable for an ebook and you need one sale for every 68 clicks on the ad and Sword of the Squire regularly runs one sale for every one click, sometimes even a little less, which is astonishing if you know anything about Amazon ads. Without false modesty or false bragging, I think one of Sword of the Squire strengths is that it's the first book in a new series but I don’t do lot of, shall we say, authorial throat clearing before the plot actually starts moving. When you start the first book of a new series, especially a fantasy or science fiction series, the overwhelming temptation is to do a lot of world building in the first half of the book, which can have an unfortunate tendency to evolve into info dumping. It's better to get the plot moving first and then only drop in new information as necessary to move the story forward. This makes for a more enjoyable read, and it also helps hold the reader's attention, since there's an element of mystery. I think Sword of the Squire benefits that the main protagonist, Gareth Arban, is 17 years old when the story begins. Maybe one of the reasons many fantasy novels start out with teenage protagonists is that it's immensely helpful for world building because as the protagonist learns about the world, you can introduce the reader to the same information in organic and usually seamless way. Gareth’s not a bad kid and he's not stupid, but might like many adolescents, his world view is entirely centered around himself and his own experiences. Growing out of this helps propel his character arc forward. It's also helpful for the world building and for revealing information about the world in the plot, since the beginning of the story, he wants to 1: become a knight, then 2: marry Iseult Toraemus and isn't terribly interested in anything that doesn't help with that. But external events start to force him to realize that there's a bigger world outside of his own problems. The cover helps too, and I made the cover myself. I would say as a cover designer I wouldn't say I'm great, merely on the bottom half of adequate but the cover works for what I need it to do. A few people asked where the images came from. The sword I generated in Daz Studio and the castle in the sky are stock images I got off dreamstime.com. The forest is a picture I actually took myself. It's a view from the front door of my doctor's office, which is surprisingly scenic, and I snapped a couple of pictures of that forest knowing I would use them for something someday. I then assembled everything in Photoshop. I want to say, most importantly of all, that I am very grateful to all of you who read and enjoyed the book, and I am very grateful that the 7th book of the Dragonskull series did so well when it came out this week and I am very much looking forward to writing the final two Dragonskull books soon. Dragonskull: Sword of the Squire should be up on Audible, Apple, Amazon, Google Play, and Kobo and all the other major audio book stores soon in a few weeks. If you don't want to wait and you want to get it right now, you can buy the audiobook direct from my Payhip store and use this coupon at checkout for a 25% discount and that is SQUIREAUDIO. Again, that's SQUIREAUDIO and I’ll include that coupon code and the link in the show notes. I'm also going to include the official sample for the audiobook that will be up on the stores at the end of this podcast, so you can listen to it for yourself and then hopefully enjoy it so much that you go out and immediately buy the audiobook. So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to the Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful and helpful. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice (whether Apple, Google, Spotify, or wherever). It really does help. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this week's episode, we celebrate reaching the 150th episode of the Pulp Writer Show! I look back at the ten most popular episodes of the show. We also answer reader questions and discuss reasons for conceding in Magic The Gathering: Arena. TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00: Introduction and Writing Updates Hello everyone. Welcome to Episode 150 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is March the 17th, 2023 and today we're going to celebrate this major milestone of a show. We're going to look back at the Top 10 most popular episodes of The Pulp Writer Show and discuss them a little bit. We also have some updates to my current writing projects, a little bit of discussion about Magic: The Gathering, and we'll answer a few questions from readers. So let's kick off by discussing my current writing projects. I am very nearly done with Dragonskull: Wrath of the Warlock. I'm on the final pass of editing, and this episode will probably go live on March 19th. And if all goes well, Wrath of the Warlock should be available at all ebook stores shortly thereafter. So I just got to push through the final phase of editing and then we're there. The audiobook of the first book in the series, Dragonskull: Sword of the Squire, is almost finished. That hopefully should be coming out before the end of March as well. I just got to finish proof-listening to a few more chapters and then we should be there. After that, my next major project will be Cloak of Dragonfire. I am 7,000 words into that. I'm also 7,500 words into Silent Order….which one am I on?...Silent Order: Thunder Hand, which is the thirteenth book and after thirteen of those books apparently I can no longer remember which one I'm actually writing. That will come out sometime later this year and I'm also going to start on Sevenfold Sword Online: Leveling, the second book in the series, and that will come out at some point this year, hopefully. 00:01:42: Reader Questions Let's start off with some questions from readers. Our first question is from Roger, who asks: I have a Kobo ebook reader. I've been buying your books from Rakuten Kobo for years. It seems that they do not distribute your newest ebooks anymore. Do you have a new distributor for the format Kobo ebook? Thanks, Roger. I'm glad you have enjoyed my books. In answer to your question, nearly all my books, as far as I'm currently aware, are available on all the international Kobo stores, including the newest ones, which will be Dragonskull, Cloak Mage, and the Sevenfold Sword Online book. The only exception is the Demonsouled series, which is currently in Kindle Unlimited till mid-April, but other than that (those 15 books), the other 128 or so should all be available on Kobo, and nearly all the short stories. So if there's a specific book you can't get to on Kobo, let me know and I'll double check, but I'm pretty sure you can get my newest books on Kobo, as far as far as I'm aware. Our next question is from Vincent who asks: Hi, finally read through Ghost in the Sun and loved it. Thanks for writing it. Is The Ghost series finished? Thanks. Thanks, Vincent. I am glad you enjoyed reading the books and in answer your question, I am planning to return to the Caina series at some point in the second half of this year. I just want to finish Dragonskull first and that will have a nice convenient tie in into our next question. Our next question is from Charles who asks about the Dragonskull series. How many more in this series? Wrath of the Warlock, which I was just talking about earlier, will be the seventh one and there will be a total of nine books in the series, which I am hoping to finish up by the end of summer 2023, but we will see how the rest of this year goes. Now before we get to our main topic, let's talk a little bit about something fun which I've been playing recently, Magic: The Gathering Arena. 00:03:38 Magic: The Gathering Arena I've talked about it on the show before and one of the handy features about Magic: The Gathering Arena is the ability to concede the match at any time. You're doing this towards the end or late middle of the game if you realize your cards just aren't going to allow you to win, or if you find yourself in an untenable position and don't see a way forward to victory. It's not all that different from resigning from a game in chess once you realize that checkmate is inevitable. However, if you've played Magic: The Gathering Arena for any length of time, you will notice that sometimes people concede very abruptly towards the beginning of the match, or even after the first few turns when the outcome of the game is still very much in question, or even sometimes when they’re winning. It seems mysterious on the other end of the experience, though the gold and experience points from a win rather dulls the edge of the mystery. But puzzle over it no longer! I've conceded abruptly many, many times, and it's almost always because real life intruded. Here are just a few of the reasons I have conceded: I was cooking a meal with a long preparation time and thought I could squeeze in a match while waiting for something to boil, settle or bake. This turned out to be incorrect. There was a weird noise that I had to investigate. When you own a house and you hear a weird noise, the reaction isn't, huh, what a strange noise. Rather, it's…what was that noise and how much is it going to cost to fix? Though to be fair, if you rent, you can report any problems to your landlord or rental company, who will then ignore them and raise your rent. There was someone at the door. A package arrived at the door, and since it was raining, sleeting, snowing, or this winter, some combination of all three at once, I need to bring that package off the front step immediately. An important phone call that I need to take has come in. A phone call that turns out not to be so important has come in. If you play the game with the volume cranked up to maximum, it makes a lot of random noises. The goblins growl, the monsters roar, the cards makes swooping noises when you play them, and so forth. Since my tablet is easily portable and has good speakers, I was using the game to rouse a family member from sleep with the volume cranked up to maximum, and we really need to get out the door and into the car. Time to concede! Someone needs tech support. Sometimes I play the game and think, you know what, I would just rather play Skyrim or Master of Magic. So those are just some of the many reasons I have conceded that the Magic: The Gathering Arena match. And when your opponent abruptly concedes on you, perhaps one of those reasons is at play as well. When I talked about this on Facebook, reader Scott had this to say: I've done it because I just need to play a card or a few to complete the daily. That is a good point. The game offers what's called daily quests where if you play like 20 cards of a specific type or attack with 25 creatures, you get a reward of gold and experience points. And a couple of times I've played games without conceding, even though I knew I was going to lose just because I wanted to play, you know, like two or three more cards to get me over the limit for the Daily Quest. So it's a very clever little mechanic to incentivize people to keep playing the keep playing the game. 00:06:24: Main Topic: Looking back at the last 150 episodes of The Pulp Writer Show Now on to our main topic of the week: looking back at the last 150 episodes of The Pulp Writer Show. I started this show in Halloween of 2019. That was when the first episode went live, and in the 3 1/2 years since then, this is the 150th episode and that totals up to about 46 hours of talking into this microphone. So thanks for listening, everyone and coming along for this very strange ride. To look back at the past 150 episodes and three and half years, I thought I'd look at the top 10 most popular episodes of the show, though I'd be interesting to look back at those and see which episodes are the most popular and to have a few words about each of them. So of the top ten episodes, the most popular episode of all time is Episode 1, which came out on October 31st 2019. Oh man, that was a while ago. I remember I recorded those first couple episodes on the microphone on my Microsoft Surface because I did not have the microphone I'm currently using now, so that's why the quality on the first couple of episodes was pretty weak. You know, looking back, it's almost like 2019 in hindsight, seems like the good old days. I mean, at the time it was a very busy, at times challenging year. But you know back then, we had no COVID, my books were selling better than they are now, there was no generative AI, I was in better shape, I have a couple of a couple of problems I have now I didn't have back then. So we have been looking back at 2019 at the good old days, but it's a good sign that enough people are all listening to the first episode and wanting to get further in to the show. The second most popular episode of all time is Episode 120, Using Dialogue to Create Distinctive Characters, and that was released on May 6th, 2022. So it is gratifying to see that the second most popular episode of all time is one that I've released relatively recently. So hopefully I have marginally improved as a podcaster since then. The topic of that episode, if I remember right, was how you can use dialogue, not just as a tool of conversation, but as a tool of distinct characterization, that it's one of the ways you can use to distinguish your characters from one another, because if you think about it, people talk very differently. A college professor of philosophy is going to have very different speech patterns than a, say, car mechanic or a bank teller or a teenage girl, and you can use the different ways that people talk in order to help distinguish their characters. By this I don't mean don't use phonetic accents in prose. I hate it when people do phonetic accents in prose where every word is misspelled in order to convey the idea of a regional or local accent. HP Lovecraft used to do that, and he was terrible at it. Great horror writer, very bad at accents. But there are subtler and more distinct ways you can use to distinguish characters using dialogue. It's a very interesting topic and given that it's the second most popular topic in the time I’ve been doing the show, it’s clearly one that other writers have an interest in as well. The third most popular episode of all time was Episode 38, Reader Questions and Answers, and that was the first time I did something that would become a regular topic on the show, where I read a bunch of questions from readers and or listeners, and then discuss the answers on the show. I can see why many podcasters do that because it is a great and easy way to generate content. So if you have a question you want answered, leave a comment on my website or Facebook page and who knows, it might be the topic we discuss on the show. The fourth most popular episode of all time was Episode 2: NaNoWriMo, and that was the very first time I talked about NaNoWriMo, which is the short way of saying National Novel Writing Month, which takes place every November, and that is when you're supposed to write 50,000 words or complete your novel, whichever you can do. And it is often a launchpad, so to speak, for beginning writers to find the energy to finally finish a novel for the first time, or to finish writing a book for the first time. Myself, I don't do NaNoWriMo too often, because for me, every month is National Novel Writing Month. I mean, I talk about all the different books I was working on at the start of the show. And so I have enough writing to fill many months to come, but I am not one of those people who bashes NaNoWriMo. I think it's a good exercise for both beginning and more advanced writers, if you want to try it and get into writing a novel for the first time. The most popular episode of all time is Episode 91, Introducing the Dragonskull Series, which went live on October the 11th, 2021, and that is where I was discussing in the Dragonskull series, which I was about to publish for the first time and the thought process that went into it. At that point I had written Frostborn and Sevenfold Sword and Dragontiarna, which was 37 books with Ridmark as the main character, so I wanted to take some thought and think about what I was going to do next and what kind of story I wanted to write. And so I ended up writing a story about Ridmark’s eldest son. But that has been the bestselling series of mine for the last two years since it came out and so clearly that was a good choice and I'm very much looking forward to publishing Dragonskull: Wrath of the Warlock next week. Let's see…the 6th most popular episode is Episode 31, Six Tips to Outline your Novel, which came out on June 5th, 2020, and in that I talked about obviously how to write an outline for your novel. In writing novels, there tends to be two groups of writers: those who are called the plotters, who plot everything out in advance, and then what's commonly called the pantsers, which is short for riding by the seat of your pants. Given that is a somewhat undignified term, especially in the UK, they often prefer the term discovery writers or people who are writing into the dark. Myself, I am definitely a plotter. Before I write any book or any short story for that matter, I write an outline first, which I usually do by writing a synopsis and then chopping it up into different chapters, expanding on the chapters, and going from there. That said, Dragonskull: Wrath of the Warlock will be my 139th novel, so I've been doing this a lot and I feel confident in myself enough now that sometimes I'll veer off the outline when I get far enough into the book and think something will work better. It's no different from driving across the country from Los Angeles to New York. You could follow the map, and you probably should, the first time you do that. But after you've done it 138 times, you probably know some of the shortcuts and think of a better way to do things when you get to a specific on ramp or a specific exit and it's no different from that. Let's see. I just had to pause to pause recording to take a phone call and I forgot where I was. I think we're up to seven. That that's probably a good indicator of the general level of quality of the podcast for the last 150 episodes. I'm doing a top ten list and I can't remember where I am, but I think we're at 7 and the 7th most popular episode would be Episode 110, Three Techniques for Starting your Novel, and I published that on February 25th, 2022. Every part of a novel has its own challenges. Everyone wants a satisfying ending. The middle can be something of a slog, but starting is sometimes a challenge for people. You don't want to do anything cliche like “it was a dark and stormy night.” You definitely don't want to start off by describing the weather. Never do that. And you want the start to be interesting, to hold the reader's attention. So in that episode we talked about three techniques for how do you start your novel, capture the reader's attention, and then seamlessly transition into the bulk of the novel. The eighth most popular episode would be Episode 26, Six Tips for the High Fantasy Writer and that was published on May the 4th, 2020. There's differing debates about what the terms mean, like for a while Cloak Games on Amazon UK and then Cloak Mage was turning up in the Low Fantasy category and I wasn't entirely sure what Low Fantasy was until I found out that Low Fantasy is considered to be our world where fantastical elements intrude in which is why Nadia’s world is a lot like our world but there are magic and elves and so forth, whereas High Fantasy takes place entirely in a constructed world like a Tolkien and Shannara, and other settings like that. So in that episode, since I've written a lot of what could be called High Fantasy with Frostborn, Sevenfold Sword, Dragontiarna, and Demonsouled and the Caina books as well would technically be High Fantasy if you use that definition. In that episode, I put out six tips for the High Fantasy writer, and hopefully people have found them useful. Let's see…our ninth most popular episode was Episode 3: Kindle Unlimited For Indie Authors, and I published that all the way back on November 18th, 2019. That is a perennial topic that indie authors talk about, whether their books should be exclusive in Kindle Unlimited, or whether they should be wide and available at all retailers. 4 years, well 3 1/2 years after recording that episode, I'm definitely leaning more on the side of publishing wide and staying away from Kindle Unlimited simply because the macroeconomic environment overall in 2023 is much more unstable and fluid than it was in 2019. Now I forgot what year was, but it's 2023. We've had the war in Ukraine going on for a year. The economy is much worse than it was in 2019. We've had bank failures and, you know, other economic problems like that, a bunch of layoffs in the tech sector. Overall, putting all your eggs in one basket, even a basket as powerful as Amazon, is just not a good idea nowadays. I mentioned earlier in the show that the Demonsouled series was in Kindle Unlimited right now so I can experiment with it, but it's going out in April and I think it's going to stay out of in April. And then I'm probably gonna be done with Kindle Unlimited for a while, just because the economy is so unstable and seems like a great idea to have the books spread around to as many different stores as possible. I don't think Amazon will go out of business, but I bet a lot of Silicon Valley Bank customers thought their bank wasn't gonna go out of business either. So if for that reason alone, I am less likely to experiment with Kindle Unlimited than I would have been in 2019. And finally the 10th most popular episode from the podcast was Episode 123, Technology and Genre in Cloak Mage and Cloak Games, and that was published on July 8th, 2022. In that I talked about how Cloak Games and Cloak Mage, which has become sort of an unintentionally mixed genre series, like it's primarily urban fantasy and it the covers are designed to look like urban fantasy books and they’re advertised as urban fantasy books, which works, but there was a very strong and growing science fiction element to the stories because it takes place 300 years or so in the future and there's more advanced technology available for the characters than there is on our contemporary Earth. And I think the lesson here is that if you're writing a multi genre book like Cloak Games, you really need to pick one genre to be the dominant one and have the other genres be more influence or elements that play into it and then focus all your advertising around the dominant genre of the book. That certainly has been what I've learned advertising in Cloak Games, and hopefully that advice will be helpful to you in your own efforts. So that was the 10 most popular episodes of the podcast. If I forgot one because I got interrupted by the phone call, I'm sorry about that, but I think those were all ten. What do I want to do with the podcast in the future, now that we are 150 episodes in? I would like to provide more helpful advice to various writers who might be listening to this. I would continue to talk about things that interest me on the side that related vaguely to writing like, you know, various computer games or board games that capture my interest. I would definitely continue answering reader questions that I get and talking about them on the podcast. And I would, if the opportunity arises, like to do more interviews. You might remember that I interviewed Troy Lambert from Plotter back in December 2022. I believe that was a good time and a good interview. I think it was informative and that people found it useful and I would like to do more of that in the future, if I can find the time to do it because as I mentioned at the start of the show, there is quite a lot of books I need to write and this is sort of a side project. So, 150 episodes in, maybe we'll be still here at 300. Hopefully we'll soon be here at 200 and I'd like to finally close off the show by thanking everyone who's listened for the past 150 episodes and all 46 hours. So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful and if you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting platform of choice. It really does help. