Podcasts about caina

The Kazuo Ishiguro season continues with maybe his least known, maybe his least liked work: Nocturnes. Sitting between the mega-hit Never Let Me Go and the critical blockbuster The Buried Giant, this book is often overlooked and, maybe, it kind of deserves to be? But first, we talk GAMING - specifically Clair Obscure: Expedition 33 and The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy, because our woke Marxist schools taught us that everything is a text. Music by Hedvig Mollestad Trio, theme tune by Caina.

Are books... dangerous? A lot of people think so, from Moms For Liberty to the mostly-imaginary internet spectre of the censorious Puriteen. Lyta Gold joins us to talk about which books are most dangerous and which might be able to redeem the act of reading. Theme tune by Caina: https://cainaband.bandcamp.com/ Danger is our Patreon's middle name: https://www.patreon.com/DeathSentence

It's the 250th episode of The Pulp Writer Show! To celebrate this occasion, this episode takes a look at the expectations people have of a full-time writer's life and contrasts them with the reality. This coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Dragonskull: Talons of the Sorcerer, Book #6 in the Dragonskull series (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills), at my Payhip store: TALONS50 The coupon code is valid through May 27, 2025. So if you need a new audiobook for spring, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates   Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 250 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is May 2, 2025, and today we're looking at what it is really like to be a full-time writer. This is also the 250th episode of the podcast, so thank you all for listening to the podcast over these last six years. Before I started recording, I totaled up the total length of previous podcast episodes and came to about 78 hours, give or take. That's like three days of continuous talking, which sounds less impressive when you realize it was recorded over the last six years.   Thank you all for listening and here's hoping you can stick around with the next 250 episodes. Before we get to our main topic, which is the expectations versus reality of being a full-time writer, we are going to do Coupon of the Week, a progress update my current writing projects, and then Question of the Week. So let's kick off with Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Dragonskull: Talons of the Sorcerer, Book Six in the Dragonskull series (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store. That code is TALONS50. As always, you can get that coupon code and the links to my Payhip store in the show notes. This coupon code is valid through May 27th, 2025. So if you need a new audiobook for spring, we have got you covered.   Now an update on my current writing projects. I am 60,000 words into Ghost in the Corruption, which puts me on chapter 13 of 21, so I'm about two thirds of the way through. I think the rough draft will be between 90-100,000 words long, so hopefully I can have that out before the end of May, if all goes well. I also just finished Chapter One of Shield of Power, which will be the final book of the Shield War series and that'll be my main project once Ghost in the Corruption is finished. I'm also 87,000 words into Stealth and Spells Online: The Final Quest, and that will be my main project once Shield of Power comes out. I expect Final Quest should come out pretty soon after Shield of Power just because I've been chipping away at it for so long and I'm getting close to the end.   In audiobook news, recording is almost done for Ghost in the Assembly and that'll be narrated by Hollis McCarthy. Recording is totally done for Shield of Deception (as narrated by Brad Wills) and that is working its way through processing at the various audiobook platforms, so hopefully we'll not be too much longer before we can get that to you.   00:02:26 Question of the Week So that is where I'm at with my current writing projects. And now let's move on to Question of the Week. Question of the Week is intended to inspire enjoyable discussions of interesting topics. This week's question, what is your favorite Jonathan Moeller book? The reason for this question is that this is the 250th podcast episode, so it seems like a good topic for that particular milestone. And as you might expect, we had an array of different opinions.   Joachim says: You are kidding us! By the end of the week? How long did you think about your own answer? Let me mirror you: for my own answer, the question is a bit difficult because I spent money on all your books, which meant I thought all of them a good buy. So let me split my answer into male and female protagonists. The best female book was Ghost Exile: Omnibus One because it prompted me to continue with Ghost Exile and fill in the Ghost series later. The Ghosts Omnibus One and Ghost Exile: Omnibus One were my first two books from you. The best male book was the one with Jack March where Thunderbolt said, “males are ogling breasts which never existed”, especially as such AI generated videos are now all over the place on YouTube.   I have to admit that I first came up with the character of Thunderbolt back in early 2021 when I was working on Silent Order: Rust Hand (that was before the AI boom really took off), so she turned out to be a very prescient character for the AI era in a number of ways.   Joe B. says: That is a tough question as there are many contenders. I'm going to go with one that is a little different, Sevenfold Sword Online: Creation, but now known as Stealth and Spells Online: Creation.   Justin says: I nominate Soul of Swords, an excellent end to an excellent series.   Perry says: There can only be one! Demonsouled. Paul says: For me, I think my favorite female protagonist  book is Cloak Games: Truth Chain. Such a dramatic change to Nadia, sets up the series in her struggles with self and enemies so well.   Brad Wills (who as you know narrated the Frostborn, Dragonskull, Malison, and Shield War series for me) says: Does a three book arc count?  Excalibur, The Dragon Knight, and The Shadow Prison made for a fantastic lead-up and finale of the Frostborn series.   Hollis McCarthy (who as you know, narrated the Ghosts and Cloak Mage audiobooks) says: Ghost in the Storm, when Caina and Kylon meet in the Battle for Marsis. Nonstop action, incredible chase scenes, and a great intro to their combative relationship.   Fred says: It's hard for me to say which book is my favorite. All your book series were all great.   Juana says: Frostborn: Excalibur with Ridmark. I happen to love stories about Excalibur, odd but true. Caina in Cloak and Ghost: Rebel Cell because Caina and Nadia are an incendiary team. So there! Randy says: Frostborn: The Dragon Knight. This whole series is great, but that is one of the high points.   Dennis says: I couldn't name my favorite as I enjoy everything you write. I probably enjoyed the Frostborn series best at the time, but having bought and read every one of your books it's now impossible.   Kevin says: There's no way on earth that I could put one book above another, so I would've to take the coward's way out and say Frostborn: The Gray Knight simply because it has a book that drew me to the worlds of Jonathan Moeller back in the spring of 2017, since which time I have bought 117 of his books, including a few omnibus editions, so a few more actual books, I suppose. I avidly read them all as they're published these days, except the Silent Order series (just doesn't grab me and pull me in like the others). Jesse says: Cloak Games: Sky Hammer. Damaged Nadia at her best, epic action the whole way. And yeah, the chapter The Last Death of Nadia Moran was viscerally cinematic and probably the biggest emotional payoff you've written in my opinion, tied her entire journey together. In my head, I cast Castle-era Stana Katic as Nadia, and it worked better than I expected it might.   Morgan says: I can't narrow it down to just one. So top three in no particular order, Sevenfold Swords: Swordbearer, Dragontiarna: Gates, and Stealth and Spells Online: Leveling. That being said, I think Niara might be my favorite character of all your books I have read.   Jonathan T says: I too am torn though only between two books, Frostborn: The Eightfold Knife and Frostborn: The Shadow Prison.   [Side note/addition from The Transcriptionist: My vote is for Half-Elven Thief!]   So thank you everyone for the kind words about all those books. For my own answer, the question is a bit difficult because I've written them all, which meant I thought all of them were good idea at the time. I suppose the glib answer would be the one that made me the most money, which was Frostborn: The Iron Tower, but it really depends on the category, like my favorite heist book, my favorite mystery book, my favorite dungeon crawl, my favorite first in series. So I think I'll go for the most basic level of categorization and split it up by male and female protagonists.   My favorite book of mine with a female protagonist would probably be Cloak Games: Rebel Fist, since it's such a turning point for Nadia and starts the trajectory of the rest of her character arc. It's the first time she really has to save the day instead of just trying to save herself and shows that her brother Russell can also handle himself, which as you know, comes up again later. My favorite book of mine with a male protagonist would probably be Dragontiarna: Defenders, since it has the Battle of Shadow Crown Hill, which was one of my favorite sequences to write. Four different characters have plans and they all crash into each other at the same time, which was a lot of fun to write and set up, which was a real highlight for me in 2020 because as we all know, 2020 was a fun year.   00:07:35 Main Topic of the Week: Writing Full Time: Expectations Versus Reality   So that is it for Question of the Week. Now let's move on to our main topic this week, writing full-time: expectations versus reality (admittedly from the perspective of a self-published author). If you spent any time around the writing community on the Internet at all, you know that many people dream of becoming a full-time writer, and sometimes people think that the only way to be successful as a writer is to write full-time. There are many expectations that people have about what it means to be a full-time writer. Now that I've been a full-time indie writer for nearly nine years at this point, I can provide some lived perspective. In this episode, I will talk about five of those expectations that people have about full-time writing and the way those expectations might be skewed.   So before we get to those, I should mention how I actually became a full-time writer. In 2016 (which seems like a really long time ago now), the Frostborn series was doing really well, and at the time I was also working full time and I realized that summer I was going to have to move for family reasons. I wasn't very enthusiastic about the idea of moving at first, but I decided to embrace the idea and try to make the best of it. This would involve moving a considerable distance to a different state and all the different problems that entails. So I thought about it and I thought I could look for a new job, but any job I would be qualified for in the area I was moving to would make less money than I was actually making from writing part-time. So I thought, why not try and make a go of full-time writing and see what happens?   Since that was nine years ago, I think I can safely say it's worked out pretty well. And I will say that it's been a pretty good experience and I am very fortunate and very grateful and very blessed to have been able to do this because not everyone has the opportunity to pursue a full-time creative job like I have been able to for these last nine years. That said, while it has been pretty great, it comes with a lot of flexibility and I've gotten to write a lot of great books that many people have enjoyed, it's not always all wine and roses, so to speak, which is part of the reason why I wanted to do this episode to let people more in what the reality of being a full-time writer for this long has been like. So with that introduction out of the way, let's move on to our five expectations versus reality.   Expectation #1: Full-time authors make a lot of money. The reality is that even full-time authors generally don't make that much money. A survey from The Author's Guild showed that the median amount that full-time authors make was just about $20,000, though full-time romance writers had a higher median income of about $37,000. Remember that this amount is before any health insurance costs, benefits, retirement contributions, and of course taxes that a traditional job might be able to provide or help with. In the United States, buying even fairly basic health insurance can easily be a thousand dollars per month for a family, and that doesn't include any costs related to deductibles, prescriptions, or additional dental or vision insurance. Authors are either on their own for healthcare in the US or have to rely on a spouse or partner's healthcare coverage. In other words, you either have to pony up a lot of money to buy your own health insurance or you have to rely on your spouse or partner's healthcare coverage.   And at least in the US, taxes are also much higher on the self-employed. Uncle Sam really does not like the self-employed. If you are self-employed, it is in your best interest to essentially form a small corporation and work for yourself (though for details on how to do that, you should consult with an accountant licensed to practice in your region). Now all these costs can add up pretty quickly, and they make the amount of money that you'll earn from writing much less than you think based on raw earnings before taxes and all the other expenses we were talking about. You also have business expenses like cover design, site hosting, editors, narrators, advertising, et cetera, that take even more pieces out of those earnings. You can duck some of those, but not all of them.   So it boils down to that you have to make a significant amount of money as an author to make an actual living after taxes, healthcare costs, and business expenses are taken out of your earnings, which is one of the reasons that writing part-time as you have a full-time job is not the worst idea in the world and can in fact be a very good idea.   Expectation #2: My next book will make as much or more than the last one did. The reality is that your next book or series might not make you as much money as the previous ones did. In fact, you can reliably predict that most book series will have a certain amount of reader drop off as a series goes on, which is why these days I tend to want to keep my series under nine to ten books or so. Budgeting based on your current income levels is not wise, especially with the current economic climate (which for a variety of reasons is very unpredictable) and with increased competition in the ebook market. Most authors have a peak at some point in their career. For example, Stephen King is still obviously making a great living as a writer putting out new books, but his new books don't sell nearly as well as the ones he put out in the ‘80s. J.K. Rowling's novels for adults (she writes as Robert Galbraith the Cormoran Strike series) don't sell anywhere near the number of copies as her Harry Potter series did at its peak.   For myself, my peak years in terms of writing income were 2016 and 2017, and I've never quite been able to recapture that level. In fact, in 2024, I only did about two thirds of what I did in 2017 (my peak year), which can be a little nerve wracking as you watch those numbers move up and down. That is why it is important for a writer (like many other creatives like actors) to anticipate that they might only have a limited window of peak success and to save aggressively rather than living large on the amount you're earning in that peak era. And I am pleased to report that I was fortunate enough and sensible enough to do that, so that even if my income has varied from year to year (2017 onward), it hasn't been a crippling loss and I haven't been out in the street or lost the house or anything like that.   Expectation #3: You will be happier if you write full-time. The reality is that is not true for everyone. Some people actually do better creatively and emotionally with the time restrictions placed on them by having a full-time job. Many famous writers, including Trollope and Kafka, kept their full-time jobs. Even Tolkien was never a full-time writer. He was a professor of philology until he retired. That was interesting to me because personally, I haven't had much in terms of emotional trouble being a full-time writer. I've always kind of had the ability to hyperfocus on a task, and I've been doing that for almost nine years now, and it's worked out well for me.   