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this week's episode, I respond to reader questions & comments about the principles of storytelling. Once again it is time for Coupon of the Week! SEVENFOLD SWORD: OMNIBUS ONE is going to have a Bookbub deal this month, so it seemed a good time to have SEVENFOLD SWORD: NECROMANCER be the coupon of the week! You can get 50% off the ebook with this coupon: MARNECRO The coupon code is valid until March 27th, 2023. https://payhip.com/b/iowCD TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 149 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is March 10th, 2023 as I record this and today we're going to talk about the principles of storytelling. Before we get into all that, we're going to have some writing project updates, Coupon of the Week, and a few questions from readers. First up, writing project updates. I am pleased to report that I am now done with the rough draft of Dragonskull: Wrath of the Warlock. Hopefully that will be out towards the end of March, if everything goes well and nothing drastic or unpleasant happens. Right now I am writing The First Holdfast, a bonus short story that my newsletter subscribers will get for free in ebook form when Dragonskull: Wrath of the Warlock comes out, so if you haven't subscribed to my newsletter, now is an excellent time to do that. I am also about 6,500 words into my next project, which is Cloak of Dragonfire. Once Dragonskull: Wrath of the Warlock is published, Cloak of Dragonfire Fire will be my main project and we will see how quick I can get that out. Hopefully that will be out in April. In audiobook news, I am going to start listening to the proofs of Dragonskull: Sword of the Squire as narrated by Brad Wills and if all goes well, I think that will probably be out towards either beginning or end of April, assuming nothing goes wrong with that. But I'm looking forward to sharing all those books and audiobooks with you. Now it's once again time for Coupon of the Week, where, as I build up my Payhip store, I give away coupons for good deals on various items on the store. For this week, Sevenfold Sword: Omnibus One is going to have a Bookbub deal in about a week or so, so it seemed a good time to have Sevenfold Sword: Necromancer, the immediate sequel to Sevenfold Sword: Omnibus One be the coupon of the week. You can get 50% off the ebook with this coupon: MARNECRO and that is MARNECRO. I will include the coupon code and links to the store in the show notes and you can get to the book for 50% off with that coupon through March 27th, 2023. So act now!   00:02:16 Reader Questions Now we have a few questions from readers. Our first question is from Gary who asks: Random question if you don't mind. Why can't people use the healing spell on something other than a humanoid, such as horses? The ability to heal a lame horse would really come in handy (he's referring to the Frostborn and Dragonskull universe here). That is a good question. And honestly, I have never given it any thought before and I should have because taking care of one's animals is important and a big business. Like many other people in the US, I watched All Creatures Great and Small when it came out about these veterinarians in late 1930s Yorkshire and they are very busy dealing with the many, many realities to which farm animals are prone. So that would make sense that if you can use the healing spell on like a lame horse or injured ox or a wounded donkey or something that you would do so. I have to admit that I haven't given any thought how that would work in the Frostborn and Andomhaim setting, but it makes sense so I should give that some thought and see if I can come up with something that will turn up in future books. Our next question is from Kenneth who asks: Haven't started Dragonskull yet, but how many books are you planning for it? That answer is 9. There will be 9 books in the Dragonskull series when it is complete. Dragonskull: Wrath of the Warlock is the seventh one and if all goes well, which I say a lot, but you know, if all goes well, I am hoping to finish this series sometime in summer 2023, probably towards the end of summer 2023. So Dragonskull will have a total of nine books and that is a hard limit. I am not going over nine for this series. We have a comment from Thuvia who says about Sevenfold Sword Online: Creation: Quite frankly, I bought it just to support you. I wasn't particularly interested. I was astonished over how much I enjoyed it. Looking forward to the sequel. Thanks, Thuvia. I appreciate the support and I am glad you have enjoyed the book and I have gotten many comments or reviews along those lines where people were very skeptical about the book, but they bought it because they like my writing overall, which I appreciate. And then they were very surprised how much they liked it when they read it, so if you haven't checked it out yet, you get the book at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, Smashwords, Payhip, and I think it's up on Scribd by now. So if you haven't checked out Sevenfold Sword Online: Creation yet, it has persuaded many skeptics. Finally, we have a comment from Jesse, which also triggered the idea for this week's show. I just wanted to toss you a note of appreciation with respect to your Storytelling: How to write a Novel book as well of as well as several of your podcasts had touched on a similar topic. While I have yet to brave writing a novel myself, your advice in terms of conflict introduction and subsequent escalation has benefited me greatly as I spin tabletop RPG stories for my daughter to play. Keep up the good work and thank you again for your insights into compelling storytelling. Thanks, Jesse. I'm glad you enjoyed the book. I'm glad that someone read it because until I got this comment from Jesse, I had actually forgotten I had written a book called Storytelling: How to Write a Novel because it hasn't sold very well. I think in all of 2023 it's sold, as of this recording, four copies so far, so it hasn't really been one of my more successful books, but I am glad that people are finding it helpful and I bet that Jesse will end up attempting a novel at some point if he's running tabletop games. Every Game Master or Dungeon Master I've ever encountered has novel in them and it comes out eventually, so that will be something to look forward to. 00:05:55: The Five Iron Laws of Storytelling Now because of that comment, I thought I would use this podcast episode this week to talk about the main thesis of Storytelling, which is the what I what I jokingly call The Five Iron Laws of Storytelling, which are the key components your story needs if you're going to write a novel that has a compelling plot that will hold the reader's interest. So with in that mind, I'm going to read what I had to say about The Five Iron Laws of Storytelling in Chapter 2 of that book. Understanding basic story structure gives you an excellent foundation upon which to write your novel. The going from understanding the structure of the story to actually telling a good story can be something of a challenging leap. We'll discuss five rules for telling an interesting and compelling story. You will note that most of these rules revolve around the conflict and the climax, which are the most important parts of the story. I'm sure you can remember a book, a movie, or a TV show where the dialogue was clunky or some of the characters were annoying, but you kept reading or watching because the story was sufficiently interesting to hold your attention. I originally thought up these five rules for a blog post I wrote way back in 2014, and I jokingly called them Iron Laws to make fun of how intellectuals frequently think up iron laws for politics or economics or whatever. Storytelling is a much less dour affair than politics or economics, thankfully. But as we discussed previously, the closer you discuss story structure, the better your book will be. These Five Iron Laws will help you put strong muscle on the skeleton of your story. Number One: the protagonist must have a problem that results in a conflict, because if there is no problem, there is no story. Conflict and problems are the engines that drive stories. A happy existence with minimal conflicts and problems might be ideal for real life, but it makes an exceedingly dull story. The main character of the story needs to have a problem that results in a conflict. The protagonist battling a villain is the most popular way to generate a conflict. There are countless different kinds of villains you can use. A mystery novel would have the murderer or the instigator of the crime the detective wants to solve. A thriller novel might have a terrorist group plotting a large scale attack. A fantasy novel could have an evil wizard or a dark lord. Science fiction often has malevolent artificial intelligence, alien empires, or the space navy of a rival human nation. Romance novels can have a variety of villains: a rival who threatens to steal the heroine’s love interest, or the heroine's evil boss, or someone else who stands in the way of the heroine having a happily ever after with her love interest. The point of having a villain is to create an obstacle that the protagonist must overcome or conflict of the protagonist must resolve. It's not even necessary for the antagonist to be a villain as such. You can have a story where two protagonists are having a strong disagreement, lawyers on the opposite sides of a major court case, for example. Neither one of them is the villain, or may not even be in their wrong, but the conflict between them drives the story. Note that the story doesn't necessarily have to have an actual villain, it just needs a problem. Disaster movies are a good example of this kind of storytelling. The chief conflict is not against another character, but the natural disaster that threatens the characters and their town or city. Think of the movie Apollo 13, a dramatization of NASA’s ill-fated Apollo 13 launch to the moon. The movie doesn't have a lot of interpersonal conflicts because the chief problem is so overwhelming and huge: how to get the astronauts back home to Earth after their spacecraft suffers a dangerous mechanical failure. Speaking another space survival genre movie, the film Gravity starring Sandra Bullock, is another excellent example of a movie without a villain. The movie has no villain. The conflict results from the bad luck that destroys the space shuttle in orbit, and the heroine is trapped in space. Her efforts to survive and get back to Earth make up the plot, all while struggling to find the will to keep fighting after her child's death several years ago. To sum up: your story’s protagonist absolutely must have a conflict to resolve or a problem to face. Number Two: the protagonist’s problem and conflict must be consequential and have real stakes. The problem must be serious because if it is not, there are no real stakes and the reader will get bored and cease to care about the character. The worst of all worlds is an unlikable character with a trivial problem. Then you wind up with your reader rooting for bad things to happen to the protagonist, if the reader doesn't abandon the book entirely. The absolute worst thing to hear about a book is a reader saying I just didn't care what happened to these people. A high stakes problem doesn't necessarily mean physical danger, though it can, nor does it mean that the problem must be something apocalyptic, like stopping terrorists from detonating a nuclear bomb in a major city or something like that. While that obviously is a high stakes problem, it's not something that can happen in every book. A common difficulty that writers of long series face is the escalation problem. The hero saves the city in the first book, the country in the second, and the world in the third. What's after that? A good way to avoid that problem and direct conflict is to have the problem be high stakes for the protagonist personally, especially in an emotional sense. The hero doesn't have to save the world, or the country, or even his hometown. In a thriller, it might be about rescuing one person or saving a group of hostages from bank robbers or in a mystery, it could be about solving the murder of one person. Sadly, people are murdered every day and the world at large really takes notice of one particular murder. But if the protagonist is emotionally invested in finding the killer, that will create a compelling story. As I mentioned above, physical danger doesn't necessarily have to be part of an emotionally significant plot. The classic novel Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen is a good example of a novel without much physical danger. The protagonist, Elizabeth Bennett, is in no physical danger throughout the book, save for when Elizabeth gets caught in a rainstorm and falls sick afterward (Transcriber’s correction: Elizabeth’s sister Jane is the one who gets sick). Nonetheless, the stakes of her problem, her feelings for Mr. Darcy are consequential. If she does not secure a good marriage when her father dies, there is a very real possibility Elizabeth will be impoverished, or if she marries an unsuitable man like Mr. Wickham, her life will be miserable. While a young woman dealing with her feelings seems like a trivial problem, Elizabeth will nonetheless face potentially catastrophic consequences if she chooses wrongly. That said, the problem must be something that the protagonist can conceivably deal with and handle, albeit with difficulty. Too vague of a problem or too intractable a problem and the story goes off the rails. It is possible to write a story where the central conflict arises from social injustice or class divisions. Indeed, many classic novels and movies deal with these themes (much of the work of Charles Dickens, for example). Nevertheless, it is good idea to keep those themes contained in the conflict between characters in a way that can actually be resolved at the end of the story.  Sadly, no human society has yet solved the problems of social injustice and class divisions, and it is unlikely that one ever will. If you have a story where your protagonist is essentially fighting human nature itself, rather than trying to resolve a conflict or a problem that can actually be resolved, you will leave your reader unsatisfied at the end. That leads us to the Third Iron Law of storytelling. Number Three: The protagonist must take action and struggle to resolve his or her conflict and problem. A common failure in storytelling is a protagonist who has a serious problem but does nothing about it. We've all read stories with the passive protagonist, or worse, a protagonist who does nothing but whine about his difficulties or thinks that by feeling bad about his problems they will somehow magically get better. Worst of all is when a protagonist does nothing but complain for two hours or 300 pages and somehow does solve all of his or her problems. Not to pick on a specific genre, but this is a common problem in romance novels from beginning writers, where things simply happen to a passive heroine who spends more time agonizing over her problems than acting upon them (not to pick out romance novels because other genres have similar examples of this). The chosen one story trope in fantasy, for example, when mishandled, can lead to a very passive protagonist. Conflict is the first half of a compelling story, but the protagonist taking action to resolve that conflict is the second half. A passive protagonist who does nothing can be absolute poison to a compelling story. The protagonist must act to attempt to resolve the conflict or the problem. Note that he doesn't necessarily have to act effectively, but he must take some action. In a fantasy novel, the hero must do something to defeat the Dark Lord or start the quest. In a mystery novel, the protagonist must begin investigating the crime or tracking down the murderer. In a thriller, the hero must battle the terrorists or fight the robbers. In a disaster novel, the protagonist needs to deal with the hurricane or the earthquake and its consequences. If you have a story with a conflict and the protagonists don't take active action to resolve it, that's not a story, that's just the account of bad things happening to people. We can see that every day on the nightly news. While a novel like that would be depressing, you'll do something even worse: it would bore the reader. Don't be boring. Have your pain with struggle to overcome their difficulties, which leads us to the next Iron Law: Number Four: the protagonists must face challenges and setbacks and his or her efforts to resolve his problem may even backfire. We touched on this briefly in the chapter on story structure, which is actually elsewhere in this book. One of the chief ways to make the story interesting is to have the protagonist experience setbacks in their efforts to resolve the conflict. Having the protagonist act to face the conflict makes for a satisfying story, but it can be undone if the hero overcomes the problems without any challenge. This can be a common problem in fantasy and science fiction, especially in the later books of the long series when a character becomes powerful enough that it's difficult to think of challenges for him or her. For example, how does the writer think of believable foes for Superman, a character who is essentially invincible? In less fantastical settings, this can still be a problem for a character who is a billionaire or who is wealthy enough and powerful enough that it might be difficult to find problems that result in realistic conflicts and challenges. The key to overcoming these potential problems is remember two important elements of story plotting. First, every action in life will encounter complications. Second, every action has unanticipated consequences that may result in additional problems. Once you know to look for it, you can see this plot technique used in many classic stories. To cite a few examples, in The Lord of the Rings, the Fellowship is first forced to divert from their planned route to Mordor into the mines of Moria, which results in even more challenges. In Pride and Prejudice, Mr. Darcy's first proposal to Elizabeth goes disastrously wrong. In the Sherlock Holmes story The Adventure of the Norwood Builder, Sherlock Holmes sets out to exaggerate his client, only to find absolutely no proof of his innocence and ample evidence of his guilt. Whenever someone sets out to do something, whether a fictional character or in real life, complications and additional troubles are inevitable. Watching a character work through these difficulties makes for compelling fiction. Unintended consequences are a natural result of unplanned complications that can help with the plot of your novel. In storytelling, unintended consequences occur when a character sets out to do a task or solve the problem, only for something to happen that he did not intend. To return to an earlier example, let's say you start driving to the post office and hit a deer on the way. The damage to the car is an unintended consequence of the decision to drive from the post office. There could be other unintended consequences resulting from the collision. The insurance company could refuse to pay, or you might have to get a new car, or in all the trouble, you forgot to go to the post office and put the gas bill in the mail entirely. That was a relatively simple example, but you can see its useful application to storytelling. Unintended consequences are a great way to add tension to your plot. For example, you could have a murder mystery where the detective is interrogating a potential suspect for a murder. In a panic, the suspect flees or to be killed by the real murderer to remove a potential witness. This will add further complications to the plot since the detective’s investigation suffered a setback and the detective’s superiors might remove her from the case. It also provides the opportunity for additional characterization as the detective’s reaction to the accidental death will reveal a great deal about her. Of course, any conflicts raised within the story must be resolved, which leads to the Final Iron Law. Number Five: the ending must absolutely provide satisfactory emotional resolution to the problems raised in the story. Of all the Five Laws, this one is the most important. Screw this up and readers will be ticked and talking about it on the Internet for years. Whatever crisis comes up in the story, whatever conflict or difficulties, it must be resolved in emotionally satisfying manner by the end of the story. Note that emotionally satisfying doesn't mean that it has to be a happy ending, just that the ending must resolve the story’s conflicts in such a way that the reader doesn't feel cheated for having read the book. Your story can have a happy ending or a sad ending, or a mixture of the two, but the ending must be emotionally satisfying. What does it mean for the story’s conflicts to be resolved in an emotionally satisfying manner? Basically, two different things need to happen at the ending of the story. First, the conflict has to be resolved. Second, the characters need to experience change because of resolving the conflict. Let's look at a few good examples. The ending of the Lord of the Rings provides an excellent example of this. The object that caused the central conflict in the story, the One Ring, is destroyed and the Dark Lord is defeated. All the main characters experience change as a result. Frodo is wounded and never really recovers, while Samwise steps up and becomes the leader of the Shire. Mary and Pippin evolve from young rascals and become the leading figures of the Shire while Aragorn becomes the King of Gondor and weds Arwen and Gandalf returns to the Undying Lands, his mission to oppose Sauron complete. The ending of the movie The King's Speech is another good example of resolving a conflict. Let's leave out the historical accuracy of the movie, or lack thereof, which isn't relevant to a discussion about story structure. At the end of the movie, King George VI addresses the nation over the radio without succumbing to his speech, simultaneously resolving the conflicts over his stammer and his fear of accepting his duties as king. This is an ambivalently happy ending. George VI has overcome his conflicts, but the viewers know that the United Kingdom is about to go through World War II and George himself will die of lung cancer and heart disease in 1952. Nevertheless, conflicts within the story have been resolved. An ending can also be tragic so long as the story’s conflicts are resolved. William Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet is a classic example. Romeo and Juliet both commit suicide at the end of the play, but the tragedy of their death shocks their family so badly that they end their destructive conflict. All the conflicts in the story have been resolved, albeit at a high price. So those are The Five Iron Laws of Storytelling, or so I termed them. If you want to read more stuff like this, my book Storytelling: How to Write a Novel is available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, Smashwords, and Scribd so you can pick that up for just $2.99 USD in ebook format and get more of my hopefully helpful writing advice. So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful and interesting. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe, stay healthy, and see you all next week.