I've since realized that is not true for many people. One of the things that demonstrated it to me, believe it or not, was insurance actuarial tables. One thing that I tried to do after I became a full-time writer was try and get disability insurance in case I had an accident or severe illness and could not write anymore. I learned that it's extremely difficult for full-time writers to get disability insurance due to their high rates of substance abuse and mental illness. I was astonished by this because I've never had problems with substance abuse or mental illness myself, but given the number of writers and other creatives I've known who have had those issues, perhaps that's not that surprising, but I was still baffled to learn that.   For example, in my area there are a number of tree management companies (because it's a heavily wooded area) and it's a lot easier for an arborist who works with a chainsaw all day to get disability insurance than it is for a writer, which is somewhat crazy to think about because as a writer, I'm mostly sitting in a chair all day pressing buttons on a keyboard while an arborist is climbing a tree or in a crane with a chainsaw, which is a much more physically dangerous thing. But because of the rates of substance abuse and mental illness among full-time writers, apparently it is very difficult for full-time writers to get disability insurance. Some people struggle with the lack of structure and outward accountability that comes from being a full-time writer and find that actually decreases their productivity and leads them to fall into substance abuse or sink deeper into mental health problems. Very few people have the self-discipline and mental resilience required to be a full-time writer for years on end. And that's not me tooting my own horn so to speak, but apparently it is just the facts. Some writers even go back to full-time work just because they find it less stressful or better for their wellbeing. So I think this is an excellent example of having to know yourself and know what is best for you. For example, if you're a very extroverted person who enjoys talking to people at the office, becoming a full-time writer where you spend most of your time by yourself typing might not be the best for your long-term mental and physical health. Expectation #4: Writing full-time will make me more productive. The reality is having more time does not necessarily mean that you'll be more productive. Writers are notorious for falling prey to time wasters, such as social media scrolling, research spirals, and writing adjacent activities (of which there is a whole series about on this podcast already). It does take a lot of a self-discipline, focus, and determination to be a full-time writer. If you are a full-time writer, especially a full-time indie writer, you also have to balance writing time with various administrative tasks, marketing and ads, social media, fan correspondence, and the various tasks involved in the self-publishing process. Writing is not the only thing that writers actually do, and the other tasks often make finding time for writing more difficult than you might expect. Even traditionally published writers still have to carve out time for administrative work and assisting with marketing and social media work.   As your writing career scales up, so does the behind the scenes workload. This is true in my case. Up until 2023, I basically did everything myself, but I did have COVID pretty badly for a while in 2023 and it just knocked out my energy for a while and I realized that I can't keep trying to do everything by myself. I basically had a choice, either cut some tasks or get some help. So I have some people now, some contractors who help me with things like listening to audiobook proofs (I used to do that all myself), doing the podcast transcript, and Excel record keeping (which I used to do myself). While that is an expense, I don't regret it because it really has taken a lot off my plate and freed up more time for writing, which of course is the entire point.   Expectation #5: I admit this one made me laugh. I will have more free time as a full-time writer. I can attest firsthand that that is not true. What you have as a full-time writer is flexibility. The reality is, although there is flexibility on the job, the hours can be more than for a full-time job. There's a joke that full-time writers can work any 12 hours they want every day.   Most indie authors are putting out far more than one book a year in order to make a full-time income, and that requires a fairly demanding pace that most people don't have the self-discipline to maintain as a lifestyle for years and years on end. The majority of full-time writers right now are either romance or erotica writers who are putting out at least a book a month, sometimes even more. As I mentioned in an earlier point in the show, the administrative task can take far more time than most people would imagine. They could, depending on the circumstances, be easily 40 hours a week on their own before you have time to do a single word of writing on the page. I found you really have to guard your writing time well and find ways to keep administrative tasks, distractions, and necessary tasks such as home maintenance or childcare separate from writing.   Anyone who has ever worked from home is familiar with how difficult that can be because home comes with a wide set of distractions. Granted, that's often fewer distractions than the office, but home can have its own set of distractions. I've mentioned before that you need a bit of tunnel vision to produce the quantity of writing I do month after month. I do keep to a pretty rigid schedule. I have daily word count goals I always try to meet and I use the Pomodoro Method to make sure that I'm prioritizing my writing time.   If you are self-employed and working for yourself, that means there are no allocated vacation or sick days and no paid sick leave in the writing world. Taking a couple of weeks off usually means anticipating a loss in income, such as a month without a book being released. Sometimes, especially in the case of illness, family emergencies, and so forth, that just can't be helped. However, the long vacations people imagine writers being able to take mean either a loss of income or a couple of weeks beforehand of working extra hours to make up for it. For example, Brandon Sanderson, who is probably the most famous fantasy author right now, still works and writes on his vacations and does extra work before leaving for a vacation (such as pre-recording videos).   So as you can see, most of the expectations people have about what it's like to write full-time come from the hope that it will change their productivity or make it easier to write. In reality, if you manage your time well, you can often meet all your writing goals even while working another full-time job. Some people are even more productive under the time pressure of only having an hour or so available to write each day. You don't have to wait until you are a full-time writer for your writing career to start. I wrote for decades and published for years before I was a full-time writer.   Frankly, the idea that you need to be a full-time writer in order to be taken seriously or make money exists only in your own mind. Whether you are a full-time writer or not, what matters is having the discipline to shut out distractions and write with absolute consistency regardless of the circumstances. Even writing 250 to 300 words every single day can add up very quickly, even if you don't do it in 15 minute bursts like Anthony Trollope did.   Finally, I suppose this makes it sound like I'm painting a very bleak picture here, but I'm not. As I said before, I'm very fortunate to be able to do what I do, and I'm very grateful to all my readers that I'm able to write full-time and even hire on contractors for narration and behind the scenes work. I appreciate and am very grateful to all the readers who have supported me by continuing to buy my work and access it through subscription services like Kindle Unlimited or Kobo Plus or library options like Libby and Hoopla.   So that is it for this week. I hope it provided some insight into what it's like to be a full-time writer. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show and all 250 episodes. I hope you found the show and all 250 episodes useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. 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.  

Today's guest episode features an incredible human that I met during my travels in Australia. Caina Mendes is one of my best friends that I was lucky enough to meet when I was in Byron Bay. We had countless incredible conversations during this week we spent together and I kept saying to him, I wishhhhhh we had just recorded this for my podcast. So, we decided to sit down now to share a sneak peek into what we have been chatting about all day long during this week we spent together. We're diving deep into all things polarity, psychedelics, stagnation, success, relationships, attraction – it's gonna be spicyyy! So babe, grab your cacao or your matcha and a journal, because you're going to want to take notes!WANT PERSONALIZED SUPPORT? APPLY FOR MY 1-1 COACHING HERELAST CALL + SAVE 10% OFF: JOIN MY FEMININE ENERGY MINI-MIND *THRIVE ON LIFE*In this episode, we discuss: – Caina's life story and his journey that brought him to where he is today– Lessons and experiences on men, women, and polarity in relationships– The four levels of trust and attraction - what are relationship grids?– Indicators that a man is looking for a long-term relationship + traits they're looking for– Caina's thoughts on psychedelics and spirituality– Caina's top tip to Unfuck Your Life that you can implement today------Connect with Caina: Caina's instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cainaxmendes/ Caina's Business: https://www.instagram.com/heetbyron/ Connect with Laura: Laura's Website: https://www.lauraherde.com/Laura's IG: https://www.instagram.com/laura.herde/Laura's 1-1 Coaching: https://www.lauraherde.com/application-1-1Laura's Coaching Certification Course: https://www.instagram.com/embodiedcoachacademy/More free resources for you:*FREE* HEAL YOUR FEMININE ENERGY GUIDE⁠*FREE* MASTERCLASS: THE ART OF ATTRACTION>> EMAIL ME TO CONNECT/ ASK QUESTIONS: hello@lauraherde.com>> FOLLOW ME ON INSTAGRAM: @laura.herde Feel free to share this episode with your bestie, and tag us on IG when you listen so we can repost you!Make sure to be subscribed to UNFUCK YOUR LIFE, we publish episodes every single Tuesday.Thank you so much for tuning in, love xx

In this week's episode, I take a look at some of the historical influences & inspirations that went into my new book GHOST IN THE ASSEMBLY. This coupon code will get you 25% off SILENT ORDER: OMNIBUS ONE at my Payhip store: SILENT25 The coupon code is valid through April 7th, 2025. So if you need a new book to read for spring, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates   Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 244 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is March 21st, 2025, and today we are looking at some of the historical influences that went into Ghost in the Assembly. Before we get into that, we will do Coupon of the Week and an update my current writing and audiobook projects. And then Question of the Week, which we did have time for this week.   This week's coupon code will get you 25% off the ebook of Silent Order: Omnibus One at my Payhip store. That coupon code is SILENT25. I'll have the links and the coupon code in the show notes. This coupon code is valid through April 7, 2025, so if you need a new book to read for these spring months, we have got you covered.   Now an update on my current writing projects. I am 44,000 words into Shield of Battle, the fifth book in the Shield War series. I'm hoping to have that out towards the end of April, if all goes well. A reminder that the Shield War series will be six books, so Shield the Battle will be the second to last one. I have also started on the sequel to Ghost in the Assembly, and I am 4,000 words into that, give or take. I had originally planned to call this book Ghost in the Assassins, but I thought that sounded too similar to Ghost in the Assembly. So the fifth book in the Ghost Armor series will be called Ghost in the Corruption. A reminder that Ghost Armor will be six books long and Ghost in the Corruption will be the fifth of six books, so the second to last book in that series as well.   In audio news, recording has started for Shield of Deception and Ghost in the Assembly. Shield of Deception will be excellently narrated by Brad Wills and Hollis McCarthy will excellently narrate Ghost in the Assembly. I expect both of them will probably be out sometime towards the end of May if all goes well, given how long it usually takes to record an audiobook.   In Stealth and Spells Online news, I am 68,000 words into the third and final book in this trilogy. Once Ghost Armor and Shield War are complete, then I will hopefully release the final book in the Stealth and Spells Online because I've been working on that as a tertiary project for quite a long time now. So that's where I'm at with my current writing and audiobook projects.   00:02:17 Question of the Week   Now let's move on to Question of the Week. Question of the Week is of course designed to inspire enjoyable discussions of interesting topics. This week's question, what is your favorite style of fantasy setting (like a more high fantasy, one like Middle Earth or the Forgotten Realms, urban fantasy like the Dresden Files or Kate Daniels or more steampunk like Everon and so on)? No wrong answers, obviously.   And as you can imagine this inspired quite a few responses.   Perry says: Hyperborea! Lankhmar is up there as well. Setting where magic is rare, and usually dangerous or evil. The first edition of the Forgotten Realms (the grey box from the ‘80s) was great. Enough detail to let you use the setting, lots of room to make it your own. Then all the Forgotten Realms novels started to appear with the release of the second edition in the ‘90s and everybody in the world suddenly had powerful magic at their fingertips. Elminster, the Seven Sisters, Drizz't, and others took the appeal right out of the setting for me.   Joachim says: I like the Spelljammer Campaign setting best. A lot of great modules. It seemed it was not overly successful. A shame. I had a campaign running in this setting with some people who liked it. In addition to the Spelljammer modules, you can easily transfer any normal module centered on a small town onto an asteroid.   Evan says: A huge Sanderson Cosmere fan here, especially Stormlight Archive. I like the magical progression tied in to character development, with a bit of mystery of how things work or an unknown that takes time to unwind or tease out.   Justin says: My problem here is separating the settings from the authors. Given that near impossibility, I would cast my vote for high fantasy with a bit of techno/steampunk mixed in. Example – Andre Norton's Witch World.   Bonnie says: I seem to gravitate towards the swords and sorcery genre like Frostborn, but I also enjoyed the urban fantasy/Nadia and the other genres. I have to thank you for introducing me to all of these.   Michael says: Okay, Jonathan, that's the second time I've noticed you indicating a preference for sword and sorcery saga where a barbarian hero travels between corrupt city states and now I really, really want you to write this. And yeah, that's definitely my favorite type of setting too.   Simone says: Definitely urban fantasy. Even in your books, which offer an unusual variety of fantasy settings, I find I enjoy the Cloak series the best.   Roger says: Being an old fogey, I prefer high fantasy always. Can't seem to get my head around urban fantasy. It jars with me.   John says: While I enjoy all settings, I'm also a traditionalist and want a non-industrial, non punk setting without some sprawling empire, more like the aftermath of empire with multiple successor states.   Jonathan T. says: Personally, Star Wars has always been fantasy in a science fiction setting, and that remains a personal favorite. Other than that, I suppose I'm for high fantasy, although I'm not opposed to high fantasy slapstick either such as the Wuntvor trilogy. At some point I must try again to surmount the obstacle known as The Wheel of Time.   Catriona says: Epic and high fantasy are my favorite, enjoy Dark Fantasy, too. Urban fantasy is a hard pass for me.   Juana says: Sword and sorcery, parfait gentle knights, medieval societies, historical fiction like Doyle's The White Company and Sir Nigel. Wherever Nadia lives.   Justin says: Sword and sorcery, magical creatures/beasts. Definitely needs different environments like cities and wild mountains and forests. Not sure what genre that is, but that's what I like.   MG says: High fantasy.   Brandy says: I like ones with a clearly defined map. Sometimes it seems like the world wasn't thought about clearly, so it makes it hard to imagine and I find those stories the least successful. The ones I go back to repeatedly, the ones I read over and over or pimp out to other authors or groups are those I feel like they have a great structure and map, even if it's added on to later. So high, low, or middle, I just really just want the author to tell a great story and make it a great one.   Speaking as an author myself, I really dislike drawing maps, but fantasy readers really like maps, so that's why I have been doing more and more maps lately.   Pauline says: Urban fantasy is definitely my favorite.   Jeremy says: High Fantasy is my favorite. However, my favorite fantasy author is Terry Brooks. His series is Low Fantasy based on Earth. I found out years after reading the series LOL.   For myself, I think my favorite would be a pre-industrial setting with a lot of city-states and various dangerous magic, like you have a barbarian hero wandering from city-state to city-state with monster infested ruins and wilderness between them. When he gets to the city states, he can fight corrupt sorcerers, arrogant nobles, and thieves guilds, and then move on to a new adventure in the next book. So basically a sword and sorcery style setting. So that's it for Question of the Week.   00:06:30 Main Topic of the Week: Ghost in the Assembly: Inspirations and Sources (Note: Spoilers for Ghost in the Assembly!)   This week and now onto our main topic, Ghost in the Assembly inspirations and sources that went into the book. I should mention that this episode contains mild spoilers for Ghost in the Assembly. So if you have not finished reading Ghost in the Assembly yet, stop listening and go finish reading Ghost in the Assembly.   So I thought it would be interesting to talk about some of the ideas and influences that went into Ghost in the Assembly. I have to admit, it took me a few years of thinking between Ghost Night and Ghost Armor to figure out how to write more Caina stories because Caina had become a political figure by the end of Ghost Night and political figures typically do bad things for personal advancement and then lie about it. That is in some ways the essential definition of a political figure. This of course, is hard for a writer to use as a sympathetic protagonist.   Of course, I eventually realized the way around this, the success of a political figure cannot be judged by their personal morality or even their political morality, but by the results of their decisions. Did they do the most for the greatest good of their people? Therefore, I just needed to write a political figure who did somewhat sketchy things (like subverting the Kyracian houses via buying up their debt) in the name of the greater good of the people (defending them from the impending attack of the Red Krakens).   I frequently said that if you want to write a good fantasy novel, you should try to stick to about 15 to 25% of the actual harshness of the past. I don't think you want to go full Grimdark, but you don't want your fantasy world to be indistinguishable from a typical 21st century parliamentary democracy because I think that kind of defeats the purpose of fantasy where you want to visit a world that is eldritch and strange and at least somewhat different than our own. So for Ghost in the Assembly, I went to about 15 to 25% of the experience of ancient Greek democracy. For the entire time that New Kyre and the Kyracians have been in the series (Ghost in the Storm was way the heck back in 2012 and the Kyracians were mentioned before that), they've always been very loosely based on the democracy of ancient Athens. In fact, the very name Assembly of New Kyre comes from ancient Athens, where the gathering of voting citizens was called the ecclesia, which translates into English as assembly. Interestingly, this is also the origins of the word ecclesiastical in terms of a church since one of the first words for the church was ecclesia in the sense of the assembly of the believers in Christ.   Athens wasn't the first ancient Greek democracy, but it was one of the most successful. It was also one of the democracies that self-destructed in the most spectacularly dramatic fashion possible. The Athenians decided to convert the Delian League from an alliance of city-states into their own private empire. A demagogue convinced them to waste enormous resources attacking Syracuse and Sicily, which ended disastrously. The Athenians were eventually defeated by the more militaristic Spartans.   People have debated for centuries whether or not this means democracy is inferior to the Spartans' harsher system, but that overlooks the key fact that a few decades later, Athens, Sparta, and all the rest of the Greek city-states were conquered by the Macedonians anyway. I suppose the actual historical lesson is that a city-state, regardless of its government, is no match for a larger centralized state with better leaders and better military organization. In fact, historically city-states tend to eventually get subsumed into larger political entities. If they last for a long time, it tends to be because of geography (like in ancient Greece) or because of weak and or remote central authority like the medieval Italian city-states, which were ostensibly under the authority of the Holy Roman emperor but in practice tended to do whatever they wanted. Places like modern Vatican City tend to be special exceptions.   Caina's criticism of the assembly of New Kyre in the book is that it is not as egalitarian as it pretends and is easily swayed by both demagogues and bribes. The Athenian assembly of citizens had both these problems, but far worse. You needed to have a substantial level of property to be allowed to vote, and there were numerous examples of the votes swinging on bribes or last minute orations. The Athenian assembly was easily swayed into making bad decisions, such as supporting the disastrous attack on Syracuse during the Peloponnesian War that was the start of Athens' downfall.   In Ghost in the Assembly, Lady Eirenea Tritos is one of the nine chief magistrates of the city, but in an Athenian democracy, women were not allowed to vote and most definitely were not allowed to hold political office. The ancient Greeks in general did not have a very high opinion of women. One Greek orator said that men had wives to produce legitimate heirs, concubines to attend to the body's “daily needs”, and prostitutes for pleasure.   Because of things like that, I thought a setting with a hundred percent of the harshness of ancient Greece would be off-putting to the reader. So as I said, I shot for between 15 and 25% of the actual harshness. New Kyre is definitely richer, better governed, and less elitist and chauvinistic than the ancient Greeks. That said, New Kyre isn't an egalitarian place. Nobles have vastly more rights and money than commoners, and both nobles and commoners own slaves and only the poorest commoners own no slaves themselves. Indeed, slavery is so common in New Kyre that the other nobles see Kylon's decision that House Kardamnos will have no slaves as a sign of malevolent and sinister foreign influence.   Kalliope's fear that she could be dispossessed and Kylon simply take her children is very real. If Kylon wanted, he probably could keep Kalliope from seeing Nikarion and Zoe ever again, though that would inevitably put him in conflict with Lysikas Agramemnos and Calliope is charismatic enough to powerful allies to her side. If Kylon did in fact refuse to allow Kalliope to see their children, he might well set off a civil war. But Kylon, who lost both his parents when he was young, doesn't want to deprive his children of a loving mother.   Of course, the ancient Greeks never had to fight the Red Krakens and orcs. The Red Krakens, the Caphtori, are kind of written like snake-worshipping Vikings. In fact, Caphtori are inspired by the “Sea Peoples”, pirates that seem to have contributed to the collapse of Bronzes Age civilization. Historians argue endlessly about the impact of the Sea Peoples or whether they existed at all, but if they did exist, they might well have been proto-Ancient Greeks, perhaps Mycenaean in origin.   Since having one ancient Greek-esque group fighting another would've been confusing in the book, I made the Caphtori/Red Kraken more like Vikings, which I suppose is a bit of historical anachronism, but Ghost Armor is a constructed world with elves, orcs, and sorcerers, so it's not like I'm writing period accurate historical fiction here.   So these are some of the influences that went into Ghost in the Assembly. I don't have any grand concluding point here. Those were just some of the ideas I thought about and went into the story. Though I should mention that for a while I was a graduate student in medieval history and I hated the experience so much I left and went into IT instead. That said ,decades later it has proven a useful source of plot ideas for fantasy novels, so it worked out in the end.   One final note, a reader suggested that Kalliope Agramemnos and Mardun Scorneus might hook up in later books. And I have to admit, I laughed at that suggestion. Kalliope would react with dismay at the thought of marrying anyone other than an extremely high ranking Kyracian noble, and at the prospect of marrying Kalliope, Mardun would think about it, fake his death, and flee back to the Empire, preferring to take his chances with the Magisterium rather than Kalliope. Anyway, thank you to everyone who has read Ghost in the Assembly. I am very grateful that so many people have enjoyed the book.   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 back episodes of the show on https://thepulpwritershow.com. 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 continue our discuss about how seeking prestige can be dangerous for writers, specifically in the form of traditional publishing and the New York Times Bestseller list. This coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Dragonskull: Shield of the Knight, Book #2 in the Dragonskull series (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills), at my Payhip store: DRAGONSHIELD50 The coupon code is valid through March 21, 2025. So if you need a new audiobook for spring, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00   Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 241 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is February 28th, 2025. Today we are continuing our discussion of how to escape the trap of prestige for writers, specifically traditional publishing and The New York Times Bestseller List. Before we get to our main topic, we will do Coupon of the Week, an update on my current writing and audiobook projects, and then Question of the Week.   This week's coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Dragonskull: Shield of the Knight, Book Two in the Dragonskull series (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills), at my Payhip store. That coupon code is DRAGONSHIELD50. As always, I'll include the coupon code and the link to the store in the show notes. This coupon code is valid through March 21st, 2025. So if you need a new audiobook as we start to head into the spring months, we have got you covered. Now an update on my current writing projects. I'm pleased to report I am done with the rough draft of Ghost in the Assembly. I came in at 106,000 words, so it'll definitely be over a hundred thousand words when it's done. I'm about 20% of the way through the first round of edits, so I am confident in saying that if all goes well and nothing unexpected happens, I am on track to have it out in March. I am also 10,000 words into Shield of Battle, which will be the fifth of six books in the Shield War series and I'm hoping to have that out in April, if all goes well.   In audiobook news, recording for both Cloak of Dragonfire and Orc-Hoard is done. I'm just waiting for them to get through the processing on the various stores so they're available. There is also an audiobook edition of Half Elven Thief Omnibus One and Cloak Mage Omnibus Three that hopefully should be coming in March. More news with that to come.   00:01:55 Question of the Week   Now let's move on to Question of the Week. Question of the Week is intended to inspire interesting discussions of enjoyable topics. This week's question: what is your favorite subgenre of fantasy, high fantasy, epic fantasy, sword and sorcery, historical fantasy, urban fantasy, LitRPG, cultivation, or something else? No wrong answers, obviously.   Cindy says: Epic fantasy or those with a good history for that world. The Ghost Series are fantastic at this.   Thanks, Cindy.   Justin says: I enjoy all those sub-genres, if they are done well. In times past I would've said comic fantasy, but that is because Terry Pratchett at his best was just that good.   Mary says: High fantasy.   Surabhi says: I'd honestly read anything fantasy that's written well and has characters I'm attached to, given that it's not too gritty. Bonus points if there's humor! Also, I love your books so much and they're the perfect blend of fantasy, adventure, and characters. Your books were what really got me into Sword and Sorcery.   Thanks, Surabhi.     Matthew says: See, that's difficult. I love my sabers, both light and metal. I would say urban fantasy crosses the boundary the most. If it's a captivating story, it will be read.   John F says: I can't choose one- Lord of the Rings or LWW, The Inheritance Cycle, The Dresden Files, Caina, Ridmark, or Nadia. I think what draws me is great characters who grow. The setting/genre is just the device. That's why I keep coming back to your books. You create great characters.   Thanks, John F.   John K says: I think I'm partial to historical fantasy. I enjoy all genres, but when I think of my favorites, they tend to be derivations of historical settings. Think Guy Gavriel Kay or Miles Cameron. That said, I was weaned on Robert E. Howard, Fritz Lieber, Michael Moorcock, Karl Edward Wagner, Jack Vance, so a strong sword and sorcery second place.   Juana says: High fantasy. Belgariad, Tolkien, dragons, et cetera.   Jonathan says: Sword and sorcery in space! Prehistoric sword and sorcery, sword and sorcery always.   Quint: says Sword and sorcery!   Michael says: Sword and sorcery.   For myself, I think I would agree with our last couple of commenters and it would be sword and sorcery. My ideal fantasy novel has a barbarian hero wandering from corrupt city state to corrupt city state messing up the business of some evil wizards. I'm also very fond of what's called generic fantasy (if a fighter, a dwarf, an elf, and a wizard are going into a dungeon and fighting some orcs, I'm happy).   00:04:18 Main Topic of the Week: Escaping the Prestige Trap, Part 2   Now onto our main topic for the week, Escaping the Prestige Trap, Part 2, and we'll focus on traditional publishing and the New York Times Bestseller List this week. As we talked about last week, much of the idea of success, especially in the United States, is based on hitting certain milestones in a specific order. In the writing world, these measures of success have until fairly recently been getting an MFA, finding an agent, getting traditionally published, and hitting The New York Times Bestseller List. Last week we talked about the risks of an MFA and an agent. This week, we are going to talk about two more of those writing markers of prestige, getting traditionally published and having a book land on The New York Times Bestseller List. Why are they no longer as important? What should you devote your energy and focus to instead?   