In this week's episode, we take a look at Microsoft's new Bing Chat AI, and discuss whether it is a good idea or not. I also talk about Magic The Gathering: Arena, and describe how my Facebook and Amazon ads performed into February 2023. TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 148 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is March the 3rd, 2023, and today we're going to talk about Microsoft's new Bing Chat AI. Is it a good idea? Is it a bad idea? Let's find out. We'll also talk a little bit about a game I've been playing recently called Magic: The Gathering Arena and we'll do a catch up on my current writing projects and see how my various book ads performed for February 2023. Before we get into that, let's have a catch up on my current writing projects. I am on chapter…it's either chapter 13 or 14 of 20 of Dragon Skull: Wrath with the Warlock. I can't remember off the top of my head, but it's either in chapter 13 or 14. I am hoping to get to 60,000 words once I finish recording this podcast, and then if all goes well, I am very much hoping I can wrap up the rough draft next week. I am also 6,000 words into Cloak of Dragonfire and also 6,000 words as well into Silent Order: Thunder Hand. Recording is underway for Dragon Skull: Sword of the Squire. That will be narrated by Brad Wills and we are hoping to have that for you sometime in April, if everything goes well. For Sevenfold Sword Online: Creation, it is at about 96% of the sales goal it needs to reach by Mach 13th if it's going to be viable for a sequel, so only four more percent to do in another 10 days, so hopefully that will go well. 00:01:42 Book Ad Results for February 2023 So let's see how my various book ads performed for February. First up, my Facebook ads. Here is what I got back for every dollar I spent on advertising this series. The way this works is I will advertise the first book one of the series at a discount and then total up how much they make from the rest of the series and compare it to the cost of the ad. So for Frostborn, for every dollar I spent, I got back $3.65 and the audiobooks were a quarter of the total revenue. For The Ghosts, for every dollar I spent, I got back $2.89 and the audiobooks were a third of the total revenue. And for Cloak Games and Cloak Mage, for every dollar I spent, I got back $4.21. We can see that the Facebook ads were doing quite well in February and it does help to have a sort of deep catalog of audiobooks since all the Frostborn books and all of The Ghosts and Ghost Exile series are also in audiobook. It's just very expensive and a lot of work to get to that point when you have a really long series. So let's also check in on my Amazon ads. Remember, for an Amazon ad to work, it needs one sale for every six to eight clicks. So I'll describe how many clicks it got to get a sale and how much I got back per dollar spent. For Dragonskull: Sword of the Squire, I got a sale for every 0.83 clicks (less than one click per sale) and that got back $6.63 for every dollar I spent. Cloak of Dragons didn't do quite as well. I got one sale for every 5.05 clicks. And for every dollar I spent, I got back six cents. So while the Cloak of Dragons ad didn't lose any money, it didn't make any money. I think the reason for that is, as I've mentioned before on this show, Amazon ads kind of have a chicken and the egg problem where they work really well if you already have traffic going to your book. But the whole point of ads is to get traffic going to your book. So the reason Dragonskull: Sword of the Squire did so well is because that's currently my most popular series. But I think the Cloak of Dragons ads will improve when I release Cloak of Dragonfire, which hopefully will be in April or possibly May. Finally, let's see how Demonsouled did, which I advertised in both Amazon ads and Facebook ads. For Demonsouled for every 2.25 clicks I got on the sale of Demonsouled Omnibus One and for every dollar I spent combined across Amazon and Facebook, I got back $1.40, which is pretty good. It could be better. It should be better, but what I decided to do since the Facebook ads don't really seem to be working for Demonsouled is I shut those off and just focused on Amazon ads for Demonsouled for March and then the budget I was putting towards Demonsouled on Facebook will probably go to lead generations for my newsletter instead. So thanks for reading, everyone and I am glad so many of you were able to pick up my books, whether organically or through ads. 00:04:45 Magic: The Gathering Arena Now, before we get into our main topic, let's talk a little bit about a game I've been playing over the last few months. I've written quite a few things critical of Hasbro regarding their open game license situation, but it's important to be fair and I've been playing another Hasbro product I enjoy quite a bit. Magic: The Gathering Arena is an excellent free to play game and I've enjoyed it a lot over the last six weeks or so. Back in the 1990s and early 2000s I played a bit of Magic: The Gathering, but I eventually stopped for three reasons. One: I was really busy all the time for the rest of the 2000s. Two: those cards get expensive and three: finding new people with whom to play was often a hassle. I still have a shoebox worth of Magic cards sitting in my closet, but I don't think I've opened that box for like fifteen years. Anyway, while I was reading about the OGL problems, I also came across a few posts referencing that Magic had become a billion dollar brand for Hasbro. A billion dollars? I hadn't expected that. I recalled vaguely that there was a Magic computer game in the 90s, so I wondered if anything like that existed now. After some research, I came across Magic: The Gathering Arena, discovered it was free to play, that it would run on my tablet, and gave it a chance. It's a very well designed and slick app. The onboarding tutorials are excellent. It starts with a color challenge where you play against the computer using a deck of each of the game’s five colors and when you win, you get a bunch of free virtual card decks you can use to play against actual humans. It also does an excellent job of resolving all the various insane rule combinations you can get in a Magic match. The game has the hedonic loop (which is a way of referring to the effort reward cycle) down pat. Every day there's a challenge where if you play 20 cards or 25 cards of a certain type, you get a bonus in gold and experience. If you win matches, you get gold and experience. If you get enough experience, you get rewarded with more virtual cards. Of course, microtransactions are liberally laden throughout. You can buy custom card sleeves, custom avatars, virtual pets, and gems that permit entry to various tournament style events. Despite that, you can enjoy yourself thoroughly without spending a single actual penny. And while the app is great for casual play, you can pop in quickly, play a quick match while waiting for the bus through the doctor or something, and then be done in a way that is impossible with physical cards. One of the great strengths of Magic as a game is that the matches can be over really quickly depending on how the cards are drawn (as quickly as two minutes in some cases), so the app is good for casual play. I think its main strength is that it automates out the most annoying part of Magic: the Gathering, finding other players and then dealing with their personality quirks, which may or may not make for a pleasant gaming experience. The game can usually pair you with a player in under a minute (often less) and interaction is severely limited during the game, basically a few words like hello and good move, that kind of thing. And if someone's annoying, you can simply mute them, that way you don't have to deal with someone rage quitting and flipping the table, or endless argumentation over some fine point or another of the rules. I've enjoyed the Magic: The Gathering Arena app quite a bit, and it makes playing the game so frictionless that in the past two months, I've probably played more actual matches of Magic: The Gathering than I did in all the ‘90s and the 2000s, and now I can say that I've won several Magic: The Gathering matches on my tablet while using the restroom. In the ‘90s, if you had said you won Magic games while in the bathroom, people would have been gravely concerned, but this is less of a concern in 2023. So that was talking about a fun bit of technology. 00:08:14 Main Topic: Bing Chat AI So now let's talk about a less fun bit of technology: generative AI, specifically Bing chat AI. I was able to get into the Bing chat AI that's still fairly sort of in a limited beta testing program type thing. So I gave it a try. To start with, I should make it very plain that my opinion about all the new generative AI tools is quite low, much like my opinion of cryptocurrency and NFTs is quite low. I think that while these new generative AI tools have some utility, it isn't nearly as much as their proponents believe. I also think they are massively overhyped. I also think there's a bit of a narcissist effect going on with this kind of thing. The tools just vomit the portions of their data set indicated by the generated prompts to the user and the user then gazes in admiration at the reflection of their own psyche. Or it's a bit like the Israelites and the golden calf from the Book of Exodus in the Bible. Look at this beautiful thing we made. Surely it must be a god. In the modern version of the golden calf, it's look at this mathematical formula we made that brute forces probabilities. Surely it must be an artificial intelligence made in imitation of our own minds and not an infinite crap generator. This is not a golden calf, and no one thinks generative AI is a god, at least I hope not, but I think the same psychological mechanism is at play. If I was feeling really snarky, I'd say that Web One was static content, Web Two was user generated content, and Web Three is the scammer’s paradise. In particular, my opinion about AI image generation remains highly negative. Image AI generation is essentially copying the images that it’s been trained on. I don't even like the word trained to describe it, since it boils down to essentially a million photocopiers taking a million pieces from a million different images. The artificial intelligence involved is basically brute force copying patterns of these images in its data set, and when the user enters a prompt, it uses those copied patterns to spit out an allegedly new image. For example, if you go to any of the AI image generators and use Magic: The Gathering plains card as the prompt, the AI will dutifully produce a mishmash of every Magic: The Gathering plains card its data set scraped from the Internet, complete with weird symbols where the text would be because it's essentially trying to copy every single card and produce an average of them. While I am also dubious about AI text generation, I am slightly less dubious about it than image generation because it tends to be really fancy autocomplete. Granted, I don't think highly of it, but I don't think it's as ethically sleazy as AI image generation, and it's possible these tools have a use I don't see yet. I mean I don't like voice assistance at all, but I recognize they've been hugely helpful to people, especially during the pandemic, particularly for elderly people and people with mobility or health concerns. And while I am dubious about cryptocurrency, it can be very helpful to people who live in countries with weak financial regulation or authoritarian governments. And there have been documented cases of various migrant or guest workers who use cryptocurrency to send funds back home because if they tried to use normal currencies, their employers would steal it. So within that vein, while there are enormous problems with AI text generation, they've already been thoroughly explored by people smarter than I am, but I remain open to the possibility that there is a use for it, I'm just not seeing it. With that long winded introduction (somewhat cranky, opinionated) out of the way, let's get to Bing Chat. When (as I said at the beginning) Microsoft started opening up its Open AI-fueled Bing chat, I decided to give it a try and my opinion is it's possible that Microsoft might beyond the beginnings of a good idea. Possibly. One of the big problems with the present form of the Internet is that search is dominated by Google and Google derives most of its revenue from online ads. This has a distortion effect, which means that the top search results for many Google searches now are just a bunch of SEO optimized ad farms. I'm sure we've all Googled for a recipe and it ended up on a page with a billion ads and the recipe way at the bottom. Finding accurate information with a Google search has become harder and harder because a lot of very smart people have optimized Google search for maximum ad revenue, so the top results for a particular search are often equally optimized for maximum search ad revenue. Bing Chat, by contrast, is designed for questions. The way it works is that you ask the chatbot a question, it searches for relevant results, and then summarizes them in a few tidy paragraphs. Then you can ask more refining questions to get better results. Every answer also contains hyperlinks indicating where the chatbot got its information for the answer. This is more efficient than scrolling through page after page of search results. Though you can see the weakness: the answers are only as good as the information it was drawing from, so it's possible the AI could give you a neat and definitive answer full of absolute nonsense. For example, I was talking with someone familiar with horse research, and she suggested a very specific question related to a very specific equine medical problem. Bing Chat ground out an answer that was authoritative sounding, but both very vague and entirely incorrect, which we suspected would happen because there simply isn't very much medical research on this particular equine health problem, and therefore nothing upon which Bing Chat could draw. It's also very bad at value judgments. I was talking about this with some education people and they suggested I ask it a very specific question: whether Montessori preschools or Waldorf preschools have better outcomes for child development. I have no idea what that means either, but when posed the question, the chatbot ended up providing a summary of both types of preschools. At a casual read, it seemed like it answered the question, but it totally didn't, which remains the biggest problem with generative AI text. It sounds authoritative and knowledgeable, but it isn't at all. It's just a fancy autocomplete stringing together words most statistically probable to be located together in a sentence. So it's possible that in this particular instance, AI could improve search, though I retain my overall negative opinion of AI. I think the biggest danger for this kind of chatbot is what's called apophenia, the human tendency of seeing patterns where none exist. You can see this on Twitter all the time, where many people assume that every news event is part of a sinister plot perpetrated by a cabal of all powerful, yet highly incompetent conspirators. Because while typing with the chatbot, it feels like you're chatting with an actual well-organized person on the other end of the connection. It's not, of course, it's just an illusion created by the way the human mind works. We tend to anthropomorphize everything: our pets, our tools, the weather, and we so often see patterns where one simply just doesn't exist. For many people, this can be an intoxicating illusion. I can easily see people developing unhealthy relationships with this kind of chatbot and accepting uncritically anything it tells them. I'm susceptible to this anthropomorphizing as well. I know Bing Chat is just a mathematical formula, but I still use please and thank you while typing to it (or maybe I was just raised well). Despite these dangers, Bing Chat might actually be a useful implementation of AI. Overall, however, my opinion of generative AI as a technology remains negative for three reasons. One, it doesn't solve a serious problem. Two, the trivial problems it does solve are outweighed by the massive new problems that it creates. Three, overall, I think it makes the world slightly worse. If one creates an infinite crap generator, it's reasonable to expect an increase in the overall level of crap. Hopefully all the corporations investing massive resources into AI generation will take a massive loss and then the technology can be marginalized. That's what I would like to happen. We'll see whether it actually does happen. Probably not. And I retain my negative opinion of AI, though I am open to having my mind changed if someone can demonstrate why it's not a bad thing. But I have read a lot of the arguments and listened to a lot of the podcasts about people who are very positive about generative AI and think it's a good thing, but I just don't. I am just not convinced. So that is it for this week. I hope you enjoyed this week's show and found it helpful. If you like the podcast, please leave a review on your podcast platform choice, whether it's Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, or anywhere else. It really does help. Until then, I hope you all stay safe and healthy and see you all next week.

In this week's catch-up episode, I take a break from shoveling snow to calculate just how many short stories I've actually published. I also talk about SEVENFOLD SWORD ONLINE: CREATION, my new LitRPG novel. This week’s coupon is for GHOST IN THE SURGE (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy), the climactic book of the first THE GHOSTS series. You can get fifty percent off the audiobook with this coupon code at Payhip: FEBSURGE The coupon code is valid until March 6th, 2023. https://payhip.com/b/wWRtS TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 147 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is February 22nd, 2023 and today is a catch up episode since I haven't recorded one for a couple of weeks. We'll see some reader comments about my LitRPG book, and then we'll delve into how many short stories I've actually published, which I've been wondering for a while. First up, some updates on my current writing projects. I'm pleased to report that my first LitRPG book, Sevenfold Sword Online: Creation, is now out. You can get it at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books and Smashwords (also Payhip). If you are on a non-Amazon platform, I would recommend getting it soon because I am contemplating putting it into Kindle Unlimited at the end of the month. So that's in another six days. I was wondering if I would have to do that from the beginning because the LitRPG market appears to be mostly on Amazon, so I thought that might be an inevitability. So we'll see if I actually do that or not. But if you're curious to try it and want to give it a read and you're not using Amazon, sooner would be better than later. In other writing news, now that that's done, I am 30,000 words into Dragonskull: Wrath of the Warlock, and I am hoping to have that come out by the end of March if all goes well, though it looks like there's a chance it may slip to April. Depends on how March goes. I'm also 5,000 words into Cloak of Dragonfire and that's either going to be out in April or sometime after Dragonskull: Wrath of the Warlock and I'm also 5,000 words into Silent Order: Thunder Hand. In audio news, Brad Wills will be getting started recording the first Dragonskull book on Monday, actually. I've taken a bit of a break from audiobooks since October…no, November, so it's been less of a break than I thought. But I do need to get started doing audiobooks again, partly because people are asking for them, and partly for tax reasons because if you are a self-published writer (though, you should consult with a qualified tax professional such as a CPA), you can usually deduct the narration costs and production cost of an audiobook from your taxes, which if you are running a small publishing business like I am, is a very useful thing to do. So hopefully we should have the first Dragonskull book for you in audio sometime in April or possibly May. In other audiobook news, Hollis McCarthy, who narrates The Ghosts and Cloak Mage series, is going to narrate a couple of Cloak Mage short stories for me, specifically Prophecy of the High Queen and Dragon Song. Clock Mage: Omnibus One in audio hasn't sold as well as I would hope, so we're going to add Prophecy of the High Queen to that so I can do the nice quartered cover with four different covers on it that I did for The Ghosts: Omnibus One. And then we'll do the same thing with Cloak Mage: Omnibus Two whenever I get around to uploading it. So that is what I am currently working on for writing projects at the moment and we should also mention Coupon of the Week here. This week's coupon is for Ghost in the Surge as excellent narrated by Hollis McCarthy, the climactic book of The Ghosts series. You can get 50% off the audiobook with this coupon code at Payhip: FEBSURGE again that's FEBSURGE and that coupon code is valid until March 6th, 2023. And I will include the link to my Payhip store in the show notes. 00:03:52 Reader Questions/Comments Now for a couple of reader questions and comments. The first question is from PM, who asks: I've been working my way through all the audios released for Nadia. I'm just finishing Cloak of Shards. I know they're expensive, but I'd love to listen to Spears and Masks, and of course I'd really love to listen to Caina’s Ghost Night series. At the end of Cloak of Masks, it says to look for Cloak of Dragonfire at the end of 2022. Do you have a release date plan for planned for Dragonfire? I checked but I don't see it available as a Kindle book and only see it on your website as coming in 2023. Thanks for all the hours of listening pleasure. It's going to be tough to leave Nadia’s world. Thanks, PM. I'm glad you enjoyed the books and the audiobooks. A lot of a lot of the credit (actually most of the credit for the audiobooks) goes to Hollis McCarthy, who narrated them. In answer to your question, Cloak of Dragonfire, as I mentioned earlier in the show, should hopefully be out in April or May of 2023. Depends on how March goes, but I am 5,000 words into the book as of right now. So it is underway. Now for our first question about Sevenfold Sword Online: Creation (which I think you should all read), actually a comment. Jeff says yay for any excuse to get back into Andomhaim. Any character is tied to Ridmark in some way is a definite must buy for me. Not very far due to being busy with mobile games and work, but loving it so far. Pretty cool mixing Sword Art Online vibe with Dungeons and Dragons. Ironically, once played as a Dungeons and Dragons character based on Ridmark’s set as an oathbreaker paladin with a few levels in monk to gain access to the quarterstaff like Ridmark used before he became the Shield Knight along with the feat of Shieldmaster to fit with his gained role of Shield Knight. My Dungeon Master was gonna let me play it as a reluctant oathbreaker who worked towards becoming a paladin of redemption. I think we ended up getting up to around level 12 before the game fell through due to people being unable to play anymore due to scheduling conflicts etcetera. Thanks, Jeff. I'm glad you are enjoying the new book and all the other Ridmark and Andomhaim books I've put out. The setting does lend itself very well to role-playing games. It's actually a pretty frequent occurrence where people write to me and say they're basing some part of their campaign off Andomhaim or they ask if I plan to put on like an RPG supplement or that kind of thing, but people have quite frequently used Ridmark and various characters and settings from Andomhaim in their Dungeons and Dragons campaign. I've just never written anything official related to that. So that might be a someday project. Our next comment is from GS, who says: just finished and absolutely loved. It's amazing getting to encounter old favorites again, but having them in the background, letting new characters take control of the story. Really looking forward to reading more as I'm hooked, but then again, I always am when it comes to your books involving Ridmark or Andomhaim as world and character building are the best. Thanks, GS. I am glad you have enjoyed the story and I'm glad you're finding them enjoyable. I'm hoping to be able to continue Sevenfold Online: Creation soon. I just got to figure out when I can fit it in to the schedule, which as you have heard on the show so far, is quite full. Our next comment is from JH who says: you got me hooked again. Sevenfold Online: Creation is a very creative twist to the realm of Andomhaim. I appreciate your hard work and great series. I originally came across your works in Kindle Unlimited with the beginning of the Frostborn series. It was free. Now I look forward to spending the five or so on each new book. A great investment I hope benefits you as well. You are gifted author and I really enjoy good triumphing over evil. I feel like I am tracking with much of your culture, having spent time playing Elder Scrolls, watching the Borg on Star Trek, serving the Marines, etcetera. Keep up the good work. Thanks, JH. I am glad you have enjoyed all the books and that they brought you reading enjoyment. I should mention I have never actually been in the US military, so I'm pleased that I'm able to write the military characters in a way that doesn't seem too unrealistic. I'm very grateful that you have enjoyed the books so far. Our next question is from Scott, who asks about Sevenfold Online: Creation. When will it come out in audio? The definitive answer to that is maybe. It depends on how it sells and how everything else sells because audio is expensive and you kind of need an ebook to sell it really well before it's worthwhile to do an audiobook of it, which is why we're starting on the Dragonskull series to put into audio and not Sevenfold Sword Online quite yet. 00:08:17 Final Reader Question Transitioning Into Main Topic: How Many Short Stories Have I Published? And one final question that will segue into our next topic quite neatly. WD asks when I mentioned on Facebook that Sevenfold Online: Creation was my 138th novel, he says: that's not counting short story collections, right? Because you have written quite a few of those with all your promotional stories. Indeed I have written a lot of short stories, but for a while I was not entirely sure how many short stories I have self-published. However, I'm recording this on Ash Wednesday, which is the traditional start of the Lent season where one is supposed to reflect upon their sins and mortality. In my case, I spent all day shoveling out from the first day of the big blizzard and then getting my tax paperwork sorted out. Since death and taxes are the only constants in life, I suppose that counts as contemplating one's mortality. Though I have to admit, shoveling and keeping an eye out for slick ice underneath the snow is also a very excellent way to bring one's own mortality to the forefront of the mind. However, since I didn't have any time to write and I spent most of the day in spreadsheets anyway, it occurred to me that this was probably a good time to figure out your recurring reader question anyway, since I wouldn't have any time to write new stuff today. And that question is how many short stories I have self-published. As I mentioned, I know how many novels I have published. Sevenfold Online: Creation was #138 and Dragonskull: Wrath of the Warlock will be #139, but I am uncertain of how many short stories I've actually self-published. I know it's a lot. If we go way back to Ghost in the Forge and that was at the end of 2012, I think. Yeah, Ghost in the Forge would have been either the end of 2012 or the start of 2013, but when Ghost in the Forge came out, I also wrote Ghost Aria to accompany it as a free bonus for newsletter subscribers. I've done that pretty consistently in the eleven years since where when I publish a novel and send out an email to my newsletter subscribers, I will very usually have a free short story included unless time constraints got away from me. So that's a lot of short stories. But how many of them have I actually self-published? Once I got my tax spreadsheets all neat and tidy, I dug in and started doing some math. So for Frostborn, I wrote 9 short stories. And I should know I didn't count the short stories that eventually become the novel Frostborn: The Skull Quest, because that eventually became a novel, and I had had an eye towards those becoming a novel the entire time while I was writing them. For Cloak Games and Cloak Mage, I've written 10 short stories. For Cormack Rogan, I've written 1. For the Demonsouled series, I've written 8. For Dragonskull, I've written 7 so far, and in fact I'll be writing another one once Wrath of the Warlock is done. The Shield Knight short stories are short stories set in the world of Andomhaim that came out during Sevenfold Sword and Dragontiarna and I've written a total of 17 of those short stories. For Caina, across all her series so far, I have written 26 short stories so she takes the cake or the crown, so to speak, as the most short stories. For Otherworlds, and those are a collection of short stories that I wrote way before the Kindle came along and then last year I bundled them together into The Otherworlds Collection and part of my anthology series. Those short stories are 23 in total. For Silent Order, that is 4 short stories and for Sevenfold Sword Online that is 1 short story so far. I think Caina has the most short stories because her character and the setting lend themselves most easily to short side ventures I think, especially ones that have some variety because most of my short stories basically boil down to “the main character or a side character have a side quest” and I think it's easier (at least so far) to come up with more varied side quests for Caina than it has been for any of the other characters or settings. Anyway, that adds up to 106 total short stories. 106! That is a lot. I wasn't going to spend all day totaling up the word counts for all these short stories but if you assume a reasonable average of about 5,000 words per short story, that means in the last eleven years I've published over half a million words of short fiction and then given most of them away for free. So that means as of the day I'm recording this, which is February 22nd, 2023, I have published 138 novels and 106 short stories. So the last 12 years have been quite busy and when I say I really do like short stories, I am clearly not kidding. So that's it for this week. I hope once March comes around, things will settle down a bit and I'll be able to get back into a more regular recording rhythm for this podcast, but we will see how March goes. That is it for this week. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform choice, whether it's Apple or Spotify or Amazon Music or any of the others. The positive reviews really do help, so if you would like to leave one, I would definitely appreciate that. So until next week, stay safe and stay healthy and see you all (and hopefully have a blizzard free) next week!

In this week's episode, we take a final look at the OGL and Creative Commons situation with Dungeons & Dragons, and consider what it means for indie authors Coupon of the Week! The audiobook of GHOST IN THE MASK (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy) is now available on my Payhip store! You can get it for 50% off with this coupon code: FEBMASK The coupon code is valid until February 27th, 2023. https://payhip.com/b/LHcX4 TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 146 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is February 3rd, 2023. Today, we're going to talk about one final Dungeons and Dragons business lesson for indie authors. Before we get into all that, let's have an update on my current writing projects. I am pleased to report that my LitRPG book is done (the rough draft of it, anyway). I thought it would be about 60,000 words, but it turned out to be 87,000 words, so it's about as long as a Dragonskull book. What is the title and what is the book about? The book is called Sevenfold Sword Online: Creation. What is it about? I will read the book description right now: The greatest epic fantasy MMORPG in history has a ticking time bomb at its heart. Noah Carver used to work for Maskell Entertainment developing the smash hit virtual reality game Sevenfold Sword Online, loosely based on the fantasy novels of Jonathan Moeller. Then Carver got fired not for incompetence and not for laziness, but because he discovered the truth. The game's runaway success was built on the deadly technology of humanity's ancient enemy and Maskell Entertainment doesn't want anyone to find out. And unless Carver finds proof, a lot of innocent people are going to die. If you go to my website or my Facebook page, you can see the cover image, which for obvious reasons is impossible to share over an audio podcast. Next up, once that's done is a short story called Griefer that will describe how the protagonist of Creation met someone significant to him and my newsletter subscribers will get that for free when Sevenfold Sword Online: Creation comes out in February, and then that is my plan to have it out before the end of February, if all goes well. Will there be sequels? I don't know at this point. I've never written a LitRPG book before, so I have no idea how this is going to go. At various times I was writing it, I would either thought I ever thought this is amazing, it's going to do well, or this was a terrible idea, I shouldn't have done this, but we are committed now. I have a specific sales figure in mind for the first thirty days of the book is out and if it hits that, I will write sequels. If it doesn't hit that, well, we'll chalk this one up to a learning experience, but one way or another you will be able to read the book and decide for yourself before the end of February, if all goes well. I am also planning on posting the first two chapters on my website and Facebook once they are ready so that people can read the first two chapters and decide for themselves if it's something they want to read since, as I’ve said, I've never written a LitRPG book before. I'm also working on Cloak of Dragonfire and Silent Order: Thunder Hand on the side and they both passed the 3,000 word mark today. After Sevenfold Sword Online: Creation comes out, my next big project will be Dragonskull: Wrath of the Warlock, and I'm doing that right away because Dragonskull is my best-selling series and if Sevenfold Sword Online: Creation turns out to be a flop then it would be nice to have a Dragonskull to help to recover from that. That is where I'm at with my current writing projects. Now it’s time for Coupon of the Week and the Coupon of the Week for this week is for the audiobook of Ghost in the Mask, as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. It's now available on my Payhip store for 50% off with this coupon code: FEBMASK. That would be FEBMASK again, that's FEBMASK and you get that at Payhip. I'll include the link to that in the show notes and the coupon code will be valid until February 27th, 2023. 00:03:50 Reader Question Before we get to our main topic, we have a question from Reader AB, who wrote in to ask: Hello. I just wanted to ask if you could tell me where the Dragonskull books fit on your reading order as I don't see them. Are they standalone? I thought maybe they were with the Frostborn/Sevenfold Sword/Dragontiarna universe. They do indeed. The Dragonskull books take place in the Frostborn/Sevenfold Sword/Dragontiarna universe and they take place about ten years or so after the end of Dragontiarna. I do have to make sure I get that reading list updated on my website since I haven't done that for a while and I'm afraid it's one of those chores that falls behind the necessity of writing more because it's like, I could write another 5,000 words of book today or I could do miscellaneous chores and I'm afraid that it has fallen under that category, but I really do need to get a better reading list put together and posted on my website. 00:04:40 Main Topic: Business Lesson for Indie Authors from Dungeons and Dragons Now on to our main topic of this week: one more business lesson for indie authors from Dungeons and Dragons. I think part of the reason I'm a writer is because I am trying to understand human nature, which as we all know, is an unending puzzle that often defies explanation. As humans, we are both simultaneously rational thinking creatures and irrational to the point of self-destructive madness. People can both stun you with their generosity and amaze you with their perfidy. And this sometimes happens inexplicably in the same person, sometimes even on the same day. And a recurring theme in human history is how often a group of smart people put together a plan that somehow backfires and has exactly the opposite result of what they intended. I've written before about the latest legal controversy engulfing Dungeons and Dragons, though to be honest, based on what I've read, you could put together a history solely of the many, many lawsuits and legal maneuvers around Dungeons and Dragons, and you’ll arrive at a very nearly complete history of the game. I should mention that I haven't actually played a tabletop RPG since, like 1999 or so, but as a self-published fantasy writer, I'm sort of living the next street over, so to speak, so I watch this controversy with interest. Anyway, to sum up, for the last 20 years, Dungeons and Dragons had an Open Game License which lets people create compatible content like settings, adventures, and so forth for Dungeons and Dragons without paying royalties to Hasbro, which currently owns the rights to the game. Recently a draft from an updated OGL leaked, probably by a Hasbro employee who recognized what a bad idea the updated license was, imposing far more restrictive terms and including the right for Hasbro to take any D&D compatible material without payment. Predictably, a massive snowballing uproar ensued, with a variety of interesting consequences. Paizo (I’m not sure I pronounced that right or not but it's spelled PAIZO), which makes the second biggest tabletop RPG after Dungeons and Dragons, sold through eight months worth of inventory in a few weeks. Many other RPG publishers announced high sales. Dungeons and Dragons Beyond, Hasbro's virtual tabletop site, lost a ton of subscribers, and Paizo and a bunch of smaller RPG publishers announced plans to make their own version of the OGL, the Open RPG Creative License, which will have the clever acronym of ORC. So what Hasbro wanted to do, what they wanted to have happen, was to increase Dungeons and Dragons’ revenue and drum up publicity before the new Dungeons and Dragons movie that is coming out later this year. Instead, the actual results of their plan were one: damage to their reputation, two: loss of monthly subscription revenue, three: increased sales for their competitors, and four: the possible creation of a new long-term rival in the ORC license. I doubt it would be any comfort to Hasbro, but this kind of thing happens again and again in human history, though often with far more serious results. Unintended consequences can be nasty customers. When King Richard II of England seized the estates of Henry of Bolingbroke, he didn't think to himself, “this plan will end with me starving to death in a prison cell.” Richard just wanted to rid himself of a potential rival. But what actually happened was that Henry gathered an army from the other nobles who Richard had angered, seized the crown for himself, and Richard was deposed and died of starvation in captivity. Or when the conspiracy of Brutus and Cassius stabbed Julius Caesar to death. Their plan was to rid Rome of a dangerous tyrant and restore the rule of the Senate instead of a dictator. Instead, the actual result of their plan was that within a few years, all the conspirators were dead and Caesar's nephew, Octavian, would rule Rome as a far more competent and ruthless tyrant for decades. A common joke among historians is that Caesar was a merciful man who forgave his enemies, and so he was stabbed to death while Octavian was a ruthless man who killed his enemies without mercy, and so died of bed in old age. No doubt we can all think of examples in our own lives or from our old employers, where what was supposed to be a good plan blew up in everyone's faces. And without naming any examples, I'm sure we can all think of recent political and economic plans that have produced somewhat less than desirable outcomes. However, it seems that cooler and more farsighted minds have prevailed at Hasbro. A few days before this recording, the company announced those releasing the Core Rules of Dungeons and Dragons to Creative Commons. Of course, the Core Rules are a massive 400 page PDF document that's actually quite well written. It's basically a condensed version of the Player's Handbook and the Dungeon Master's guide without the excellent illustrations and artwork. This was actually a fairly clever move on