So let's start with looking at getting traditionally published. Most writers have dreamed of seeing their book for sale and traditional publishing for a long time has been the only route to this path. Until about 15 years ago, traditional publishing was the way that a majority of authors made their living. Now that big name authors like Hugh Howie, Andy Weir, and Colleen Hoover have had success starting as self-published authors (or in the case of authors Sarah J. Maas and Ali Hazelwood, fan fiction authors) and then are getting traditional publishing deals made for them for their self-published works. It's proof that self-publishing is no longer a sign that the author isn't good enough to be published traditionally. Previous to the rise of the Kindle, that was a common belief that if you were self-published, it was because you were not good enough to get traditionally published. That was sort of this pernicious belief that traditional publishing was a meritocracy, when in fact it tended to be based on who you knew. But that was all 15 years ago and now we are well into the age of self-publishing. Why do authors still want to be traditionally published when in my frank opinion, self-publishing is the better path? Well, I think there are three main reasons for that.   One of the main reasons is that the authors say they want to be traditionally published is to have someone else handle the marketing and the advertising. They don't realize how meager marketing budgets and staffing support are, especially for unknown authors. Many traditionally published authors are handling large portions of their own marketing and hiring publicists out of their own pocket because publishers are spending much less on marketing. The new reality is that traditional publishers aren't going to do much for you as a debut author unless you are already a public figure.   Even traditionally published authors are not exempt from having to do their own marketing now. James Patterson set up an entire company himself to handle his marketing. Though, to be fair to James Patterson, his background was in advertising before he came into publishing, so he wasn't exactly a neophyte in the field, but you see more and more traditionally published authors who you think would be successful just discontented with the system and starting to dabble in self-publishing or looking at alternative publishers like Aethon Books and different arrangements of publishing because the traditional system is just so bad for writers. The second main reason authors want to be traditionally published is that they want to avoid the financial burden of publishing. This is an outdated way of thinking. The barrier to publishing these days is not so much financial as it is knowledge. In fact, I published a book entirely using free open source software in 2017 just to prove that it could be done. It was Silent Order: Eclipse Hand, the fourth book in my science fiction series. I wrote it on Ubuntu using Libre Office and I edited it in Libre Office and I did the formatting on Ubuntu and I did the cover in the GIMP, which is a free and open source image editing program. This was all using free software and I didn't have to pay for the program. Obviously I had to pay for the computer I was using and the Internet connection, but in the modern era, having an internet connection is in many ways almost a requirement, so that's the cost you would be paying anyway.   The idea that you must spend tens of thousands of dollars in formatting, editing, cover, and marketing comes from scammy self-publishing services. Self-publishing, much like traditional publishing, has more than its fair share of scams or from people who aren't willing to take the time to learn these skills and just want to cut someone a check to solve the problem. There are many low cost and effective ways to learn these skills and resources designed specifically for authors. People like Joanna Penn have free videos online explaining how to do this, and as I've said, a lot of the software you can use to self-publish is either free or low cost, and you can get some very good programs like Atticus or Vellum or Jutoh for formatting eBooks for very low cost.   The third reason that writers want to be traditionally published is that many believe they will get paid more this way, which is, unless you are in the top 1% of traditionally published authors, very wrong. Every so often, there's a study bemoaning the fact that most publishers will only sell about $600 worth of any individual book, and that is true of a large percentage of traditionally published books. Traditional publishers typically pay a lump sum called advance, and then royalties based on sales. An average advance is about the same as two or three months of salary from an office job and so not a reflection of the amount of time it typically takes most authors to finish a book. Most books do not earn out their advance, which means the advance is likely to be the only money the author receives for the book. Even well-known traditionally published authors are not earning enough to support themselves as full-time authors. So as you can see, all three of these reasons are putting a lot of faith in traditional publishers, faith that seems increasingly unnecessary or downright misplaced. I think it is very healthy to get rid of the idea that good writing comes from traditional publishers and that the prestige of being traditionally published is the only way you'll be accepted as a writer or be able to earn a living as a full-time writer. I strongly recommend that people stop thinking that marketing is beneath you as an author or too difficult to learn. Whether you are indie or tradpub, you are producing a product that you want to sell, thus you are a businessperson. The idea that only indie authors have to sell their work is outdated. The sooner you accept this reality, the more options you will have. Self-publishing and indie publishing are admittedly more work. However, the benefits are significant. Here are five benefits of self-publishing versus traditional publishing.   The first advantage of self-publishing is you have complete creative control. You decide what the content of your book will be; you decide what the cover will be. If you don't want to make the covers yourself or you don't want to learn how to do that, you can very affordably hire someone to do it for you and they will make the cover exactly to your specifications. You also have more freedom to experiment with cross-genre books. As I've mentioned before, publishers really aren't a fan of cross genre books until they make a ton of money, like the new romantasy trend.   Traditional publishing is very trend driven and cautious. Back in the 2000s before I gave up on traditional publishing and discovered self-publishing, I would submit to agents a lot. Agents all had these guidelines for fantasy saying that they didn't want to see stories with elves and orcs and dwarves and other traditional fantasy creatures because they thought that was passe. Well, when I started self-publishing, I thought I'm going to write a traditional fantasy series with elves and orcs and dwarves and other traditional fantasy creatures just because I can and Frostborn has been my bestselling series of all time in the time I've been self-publishing, so you can see the advantages of having creative control.   The second advantage is you can control the marketing. Tradpub authors often sign a contract that they'll get their social media and website content approved by the publisher before posting. They may even be given boilerplate or pre-written things to post. In self-publishing, you have real time data to help you make decisions and adjust ads and overall strategy on the fly to maximize revenue. For example, if one of your books is selling strangely well on Google Play, it's time to adjust BookBub ads to focus on that platform instead of Amazon.   You can also easily change your cover, your blurb, and so forth after release. I've changed covers of some of my books many times trying to optimize them for increased sales and that is nearly impossible to do with traditional publishing. And in fact, Brandon Sanderson gave a recent interview where he talked about how the original cover of his Mistborn book was so unrelated to the content of the book that it almost sunk the book and hence his career.   You also have the ability to run ad campaigns as you see fit, not just an initial launch like tradpub does. For example, in February 2025, I've been heavily advertising my Demonsouled series even though I finished writing that series back in 2013, but I've been able to increase sales and derive a significant profit from those ads.   A third big advantage is that you get a far greater share of the profits. Most of the stores, if you price an ebook between $2.99 (prices are USD) and $9.99, you will get 70% of the sale price, which means if you sell an ebook for $4.99, you're probably going to get about $3.50 per sale (depending on currency fluctuations and so forth). That is vastly more than you would get from any publishing contract.   You also don't have to worry about the publisher trying to cheat you out of royalties. We talked about an agency stealing money last episode. Every platform you publish your book on, whether Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Smashwords and Apple will give you a monthly spreadsheet of your sales and then you can look at it for yourself, see exactly how many books you sold and exactly how much money you're going to get. I have only very rarely seen traditional publishing royalty statements that are as clear and have as much data in them as a spreadsheet from Google Play or Amazon. A fourth advantage is you don't have to worry about publishers abandoning you mid-series. In traditional publishing, there is what's called the Publishing Death Spiral where let's say an author is contracted to write a series of five books. The author writes the first book and it sells well. Then the author publishes the second book and it doesn't sell quite as well, but the publisher is annoyed enough by the decrease in sales that they drop the writer entirely and don't finish the series. This happens quite a bit in the traditional publishing world, and you don't have to worry about that in indie publishing because you can just publish as often as you want. If you're not happy with the sales of the first few books in the series, you can change the covers, try ad campaigns, and other strategies.   Finally, you can publish as often as you want and when you want. In traditional publishing, there is often a rule of thumb that an author should only publish one book a year under their name. Considering that last year I published 10 books under my name, that seems somewhat ridiculous, but that's a function of the fact that traditional publishing has only so much capacity and the pieces of the machine involved there are slow and not very responsive. Whereas with self-publishing, you have much more freedom and everything involved with it is much more responsive. There's no artificial deadlines, so you can take as long as you want to prepare it and if the book is ready, you don't have to wait a year to put it out because it would mess up the publisher's schedule.   So what to do instead of chasing traditional publishing? Learn about self-publishing, especially about scams and bad deals related to it. Publish your own works by a platform such as KDP, Barnes and Noble Press, Kobo Writing Life, Apple Books, Google Play, Smashwords, and possibly your own Payhip and/or Shopify store.   Conquer your fear of marketing and advertising. Even traditionally published authors are shouldering more of this work and paying out of their own pocket to hire someone to do it, and if you are paying your own marketing costs, you might as well self-publish and keep a greater share of the profits. The second half of our main topic, another potential risk of prestige, is getting on The New York Times Bestseller List. I should note that I suppose someone could accuse me of sour grapes here saying, oh, Jonathan Moeller, you've never been on The New York Times Bestseller List. You must just be bitter about it. That is not true. I do not want to be on The New York Times Bestseller List. What I would like to be is a number one Amazon bestseller. Admittedly though, that's unlikely, but a number one Amazon bestseller would make a lot more money than a number one New York Times Bestseller List, though because of the way it works, if you are a number one Amazon bestseller, you might be a New York Times Bestseller, but you might not. Let's get into that now.   Many writers have the dream of seeing their name on the New York Times Bestseller List. One self-help guru wrote about “manifesting” this milestone for herself by writing out the words “My book is number one on The New York Times Bestseller List” every day until it happened. Such is the mystique of this milestone that many authors crave it as a necessity. However, this list has seen challenges to its prestige in recent years. The one thing that shocks most people when they dig into the topic is that the list is not an objective list based on the raw number of books sold. The list is “editorial content” and The New York Times can exclude, include, or rank the books on the list however they choose.   What it does not capture is perennial sellers or classics. For example, the Bible and the Quran are obviously some of the bestselling books of all time, but you won't see editions of the Bible or the Quran on the New York Times Bestseller List. Textbooks and classroom materials, I guarantee there are some textbooks that are standards in their field that would be on the bestseller list every year, but they're not because The New York Times doesn't track them. Ebooks available only from a single vendor such as Kindle Unlimited books, ebook sales from not reporting vendors such as Shopify or Payhip. Reference Works including test prep guides (because I guarantee when test season comes around the ACT and SAT prep guides or the GRE prep guides sell a lot of copies) and coloring books or puzzle books.  It would be quite a blow to the authors on the list to realize that if these excluded works were included on the list, they would in all likelihood be consistently below To Kill a Mockingbird, SAT prep books, citation manuals, Bibles/other religious works, and coloring books about The Eras Tour.   Publishers, political figures, religious groups, and anyone with enough money can buy their way into the rank by purchasing their books in enormous quantities. In fact, it's widely acknowledged in the United States that this is essentially a legal form of bribery and a bit of money laundering too, where a publisher will give a truly enormous advance to a public figure or politician that they like, and that advance will essentially be a payment to that public figure in the totally legal form of an enormous book advance that isn't going to pay out. Because this is happening with such frequency, The New York Times gave into the pressure to acknowledge titles suspected of this strategy with a special mark next to it on the list. However, these books remain on the list and can still be called a New York Times Bestseller.   Since the list is not an objective marker of sales and certainly not some guarantee of quality, why focus on making it there? I think trying to get your book on The New York Times Bestseller List would be an enormous waste of time, since the list is fundamentally an artificial construction that doesn't reflect sales reality very well.   So what can you do instead? Focus on raw sales numbers and revenue, not lists. Even Amazon's bestseller category lists have a certain amount of non-quantitative factors. In the indie author community, there's a saying called Bank not Rank, which means you should focus on how much revenue your books are actually generating instead of whatever sales rank they are on whatever platform. I think that's a wiser approach to focus your efforts.   You can use lists like those from Publishers Weekly instead if you're interested in what's selling or trends in the industry, although that too can be manipulated and these use only a fairly small subset of data that favors retail booksellers, but it's still more objective in measuring than The New York Times.   I suppose in the end, you should try and focus on ebook and writing activities that'll bring you actual revenue or satisfaction rather than chasing the hollow prestige of things like traditional publishing, agents, MFAs, and The New York Times Bestseller List.   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 back episodes at 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.

Why is Guan Yu so powerful? Which Universal Movie Monster tastes best? How can you get somebody to enjoy Brutal Death Metal? Will Communism win? Our audience has asked all of these questions and many more, and we tackle them all with our trademark professionalism and focus. Music by Wrekmeister Harmonies Theme tune by Caina.

In this week's episode, we take a look at five tips for outlining your novel. I also take a look at audiobook sales for 2024. This week's coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Wizard-Thief, Book #2 in the Half-Elven Thief series, (as excellently narrated by Leanne Woodward) at my Payhip store: WIZARD50 The coupon code is valid through February 21, 2025. So if you need a new audiobook for spring, we've got you covered! 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates   Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 237 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is January 31st, 2025, and today we're discussing five tips for outlining your novel. Before we get to that, we will have Coupon of the Week, an update on my current writing projects, Question of the Week, and then a look at how my audiobooks performed in 2024.   First up, Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Wizard Thief, Book Number Two in the Half-Eleven Thief series (as excellently narrated by Leanne Woodward) at my Payhip store. That coupon code is WIZARD50. Both the coupon code and the link to the store will be in the show notes for this episode. This coupon code will be valid through February the 21st, 2025. So if you need a new audiobook to get you through the February doldrums, we have got you covered. And now an update on my current writing and audiobook projects. I am very, very, very pleased to report that Shield of Deception, the fourth book in The Shield War series, is done. As soon as I am finished recording this episode, I'm going to start publishing it at all the stores. So by the time this episode goes live, you should be able to get it at your favorite ebook store. I'm very pleased this is done because I think this is the longest book I have written in the last four years, which of course I picked to do over the Christmas holiday and was in the process of switching over to a new desktop computer. Great planning on my part, but the book is done and hopefully you should be able to enjoy it soon at your favorite ebook store.   Now that Shield of Deception is done, my next project will be Ghost in the Assembly and I'm pleased to report I'm 20,000 words into that. So I'm hopefully on track to have that come out sometime in March. My secondary project is also going to be Shield of Battle, the fifth book in the Shield War series, and hopefully that will be in April, if all goes well.   In audiobook news, Cloak of Masks is now finally available at all audiobook stores: Audible, Amazon, Apple, Google Play, Chirp, and all the others. A reminder that you can also get Ghost Armor Omnibus One, the combination of the first three Ghost Armor books (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy), at Audible, Apple, and Amazon.   00:02:15 Question of the Week   Now it's time for Question of the Week, which is intended to inspire enjoyable discussions of interesting topics. This week's topic: do you watch the special features on the DVD when you watch a movie? I'm talking about the making of and the director and cast and crew interviews and so forth. Not all DVDs have them of course, but some do. We have a few responses to this question.   Justin says: It depends on the movie. The special features in Monty Python and the Holy Grail Special Edition are a must-see in my opinion.   John says: I watched all the Lord of the Rings Extended Edition extras. Really great material. I know I've watched others, but I can't recall offhand. Definitely the gold standard.   Tom says: My general pattern is to watch the trailer, then the movie, then the deleted scenes. Sometimes I'll watch parts of the special features if their name caches my eye, not often though.   James says: With On-Demand through my cable provider, I just watch the movies. Being part of the PC Master Race, I've never had a gaming console to play DVDs on. I haven't bought a DVD in ages. I used to belong to Redbox, but they're not even in business anymore. Elizabeth says: Sometimes, or play in another language with English subtitles.   Brandy says: Sometimes. I watched The Lord of the Rings special features and enjoyed it. I also watch historical extras or look them up.   Bonnie says: I think I may have once? I usually just watch the movie, haven't watched anything in ages, though.   Juana says: Yes. After the feature things are interesting!   Tracy says: I do.   For myself, the inspiration for this question was that I couldn't think of anything to watch, so I was watching the special features on The Lord of the Rings Extended Editions box set, which a few people have already mentioned. I really think those are the gold standard for DVD special features. Not too many special features have middle aged literature professors discussing the origins of the book that inspired the movie. There's like six discs worth of special features in the Extended Edition Lord of the Rings DVDs, and if you watch all of them, it's really a very interesting and comprehensive documentary on how those three movies were made. If you get the Oppenheimer Blu-ray, the special features that come with that are also quite interesting and worth watching in my opinion.   00:04:18 Audiobook Sales in 2024   Now let's talk a little bit about how my audiobooks did in 2024. Ebook sales were down a bit from 2023 to 2024, but my audiobook sales were up from 2023 to 2024. So here are my Top 10 bestselling audiobooks of 2024. It's nice to note that audio (at least for me) was up, in 2024 in a time of general economic contraction. So that's nice. Now my Top 10 audiobooks:   The Ghosts: Omnibus One 2. Frostborn: The Gorgon Spirit 3. Frostborn: The Dark Warden 4. Frostborn: The Broken Mage 5. Frostborn: The World Gate 6. Frostborn: The False King 7. Frostborn: Excalibur 8. Frostborn: The Dwarven Prince 9. Dragonskull: Omnibus One 10. Frostborn: The High Lords   So I have to admit, it's nice to see the Frostborn books still in the Top 10 there because they've long ago made back their production costs. So now it's just a pure profit at this point, which is nice. And it's also amusing that The Ghosts Omnibus One remains my bestselling audiobook of all time just because it's so long. Now let's see how those sales broke down by vendor because as you know, I sell my audiobooks through several different platforms. And so let's see how they did:   ACX (Audible, Amazon, Apple): 76.54% 2. Google Play: 9.84% 3. Storytel: 5.08% 4. Hoopla: 2.73% 5. Spotify: 2.27% 6. Chirp: 1.05% 7. Under 1%: Kobo, Scribd, Audiobooks.com, Overdrive, TuneIn, Bibliotheca, Nook, and Anyplay     So as we can see, Audible in the form of ACX is still pretty dominant, but there is growth on the other platforms, especially Google Play. I was not expecting Google Play to come in second. I would've thought it would've been Chirp or Spotify, but it seems Google Play did very well for me for audiobooks for 2024. So thanks for listening everyone, or at least listening to the audiobooks. We're not done with the podcast yet, so let's now move on to our main topic.   00:06:34 Main Topic: 5 Tips for Creating an Outline for Your Novel   Now let's move on to our main topic, five tips for creating an outline for your novel. In the fiction writing community, there's generally two schools of thoughts, outliners (of which I am definitely one), and discovery writers, who feel that starting with outlines sort of drains the process of its fun and magic. Though I heard an interesting point from one of Brandon Sanderson's videos recently where he said that all outliners do have a little bit of discovery writer in them because if you look at your outline, it'll say something like “there is a chase scene.” Then when you get to that part of the book, you write out eight to ten pages of the chase scene or whatever that you come up with on the spot and then later refine and improve through editing. So that's a good point, but I do think outlining is more useful in general for writing than not outlining is.   So why outline? As I mentioned, many writers do not outline, but I do think outlining does help, especially with beginning writers. For one, it saves time because if you follow the outline, you're less likely to go down a blind alley and realize you have to drop the last 10 or 20,000 words you wrote. It helps prevent getting stuck and not knowing what to write next. And it also really helps because it'll save you time in editing because you're less likely to have to rewrite large portions of the book. And it's also helpful for maintaining continuity as well.   I found also that outlining in advance is good because it forces you to think about things before you start because we all know writers who get really excited about writing, get a third of the way through, and then don't know where to go next. It's because they haven't thought it through. Outlining forces you to really think through the middle, which is where a lot of writers get stuck, and it also forces you to think through the ending and make sure it properly resolves the conflicts and stakes raised in the story.   As an example, I know a beginning writer who did not create an outline when setting out to write for the first time, although she had a strong setting and liked her characters, she realized about halfway through that the conflict wasn't enough to carry her whole story and that changing the conflict or raising the stakes would change the tone of the story too much. And unfortunately, she decided to abandon the draft. You could look at that one way, that it was months of wasted effort for her that could have been prevented with a couple hours of outlining, though I think it's better to look at it as a valuable learning experience where she learned that yes, outlining really will help me with my writing and just sort of had to learn that the hard way through attempting to write without an outline first.   #1: So our first tip for outlining novels is to learn story structure. It's hard to write an outline without understanding good story structure, but the flip side is if you do understand story structure and put good story structure into your outline, it will be all the easier to write your novel. The basic story structure that everyone learns in English class when they're talking about short stories (or should learn an English class when they're talking about short stories), is introduction, conflict, rising action, climax, and resolution. That is essentially basic short story structure that's in short stories and in novels, however long. A longer novel of course we'll have subplots and sort of sub conflicts and maybe false ends and red herrings, but that basic story structure is there throughout. So our first tip for good outlining is to understand story structure. And if you try to hold to that basic five step story structure when you're first starting out, especially when you're first starting out, you'll probably find it a lot easier to go.     #2: Start with the problem. What do we mean by that? First, think of the main conflicts and then start outlining to move the characters/locations around them accordingly. Work the hardest on understanding your central conflict. Your protagonist must have a problem that results in a serious conflict. Now, serious conflict doesn't necessarily imply violence, though in genres such as a thriller and mystery, it can. The conflict must be emotionally significant and serious for the protagonist where there are real stakes involved.   The example I usually go to for this is the movie The King Speech, which is a highly fictionalized version of Britain's King George VI learning to overcome his stutter to speak in public. At no point in the movie is George VI in any physical danger. His wife and children love and respect him, and he's generally well regarded by everyone who knows him. However, the problem is he can't speak in public effectively, and this is a huge emotional problem for him. And frankly, one with serious stakes after his brother abdicates and he becomes king. He needs to be able to speak effectively in public or he won't be able to carry out his duties well. So this conflict of dealing with his stutter and his speech impediment is central to the movie. And even though he's not in any physical danger, it nonetheless has very high stakes for him, which is why I say that the problem has to be emotionally significant and have high stakes for the protagonist.   And there are ways to do that without violence, though of course, if you're writing fantasy or a thriller, you can use all the violence you want. You can help create a significant conflict and problem for your character by asking yourself a few questions. What conflicts and actions lead up to it? What is causing this conflict to happen? What are the stakes? What will happen if it doesn't resolve favorably? And why is the character involved? What must they do to resolve the conflict?   For an example from my own books, I'm going to talk about Half-Elven Thief, which is available on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited if you want to go read that. In Half-Elven Thief, the main character is Rivah, who is a member of a fantasy Thieves Guild in her city. She's massively in debt to her immediate superior in the Thieves Guild who hates her and has been using that debt to exploit work from her and considering selling her into slavery to recover the debt. However, a massive and very dangerous job comes to the Thieves Guild, and Rivah is the one assigned to take the job, and if she pulls off the job, her debt will be repaid and she doesn't have this debt hanging over her head anymore. But the job is to steal a spell book from a very dangerous and powerful wizard, so there's every chance she'll be killed in the process. So the central conflict of Half-Elven Thief, that Rivah needs to steal this spell book from this very dangerous wizard, and the stakes for that is so she can get out from under this debt her superior has been holding over her head for the last three years. So hopefully that is a helpful example of a conflict with serious stakes for the protagonist.   #3: Our third tip is to start with simple. What is the book's blurb or elevator pitch for this story? Write that first. There's a couple different ways you can do that. I've sometimes described my Cloak Games/Cloak Mage series as Shadow Run meets The Dresden Files, which can be a starting point. I've heard people describe the Caina series as Black Widow meets Conan the Barbarian, which is another way to do it. To return to our previous two examples, in The King's Speech, the precise pitch is “faced with becoming King George VI must overcome his speech/stutter and face his emotional problems in order to effectively exercise his office.” And with my book Half-Elven Thief, the elevator pitch was, “in order to escape a dangerous debt, a thief is forced to steal a spell book from a dangerous wizard.” So that is the one sentence starting point, and you can use that to build the conflict.   Another potential way to do this is to write the blurb for your book and then build the conflict off that. For example, here is the blurb for another one of my books, Ghost in the Serpent, which is available at all ebook stores.   Anyway, the blurb: “A deadly poison. A hidden cult of sorcerers. Only Caina can find the truth. Caina is a countess of the Empire, an advisor and friend of three powerful monarchs, but she was once a nightfighter with the Ghosts, the spies and assassins of the Emperor and faced lethal sorcerers and corrupt lords. And when a hidden cult of malevolent sorcerers emerges from the shadows, Caina will show them that she has forgotten none of her old skills.”   So what is this blurb doing? It is introducing the setting and the characters, Caina and the Empire, focusing on the conflict and stakes and focusing on how they relate to Caina. And that allows us to sort of expand out into the conflict. If you read the book, you know that the plot is someone tries to poison Caina and fails. As she investigates what happened, she discovers that her husband had two children that he didn't know about, and for some reason this mysterious cult is trying to kill both Caina and these children, which pulls her deeper into the mystery. So that is the stakes and the conflict, and that is how I was able to build the book around them. #4: Our fourth tip is to just start. Just pick a time, grab your laptop or your notebook or whatever, and just start writing down an outline for your short story or a synopsis. Don't research things about your story while you're outlining. You can just write “TO BE RESEARCHED LATER” in capital letters, which is what I do sometimes. Don't research the perfect way to make an outline, just sit down and make an outline. How I outline personally is what I usually do is I have the central conflict in mind, like the example with Rivah, and then I sit down and write a synopsis of what I want to happen and then I chop up the synopsis into chapters and I go from there. My outlines tend to be about 1,000 to 2,000 words long, depending on the length of the book.   For example, Shield of Deception, which I just published, was on the longer side. It came to about 120,000 words and the outline was about 2,000 words. And it basically started out as a long synopsis I wrote, and then I chopped up the synopsis into chapters and went from there. I included major story beats, where the characters were going to go, and what they did. It doesn't get too detailed. Each chapter…the book had 30 chapters. So each chapter generally was described with about 80 words in the outline, maybe a hundred words, depending on what goes on. The detail varies. Basically, like in a chapter outline, I'll say “Character X comes and confronts Character Y and then they fight.” Then I will extemporize and make up the conversation when I actually get to the writing.   What I try to include in all the outlines is story beats that have to be in the story. The character has to be here or the plot doesn't make sense, or they have to go this location or it's a massive plot hole, or they have to think of this or it causes a plot hole, that kind of thing, which is part of the value of the outlining process is that it forces you to think of these things in advance. What I don't include is that I don't get too super detailed because to return to the Brandon Sanderson example from earlier in the show, when you get to the actual scene, there is a bit of discovery writing, like where I'll write where Character X confronts Character Y about whatever they're arguing about. Then the actual conversation I will just write when I arrive there.   #5: And our fifth and final tip, try a different style of outlining if you're struggling. There are different outlining techniques and styles out there. Here are two examples.   There's the Snowflake Method by Randy Ingermanson, which is where you start with a one sentence summary, build up to a paragraph, and continue to add detail in depth. There's also Dean Koontz's story structure from his book, How to Write Bestselling Fiction. His story structure is:   Get your character into trouble as quickly as possible Their plans backfire Things escalate until defeat seems inevitable Victory against all odds   If you're having trouble starting an outline, that might be a good way to do it. That said, there is no magic bullet. There is not a magic outlining style or perfect outlining style that will guarantee success. So don't get lost in endless reading or studying different kinds of outlines. A finished outline is better than waiting for a perfect one. And in that vein, a book that you have actually written, even if it's not as cool as you want it to be, is still infinitely better than a book that exists only in your head. And all that said, those five tips for outlining, I'm about to do all that myself. There is in the tech industry a phrase called “eating the dog food” or “eating your own dog food,” which means if you make a product and sell a product, you should probably be using the product a great deal. And Microsoft in particular was known for leaning on this. And for myself, I'm going to be doing everything I just talked about here because over the next few days, I'll be writing the outline for Shield of Battle, which at the moment consists of only four sentences I jotted down when I had ideas. I'll be applying all those techniques myself to write the outline for Shield of Battle, and hopefully it will work well for me. I think it will. I think these tips, if you want to start outlining your novels before you write them, would hopefully be helpful for you as well.   