Hasbro's part. It defangs much of the criticisms, since anyone can use Creative Commons stuff, so long as they attribute it. Of course, one of the things I learned reading about this is that you can't actually copy or game mechanics, thanks to a Supreme Court decision that goes back to the 19th century. This is why if you go on the Google Play Store or the Apple App Store, you can see a lot of free games with names like Business Town that basically use a lightly modified version of the Monopoly rules, but with none of the trademark terms, images, or iconography associated with Monopoly. So if Hasbro tried to sue over it, the odds were not in the company's favor, and if and if anyone makes their own RPG stuff using the Core Rules in Creative Commons, the Creative Commons License means that Hasbro can't sue about it, and they are prohibited at this point from doing so. It also means that people will continue making RPG stuff compatible with the core Dungeons and Dragons rules, so that's a win for Hasbro. One of the reasons that TSR went bankrupt in the 1990s was that the company kept making campaign settings with beautiful illustrations and maps. But the books were so expensive to print that TSR frequently lost money on each copy sold. So when TSR was about to grow a business, Wizards of the Coast bought the company, and Hasbro bought Wizards of the Coast, which is got we got to where we are today. With the Creative Commons release, people will make compatible RPG campaign settings, which will encourage sales of Hasbro's Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide. And if Hasbro wants to go into a more restrictive license with a future version of Dungeons and Dragons or virtual tabletop software, they have a clear avenue to do so. If people complain, Hasbro can always say, well, the Core Rules for 5th edition are in Creative Commons. Go use those but enjoy premium features in our new version of the game. The welcoming invitation is usually a better tactic than the coercive hard sell. Freemium is a successful business model for a reason. This might even remove the ORC license as a potential long-term threat. The tabletop RPG world is a notably quarrelsome one, and getting a lot of RPG publishers to agree on anything would be difficult. It's too soon to predict what will happen, but it's easy to see the ORC project devolving into infighting. To use a lightly exaggerated example, it's hard to see a military veteran owned RPG publisher that specializes in war games about the global War on Terror agreeing with an RPG publisher that specializes in romantic furrykin adventures and prominently has the phrase “we recognize that words are violence” on their social media profiles. However, stranger things have happened, and nothing unites people quite like a common enemy, though to return to our starting observation about human nature, nothing quite inspires bickering and infighting like a common enemy. So after that lengthy introduction, how does this relate to indie authors? It shows the value and goodwill generated by giving away things for free. I don't mean the copyrights to my books or anything like that. I'm keeping those. I mean the value of giving away free ebooks for people to read. Right now, as of the time I'm recording this, Frostborn: The Gray Knight, Frostborn: The First Quest, Sevenfold Sword: Champion, Child of the Ghosts, Cloak Games: Thief Trap, Silent Order: Iron Hand, and The Tower of Endless Worlds are all free on the various ebook stores, and I will probably make Avenging Fire free as well when comes out of Kindle Unlimited later in February. In fact, when I was typing this, I forgot that I made Ghost in the Ring free a while back. That comes to over 800,000 words of fiction that I give away for free almost every day across multiple platforms. At my absolute top writing speed, at peak health, and with nothing going wrong with real life, I can write about 100,000 words a month, though I've slowed down in the last few years. That means every single day of the year I give away like eight months of work for free. Eight months! Taken it on its own, that sounds like utter insanity, but in January 2023, I sold three times as many ebooks as I gave away for free. The free ebooks are an excellent way to draw new readers and get them to try the paid books in the rest of my various series. And anecdotally, I have heard from many, many readers who say they got started reading one of my free books and kept on reading. I also wrote about 50,000 words of short stories or so that I gave away for free to my newsletter subscribers in 2022. Again, that's several weeks of work, but it encourages people to sign up to my newsletter, which is my best tool for selling books. It also has a salutary effect of increasing my newsletter engagement since people click on the links to get the free story, which means fewer of my newsletters end up in spam folders. So I think the lesson for indie authors here is clear: don't be afraid to give away ebooks for free. I don't think I would have found as many readers as I'd have if I did not. 00:14:00 This Section: Comments from Reader JD about the Situation Now, when I talked about this on Facebook, I got a very good comment from my reader JD, who is much more knowledgeable about the tabletop RPG world than I am and so he had some good points that I would like to read here. He said: The leak was not a draft, it was a legally binding contract that rather than sign, a third party creator leaked. I believe it was a creator. Either way, it was clearly not a draft. That designation was applied by Hasbro after they got called out. On the whole, this is probably a boon for the tabletop RPG vertical at large. Rather than a mass migration to a single new platform, I suspect that more niche options will start to gain traction. Creators will be emboldened to try new things and this will spread awareness about smaller systems from Deadlands to Thirsty Sword Lesbians. Yes, Thirsty Sword Lesbians is a real system that someone really designed and people really bought. Pathfinder is a better game anyway, and while I am a capitalist, this is a drawback to late-stage capitalism. Investors want tabletop RPGs as a service, and that's what Hasbro was trying to do. Profit itself is no longer enough. Investors want growth, so they made a play that some people in suits thought would work like it does in every other vertical because they had no idea what their customers wanted or what made the property they bought stand out. It was not the game that made Dungeons and Dragons so great. It was the free marketing and support of content creators, including Critical Role and other shows, as well as Kobold Press and other creators. Hasbro failed to do even the minimal amount of research about their customers and it has and will continue to cost them. So those are good notes from JD. 00:015:34 Closing Remarks Back in college lo these many years ago, I was a history major, which was not terribly useful for getting a job later in life. But what it did do was provide the gift of perspective, where if you think about it and you have a bad day, you say, well, at least you know, this isn't the Black Death or many other historical catastrophes that occurred throughout human history. It also is good for providing lessons where you can look at the failures of the past and say to yourself, are we repeating this? Is this something I want to do, because someone tried this once before and look how badly it ended? In this case, I think we're right. I think JD is right and that Hasbro's failure here will be studied by future generations of business students as an example of how not to engage with your customers. So that's it for this week. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. It really does help. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this week's episode, we take a look at third person narration versus first person narration, and consider the pros and cons of each when writing fiction. Once again it's time for Coupon of the Week! The audiobook of GHOST IN THE ASHES (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy) is now available on my Payhip store! You can get it for 50% off with this coupon code: JANASHES The coupon code is valid until February 15th, 2023. https://payhip.com/b/JXW0t TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 145 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is January 27th, 2023, and today we're going to talk about third person versus first person for fiction and whether one is better than the other. Before we get into all that, let's say have some updates on my current writing projects. For the LitRPG ebook, I am 63,000 words into it as of this recording, which means I'm about 2/3 of the way through the rough draft. Hopefully progress will continue to be good and I would very much like to get that rough draft wrapped up in the first week of February and then I will announce the title, the book description, and the cover so you all can see exactly what it's going to be about. I'm also working on Silent Order: Thunder Hand and Cloak of Dragonfire in the background as my main focus is on the LitRPG book and I am about 2,000 words into both Cloak of Dragonfire and Silent Order: Thunder Hand. I did have time for Coupon of the Week this week. This week's coupon is for the audiobook version of Ghost in the Ashes, as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy, which is now available in my Payhip store. You can get it for 50% off with this coupon code: JANASHES. That's JANASHES again, that's JANASHES. The coupon code is valid until February 15th, 2023 and I will include a link to the Payhip store and the audiobook in the show notes. 00:01:35 What is LitRPG? Since I've mentioned I am working on a LitRPG book, a few people have asked what LitRPG is as a genre, so I thought I would attempt an explanation here. Basically, it's a story about a fantasy video game, usually using elements from both fantasy and science fiction. It's not surprising that a genre like this should have evolved. Recently, a New York Times article was roundly mocked for stating that until fairly recently, video games were a niche hobby typically associated with children. Now, this may have been true in 1980, but as painful as this may be for some people to admit, it hasn’t been the 1980s for a while now and the 1980s aren’t coming back anytime soon. In 1980, it would have been very unlikely for a group of middle-aged professionals to discuss their favorite video games over lunch. In 2023, this is so commonplace as to be unremarkable. Even people who don't think of themselves as playing video games will often play stuff like Words with Friends, Wordle, Boggle, and Candy Crush on their phones. Anyway, given the cultural penetration that video games have achieved, it's not surprising that fiction and novels will start to reflect that. There are several novels that can be considered proto-LitRPG, but it didn't really evolve into a distinct genre until the 2010s. To speak broadly, LitRPG tends to break down into four main types of stories. First, the plot revolves around the players of a video game controlled by a large and ruthless business, reflecting how in real life, much of the game market is controlled by occasionally unscrupulous mega corporations. Often the game will involve virtual reality or some sort of immersion into the virtual world like The Matrix. Usually the stakes in the game world and in the real world are equally tense and significant and often end up connected and feed into each other. The second type of LitRPG is the protagonist is kidnapped by aliens or gods, or some sort of interdimensional beings, and taken to a world or a pocket dimension set up to function exactly like a computer game, which the aliens or gods or interdimensional beings have created, for reasons mysterious, benevolent, or malevolent. The characters must often either win the aliens game, find a way to escape, become the masters of this pact dimension, or some combination of all three. The third type is apocalypse. Earth is afflicted by some sort of massive event or catastrophe, like nuclear explosion, asteroid impact, quantum singularity, or something of that nature and that rewrites the rules of reality and causes the Earth to become like a computer game. The characters must navigate this new reality. The fourth type is dungeoncore stories. The protagonist is transformed into the master of a typical RPG dungeon and must build the dungeon, stock it with monsters, and defend it against adventurers. I think the original genesis of this version was the Dungeon Master games from the ‘90s, where you play as the evil overlord of a dungeon and fight off invading adventures, though nowadays Dwarf Fortress and Minecraft are probably bigger influences. Obviously there are overlaps between the four main strands and they have other influences like Chinese progression fantasy style stories have a big influence on LitRPGs, and all the different strands tend to have base building stories where the protagonist gains control of a stronghold or a town and must collect resources and build it up, which is of course the premise of many games. A little preview, my LitRPG book is almost entirely in category one. However, I think I've managed to create a satisfying twist on the premise and we'll find out if I'm right soon enough. 00:05:02 Reader Questions Now, before we get into our main topic of the week, let's have some questions. Our first question is from Anthony, who says: I am an avid day one reader of your Frostborn and Dragonskull series and have been since book 3 or so. I've been looking to start a new tabletop RPG campaign with some friends, and I think the world of Andomhaim is a great place to set it in. Many layers of history built on top of each other make for a great sandbox setting. I was planning on going through the books again, rereading and taking notes on locations, monsters, and creating a sort of world Bible for the campaign. I thought it might be worth asking if you had a document with all that information that you would be willing to share before I did all that. Thank you for your writing. I love reading through them whenever the books come out and they've been inspirational with their creativity. Thanks, Anthony. I'm glad you have enjoyed the books. In answer to your question, I don't really have a sort of master world Bible document. The closest I have would be the glossaries at the end of the Sevenfold Sword and Dragontiarna books. Probably the most complete glossary would be the one at the end of Dragontiarna: Warden, if you want to use that as a reference. I thought in the past about doing like a world of Andomhaim source book with, you know, a lot of information and background on the setting and tips and tricks for adapting it to the various dominant tabletop RPG systems out there. The trouble is I just don't have the time to do it. Like this podcast. I'm recording this at three in the afternoon. I got up at 6:15 this morning and I've kind of been going full blast all day and I still only had time to get 100 words of new book written today, but hoping to get another, you know, 2,900 after recording this. I would have liked to have gotten more done, but 3,000 words is all I think I'm going to manage today. So I just don't know what I would fit in the writing of something like a world bible. But I'm glad you have enjoyed the books. Our next question is from Becca who says: Does this mean another of your wonderful mystery novels is coming soon? Thanks, Becca. I'm glad you like the Cormac Rogan books, which are the ones she's referring to. In answer to your question, unfortunately no, I don't have any plans to continue that right now. The reason is the last time I wrote a mystery novel, it was Covering Fire. Covering Fire's entire first month of sales came to about 60% of what Dragonskull: Talons of the Sorcerer did on its first day, versus the entire month. So it seems like it's a better idea to write more Dragonskull books than Cormac Rogan books, but maybe I will have time at some point in the future. I just don't have any immediate plans to continue. Our next question is from Colin who says: I just finished rereading all the Nadia books. Any more coming soon? Any more Cloak and Ghost? I am 2,000 words into Cloak of Dragonfire and that will come out sometime this year. Maybe in the spring, maybe in the summer. Depends on how the next couple of months goes, but I am starting. It will come out at some point before the end of 2023. I'm not planning to do any more Cloak and Ghost books because the crossover confused people and I got a lot of very confused emails about it. While I appreciate the people who did enjoy those books, they were too much hassle so I stopped doing them. 00:08:22 Main Topic of the Week: Third Person or First Person Point of View? Now on to our main topic of the week: different point of views. Is it better to write your book from a third person or first person? First, let's define our terms. Writing in the third person is when you are writing using the character’s name and their specific pronouns. For example, Ridmark did this, Ridmark did that. He did this, he did that. That's third person. First person is when you use the first person pronoun of I, like I did this, I did that and so on. Second person is when you use the you pronoun. You did this, you did that. That's a lot less frequently used in fiction, though. We'll touch on that in a bit. There's three different kinds of third person. All the different types with the third person or first person have their own pros and cons. There's not really a right answer or a wrong answer, but we’ll go through them here. Third person omniscient is where you are telling the story from the third person, but you aren't restricting yourself to the interior of a single character’s head. Sometimes writers use what's called third person limited, where it's written in the third person, but it's just entirely from the point of view of one character. For example, to use a common example, George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire books, that uses third person limited. Each chapter is from a specific viewpoint character and then he rotates through them as the book progresses. By contrast, third person omniscient will jump from the head to head of each of the characters in the same chapter, or sometimes even in the same sentence. Like they could say something like “she thought he was an idiot, but he also thought that she was an idiot” in the same sentence, and that would be an example of third person omniscient. Now this approach is not so popular nowadays, but it does have its advantages. One of the big advantages it is very easy to tell a story and you can cover a scene from multiple perspectives. Agatha Christie did this a couple of times, and it's very common in older books as well. Tolkien did this in Lord of the Rings as well, and because he was Tolkien, he was able to pull it off. In the various chapters, because of the way he has the book divided, we'll spend more time with one group of characters and then switch to a different group of characters and we'll be able to get glimpses from inside the point of views of the various characters. Some of the chapters with Frodo and Sam switch between Sam and Gollum's viewpoint pretty frequently. However, I should mention these examples of third person omniscient I've mentioned so far are involve Agatha Christie and J.R.R. Tolkien, who are considered to be some of the best writers in the English language, which means when they set out to do third person omniscient, they knew exactly what they were doing and why. For newer writers, it's very easy to accidentally cause the reader to get lost trying to keep track of whose point of view we are currently in. It's also easy for all the characters to end up sounding the same because since third person omniscient easily jumps from perspective to perspective. If you're not careful, all the characters will end up having internal monologues that sound close to the same and that is not helpful for storytelling. So as you see, third person omniscient has both pros and cons. The other variant of third person is third person limited, where unlike third person omniscient, you are sticking entirely within the head of one character. This has many advantages and one of them is that it's easier to focus and you don't have to worry about getting your characters muddled together in their internal monologue quite so much. I would say that this is probably the best approach for beginners. You can use third person omniscient if you know exactly what you want to achieve with it. But if you're just starting out and you're not entirely sure of yourself and if you want to use third person, it's probably best to stay to a third person limited. It's a common technique. We mentioned already that George R.R. Martin's used it in his books, Wheel of Time used it, and you can probably think of many other books that use third person limited and then rotate between the different point of view characters. The weakness of this is you need to be careful that the point of view character doesn't know things that he or she shouldn't. Like if you're writing in third person omniscient and you're writing a mystery, it's possible to have you know, the murderer and the detective in the same scene without either of them realizing it and thinking their own internal monologues and not worrying about, you know, the other overhearing their thoughts. With third person limited, you do need to keep track of which character knows what, and you also need to make sure that you try to develop a distinctive voice for each character, because obviously a housing contractor wouldn't talk the same way as a professor of professor of literature. And so if you have like those two characters in your book, you need to make sure that their point of views, if their point of view characters are distinct. Before we talk about first person, to maintain a strict numerical order, we should probably talk about second person first. Second person is when you use the pronoun you to narrate the story. Like you say in the story you did this and then you do that and this is probably most commonly used or at least most  used in a form where people will encounter it in video games and usually like the narrative cutscenes between a video games or in like the quest log of a video game where it wills say, you are standing before the gates of the fortress or the quest log will say you have accepted this quest from the lord of the fortress to go out and get this and so forth. In fiction, to be blunt, second person tends to be kind of weird. It's usually very stream of consciousness. It often appears in like dream sequences or like drug flashbacks, that kind of thing. It's also very commonly used in present tense because the third person omniscient and third person limited are usually past tense like he said, or she said, and so forth. But second person, when it shows up, tends to be in the present tense. Like you stand at the edge of the precipice and you walk through the valley of your dreams, and so forth. So this can work for flashbacks or for any sort of scene where you want to convey a sense of surreality, like a dream sequence or the character slipped into another world that the human mind can't process, that kind of thing, but otherwise, unless you have a specific need for second person, it's probably best to stick to either third person, either limited or omniscient, or first person. So with that in mind, let's talk about first person. First person obviously is where you write the story from a single character’s perspective using the pronouns I and we, like I did this and I did that and so forth. This has many advantages. For one, it's very easy to focus because then since you're writing entirely from this one character's perspective, you don't have to worry quite so much about the other characters perspectives as you write, but you do need to have a very specific voice. When you’re writing in first person, sometimes it's good to use like a framing device for why the book’s in first person, like someone's writing a memoir or telling the story of what happened, which means that gives you a useful framing device for why the book is written in first person. Again, you have to be very aware of the character’s specific voice and what they know and when they know it because the difference between this and third person admissions is that first person is inherently limited. Since your writing will only know what the character at that time knows. If your first person character suddenly knows things that he or she couldn't know, the reader will be annoyed and feel cheated. There might not be a point to writing it in first person if you're already better served by third person limited. I have seen examples of first person where two different characters will be telling the story and the chapters alternate back and forth between them and that can work, so long as you clearly indicate at the start of the chapter which character is currently telling the story. You can also combine first person with third person limited. I have done that several times in the Nadia books. The last couple of Nadia books have had that, and it seems to have worked well and people like them. At least I haven't had too many complaints about the way it works. Some genres in particular seem to prefer first person like urban fantasy, which the Cloak Games books are, has a lot of first person. It's almost like a genre convention at that point and a lot of mystery novels have first person as well. Private eye novels in particular prefer to use first person, dating all the way back to the time of Raymond Chandler when he was writing Philip Marlowe. So those are the various pros and cons and advantages and disadvantages of writing in third person, second person, and first person. It boils down to there is no right way or wrong way. It's just whatever you feel comfortable writing and whatever serves the story best. We writers like to talk a lot about the various rules of writing or do this or don't do that, but it ultimately comes down to just one rule that overrides everything else: don't be boring. So pick whatever point of view method that you feel helps your stories to be not boring. So that's it for this week. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this week's episode, I ran out of time to prepare notes for a show, so instead I'm going to answer many reader questions and talk about topics of interest to indie authors. I ran out of time to prepare a Coupon of the Week for this week, but if all goes well it should return next week. TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 144 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is January 19th, 2023 and today we are winging it. I didn't have time to prepare anything for the show this week and I have to record it a day early, which also gives me a lack of time to prepare things. So instead of prepared notes, I'm going to take a look at a couple of different topics of interest to indie authors and then attempt to extemporize upon them. So this should be an interesting show, though maybe not in the way I would hope. Before we get into whatever topics I will make up on the spot, let's have a look at my current writing projects. I am now 31,000 words into the LitRPG book I've mentioned before, and I'm hoping to have it out towards the end of February. Writing in LitRPG, which is a new genre to me, has been an interesting experience. I've written before that I wanted Frostborn to feel like a massive tabletop RPG campaign, one where the characters start out finding the local farmer’s missing pig and end up deciding the fate of kingdoms and empires by the end of the series. I think I achieved that with Frostborn. However, Frostborn was epic fantasy, not LitRPG and I don't think LitRPG even properly existed as a genre back in 2013 when I started writing Frostborn. So I suppressed any game type language in favor of making it more realistic in Frostborn. I didn't want any of the characters sound like they were playing a game. Like last year, I read Dragons of Autumn Twilight for the first time, and while it’s a classic within the genre, it was very clearly written to follow a Dungeons and Dragons module, and that was the feeling that I wanted to avoid with Frostborn. I definitely couldn't have any sentences like “Ridmark rolled a 19 on his blunt weapons attack roll and his staff impacted the Mhorite orc’s head for two D 8 + 2 points of bludgeoning damage.” But after ten years of suppressing any hint of game language, I can finally indulge that impulse for this book. I'm hoping to have the rough draft done in early February. Once that happens, I'll share the title, cover, and book description which will give a better idea of what the book is about. I'll also post the first chapter once it's edited to give a little preview. In fact, as I said that maybe I'll post the first two chapters since I think that would work better (unless of course I rearrange the order of the chapters, which I tend to do from time to time). Will this be a standalone book or part of the series? It depends. I have a specific sales figure in mind for the book’s first thirty days. If it hits that target, I’ll write sequels. If not, I will just chalk it up to a learning experience, which is of course always valuable for life. But if all goes well, before the end of February we'll be able to see if I can write a LitRPG book successfully or not. I have actually also started working on Cloak of Dragonfire and Silent Order: Thunder Hand. I don't know when those will come out, because after the LitRPG book is done, I want to write Dragonskull: Wrath of the Warlock right away. The Cloak of Dragonfire and Silent Order: Thunder Hand will probably come out in the spring and the summer of this year, if all goes well. For Coupon of the Week, this week I'm afraid due to time constraints I have once again run out of time to do Coupon of the Week, but hopefully that will return next week. 00:03:26 Reader Questions and Comments We have a bunch of questions from readers that we are going to answer right now. So our first question and comment is from TR, who says: some appreciation/thought for you on narrators. For the last 10 to 12 years, I've read mostly certain sorcery and independent authors, with the exception of Eragon from Christopher Paolini, so that reading has now transitioned to 80% audio due to commutes and time. Recently I watched the Bosch series on Amazon and thought I would listen to Connelly’s Bosch series that I read years ago, just like I have with your work. So my point, Connelly rotates narrators frequently. Some are good and some really suck, not just subtle differences, but one sounds like a Harvard professor and one sounds like Nick Nolte in 48 hours, but added in a drunken bender version of Nolte. It's still been enjoyable, but it leads to the fault of zero continuity even though the stories progress and have some overlap and you feel as if the protagonist has multiple personalities that you have to relearn every narrator change. That is an excellent point, and it's why, whenever possible, I try to have the same narrator across the series. I've done that pretty consistently, with the exception of Frostborn. The first five books were produced through Tantor and they selected Stephen Crossley as the narrator. I did the last ten books of the series myself, and I recruited Brad Wills as the narrator. Now, in my opinion, Steven Crossley and Brad Wills both did an excellent job narrating the books, but Brad's narrative style is very different than Stephen, so it is a bit jarring for people when they go from Frostborn: Iron Tower to Frostborn: The Dark Warden. But that's inevitable. It's a structural thing that's built into the series, and as I might talk about later in the show, the Frostborn series are my best-selling individual audiobook titles by far. Out of all my audiobooks like, I think half my audiobook revenue in 2022 came from the Frostborn series. So clearly, very many people agree with me that Brad Wills does a good job narrating the series. As for reasons why narrators can change, there are a couple different ones. The most serious are of course the narrator dies or get sick or injured and can no longer narrate. Sometimes there are contractual disputes, sometimes the rights move from one publisher to another, so there can be a whole bunch of different reasons the same narrator does not narrate the entire audiobook series, but if you have the option and you're an indie publisher, whenever possible, it's good to stick with the same narrator for the entire series. Our next question is from Jeff, who says about Dragonskull: Talon of the Sorcerer: Love how you dropped these books with no advance notice makes for an excellent surprise that day. By the way, how do you actually pronounce Xothalaxiar? I just answered that question by reading it aloud, didn't I? I say it does Xothalaxiar and if there is ever an audiobook version of the series (and I think going to decide on that one way or the other at the end of February), then Xothalaxiar is how I will instruct the narrator to pronounce that particular name. But it is interesting that he says there's no advanced notice of the book because I talked about how it's coming on my website and Facebook and Twitter and this podcast too, but just goes to show that not everyone checks all the information sources, which again speaks to the value of advertising. Our next question is from SK, who says concerning Dragonskull: Talons of the Sorcerer: How many books will it be in this series? It's also ten years since you introduced the world of Frostborn. Congratulations. Thanks. I think let's see, when did Frostborn: The Gray Knight come out? I think that was August or September 2013. I should look that up quick. Yeah, August 2013 is when it came out. So this will be the 10 year anniversary of Frostborn this year. It has been a wild ride. In answer to the question, I decided during the writing of Dragonskull: Talons of the Sorcerer that the Dragonskull series will have nine books. I'm hoping to start on the seventh one Dragonskull: Wrath of the Warlock after the LitRPG book is done, and then the final two will hopefully be out yet this year in 2023. Our next question is from CA, who says in response to me saying that Dragonskull: Talons of the Sorcerer was by 137th book, CA says: I'm guessing you're not 137 years old. So would you let us into your writing schedule? It sounds as though it's insanely fast. I have had insanely fast days. In 2020, I did have like 22 ten thousand word days, but however that was during peak COVID and so there was nothing else to do, so I wrote a lot. Generally I'd say I do write faster than most people, but I do write more consistently than I write fast. Like today, I was hoping to get 6,000 words written, but I had to spend a large portion of the day on snow removal, so that's not going to happen. But I am going to try instead to get 3,000 or maybe even 4,000 words, if things go well. And I think that is the key consistency and not letting the perfect be the enemy of the possible. Like, if you imagine your writing time as like a pie and then someday you show up and like, oh hey, you're only gonna be able to get like one slice of the pie instead the whole pie. Quite a few writers have the bad habit of stomping off and not doing anything, but it's better to have a single piece of pie than no pie at all, and that's my approach. So even on really busy days or busy weeks like this one, I’ll still try and squeeze in as much writing as possible, and that adds up over the long term. Our next comment is from MI who says: A bit late, but Happy New Year. May your ideas flow like the monsoon in my country. I believe based on his Facebook profile MI is from Indonesia, though it could be mistaken. After Wreck Hand came out, I decided to do a marathon from Iron Hand until Wreck Hand. Problem was it gave me spaceship fever. Since my Freelancer installer was gone and Elite: Dangerous is on sale now I'm hooked. I blame you and thank you. You are welcome. If you are looking for other good space opera books to read while waiting for a Silent Order: Thunder Hand, there's a couple I could recommend. The Icarus Hunt and The Icarus Plot by Timothy Zahn are both excellent, and in fact the Icarus Hunt is my favorite science fiction novel of all time. The Galaxy's Edge series by Nick Cole and Jason Anspach just wrapped up with its last book, so the series is complete and it's a pretty good space adventure opera with their own versions of like the Force and the Empire, and so forth. Another series that is complete is the Expanse by James S.A. Corey that is excellent and very thoughtful space opera, and they did end the series on a satisfactory note, which is something that many science fiction and fantasy writers struggle with, so I can recommend that and also if you want to really good space opera that happens to be Star Wars, I recommend the original Thrawn trilogy by Timothy Zahn and the subsequent Thrawn books he's written. They're well worth reading and frankly more intelligent than many Star Wars tie in novels or media tie in novels in general. Our next question is from Rob who asks: What's happened in the Nighmarian Empire (that is the setting for the Caina books)? Is there another book in the offing? The definitive answer to that is maybe. I do have several ideas for subsequent Caina books that I think I could write pretty straightforwardly. The trouble is, I already have a lot of other things in progress. The Dragonskull series, the Nadia series/Cloak Mage, Silent Order, and I would like to, you know, have some things wrapped up before I start writing something new. Then again, on any given month, The Ghosts books are like 10 to 15% of my monthly revenue, so it makes sense to write another one, but I have so many other things in progress. So at some point I might do a poll on my website asking whether people would prefer if I write a another kind of book or focus on getting more books out faster in my current unfinished series. It might be an interesting question to my readers. Our next question is from Doug who asks: Are you interested in writing RPG source books since Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro has alienated everyone with its new Open Game License? We talked about the whole Open Game License thing in previous episode of the show, so no need to recap that here. The situation remains ongoing and developing. In response to that, I would have no objection to an RPG book in the setting of Frostborn or Caina or Nadia's world, or whatever. I just don't have time to write it, so that is not something we will see anytime soon. 00:12:30 Main Topics So let's pick some topics at random to talk about for this episode, and one of them might be sales percentages for 2022 last year. I thought would be interesting to see what percentage of ebook sales came from which platform for me. Overall, 55% of my ebook sales came from Amazon and the other 45% came from the other stores, which we're going to break down now. After Amazon, the next biggest one was the Google Play Store, which did 15.5% of my ebook sales, then followed by Apple, which did about 12.6% of my ebook sales. This was followed by Kobo, which was 10.4%, and then that was followed by Barnes and Noble’s Nook platform, which was 3.8% and then finally the various small stores that are distributed to through Smashwords and that came to about 2.6%, give or take. So that is how ebook sales break down for 2022 for me. A common question I get asked is if I have a Patreon, and if since I don't have one, what would cause me to get one? I don't have a Patreon because I don't really need one, but circumstances can change. And I've said before, it would cause me to get a Patreon is a massive change in the current self-publishing landscape. Like for example, if Google decides to stop selling ebooks through Google Play. I don't think they would. That's a pretty easy profit center for them. But Google is notorious for canceling products and services that are fairly popular, such as Google Reader for example, and so if Google decides tomorrow to wake up and say, hey, we're not going to sell ebooks anymore, that would make me start a Patreon. If Apple stopped selling ebooks or Amazon decided to fiddle with the royalty percentages it pays on ebooks, that could change my mind too. For right now, in the current self-publishing landscape, I don't see the need for me to have a Patreon, though I reserve the right to change my mind about that if something drastic changes in the self-publishing landscape. Let's see, we need another topic. So let's take a look at my best selling ACX audiobooks of 2022, both individual titles and bundles. I say ACX because I distribute my audiobooks both for ACX for Amazon, Audible, and Apple and Findaway Voices for everywhere else. And it's generally easier to work out best-selling titles and various figures on ACX because the interface is simpler and this isn't a knock on Findaway Voices. It's just that ACX only distributes to three stores (Amazon, Apple, and Audible), whereas Findaway does something like 40 so just due to the nature of that it's easier to parse out best-selling audiobooks on ACX as opposed to Findaway Voices. Also to be fair to ACX as well, I made about four times as much from ACX audiobooks than I did from Findaway Voices in 2022, though that's not nearly as big of a gap as it was in years past. It used to be something like, you know, 10 times as much on ACX, or 12 times as much, but my best-selling titles at ACX and we should distinguish between individual titles and bundles, because I do three book bundles of like the Ghost Series audiobooks and those are much easier to sell than individual titles, I’ve found because there's so much longer. The Ghosts Omnibus One is I think like 39 hours long. When I do Ghost Exile Omnibus Three sometime this spring, that's going to be over 40 hours long, so it's a lot easier to sell a long audiobook than it is a regular title. My best-selling individual title on ACX was Frostborn: The Shadow Prison, the long-awaited final audiobook in the Frostborn series, as excellently narrated by Brad Wills. My best-selling bundle title was once again, The Ghosts Omnibus One, as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy and that contains Child of the Ghosts, Ghost in the Flames, Ghost in the Blood, and the short story Ghost Aria. Another common concern with authors and Audible is the high return rate, because for a while Audible was letting people use their credit to listen to a book, listen to the entire book, and then return it and get the full credit back and the author doesn't get paid. They've tried to clamp down on that sense, and they also include more detailed return data, but I think the return rate for audiobooks was pretty good. For all of 2022, my return rate for ACX audiobooks was 1.2%, which is pretty good in comparison to the overall return rate for many products. I should mention that due to a Chirp deal I had November for Child of the Ghosts where it was temporarily $0.99, Child of the Ghosts was probably the title with the most individual sales overall across all my audiobooks for 2022. I don't have time to dig through the spreadsheets and work out exactly by how much it's sold, but I'm pretty sure that Child of the Ghosts was my highest individual quantity selling title for 2022. Let's see…another topic. Let's talk a little bit about AI art. Longtime reader Brett left a comment on one of my previous posts about AI art where he says: well, you are sort of right about the massive lawsuit. And then he includes a link to a news article about the recent lawsuit launched by Getty Images against an AI image generator. Brett continues to say: the “sort of” part is that they are not going after individual users, just the groups that host the AI art tool, so writers who have generated images for book covers are still safe. My prediction is that the plaintiffs win….lawyers will make fabulous amounts of money….the artists themselves will be relatively worse off because they won't be able to use the tools either, so their productivity will be much lower. As you probably know from reading my blog or listening to this show, I'm generally not in favor of AI art in its current form, and I strongly recommend against using anything produced with AI image generation for any commercial reasons for the reasons that Brett just enumerated above. My personal objection to AI art is that I think it is essentially plagiarism, that it's the salami slicing of plagiarism. If you're not familiar with that term, salami slicing is a term for a kind of a systematized theft where you see a little bit from each target and that way hopefully the targets don't notice and the earnings pile up. A common version of that is like a bank programmer who writes code where every time there's a transaction amount, half a cent gets redirected to his account, though of course this has been pretty easily detected for many years. This is the plot of the movie Office Space as a matter of fact, where the protagonists write a salami slicing program and accidentally steal way more money than they intend. Though you can see variants of that with like, you know, scams designed to, you know, take a few dollars from a bunch of credit cards or from Zelle accounts and so forth. Now this is what I think “AI art generation” does that right now. It essentially steals a little bit from a million different pictures and combines them together. Now AI advocates will say no, it's not stealing, it's generating interpretations based on the prompt like you type in, you know a prompt like say Boba Fett eating at McDonald's. The AI art generator will seek out various images of Boba Fett and McDonald's and generate mathematical hashes based on that, and then create variations of its hashes and the AI advocates will say that this isn't copying, his is interpreting, but I think the difference is that human beings interpret, human beings can be influenced, machines can't. All the AI art generator is doing is essentially doing a very bad photocopy. An AI art generator is, in my opinion, essentially like a billion different photocopiers together slicing off little bits of a million different pieces of pictures and combining them together in something new. So I do think the lawsuit has merit and that there is quite a bit that's very ethically questionable about AI art in its current incarnation. Now, this isn't to say that the technology doesn't have any kind of use altogether. I'm not very fond of cryptocurrency either, but I can see that there is a legitimate use for it. If you live in a country with a strong central banking authority or a financial regulator you can be pretty confident of putting $10,000 or equally large sum into the bank and getting it back unless the government decides you're a drug merchant or something. Whereas if you live in a country with a weaker government and a more corrupt public sector, it's entirely possible that you can put $10,000 into the bank and you'll never get it again because the bank will steal it or the government will steal it. Cryptocurrency provides a way to get around that by putting your money in something that the government or a corrupt bank can't get at, and apparently it's become quite common for migrant workers in various countries around the world to send their wages back in cryptocurrency because that way their host country can't steal it and then the various financial authorities back in their home countries can't steal the cryptocurrency as well. So it's like things like that where you may not necessarily think of them. Something like cryptocurrency could have legitimate use case, even though mostly what it gets used for in the United States is a variety of scams and failing cryptocurrency exchanges. So I suspect that the AI art generation technology isn't going away and it is going to find a legitimate use eventually. I don't think it's in a good place in its current form, and I suspect Brett's comment above was a bit too gloomy. I don't think the technology is going to be banned. I suspect that the lawsuit will probably be settled rather than go all the way to the Supreme Court, with the Supreme Court banning AI generation or something of that nature. But I do think the lawsuit will eventually be settled in some form and that hopefully AI art can come along in a more ethical and less plagiarism friendly form where if you type a prompt into the AI generator, it spits out an image that still includes the watermark of the image it scraped on some photographer’s website to build its data set. So I have rambled on various indie author topics for about 24 minutes and that's enough for a show. Thanks for listening to everyone this week. I hope next week I can have a more coherent show and return to Coupon of the Week. I hope you found the show useful. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this week's episode, we take a look at the controversy over the Open Gaming License for Dungeons & Dragons, and examine the business lessons that offers (along with a business lesson from Taylor Swift) for indie authors. I just finalized the audiobook of GHOST IN THE FORGE (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy) on Payhip store, and you can get the audiobook for 50% off with this coupon code: JANFORGE The coupon code is valid through January 31st, 2023. Get the audiobook of GHOST IN THE FORGE here!: https://payhip.com/b/vhySD Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 143 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is January 12th, 2023, and today we're discussing one more business lesson from Dungeons and Dragons and a surprising business lesson from Taylor Swift. Before we get into all that, let's have an update on my current writing projects. I’m pleased to report that Dragonskull: Talons of the Sorcerer is completely done and is now out at all ebook stores. In fact, as of this recording, it is live everywhere except Kobo, so hopefully should be up on Kobo by the time you listen to this. Now that Dragonskull: Talons of the Sorcerer is finished, my next main project will be the LitRPG book I was talking about. I'm about 15,000 words into it. I want it to be about 80,000 words long, and if all goes well, that'll come out towards the end of February. After that, I would like March’s book to be the next Dragonskull book, which I am tentatively titling Dragonskull: Wrath of the Warlock, and then after that we'll have Cloak of Dragonfire. So to that end, I've also started working on the outline for Cloak of Dragonfire and Silent Order: Thunder Hand. I'm actually hoping to finish the outline for Cloak of Dragonfire once I finish recording this podcast. Now let's do Coupon of the Week. As of January 11th (yesterday), I made more in direct sales via Payhip in 2023 than I did in all of 2022. So it took just 11 days to surpass 2022’s total of direct sales. So I’m going to continue on with Coupon of the Week through 2023. To celebrate that milestone, I just finalized the audiobook of Ghost in the Forge on the Payhip store, as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy, and you can get the audiobook for 50% off with this coupon code: JANFORGE. The coupon code is valid through January 31st, 2023 and I will include the link and the coupon code in the show notes for this episode.   00:02:11 Non-Sponsored/Non-Gifted-Product Review of Inkarnate Before we get into further topics, there's one thing I want to mention. I have lately been using a web service called Inkarnate to create maps. It looks like it was originally designed for Game Masters or Dungeon Masters who run tabletop RPGs to design maps for their campaigns. But if you use the paid version, it's free for commercial use, which means I have been playing with it to make maps. I made an updated map of the Kingdom of Owyllain from Sevenfold Sword and I'm working on a map of the Western Empire from the Caina books, since the empire is big enough that it may be easier to split into eastern and western maps, kind of with the real Roman Empire in the 4th century. I don't enjoy drawing maps, so I should just say that I've never enjoyed drawing maps across the 137 books I’ve published, even though really, if you're writing epic fantasy like I often do, maps are kind of a mandatory requirement. So I will put together maps in GIMP and Photoshop for the my website, but I never enjoyed doing it. However, I actually enjoy using Inkarnate. For the first time, making a map is kind of fun. I liked it and I'm going to continue using it. It was my first business expense of 2023. It also has a very handy random world map generator, so the next time I have to create a new epic fantasy setting, I think I would use that and then just move things around to my liking and create a totally random world map that will be much easier than the way I used to draw maps by sitting down with pen and paper and drawing the map and then scanning it into my computer and then making a digital file out of it with GIMP or Photoshop. 00:03:53 Reader JD’s Opinion/Comments on Episode 141/Debt As you can tell from the episode title, One More Business Lesson from Dungeons and Dragons and Taylor Swift, this episode is kind of a follow up from the earlier episode, Episode 141: Six Business Lessons from Dungeons and Dragons. Reader/listener JT had a good comment about that episode. JT says there is a little word that I saw arise, and I was unsurprised. Debt and all of the related words should be treated as profanities. TSR went into debt. Wizards of the Coast was in debt. Hasbro is in debt, and as are a great many, if not all companies. Debt killed Sears, Wards, Kmart, Blockbuster, and hundreds of other companies. 00:04:55 Jonathan’s Reply to Reader JD’s Comments In the indie author world, there is a time and place for debt. Like sometimes you might have no choice but to get a car loan or a small business loan or a mortgage, but those are all the fairly well regulated and can be managed, though it is still of course best to avoid those if possible. For indie authors, it's really a good idea to avoid going into debt for your expenses. It's better off to bootstrap as you go. You know spending like $250 or $300 and putting it on your credit card to pay for a cover is one thing. Spending like $5,000 on Facebook ads and putting it on your credit card if you are not sure you're going to get it back is something else entirely. If you're starting out as an indie publisher or writer, it is a very good idea to avoid debt in general. 00:05:43 Main Topic: Business Lesson from Dungeons and Dragons and Possibly Taylor Swift Now, the idea for the main topic of this episode was inspired by reader Michael, who said about my podcast and post about Six Business Lessons from Dungeons and Dragons: Thanks, Jonathan. That's a very interesting post on the subject, dear to my heart, having played D&D for many decades. It's also quite topical given the current heated debates on the future of Dungeons and Dragons and whether Wizards of the Coast is about to revoke or cancel the Open Game License, which was such a big contributor to the Renaissance and the game’s popularity after the TSR buyout. Now, I had heard rumors about this stuff with the Open Game License on Twitter, but I hadn't paid very close attention to it because as I mentioned the previous episode, I haven't played a tabletop RPG game this century. However, it seemed like an interesting question, so I looked into it in a bit and it's really interesting looking at this legal battle from an outside perspective because it demonstrates a valuable business lesson for both indie authors and any business in general. So what's going on and why am I talking about this? Basically, when Wizards of the Coast bought Dungeons and Dragons, they came out with the Open Game License, which lets third party publishers create adventures and settings that work with Dungeons and Dragons. Many disinterested observers agree that this is one of the key reasons for the overall success of Dungeons and Dragons, the vibrancy of the third-party ecosystem around it. It's similar to the reason DOS and later Windows 95 beat up their rivals in the ‘90s. Microsoft was very friendly to third party developers writing software for its platform, and even to this day, Windows is still much more of an open ecosystem than iOS. You might remember that famous viral video of Steve Ballmer standing on a stage, shouting “Developers, developers, developers!” at the top of his lungs, and he got made fun of for that. But he had the last laugh because he became a billionaire and the reason he became a billionaire was because Microsoft made Windows into a relatively open platform for application developers, which made Windows more popular than many of its rivals. But back to Dungeons and Dragons. Later, Hasbro bought Wizards of the Coast, and Hasbro had a suboptimal year in 2022, and really needs more revenue. So Hasbro was planning to put out a far more restrictive version of the Open Game License to bring in more Dungeons and Dragons money, and hopefully collect royalties from third party publishers. To return to that Microsoft example, it would be as if Microsoft somebody demanded of royalty from every developer who has ever sold or written software for the Windows platform. As you could expect, much outrage has ensued. The ongoing public relations disaster for Dungeons and Dragons as a brand has been fascinating to watch. The Electronic Freedom Foundation has even weighed in, saying that it might threaten the legal foundation for open source/free software, which would really annoy a lot of rich and powerful organizations, since most of the Internet runs on open source/free software. So this whole thing will probably end up in court with a bunch of lawsuits, but this demonstrates a potential danger for indie authors, which is why I'm talking about it and indeed, business people in general, and that danger: beware rent seeking behavior. Or, to put it another way, if you are charging money for something, it is absolutely imperative that you provide value for that money, otherwise your customers will swiftly turn on you. First, we should define our terms. What is rent seeking behavior? The Wikipedia definition is pretty good and it says, “rent seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating the social or political environment without creating new wealth.” I'd also add manipulating the legal environment to that list. Basically this is a way of making money without making new products or building new things or actually doing something but finding ways to charge people for things without actually doing things. The Hasbro/Dungeons and Dragons controversy is a fairly good example of rent seeking. Rather than trying to make money by creating new products, Hasbro is attempting to find a new source of revenue by imposing royalty costs on third party publishers. Now why is rent seeking bad? Well, if you're the one collecting the rents, it's actually a pretty good deal. For everyone else, it's less than optimal. If you're making new products and you have to pay a high royalty or rent to do so, that drastically reduces the incentive to make these products and in the end, rent seeking can destroy the individual or company collecting the rent. Freed from the need to work to generate revenue, the rent collector tends to become fat and lazy, indeed ossified, making it vulnerable to the more nimble and hungrier competitors. For example, Quark Express used to be the dominant program for desktop publishing in the 2000s, but then Adobe InDesign came along and sort of ate Quark’s lunch. Microsoft stopped improving Internet Explorer after 2004 or so, and since you're probably not reading this on Internet Explorer, look how that turned out. Hasbro is hardly the only company to fall prey to this malady. When you get a critical mass of MBAs and corporate lawyers in the same building together, their shift in focus tends to go from “making products to satisfy our customers” to “forcibly extracting as much money from our customers as possible.” The metaphor of the goose that lays the golden eggs is a bit of a cliché, but it comes to mind. Imagine you have a goose that lays one golden egg every fiscal quarter but if you kill the goose and open it up, you can get three eggs immediately. Killing the goose to get the three eggs inside of it seems foolish when you could get four eggs a year, but from the perspective of a high-ranking MBA, killing the goose to get those three eggs means that the stock price goes higher this quarter. When the eggs run out, that's somebody else's problem, and hopefully you'll have leveraged that raised stock price into a higher paying job somewhere else by then. So here are just a few examples of the many other instances of rent seeking behavior we've seen in recent years. Keurig, the company that makes the one serve coffee brewers, was massively successful. In an odd parallel to the Hasbro situation, the Keurig machine was successful enough that it spawned a wide third-party ecosystem of coffee pods and various accessories. The Keurig company decided they wanted that market all to itself, so the Keurig 2.0 Brewers, introduced in 2014, were designed to only work with authorized coffee pods sold by Keurig or by third party licensors who had coughed up a hefty license fee. It also blocked reusable K cups that people use to make their own coffee with the devices. As you might expect, a massive backlash ensued, accompanied by many lawsuits and Keurig had to back down. Cricut is a company that makes cutting plotters that print out designs and vinyl and leather or so forth, and you can use it for various crafty style projects. For most of the company's history, you didn't need to use a subscription plan to use the Cricut device. In 2021, the company decided to make the subscription plan mandatory, meaning that the Cricut devices would not work without it. A massive uproar ensued and Cricut had to back down. John Deere, which makes agricultural machinery in 2016 decided that only authorized John Deere technicians would be allowed to work on John Deere vehicles and machines. Since many farmers are located along long way from a John Deere dealership, this did not go down terribly well. Imagine, for example, a combine harvester breaking down during harvest time when inclement weather threatens. Without timely repair, tens of thousands of tons of crops could be swiftly lost, which would be a ruinous financial blow to many farmers. In fact, just in January of 2023, a few days before I started recording this, John Deere backed down somewhat, though more cynical observers noted that the company might be trying to get ahead of various right to repair bills brewing at the US federal level and in the legislatures of several U.S. states. In another example, Microsoft itself fell prey to this malady with the original version of the Xbox One game console, which had more restrictive DRM to prevent the sharing of game discs and to drive digital sales. By now we should be familiar with the pattern. A massive uproar ensued. Microsoft had to back down and Sony's PlayStation console is able to thoroughly beat the Xbox for that round of video game console wars. Amusingly, as of 2023, something like 80 to 90% of all game sales, depending on the source, are digital downloads as of this year. If Microsoft had just exercised a little patience, it would have gotten exactly what it wanted without the bad PR. So those are just some examples from the top of my head while I was typing out this post. No doubt you can think of several more that you have encountered in your day-to-day life or in your career fields where you have had to deal with a company trying to engage in this kind of rent seeking behavior. There are also a couple of examples that are borderline. Are software subscriptions rent seeking? Well, I think it depends on the software and your need for it. Again, it boils down to if the company is providing value for the price or not. If the software receives regular updates and also provides useful features like cloud integration or online backups, that kind of thing, that's one thing. Microsoft has gotten pretty clever with subscription models. Something like Office 365 or Xbox Game Pass is generally for most people a good value for the money because you get the nifty side features and the software is updated pretty regularly. By contrast, if the software hasn't been updated in years and stops working if the subscription stops, that's something else entirely. Apple occasionally gets accused of rent seeking with the App Store and the thirty percent cut it takes some digital sales through the App Store, but as often happens, Apple went about it cleverly. It's a matter of setting expectations. From almost the beginning of the App Store, Apple took a thirty percent cut of the sale, and it's stuck pretty consistently to that for almost 15 years now. There is a big difference between setting expectations from the very beginning versus somebody yanking out the carpet from beneath people (like the examples with Keurig and Cricut and John Deere above). Apple has gotten sued a lot over this policy, but it hasn't gone away. It’s never received the public outrage over the other examples I mentioned, probably because the average person doesn't care all that much if Spotify and Epic lose thirty percent of their digital sales to Apple for iPhone and iPad users. Now, if Apple decided to go from like 30 to 50% suddenly, or if it had started at 5% and then shot up to 30%, that will be something else entirely, but we'll see if various lawsuits and potential antitrust actions force Apple to change its App Store rules or not, because in combination with some of the right to repair bills I talked about earlier, there's also increasing movements and sort of scrutiny on various online App Store practices, which may force online companies to change their business, or they might change themselves to try and get ahead of potential regulation. Now to venture a personal opinion. If I were king for a day and like the Law of the Medes and the Persians in the Book of Esther in the Bible, my edicts could not be repealed, I would decree that anyone serving in the leadership of a large enough company would first have to spend 7 years working in a non-management position within that company, preferably in a job where you had to deliver concrete results. Granted, that wouldn't completely weed out the foolish, but it would definitely reduce the sort of outside hire CEO who is golfing buddies with the board and has no knowledge of the company that he or she is leading. You know the kind of CEO who is just there to loot the company and get a golden parachute. A lot of the mistakes that we saw above and with the rent seeking in general come from that sort of CEO. But we've been talking about million and billion dollar companies. What does this have to do with indie authors (to return to the whole point of this podcast)? Indie authors can engage in rent seeking behavior themselves, and I think the biggest example has been the various trademark controversies. A few indie authors have tried to trademark common words that they use in their book titles, and this almost always ends badly. I'm not a lawyer, but based on the posts of actual lawyers who have written about this, this seems to be a borderline use of trademark law. The most prominent example was from a few years ago when an indie romance author trademarked the word cocky and then went off after other romance authors who had used the word cocky in their title. The author in question claimed that she had done it so her readers would not be confused, which honestly makes one wonder about her opinion of her readers’ intelligence. But by now we should be familiar with the pattern. Massive outrage forced the author to back down. The so-called Cocky Gate (cute name) was the biggest example of this, but there have been a few others in other genres. So what can we as indie authors and business people learn in general from this? I think the lesson is that it's better to seek to add value rather than to extract rents. When your customers or your readers spend money on your books or your products, they feel they are receiving value instead of that you are trying to price gouge them. Granted, adding value is more work than seeking rents. You have to develop new products or write new more books and then sell them to your customers. I've personally tried to do this in a variety of ways: giving free ebooks to people who subscribe to my newsletter, giving free short stories away when I publish a book, keeping free ebooks on all the major retailers, and regularly doing $0.99 sales on box sets. I do admit I've had to raise prices due to inflation over the last few years, but unfortunately that's true of nearly everything and I've been able to offset that by offering regular coupons through my new Payhip store, which I mentioned earlier in the show. When I was talking about this episode, someone suggested musical artist Taylor Swift as an example of someone who understands the importance of adding value rather than extracting rents. Granted, I think the only time I have ever actually listened to Taylor Swift’s music is when someone happens to be playing it at the gym. I'm afraid I'm just not in the target demographic. But I looked into it a little and it seems that Swift or someone that her team really does have a good sense for business. In 2019, an investor with the perhaps somewhat regrettable nickname of Scooter bought the master recordings of Swift's first six albums as part of an acquisition. Swift responded by recording new versions of her old albums, virtually degrading the value of the old albums. It's a very clever structure. You can listen to her music very cheaply on Spotify or the other streaming sites, but devoted listeners can also buy premium CDs or vinyl recordings, along with other merchandise, all of it conveniently available on Swift’s own store. That's a good example of adding value and it also demonstrates the extremely high value of owning one's own intellectual property, as I mentioned in the Six Business Lessons from Dungeons and Dragons episode. To sum up, whenever possible, I think it's better to try and add value than to extract rents. Taylor Swift provides a better example of adding value to her customers instead of the rent seeking behavior shown by Hasbro, Keurig, Cricut, John Deere, Scooter, and various other companies mentioned above, which I admit is not a sentence I ever thought I would say. But the evidence supports that conclusion. So that's it for this week. I hope that was an interesting discussion of the various intellectual property and rent seeking behaviors we're discussing. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this week's episode, I explain my process for creating a cover for my fantasy novels. We also answer reader questions. Coupon of the week returns! This week the coupon is for the ebook version of CLOAK GAMES: SHADOW JUMP. You can get it for 25% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code: JANCLOAK The coupon code is valid through January 31st, 2023. Get CLOAK GAMES: SHADOW JUMP here! https://payhip.com/b/vCTm8

The Pulp Writer Show returns for 2023 In this week's episode, we take a look at six business lessons for authors inspired by Jon Peterson's book GAME WIZARDS, which describes the legal struggles around Dungeons & Dragons in the 1980s. We also take a look at Brandon Sanderson's decision to keep his Kickstarter novels off Audible.