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 at 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 five ways to use short stories to market your books. This week's coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Half-Elven Thief, Book #1 in the Half-Elven Thief series, (as excellently narrated by Leanne Woodward) at my Payhip store: HALF50 The coupon code is valid through February 14, 2025. So if you need a new audiobook for the January/February doldrums, we've got you covered! 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates   Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 236 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is January the 24th, 2025. Today we are discussing how to use short stories for marketing. Before we get into that, we'll start with Coupon of the Week. I have an update on my current writing projects and then do Question of the Week.   So let's start off with Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Half-Elven Thief, Book One in the Half-Elven Thief series, (as excellently narrated by Leanne Woodward) at my Payhip store. That code is HALF50. You can find the link and the coupon code in the show notes for this episode. This coupon code will be valid through February the 14th, 2025. So if you need a new audiobook for the January/February doldrums, we have got you covered. Now on to an update on my current writing projects. As of this recording, I am 56% of the way through the first round of edits on Shield of Deception. I am still hoping to have the book out early in February, if all goes well. Once that is out, my main project will be Ghost in the Assembly. I am 16,000 words into that. So that is good news there.   In audiobook news, as I mentioned in the previous show, the audiobook of Ghost Armor Omnibus One (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy) has come out and you can get that at Audible, Apple, and Amazon. Cloak of Masks should be coming soon and a recording for Cloak of Dragonfire is almost done, so we should have some more audiobook news coming pretty soon.   00:01:45 Question of the Week   Now onto Question of the Week, which is designed for an enjoyable discussion of interesting topics. This week's question: what is your favorite kind of Italian food? No wrong answers, obviously, including not liking Italian food. We had quite a few responses on that.   Justin says: Ah yes, pizza, the food of company team building exercises and RPG tabletop sessions. You can't go wrong with pizza. Another dish I adore would be Italian sausage and peppers with penne pasta. It goes together quickly, tastes great, and is easy to clean up afterwards. Alas, I can no longer partake- the green and red pepper has given me gas worse than any bean dish.   Mary says: Ravioli! The right brands, because the cheese mixes vary. I like a number, but not all.   Surabhi says: Pizza wins, without a doubt!   Juana says: Pizza hits all the notes.   Denny says: I love North American pizza. Italian pizza is its own thing and not something I enjoy. I've eaten very little actual Italian food, but generally I do enjoy pasta. John says: Definitely lasagna. There is a little place in Southern California where the chef makes a deconstructed lasagna that is out of this world.   I have to admit, I didn't know there was such a thing as deconstructed lasagna.   Jenny says: Fettuccine Alfredo and Chicken Parmesan are so good, but I love getting some of both so I get the red and white sauces blended and with tasty cheesy chicken.   Brooks says: While I love a lot of Italian dishes, I really like a type of lasagna that is cream based versus marinara based. Usually it's considered a veggie type lasagna. It just adds a different twist. Basically alfredo meets lasagna.   Olaf says: Any kind of pasta (linguini, tortiglioni, rigatoni, farfalle) or gnocchi with a slow cooked bolognaise. My self-made pizza, then of course lasagna and all kinds of pasta with salsicce and let not forget tiramisu and a latte macchiato. James says: It's funny what we call “foreign food.”” Your Taco Bell style taco originated in Texas. What Americans consider Chinese food originated in San Francisco and pizza as we know it originated in New York City.   Bonnie says: Chicken parm and my husband's lasagna.   A different John says: I love a really good risotto, specifically with porcini mushrooms and pancetta. Also the truffle pasta I had in Rome about 10 years ago, but the best pasta I had was rabbit ragout with handmade pappardelle (which I'm pretty sure I didn't say correctly) at a restaurant here in California. My family loves my homemade spaghetti with meatballs. My granddaughter's favorite is actually spaghetti with clams.   Gary says: Almost anything with pesto.   Andrew says: Cannoli.   James says: Only reason I know this is because of the Food Network, but a true pizza (Italians in Italy don't have pizza) order in Italy doesn't sound appetizing to me. I want a supreme with everything but anchovies on it. While pizza, as we know it is an American invention, what an Italian in Italy would order has only tomato sauce, mozzarella cheese, and basil.   Finally, Michael says: Spaghetti.   For myself, I think my answer would be pizza, which I think as we just heard is true of many people, but pizza is kind of a category all its own, especially American pizza, which as we heard is American invention and not an Italian one. For non-pizza, I would say lasagna and spaghetti carbonara.   00:04:56 Main Topic of the Week: Using Short Stories for Marketing Now onto our main topic this week, how to use short stories for marketing. Many authors, myself included (which if you haven't subscribed to my new release newsletter, which you should really do), create short stories for marketing. It can be an effective way to connect with your readers, but why do it?   Two caveats I should get into before we get into why you should use short stories for marketing and the big one is if you don't actually enjoy writing short stories, you shouldn't do it. Marketing tactics work only if you actually enjoy doing it or you can find it at least tolerable. If you actively dislike writing short stories and prefer to write novels, then you should not try to write short stories unless you actively enjoy the process at least as much as you enjoy writing novels. The second caveat is to remember that short stories really don't sell well outside of certain very specific categories like erotica or anthologies (and even anthologies don't sell as well as full length novels). Recently I saw an interview with a longtime fantasy author who lamented because of TikTok and YouTube (and whatever) that young people nowadays prefer shorter books/quicker books and books will have to get shorter. I have to admit that has not been my experience at all. I think of the 158 books I've published, I've never had anyone write to me afterwards and say, hey, you know what? This book was too long and should have been shorter. No, they say the book should have been longer. So I think that might just be an illusion caused by that author in question being mostly traditionally published and having to deal with printing costs and the publishers being stingy on paper. But my own experience has been that readers really prefer longer works, which means that they don't want to pay for short stories and that therefore you're not going to make a lot of money from your short stories. That doesn't mean you can't use your short stories to make money, but the short stories themselves (if you sell them) are probably not going to make a lot of money and therefore giving them out for free is probably a good idea. Obviously, this is not a new idea. Nonfiction writers, especially in the self-help and business genres, have long given out charts, worksheets, and other bonus content to their newsletter subscribers. Short stories can work well as what's called a reader magnet in the indie author space. The reader magnet is where you give away something for free and hope that the people who pick it up like it enough to go on and try your paid content. I do this all the time myself with my free series starters like Cloak Games: Thief Trap or Child of the Ghosts or Sevenfold Sword: Champion, where if you read that book since it's free and enjoy it, hopefully you go on to purchase the rest of the books in the series. Short stories also generally don't sell for very much. I almost always sell mine for $0.99 USD when they're not free, so it's not a major loss of revenue or “devaluing the work” if you give it away for free, especially if it's only temporary. Another advantage is that people very obviously love free stuff, especially digital content that doesn't take up physical space. Whether you live in a one room efficiency apartment or a four bedroom house, there is only so much space to go around and you can only have so much stuff and in fact, people are always looking to declutter. This is not a problem with digital goods and if you're giving away the short stories for free in digital format, your readers can receive it whenever it's most convenient for them and it's not a burden for them to keep or maintain it like a pile of freebie clutter from a conference (like pens and tote bags, for example). Also, the idea that giving away something for free means that it is low quality is just not a value that most modern readers have. It is more a legacy of a tradpub/print books that is probably going to fade over time. Being the one to provide the free content directly to readers is a way to keep their interest and hopefully build enough of a relationship with the reader that they're willing to try out the non-free content. This is the concept of the loss leader, where you give away something for free and hopefully people will go on to buy the paid products that are connected to it. In marketing speak, this is called the Marketing Funnel, where the free thing you give away is the top of your funnel and hopefully people take the free thing and like it and they'll get drawn further into the funnel and will become paying customers. Giving away things for free also has the benefit of building up a positive association with you in the reader's mind. So hopefully when you send out a newsletter or they see that you have a new book available on Amazon or Kobo or Google Play or wherever, that they will have a positive reaction and then purchase the book.   With all that in mind, and now that we've had our caveats and laid the groundwork, let us have five reasons to give away short stories.   #1: It can keep people connected with the characters/world between books and keep up interest for the next book in the series. If there are gaps between the books in your series, new short stories keep people engaged with characters and help them to remember what happened in the previous books. A short story can also excite them for what comes next in the series, especially if it alludes to what's about to happen in the next book. I have found generally it's a good idea to avoid massive spoilers for things in the books in the short stories, though some of that may be unavoidable depending on where it's written and how it's set.   #2: It gives readers insight into characters and events that don't fit into the larger narrative but are still fan favorites or interesting to fans. My main approach when I write short stories is I don't really want them to be standalone, but I don't really want them to be spoiler-y, so I tend to treat them as DVD extras or like bonus scenes on the DVD, like everyone knows that the Lord the Rings movies came out in the theaters 20 years ago in a specific form, but when the Lord the Rings Extended Editions came out in DVD, they had many extra scenes that had been cut from the movie for time or budgetary reasons or whatever.   That is how I view the short stories I give away for free when I publish a new book. It is bonus content that gets included like bonus content from the DVD. A prominent example of that would be Trick or Treat and Blood Walk and Iron Drive short stories from the Cloak Mage series, all of which are written from the perspective of the character Casimir Volansko. These have proven to be very popular short stories for me because Casimir offers the chance to see Nadia's world from a more normal perspective because Nadia, by this point in the series, is a superpowered wizard with many responsibilities, whereas Casimir is a truck driver who just wants to retire. So that makes for an interesting contrast and looking at the world through Casimir's eyes is not something I would probably do in a main book in the series but does make for a fun bonus in the short stories.   You can also do the backstory of a character that isn't central to the narrative. A couple of times I've done that where in a short story I have fleshed out more of a character's backstory, especially with the Frostborn series where I had The Orc's Tale, The Thief's Tale, The Assassin's Tale, The Soldier's Tale, and so forth where we delved into the backstory of some of the point of view characters in the series that we didn't have time to go through in the books.   #3: It will give people a clear, easy to understand reason to sign up for your email newsletter. “Subscribe and receive two free short stories” is a more compelling argument than “subscribe to my newsletter.” If anyone subscribes to my newsletter, they get three free novels to start with: Frostborn: The Skull Quest, Blade of the Ghosts, and Malison: Dragon Curse, I believe are the three right now. But I also emphasize that if you do sign up for my new release newsletter, you do get free short stories on a fairly regular basis. If fact, I'm planning a newsletter for the 27th that will also give away more short stories. So I do send out a couple of newsletters a month whenever I have a new book come out, and there are short stories given away with all of those. So that is a good way to help build loyalty and reader engagement for your newsletter, which leads directly into reason number four.   #4: It is a carrot, not a stick to motivate people to open and read your messages, which helps with your messages getting flagged as spam. As I've mentioned before, I do enjoy writing short stories. I wouldn't do it if I didn't enjoy it, but the main marketing reason, the big one I write short stories for, is to drive engagement for my newsletter, which has a very practical benefit. Many of the anti-spam systems nowadays are very sophisticated and track a lot of what you do in the email and the more you interact with an email, the less likely it is to get classified by spam, so that way if people are clicking on links in the newsletter to get the free short story, that means they're interacting more with the newsletter and that the email is less likely to be classified as spam.   For a while in 2018 and 2019, I thought writing short stories was too much work, so I decided to phase it out, but my newsletter engagement just dropped. I realized it was because so many fewer people were clicking on the links in the emails and therefore they're getting listed as spam. So I thought, you know what? I better get back to writing short stories. If your newsletter messages are just long diary style entries, people will at best skim them or start to tune out. Having reader magnets for the newsletter gets people used to thinking there is some incentive for them to personally keep checking your updates, which of course turns back to the original point, that this will also help drive engagement and meaning your newsletter is more likely to be opened and less likely to be classified as spam.   #5: And finally, the fifth and final reason is making short stories free for a limited period of time instead of permafree gives subscribers and followers an incentive to read your posts and newsletters frequently and closely. Fear of missing out (or FOMO, as it's commonly known), is a powerful force. Having the item be free for limited time and exclusive for newsletter subscribers creates a sense of urgency to keep up with your updates. Exclusive content such as never selling the short story but only making it available to newsletter subscribers is also a big incentive for people to subscribe. Many readers (in fact, I would say most readers) are completionists and don't want to miss out on anything in a series, even for just a single short story in that series.   So those are five reasons to use short stories in your marketing to give them away for free. But there are a couple of caveats I want to add.   First, free content is part of the marketing plan and not the entire marketing plan. After being an indie author for almost 13 years now (wow, that's a long time), I've come to realize there is no single magic silver bullet for marketing, but if you do a lot of different things that have a little effect on their own, that does add up over time.   Second, free content should be in line with reader expectations/interests. For example, I'm writing epic fantasy with the Shield War series, so the short story that comes out with Shield of Deception should really be epic fantasy as well. A mystery writer who gives away romance short stories would probably baffle the reader. Likewise, if I published a Caina book and then gave away a short story that was totally unrelated to the Caina series, or indeed not even in the fantasy genre at all, that would probably confuse and annoy readers.   The third caveat is that content besides short stories can also work, such as deleted scenes and alternative point of view chapters or preview chapters. I know writers who have done that, but it needs to be substantial. For example, subscribing to a newsletter and finding out that the special preview is only a paragraph is not going to create goodwill with new subscribers and you're probably going to get a lot of immediate unsubscribes.   And fourth, and finally, the story you're giving away needs to feel professional. It needs to be formatted and edited and put together properly and the cover needs to look good. That is something I struggled with for a long time because at the start, I would hire out my novel covers and do the short story covers myself, but I didn't really know what I was doing, and eventually I learned to use Photoshop and got better at that so I could have better looking short story covers, which paid off in the long run, but it was a lot of work to get there. So that is something to consider if you're giving away short stories, is how much you want to spend on the cover image for it. It might be a good idea to just do something simple for a short story you're giving away for free, like finding an appropriate stock image and then putting some appropriate typography on it. It doesn't have to look amazing. It just has to look good and professional enough. Those are four caveats to our five previous thoughts.   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.  

In this week's episode, I celebrate the 200th episode of The Pulp Writer Show by asking readers which book of mine they read first. The episode also has a preview of the audiobook of GHOST IN THE VEILS as narrated by Hollis McCarthy. To commemorate the occasion this coupon code will get you 25% off EVERY SINGLE ITEM at my Payhip store: 200THEPISODE That's right, the coupon code will get you 25% off every single ebook or audiobook on my Payhip store, and it's good through May 20th, 2024. So if you're looking for something to read or listen to, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT Audio file Episode200.mp3 Transcript   00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 200 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is May the 10th, 2024 and today we are celebrating the 200th episode of this podcast by taking a look back at how people have found my books. We'll also close out the show with a preview of the upcoming Ghost in the Veils audiobook. First up, let's do Coupon of the Week. To celebrate the 200th episode of this podcast, we're going to have a special coupon code that will get you 25% off every single item at my Payhip store. That coupon code is 200THEPISODE, which is spelled 200THEPISODE and the coupon code and the link to my Payhip will be included in the show notes for this episode. That's right, the coupon code will give you 25% off every single ebook or audiobook on my Payhip store and is good through May 20th, 2024. So if you're looking for something to read or listen to, we have got you covered. Now let's have an update on current writing projects. The rough draft of Cloak of Titans is done, and I am about 2/3 of the way through the first editing pass. If all goes well, I am hoping to have that out before the end of May. I've also written a short story called Blood Walk and newsletter subscribers will get a free ebook copy of that short story when Cloak of Titans comes out. So this is an excellent time to sign up for my new release newsletter. You'll get 3 free epic fantasy novels when you do. Once Cloak of Titans is published, my next main project will be Shield of Darkness, which will hopefully come out towards the end of June or the start of July. I am also about 11,000 words into Half-Orc Paladin, the third Rivah book, and I will make that my main project after Shield of Darkness is done, so that book will probably come out before the end of this summer, if all goes well. 00:01:57 Main Topic/Question of the Week And our Question of the Week is also this week's main topic. It's a question that I can't answer myself, but I asked because I wanted to talk about it for this episode of the podcast, and the question is, which book of mine did you first read, and how did you come across it (since Cloak of Titans will be, I believe, my 152nd novel)? I expected a wide range of responses and we got them. Our first response is from Roman who says: first one was Demonsouled. I looked for free books when I downloaded the Kindle app for my new iPad and have read everything you've written since. I guess your plan of giving away the first book for free worked on me. That is why I give those books away for free. Our next response is from Dave, who says: I found Child of the Ghosts on BookBub. The title was intriguing. It was also free. I now have an extensive Jonathan Moeller collection on my Kindle Library. Our next response comes from Joachim, who says: Ghost Omnibus One and Ghost Exile Omnibus One were $0.99, so I purchased both. I continued with Ghost Exile, backfilling the Ghost stories later. You would not be able to answer your own question obviously, but would you be able to answer us the following question: what was the first fantasy book you published? That would been Demonsouled back in 2005, when it was traditionally published and later I got the rights back and self-published it for the first time in 2011 and then later made it free. Our next response is from Mark, who says: I found Child of the Ghosts on Kindle. Sam says Frostborn: The Gray Knight. I was looking for a new fantasy series to read after I finished the Codex Alera. Came across it while scrolling through Amazon and thought, huh, why not? Little did I know all these years later I would have an addiction to your novels. Well, there are worse problems to have. I agree very much. Our next response is from Tarun who says: read Child of the Ghosts first on the Kindle web app. Todd says: Child of the Ghosts. Caina is a great Ghost nightfighter. Mary says: Frostborn. I forget why. That seems entirely appropriate, because I wrote Frostborn 11 years ago now. Yes, eleven years ago now, because I wrote it in 2003, so I can barely remember writing it at this point, let alone how someone might come across it. Our next response is from Justin: Demonsouled. Free book offer. Steve says: Iron Hand. If I remember right, it came up as a suggestion on the Kindle app. Sara says: Frostborn. It was $0.99 and then after I finished that series, Child of the Ghosts on a 99 cent deal. Thuvia says: Thief Trap-finished it on September 14th, 2016. I don't recall how I found it, but maybe BookBub? I know the book covers amused me since they're nothing like how Nadia dresses. I have since changed the Cloak Games and Cloak Mage covers, but the original covers definitely did not reflect how Nadia dresses in the series. Our next response is from William, who says: Iron Hand, which I discovered through William King's blog when you posted your blog post on how to write and publish an ebook at no cost using free software. I remember that blog post. That got a lot of traction, especially because I've written an entire book, Silent Order: Eclipse Hand, in order to prove that point. Our next response is from Kermit, who says: the Ghost Omnibus. I was researching the next fantasy author I wanted to read because David Eddings had died. I came across your Ghosts series and decided to try it. Ann-Marie says: Child of the Ghosts. The title caught me. It was part of Kindle's recommendations for things I should try next. I was also getting off of a mystery genre binge so I wanted something different to dive into. I love Caina. She's so cool. Whoops, forgot to add Goodreads says I read it back in July 2017. Kevin says: the first books of yours were The Frostborn Omnibus One on the 21st of April 2017. I came across it on Amazon search while looking for stuff to read in the car whilst waiting for my son to come out of school. It was £0.99, so throw away money really and worth look. Since then I have, amongst others, read a further 103 books of yours to date. So it seems that making Frostborn Omnibus One $0.99 turned out to be a really good idea. Our next response is from Lee, who says: Frostborn the Gray Knight was the first ebook I picked up to read. I started because of the book description. Since then I have read almost every book you have published. Perry says: Demonsouled with the original public domain cover art (the best of the covers, in my opinion) searching for books to add to my Kobo. And I stumbled across Smashwords. I searched for free fantasy books, and your books were near the top of the results. This was just shortly after you started self-publishing. I originally grabbed a whole slew of your books there. I have since purchased and continue to buy your ebooks through Kobo. I get points for being a VIP plus a free book every year from a select list. All your short stories I buy on Kobo as well. Audiobooks I get through your Payhip store. Ah, that takes me way back because way back. In 2011 when I started self-publishing, I couldn't afford cover art of any kind, so what I had to do was look for classic artwork scenes that were in the public domain since you can reuse public domain art freely. You do in fact see a lot of traditionally published books that have old like Renaissance or Baroque paintings, for the cover. That was the original covers Demonsouled and Child of the Ghosts, public domain artwork from the 19th century. Our next response is from Lauren, who says: Child of the Ghosts on Smashwords, but I read primarily through Kindle these days. Nadia is my favorite, but I hope to use the Ghost and/or Demonsouled settings one day in our group's tabletop RPGs. Our next response is from Jesse, who says: Frostborn Omnibus One. I was sitting in an IHOP and I had just finished the last ebook in my queue. Google Books suggested it. It was a dollar for three and half books, so I figured why not? Still had half a plate of food to go. I have subsequently bought and read pretty much everything of yours is readily available and actively tracking all the series. Good stuff. I'm glad that worked out because that is one of the better stories I've ever heard of what happens in an IHOP. Our next comment is from Becca, who says: Demonsouled, when it first came out on Kindle. I can remember waiting eagerly for each book in the series. Still one of my favorites. Thank you for all the writing! Rhion says: Demonsouled. I just finished a bunch of Quantrell and Peloquin books and it popped up under suggested reading on KU. Since then, I've read quite literally your entire fiction bibliography, which is just ridiculous. Our next comment comes from Jonathan (a different Jonathan than me) and he says: first book I actually read was the Frostborn Omnibus, the first three books plus The First Quest all bundled into one. I got them on Google Play because I got a gift card for Christmas and I think the omnibus was on sale. So I couldn't resist getting four whole books for cheap, which of course led into the rest of the series and to Sevenfold Sword and to Mallison and to Dragontiarna. Mandy says: I read the Frostborn prequel and found it on the freebie list on Amazon at the time. I read everything released in that universe, as well as the Demonsouled series and am now working my way through the Ghosts series. Our next comment is from Randy, who says: Child of the Ghosts was my first. I was desperately searching for new authors and it was one of about a dozen free novels I picked up several years ago. Caina's story was so good I finished in one sitting. After I devoured what was available at the time for the Ghost books, I moved on to Frostborn. Then I found you also wrote science fiction. I've read all the different series to date and I haven't been found wanting yet. Well, not true. I'm always wanting the next book. That's why I'm working hard on the next book. Our next comment is from Martin who says: I started with the Gray Knight. I instantly loved it and the rest of the series, at least what was published at the time. When I ran out of them, I looked you up and read the Demonsouled books. After that, moved on to Caina and only recently I moved on to Nadia. I also find they have a lot of readability. Our next comment is from Lauren, who says: Child of the Ghosts, after the third book in the series was out. Found it when searching for a new read on Amazon. Was hooked from there. Marta says: I'm sure it was a Bookbub deal. I think it was the Frostborn Omnibus. Jacob says: The Gray Knight. Came across it after looking for a new series to read after I caught up on the Half-Orc series by David Dalglish. Barbara says: Demonsouled or Child of the Ghosts. It's been so long. I'm not sure which was first. Having been the one to write those books so long ago, I totally understand where she's coming from. Our next response is from Cheryl, who says: the first Ridmark Arban book. Can't remember the name, may have been The Gray Knight? That is entirely correct. It was, in fact Frostborn: The Gray Knight. Our next response is from JKM who says: the first Ghost book and I cannot remember where I came across it. John says Demonsouled on Kindle. Amazon suggested to me way, way back. I picked up a used printed copy I discovered at my local fantasy and science fiction store, Dark Carnival. Shortly afterwards gave it to my son, who enjoyed it as well. That is a deep cut, because Demonsouled was originally published in 2005 in hardback and very quickly went out of print. So I'm impressed that John managed to find one of those copies still floating out there in the used book market. Cathy says: Frostborn Omnibus One. I saw the $0.99 price and thought if I don't like it, I'm only out a dollar. Once I finished it, I started looking for other books by you and have read almost every series you've written. Michael says. I think it was Ghost in the Flames. It was early 2010s (2013 maybe?), and I just discovered the joy of self-published fantasy authors on the Kindle store. As soon as I read it, I was hooked. Bonnie says: Frostborn omnibus. It was cheap, looked interesting, so I gave it a try. Then Tower of Endless Worlds- totally hooked and now I have all the books! Michiel says: Demonsouled. It was free, so I gave it a go and started collecting everything you wrote since then. Jason says: I honestly can't remember. I think it might have been the first Caina omnibus with an Audible audiobook that I played in my car while driving to work. Then the second and I ran out of audiobooks, so I had to start reading them myself. Phillipe says: The very first Caina book, been hooked since. Susan says: Demonsouled. I was searching for something to read, and it sounded good. I have now read everything and am patiently waiting for more. Melinda says Child of the Ghosts. It was free and I was broke and bored. That is why I give away the free books: to entertain people who are broke and bored. Our next comment is from Juliana, who says: the first Ghosts book. Judy says: Child of the Ghosts. I was on Google Play and was recommended. Tom says: The Frostborn Omnibus One, on sale on Amazon. The rest is history. Justin says: The Gray Knight was a suggestion based on what I read on Apple Library. Ashley (who I believe is in fact engaged to Justin) says: My first book was also The Gray Knight and Justin was the reason I started reading this series. So thanks for the recommendations, Justin! James says: Demonsouled on Kindle way back when. It was free and a good name. I mean how Demonsouled isn't a band name yet, I have no idea. The rest, as they say, is many, many series later. I fully understand. Our next comment is from Juana who says: Frostborn: The Gray Knight. It was in a BookBub offering. Shandy says: I was in a book hangover and saw your Frostborn series on sale on Google Play Books. Omnibus got me and like 100 plus books later, safe to say I'm a fan. Beverly says: Demonsouled. It's been so long. I don't know what led me to get it. Most likely just window shopping for next read and I thought it'd be something I would enjoy. Andrew says Frostborn series. Suggested by Kindle. I've read most of what you've written since. Just can't get into Demonsouled, so don't know why. I've got those books. Just doesn't click. Christopher says: Demonsouled. I got the first book free on my Nook, like I found most of my favorite authors. I also read another one of the first book free ones at the same time, but I didn't like it. I don't remember something about a tower and magic. Then I read the Frostborn series. You were far enough into it that by the time I started I was playing catch up as you released books. I may have had to wait a week or two for the last book to come out. Then I started Cloak Games. That is still in my top three favorite series of all time. Probably top two with Spinward Fringe by Randolph Lalonde. I have read pretty much everything you've written by now. David says: Thief Trap. Found via Facebook ad. Venus says: Thief Trap. Found it doing a search for free urban fantasy on my Nook. So those are some of the first books of mine that people have read and the ways in which they found them. I think we can safely say that giving away the first book in your series for free turned out to be a very good idea. I would like to take a moment to thank everyone who has read any of my books as, as you probably guessed, have been doing this for a long time. Demonsouled was first published in April 2011 (for self-published, rather); it was initially published in hardback way back in May 2005. So I clearly have been doing this for a long time and I am very grateful to everyone who has read a book or listened to an audiobook or come along for the ride. I'm also very grateful to everyone who has listened to this podcast over 200 episodes. And here's to more interesting episodes in the future. 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 with transcripts (transcripts are available from Episode 140 onwards) on https://thepulpwritershow.com. 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. And now let's close out the show with a preview of the audio book of Ghost in the Veils, as excellently read by Hollis McCarthy: Caina gazed at the wrapped bundle in the back of the wagon. Thankfully, no blood had leaked from it. Though perhaps she shouldn't have worried. Only a few people in Malarae would have recognized the dark green liquid as blood. The wagon itself was nothing remarkable. A bit old and worn, though none of the planks had rotted and the wheels were in mostly good shape. A pair of placid draft horses pulled the vehicle, the animals well-accustomed to the noises and smells of the Imperial capital. The only thing unusual was the bundle resting in the back.It was almost the precise size and shape of the corpse of a grown man. To be fair, it was a corpse. Just not of a grown man. Or a grown woman. Or indeed anything human. Caina didn't know what it was, but she intended to find out. “Will there be anything else, Countess?” said her seneschal, a Saddaic man named Talzain. He wore the formal black clothes of a Nighmarian servant. Combined with his wan complexion, the outfit always made him look a bit corpselike. “No, thank you,” said Caina. “I should be back in time for dinner with Lord Kylon and Lady Kalliope.” “Yes,” said Talzain. He cleared his throat. “That ought to be…interesting.” “You have a gift for understatement,” said Caina. Kylon and Kalliope had their own errands in the city. When Kalliope had fled New Kyre with her children ahead of the Cult of Rhadamathar, she had taken some money and baggage with them, but she had been forced to leave it behind at the Wrecked Warship near the ocean harbor of Malarae. Fortunately, the innkeeper had kept all of Kalliope's baggage on hand. Partly because Anastasios was an honest man and partly because he feared the vengeance of Kalliope's father. Lysikas Stormblade had a formidable reputation, even among the Kyracians living in Malarae. So Kalliope had gone with some of Caina's servants to retrieve her baggage and buy such things as Nikarion and Zoe might need. Kylon himself was keeping watch over the twins. Caina suggested that he take them riding to see the city, and he agreed. The children, in awe of the father they had never known they had, had made no protest. Ardakh, Sethroza, and the other Cultists were still out there, but if they tried to attack the children in Kylon's presence, they would regret it bitterly.