In this week's episode, I look back to see how many of my writing goals in 2022 I reached, and I set some new writing goals for 2023. I also look back at my favorite books and games of 2022. TRANSCRIPT Audio file Episode140.mp3 Transcript   00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 140 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is December 23rd, 2022 and today we're discussing how many of my writing goals I hit in 2022 and some writing goals I have for 2023. We’ll also take a quick look back at some books and games I enjoyed this year and have a few questions from readers as well. First up, let's talk about where I am with my current writing projects. I had hoped to be done with the rough draft of Dragonskull: Talons of the Sorcerer by Christmas Eve (which is tomorrow when I'm recording this) but I only made it to chapter 18 of 21. So close but not quite. I would have made it, but I spent a lot of time over the last two weeks doing snow shoveling due to the bad weather. I think that soaked up enough or any time that I was not able to finish the rough draft of Dragonskull: Fury of the Barbarians before Christmas Eve. So the new goal is before New Year's Eve. It's another eve, so hopefully that counts. I am also 12,000 words into the book I hope to release in February, and I will talk about that a little more when I get to my writing goals for 2023. 00:01:12 Reader Questions/Comments Before we get into our main topics, let's have a few questions from readers. First Fluvia asks: I always look forward to your books. I'm curious. Are there any characters you miss writing? Third, for instance. Thanks. I'm glad you have enjoyed reading the books. In answer to your question, I miss writing nearly all of my characters, but then I do think it's a good idea to try writing new characters from time to time to keep the brain fresh and the readers interested. Our next question is from Natalie, who asks: are you planning to release the two most recent Silent Order in paperback? Yes, I am. I need to do the paperback versions of Silent Order: Rust Hand, since I forgot to do that last year and also Silent Order: Wreck Hand. I also have to get Cloak of Masks out in paperback as well. The reason I didn't do that this month was because I always like to order a copy of the book first. After I make the paperback, I like to order a copy of the book first to make sure everything's okay and nothing's damaged and all the printing turned out and don't like to do that in December because all the poor delivery people are overburdened as it is and the weather has been so bad lately anyway. In January, I will block off some time to sit down and do the paperback versions for Silent Order: Rust Hand, Wreck Hand, and Cloak of Masks, which I never got around to doing. 00:02:34 Favorite Books and Video Games of 2022 Before we get to our main topics, let's take a look at some of the books and video games I enjoyed this year as we're approaching the end of 2022. I thought I was going to do books, games, and movies, but I realized that if someone came up to me and said okay, books, games, and movies/TV shows, you have to get rid of one of them, I would probably get rid of movies and TV shows since I enjoyed books and video games much more. The two best movies I saw this year were Top Gun Maverick and then Father of the Bride, which I had never seen before and it's really quite funny and quite moving and a very well constructed movie. It turned up on Prime so I watched it and it was really quite good. So those are the two best movies I watched this year, Top Gun Maverick and Father of the Bride. Now on to books. My favorite books that I read this year, the first one would be The Icarus Plot by Timothy Zahn, which came out in July. It is a sequel to the Icarus Hunt, which came out like 20 years ago and was one of my favorite science fiction books of all time. The Icarus Plot is a sequel to the Icarus Hunt and continues the story in the adventures the story in the universe established in the Icarus Hunt. The premise is that in the future, interstellar travel is monopolized by an alien race called The Path who have a hyperdrive that's faster than everybody else and this has led to resentments. A human archaeologist discovers a potentially faster star drive that could destroy The Path’s economic monopoly, so all sorts of intrigue and skullduggery abound, which continue in The Icarus Plot. Definitely recommended and the audiobook versions, which are read by Marc Thompson, are very good. If you are listening to audiobooks on your upcoming Christmas journeys, they're worth listening to as well. I also read The Law by Jim Butcher, which is a novella I believe he self-published that is a sequel to his ongoing Dresden Files series and deals with the aftermath of the big events in Battleground and Peace Talks, which he released back in 2020 during peak pandemic. It's a very enjoyable little novella. I've written before and talked on the show about the trick of deescalating a long term fantasy and science fiction series and this is something that happens in The Dresden Files, since in the last couple of books here, Dresden has fought some seriously heavyweight foes. In this one he finds himself in a legal drama where his powers as a wizard and the Winter Knight are not so useful, and so he has to navigate the difficulties of that within the constraints of human law. A very interesting story and I would recommend it. I believe it's in Kindle Unlimited if you have a Kindle Unlimited subscription, so you could be read that as part of your subscription. I also read the Ice and Monster series by Peter Nealan. I'm not sure how to pronounce his name, so I took my best stab at it. The concept of this is that a group of Reconnaissance Marines on boats get pulled into a strange mist that transports them to essentially a fantasy world ruled by dark magic and monsters. And so the Recon Marines have to ally with the good forces in that world to fight the monsters. This is part of the long tradition of what's called sort of portal fantasy, where people and protagonists from our world get transported to a fantasy world and have to take part in the conflict there. It's a really enjoyable series of books as the Recon Marines deal with their own incompetent officers and the various treacherous and dangerous inhabitants of the fantasy world. And it's not done yet. I am looking forward to the sequels. Now on to the games I enjoyed most in 2022. According to Nintendo Switch’s Year in Review, the game I played the most of this year was Elder Scrolls Blades, which I enjoyed, but I can't really recommend it because it is  heavily laden with microtransactions throughout. If you are the sort of person whose psychology is vulnerable to microtransactions, then you definitely should not play this game because before you know it, you'll probably find yourself putting $600.00 on your credit card for buying legendary chests and gem packs and all that. That said, I did not spend a single dollar on this game, which was nice, and I did enjoy the bite size nature of it. As you may have gathered from other episodes of the podcast, I have a lot going on and so often gaming time is quite constrained, but it's nice to be able to pick up Elder Scrolls Blades and you know, playing for quick 15 minutes before continuing on with what I had to do that day. I did beat the main quest without paying for any microtransactions, though it did take a long time to grind out the levels necessary to do that, which the game’s bite sized nature played with being helpful. It took me like 10 months to beat it and there are times where I set it aside and then long stretches where I would play a little bit at a time and then I gradually built up enough levels and equipment to finish the game. So I can say I enjoyed it, but I don't necessarily recommend it. One game I enjoyed and can recommend is Metroid Dread. Technically, that came out in October 2021, but I didn't beat it until the end of February 2022, so I'm including that for this year. Metroid Dread is the latest installment in the Metroid series where you take control of the interstellar bounty hunter Samus Aran, and this time she's on a mysterious uncharted planet where a mysterious armored figure traps her and she has to fight her way free past all sorts of monsters and obstacles and bosses while exploring the map and getting new weapons and all the other classic elements of the Metroid series. I honestly think it's tied with Super Metroid on the Super Nintendo for Best Metroid Game, and Metroid Dread has major advantages in terms of, you know, the improvements in technology over the 30 years since Super Metroid came out. The graphics obviously are much better. Controls are much smoother. Wall jumping in Super Metroid was a serious challenge that was difficult to do, whereas in Metroid Dread, it's flawless and there are a couple of mini bosses like the corrupted Chozo soldiers you fight throughout the game are a lot easier to fight if you use wall jumping to bounce off the wall when they attack you. So if you enjoyed the Metroidvania style of games and you have a Nintendo Switch, I think you would very much enjoy playing Metroid Dread. The third game I played most this year was the Diablo 2 remake for Switch. I've been playing that the last six weeks or so. I was playing when it came out at the end of 2021 and I got to the end of Act One and sort of hit a wall and could get past it and then I put it aside. But with Microsoft and Activision and the lawsuit and the Federal Trade Commission being in the news lately, that brought the Diablo 2 remake back to my mind. I reinstalled it on my Switch and started playing again and I actually enjoyed it more this time because Elder Scrolls Blades had sort of trained me on doing things bite sized. You really can't do that with Diablo 2, you know, play for a little bit, get a little experience, and gradually grind out levels. So this time I was able to get past Act One, and now I'm on Act Two of the game. This may have been the last good game what was left of Blizzard made before it was totally subsumed by Activision. In fairness, I hear the multiplayer experience on the Diablo 2 remake isn't very good. It's probably improved since it came out, but I have no interest in playing that and I'm not going to try it, so I can't offer a definitive opinion. But if you want to play single player, it's definitely a very enjoyable experience. And the final game I enjoyed and would definitely recommend this year just came out on December 13th: the Master of Magic remake from Slitherine, and MuHa Studios. I got it the day it came out. Now that the game’s out, I can say I got in on the tail end of the beta program. I don't know how much help I was as a beta tester because I got in the beta program in September and October when I was very busy and I had no time to play it. But I've been playing it since it came out and I really enjoy it. It's a quite faithful remake of the old ‘90s Master of Magic with a lot of the rough edges sanded off. Some of the reviews were critical, saying that was copying Age of Wonders. The thing is the original Master of Magic came out first, Age of Wonders then came out, and then this is a remake of the original Master of Magic. So saying the remake of Master of Magic copied Age of Wonders is like saying J.R.R. Tolkien copied the Elves and orcs of Lord of the Rings from World of Warcraft. There's some chronological confusion that is going on there. So if you have a PC powerful enough to play the game, I definitely recommend it. It is a very heavy game in terms of RAM needed/amount of processing. I wanted to play it on my Surface Pro but my Surface Pro just doesn't have the graphics hardware to handle it, so that's not happening. I have been playing on my laptop at night which is good because it's been like -10 and the laptop heats up so much that it's a good way to stay warm without increasing the heating bill. So if you have played the original Master of Magic back in the ‘90s and I definitely recommend giving the remake of Master of Magic a try, I think you'll enjoy it. 00:12:18 Main Topic: 2022 and 2023’s Writing Goals But this isn't Jonathan Moeller's gaming podcast. This is Jonathan Moeller's writing podcast. So let's take a look at how I did with 2022’s writing goals and what I am hoping to achieve in the world of writing in 2023. I have to admit 2022 was my weakest year for writing since 2015, both in terms of words written and sales. Of course it wasn't some great mystery as to why this happened, and nor was it from any one thing. It was the cumulative effect of a lot of different things, specifically and not limited to: traveling a long way for a funeral, a whole lot of home repair (including teaching myself how to do numerous things I had never done before this year but really, really, really needed to do this year), a hailstorm, a new roof, and considerably more travel than I had in 2020 and 2021 combined. I know some people find travel energizing and even relaxing, but I don't. I'll travel happily for family and professional reasons when I need to, but I usually come home out of gas and takes a couple of days before I feel like myself again. The most humorous of my many home repair adventures was the squirrel. I've had squirrels get into the walls before, and once they're in the walls, getting them out is an ordeal. Ask me how I know. Around September, the squirrels start looking for places to nest for the winter and one squirrel in particularly zeroed in on the front porch. Somehow the thing could sense every weak point in the porch and started gnawing to tunnel into it and because of the age of the house, if a squirrel gets through the porch, it's going to find a way into the wall. So three days in a row, I had to go out, replace porch boards, and paint them, and eventually the squirrel gave up and went in search of easier nesting grounds. So my nemesis had become a woodland creature like I was a Disney villain or something, but I had to trade writing time for home repair because I really didn't want squirrels getting into the wall again and I'd say it was time well spent because there is not a squirrel in my wall right now as I'm recording this. However, all that said, if 2022 was my weakest year since 2015, I still sold 2 1/2 times as many books in 2022 as I did in 2015. Perspective, ladies and gentlemen, is very important. So I had eight writing goals for 2022 and let's see how I did with them. The 1st goal: write 1,000,000 words of new fiction. That didn't happen. I wanted to write a million new words, but for all the reasons I've explained above, I only made it to 814,000, which admittedly is still a lot of words. Granted, it's only 81% of what I wanted to do, but 81% is still a passing grade. I mean, as we've seen from recent history, you can graduate from Harvard with an 81% average and have a long and prosperous career in government. So I'm not going to complain about hitting an 814,000 words, though I really would have wanted to get to 1,000,000. My 2nd writing goal was to continue the Dragonskull series, and I did that. Dragonskull: Blade of the Elves, Dragonskull: Curse of the Orcs, and Dragonskull: Fury of the Barbarians all came out in 2022. I would have liked to have gotten one more Dragonskull out in 2022, but it didn't work out.  Dragonskull: Talons of the Sorcerer, assuming I get finished, will be my first book out in 2023. My 3rd writing goal is to continue the Cloak Mage series. We actually ended up with a lot of new Nadia this year: Cloak of Iron, Cloak of Shards, Cloak of Spheres, and Cloak of Masks, so I had four new Nadia come out this year, which is pretty good. So that went pretty well. I'm hoping to start on Cloak of Dragonfire, the 9th Cloak Mage book, in February once Dragonskull: Talons of the Sorcerer is out. My 4th writing goal of 2022 was to write a third Cormac Rogan mystery, and I didn't do that one, I'm afraid. I got about 40% of the way into it and then set it aside to do other things. The problem is that, like everyone else in 2022, I'm concerned about money. Home repair and fighting off squirrels does not pay for itself, alas. If I published a third Cormac Rogan book, I have a good idea about how much money would make. I also know that if I published a new Silent Order book, it would make five times as much. A new Nadia book would make 8 to 10 times as much, and a new Dragonskull book would make 10 to 12 times as much and all for about the same amount of work. That makes it really hard to justify spending that much time finishing the Cormac Rogan book, so I thought it was best to set the third Cormac Rogan book aside and do Silent Order instead. Maybe I will have a chance to work on it again at some point. My 5th writing goal was to write the 11th Silent Order book, Silent Order: Rust Hand and unlike my previous goal, I actually did this one. In fact did it twice as well as I hoped. I ended up doing 2 Silent Order books, Silent Order: Rust Hand and Silent Order: Wreck Hand. The advantage of Silent Order books, from my perspective, is that they're shorter and so easier to squeeze in when real life gets busy, which it did several times this year. I am hoping to start on Silent Order: Thunder Hand (that's a cool title, I think) in February and as with the previous two books, I'll squeeze it in what looks like I'm going to have a busy real life month, which undoubtedly will happen. Since a few people have asked, there will be a grand total of 15 Silent Order books to wrap up the series and Thunder Hand will be #13. So after Thunder Hand, we will have two more Silent Order books. My 6th writing goal for 2022 was to finish the Frostborn series in audio. People have been asking for this to happen for years, since 2017 when the first Frostborn audiobook started to come out from Tantor and 2022 is the year we finally did it. Frostborn: The Dragon Knight and Frostborn: The Shadow Prison came out this year, finally completing the Frostborn series in audio, with the first five books excellently narrated by Stephen Crossley and the final ten books excellently narrated by Brad Wills. As an added bonus, Brad was also able to do Malison: The Complete Series in audio, which sold really well when the ebook version had a Bookbub back in November. My 7th writing goal for 2022 was to finish Ghost Exile in audio and we did this as well. We had Ghost in the Inferno, Ghost in the Seal, Ghost in the Throne, Ghost in the Pact, and Ghost in the Winds. All came out this year and all of them excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. I need to sit down and total up how long the combined Ghosts and Ghost Exile series are, but I think it comes to like 220 finished hours. Looking back I did a lot of audio in 2022 and by autumn, combined with everything else that was going on in real life and that kind of became overwhelming. I have to admit for a while it seemed like I was forever behind and trying to get ahead, but we got through it and these excellent audiobooks are now available for you to listen to. I think I'm going to take a break from producing new audio books until spring or summer of 2023. A break from proofing audio books would be nice before I get back to it. My 8th and final writing goal was health related for 2022. It was to lose 1 pound, which did not happen. I actually lost like 500 lbs. The problem was it was just the same pound I lost over and over and over again. So we'll give that another try once the holidays are over and the giant plates of Christmas cookies are not sitting within easy reach. So those are my 2022 writing goals. I hit most of them, missed some, maybe I didn't hit many of them as I would like, but it could have been much worse. So I'm grateful things went as well as they did, and that so many people read my books. So let's take a look at what I would like to do in 2023. I don't think I'm going to set like any really big goals. The last two years have shown in the folly of long term planning, so my goals will be more along the lines of stay the course and don't do anything stupid. I do want to try something new, which I mentioned earlier in the show, with the book I'm hoping to have come out in February, but more on that as we get through the writing goals. Of my five writing goals for 2023, the 1st one is to write as many words as possible but try to hit 1,000,000 new words. The last time I hit 1,000,000 words in a year was 2020 when I did 1.27 million words. Of course, that was the year of the great coronavirus shutdowns and everything else connected with that, so there was nothing else to do but write and take Photoshop classes, as it happens. I think I had 22 10,000 word days in 2020, whereas you know in 2022 I only had one. I also wrote the entirety of the Wraithshard series and about half of Dragontiarna in 2020, which seems crazy in hindsight. That was a lot of writing, like when you look back at the stuff you did in high school and college and wonder how you lived through that. That's kind of how I feel about writing the entire Wraithshard series in 2020, though that was only two years ago. I would like, if possible and feasible, to hit over 1,000,000 words in 2023. We'll see if that happens or not. My 2nd writing goal for 2023 is to continue the Dragonskull series. The Dragonskull series will between eight to ten books long. It depends on how long book seven turns out to be, whether it will be eight, nine, or ten books. So I might finish it in 2023. We'll see what happens. That's not a promise. At the very least I definitely will continue it. Dragonskull: Talons of the Sorcerer should come out in January, if all goes well and I'd like the book after that to come out in March or April. Ah, my 3rd writing goal for 2023 is to continue the Cloak Mage series, and if I could do a couple more Cloak Mage books out in 2023, that would be great. I'm going to start on Cloak of Dragonfire in February. I do have very specific ideas for the next few books, so I'm looking forward to getting them. Nadia is going to be very busy. My 4th writing goal for 2023 is to continue Silent Order. I would like to at least get Silent Order: Thunder Hand out in 2023 and maybe the 14th book, if things work out that way. But again, if 2022 taught us anything, it was the folly of attempting to predict the future. So we I would hope I can get the Thunder Hand out and then we'll see if I can get any other books in that series out. My 5th and final goal for 2023 and one that I've alluded to already in the show, is write in a new genre of fantasy. I'm going to write a new genre of fantasy and I am actually 12,000 words into it. I realized that I haven't created any new settings since 2017 when I started writing Silent Order. You could say that Mallison was a new setting, but was really part of the Frostborn universe and was integrated into Dragontiarna. In fact, this was kind of a prequel that Dragontiarna, so I don't think it counts as an entirely new setting, so for my new genre of fantasy I decided to try writing a LitRPG book. Let's be honest, I played a lot of games so I have the background for it. Also LitRPG, Gamelit, and progression fantasy in general seem to be more popular with the younger generation than traditional epic fantasy and sword and sorcery, so I thought it'd be a good idea to try writing one. One of the keys to success as an indie author is to find the overlap on the Venn diagram between things that will sell and things that I enjoy reading and writing. LitRPG might fall into that category for me. We'll see. I have a specific sales figure in mind for the book to hit its first month. If the LitRPG books hits it, I will write sequels. If it doesn't, it will be a standalone experiment I enjoyed. I think after 137 or so books I’m an experienced enough writer to pull off LitRPG. However, the other possibility’s also true that I'm too old to pull off a LitRPG, but we will find out when I write it. More details to come after Dragonskull: Talons of the Sorcerer's done and I would like the LitRPG book to be out in February, if all goes well. And so finally, thanks for reading, everyone. I hope you enjoyed the books over 2022 and I am looking forward to writing more in 2023 (unless the squirrels get out of hand, of course). So that is it for this episode. And in fact, that is it for this year. I thank you everyone for listening to the show over this year and I hope you found it useful and enjoyable. I hope you all have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year and that the new year gets off to a good start for you. If you've enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform choice, whether Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all in 2023.

In this week's episode, I talk with Troy Lambert of Plottr (http://plottr.com), who discusses ways that writers can use Plottr to outline their books and prepared story bibles for longer series. You can see Troy's "Thursdays With Troy" videos about Plottr on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/@Plottr This week the coupon is for the audiobook of GHOST IN THE STORM. As you might know, GHOST IN THE WINDS came out in audiobook recently, and narrator Hollis McCarthy said that of the eighteen Caina novels (and two short stories) she narrated, GHOST IN THE STORM and GHOST IN THE WINDS were her two favorites. So you can get 75% of GHOST IN THE STORM at my Payhip store with this coupon code: DECSTORM The coupon code is good through January 9th, 2023. Get GHOST IN THE STORM here! https://payhip.com/b/T9Lk7

In this week's episode, we discuss 5 tips to solve the Sequel Escalation problem. We also talk about the validity of AI-generated artwork. This week the coupon is for one of my favorite books, SILENT ORDER: ECLIPSE HAND! I wrote ECLIPSE HAND entirely on Ubuntu Linux to prove that it could be done, so five years and five thousand copies sold later I still get a sense of satisfaction looking back at it. You can get 75% off ECLIPSE HAND at my Payhip store with this coupon code: 12ECLIPSE The coupon code will be valid through December 31st, 2022. https://payhip.com/b/j5J6f

In this week's episode, I answer a new writer's business questions. We also discuss when smartphones first became useful. The release of the final audiobook in the GHOST EXILE series, GHOST IN THE WINDS, is imminent! To celebrate this occasion, this week's coupon gives you 75% off the audiobook of GHOST IN THE COWL (the first one in the series) at my Payhip store: DECGHOSTS The coupon is valid through December 25th, 2022. So if you need an audiobook for your Christmas travels, GHOST IN THE COWL has you covered! https://payhip.com/b/SMj1q

In this week's episode, I take a look at seven things I am thankful for in the indie author world. I also talk a bit about ELDER SCROLLS BLADES, a mobile game I've been playing recently. 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 https://payhip.com/b/lhCyU 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.

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 https://payhip.com/b/W8H9g The coupon code will be valid until November 30th, 2022.

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

In this week's episode, I take a look at how writers should respond to negative reviews of their books. I also take a look at advertising performance in October 2022.

In this week's episode, I take a look at the movies and TV shows I watched this autumn and share my opinions. This includes Top Gear Maverick, Morbius, Jurassic World Dominion, Rings of Power, She-Hulk, Andor, and others.

In this week's episode, I discuss ways to create and maintain suspension of disbelief while writing fiction. I also answer reader questions and talk about the original HALO game.