In this week's episode, I answer a reader's question about whether or not I will use KDP's new Virtual Voice program to create AI-narrated audiobooks. This coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of DRAGONSKULL: SHIELD OF THE KNIGHT (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store: SPRINGSHIELD The coupon code is valid through April 30th, 2024. So if you need a new audiobook for spring, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Update Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 196 of the Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is April the 12th, 2024 and today we are talking about whether or not I will use Amazon Virtual Voice to produce audiobooks. Before we get to our main topics, we will have Coupon of the Week, some writing updates, and then a few random questions from readers. First up, let's do Coupon of the Week. This episode will go live on Tax Day in the US, so let's have a discount on an audiobook. This week's coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Dragonskull: Shield of the Knight, as excellently narrated by Brad Wills, at my Payhip store. That code is SPRINGSHIELD and that is SPRINGSHIELD again and that of course will be available in the show notes. This coupon code is valid through April 30th, 2024, so you need a new audiobook for spring, we have got you covered. Now let's have some updates on my current writing projects. I am very nearly almost done with Wizard-Thief. I'm hoping to finish up edits shortly and actually publish it on either April the 15th or April the 16th. So when this episode goes out, I may be publishing it literally as you are listening to this. This book, like Half-Elven Thief, will be available on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited. Next up, my next main project after Wizard-Thief is published, is going to be Cloak of Titans, the 11th book in the Cloak Mage series. It's not the end of the series; I'm planning that there's probably going to be about 15 books with four more after this one. But we are going to be blowing up a lot of the subplots in this book. So while this is not the end of the series, it will definitely have the feel like the end of a lot of plot arcs. I'm 22,000 words into it, and if all goes well, I'm hoping it will be out sometime toward the end of May and will be available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, Smashwords, and Payhip. In audiobook news, recording is underway for Ghosts in the Veils and if all goes well, that should be out sometime toward the end of May. So those are the updates on my current writing projects. 00:02:09 Reader Questions and Comments/Question of the Week Before we get to the Question of the Week, let's have a couple of unrelated questions from readers. Cameron wrote in to ask: I'm just interested in knowing how the name Calliande came about and does it have any meaning? I originally thought up the name Calliande because I wanted a unique and distinctive sounding name for the character, and so I was looking at various French and Welsh names that started with C and were about that length. I was rearranging the letters and swapping the vowels out and I came across that name and I thought, you know, that works, we're going with that. Amusingly, when I first wrote Frostborn, in my head it was pronounced Callian-DAY. But then when I did the first couple of Frostborn audiobooks from Podium way back at the end of the 2010s, Steven Crossley, the narrator pronounced it Calli-AND and ever since then, because that's where the direction he went, the official pronunciation has been Calliande and that's been the way it's been pronounced in all subsequent audio appearances of that character. Our next question is from Scott, who asks about a screenshot of the PC game Pillars of Eternity I posted on Facebook the other day. Scott says: that's on my Steam Wish List, but I haven't gotten to it yet. What do you think of it? I like it. I am enjoying it. I've had it since 2014, but I've decided the time has finally come to buckle down and finish it. If you played the original Baldur's Gate back in the ‘90s or Knights of the Old Republic or Icewind Dale or Planescape: Torment back in the ‘90s, then you will enjoy Pillars of Eternity. It's definitely worth playing. It's also an old enough game now that should work on most systems, and if you have Xbox Game Pass, the game's owned by Microsoft now, so you have Xbox Game Pass so you can play it as part of your subscription on your Xbox. Now it's time for Question of the Week, which we ask to have interesting discussions and maybe find out some good suggestions for things we might not have thought of otherwise. And so this week's question: if you listen to podcasts, what podcasts do you listen to most frequently? No wrong answers, obviously. MacKenzie says I have four podcasts on consistent subscription: The Art of Manliness, The Black Pants Legion, A Delta Green actual play podcast (content warning for very dark humor), and of course The Pulp Writer Show. Thanks, MacKenzie. Maaike says: currently just one, Kick in the Creatives posted by Sarah Busby and Tara Roskell. Through them I discovered a few more, but I haven't really found the time to really listen to them just yet. I don't know whether I can write or not, but I do know I can draw and paint, so that's what I'm focusing on. Thinking of doing NaNoWriMo though to see how my writing is. It's definitely worth trying NaNoWriMo just for once for the experience so you can see how you enjoy it or not. Michael says only two regularly, The Pulp Writer Show (thanks, Michael!) and the Legend of the Bones, which is an epic, gritty D&D solo play narrative where the dice rule. Perry says The Pulp Writer Show (not sure if you've heard of it) and The Self-Publishing Show (currently on episode 33 of 400 plus). Anne Marie says Cabinet of Curiosities by Aaron Mahnke. Jesse says: mostly Critical Role. Justin says: I didn't start listening to podcasts until I went full time with my current job in 2021. I listen to a bunch now, but most of my regular listens are The Glass Cannon Network, What Culture Wrestling, What Culture Gaming, and Adeptus Ridiculous. It's interesting how I actually haven't heard of most of these podcasts, which I guess goes to show how diverse and widespread the podcast ecosystem is, where if you have a podcast that can be very famous in a specific niche, it might be like THE podcast in that niche, but anyone who's not familiar with that particular subject of interest may have never heard of the podcast. For myself, I did not really start listening to podcasts until 2019, which is when I started listening to some of the self-publishing ones. In the past few years. I have also discovered retro video game podcasts. In that time, I've mostly listened to The Sell More Books Show and the Remember The Game podcast about retro video games, which is quite funny (but it does have some foul language, so if you check that out, be aware of it). 00:06:40 Main Topic: Amazon Virtual Voice Audiobooks Now on to our main topic of the week: Amazon Virtual Voice audiobooks. This was prompted by a question from Reader PML, who wrote in to ask: several of my favorite authors have opted to use AI Virtual Voice to release some of their older titles in audio format. I emailed you a while back hoping for more audio releases for Caina and Nadia. You indicated that audio publishing is expensive and you preferred to release the titles that were not short in length. I totally understand, but I wondered if you have considered releasing your back titles using Virtual Voice. The performance is not bad and I would really enjoy listening to all the books featuring Caina and Nadia. I don't know what the pricing scale is, but it's probably quite a bit less than a live reader. So thank you, PML for that question and for listening to all those audiobooks. If you are not familiar with the term, Virtual Voice is Amazon's new program for creating AI narrated audiobooks. Will I be using Virtual Voice to turn some of my older titles to audiobooks? No. Why? So there's three levels to my answer here. One, is it ethical to use AI for audiobook narration? Two, is AI narration good enough for audiobook narration? Three, does this help visually impaired listeners? I should mention that I have in fact experimented quite a bit with AI narrated audiobooks. Part of the reason I did this was because I wanted to understand the technology so I had an informed opinion about it. Google Play beat Amazon to the punch about two years ago, and I experimented with turning the Silent Order series into audiobooks with their technology, since I don't think the Silent Order series sells well enough to support audiobooks. After that experiment, I didn't think the AI generated audiobooks were good enough to sell in good conscience and just because you're selling something doesn't mean anyone will buy it. More on that to come. So instead, I put those AI narrated audiobooks on YouTube for free. That said, I did turn on AdSense for the audiobooks, so I made a satisfactory, if small bit of money from YouTube ads in 2023. Overall, the response from people who listen to those audiobooks seemed to be that they loved the story (thanks, everyone!), but they hated the artificial voice. Like if they had actually paid for it instead of listening to it for free on YouTube, I could just imagine the complaints. I think a lot of the authors who create Virtual Voice audiobooks and audiobooks using similar products from Google Play or other companies will be disappointed by the response they get for those audiobooks. Like I've said before, audiobooks are basically self-publishing on hard mode. But if you're coming to the market with an AI generated audiobook, it will be even harder to sell than one voiced by a human who knows what he or she is doing. So with that sort of background in mind, let's go on to the details for the answer to my question. One: is it ethical to use AI for audiobook narration? Ethics in AI is a bottomless quagmire of an Internet discussion. Overall, in my personal opinion, I think AI technology creates vastly more problems than it solves and is really nothing more than a very fancy autocomplete. I also suspect there's a bit of a speculative bubble to AI technology like there was with cryptocurrency and NFTs. For a while, all the Galaxy Brain influencer people thought crypto and NFTs were the future, and then the bubble burst and a significant portion of everything connected to crypto and NFTs turned out to be a big old scam and all the Galaxy Brains migrated over to touting AI. I suspect a lot of the AI technology rushed out now has the same speculative bubble effect and when the bubble bursts, some companies are going to be out billions since they spent all that money building infinite crap generators. A lot of people are rushing to shove AI into stuff because it's trendy and not because it's useful, like how (this is a 100% true story), the Washington State Lottery decided for whatever reason to put an AI image generator on its site, which it had to pull down hastily when that image generator started creating deepfake nude images of its users. It is also amusing how some of the really pro-AI Galaxy Brains like to say that the US needs to develop AI or else the Chinese will get it first, as if having an infinite crap generator to make deepfake nudes will somehow determine geopolitical dominance in the 21st century. But all that said, I don't think AI is going to go away. The US courts seem (so far at least) consistent in their opinion that AI is in plagiarism but isn't copyrightable, and there's a wide range of useful activity in the not copyrightable but not plagiarism space. This might change if something gets all the way up to the Supreme Court or if Congress passes some legislation on that or the EU  puts out new regulations that the companies have to follow because the EU is such a big part of their market. But for now, that seems to be the position. AI can do useful things that crypto and NFTs can't. Like for example, suppose you're applying to 40 different jobs and you can use ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot to crank out 40 different customized cover letters for your job applications. Given how messed up the job market is at the moment, I could hardly blame someone for doing that. And you see examples of people using generative AI not to create artwork, but to handle data processing type chores (like the cover letters) in clever ways that don't seem to cross any moral or ethical boundaries. So I suspect everyone will have to examine their own consciences and decide where their own line is for generative AI. For me, I decided I'm not going to sell anything that I didn't make myself, or in the case of an audiobook, was made by a human I hired. If I'm selling something, it was 100% written by Jonathan Moeller or 100% narrated by a human I hired, and the cover image doesn't include any AI generated art elements. This is also true of books and stories I give away for free, like my permafree series starters. That's where I've decided my line is going to be with AI usage. I have used AI images for Facebook ads, since ads are low resolution anyway and you often have to change out the image every week or so. Ad images are essentially disposable, and I've heard people say AI art is also disposable, so why not use the disposable products of AI art for ad images? Number two, is AI narration good enough for audiobook narration? All of my criticisms of AI aside, AI voice or Virtual Voice isn't a new technology. It's just improved text to speech synthesis technology and text to speech has been around since the late 1960s. The AI part just makes the synthetic voice sound closer to an actual human voice than the more obviously artificial tones of older technology. It's also pretty good at imitating the real human voice by now, which is why you can go on YouTube and see comedy videos of President Biden trying to make his way through Skyrim or something. Is this AI narration good enough to support creating a paid audiobook? Well, kind of, sorta. It's good enough now that it creates a near perfect imitation of a human voice. The trouble is that the voice is so perfect that it triggers the uncanny valley effect, which is when you encounter something that almost seems human but isn't. It's also really bad at emotion. The best narrators make it sound like they're telling a story, and that means varying the emotion of the voice at appropriate times, even if you're not trying to create a distinctive voice for each character. Text to speech simply isn't very good at that. That's part of the reason I won't use Virtual Voice. I don't feel the end product is of high enough quality to sell. Give it away for free on YouTube? Sure. But sell? Definitely not. It would be good enough for very dry nonfiction things like legal casebooks, geological and oil surveys, that kind of thing. A nonfiction book that required varied emotion like a war memoir, for instance or comedic travelogue would not work at all well with AI narration. And finally, number three: does this help visually impaired listeners? While I don't want to use AI nourish and create paid audiobooks, I would like to see the technology become more ubiquitous and more integrated with ereader apps and operating systems. I think the mission of technology is to help us overcome or ameliorate the inherent frailties of the human condition. That is the best and most ethical use of technology. So I would like to see AI narration eventually become just a button in the ereader app for visually impaired listeners. Like you hit the read aloud button and then the computer reads to you in a voice of your choosing. You'll still have the option to buy a human narrated audiobook if available, but the option to have the device read to you would be there if you want or need to use it. We're already kind of there, technology-wise. All the major operating systems for computer and mobile have read aloud functions. It's just not implemented consistently across the platform and the voices aren't always very good. I won't use Virtual Voice or AI narration to create any audiobooks for sale. Unless something drastically changes in the field, I don't think I'm going to change my mind on that, though of course anything is possible. In the spirit of full disclosure, as of right now (as of this recording on April 12th 2024), I have agreements with four different narrators to produce four different audiobooks, so I think I am literally putting my money where my mouth is. 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 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 eight pieces of writing advice from famous writers. I also discuss why I decided to change the name of my SEVENFOLD SWORD ONLINE series to STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE. To celebrate the release of GHOST IN THE VEILS, let's get caught up with some of Caina's older adventures in the GHOST NIGHT series. This coupon code will get you 25% off any of the GHOST NIGHT ebooks at my Payhip store: SPRINGNIGHT The coupon is valid through April 16th, 2024. So if you're looking for some spring reading, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 194 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is March the 28th, 2024 and today we are talking about eight pieces of writing advice from famous writers and what I think of those pieces of writing advice. So it should be an interesting show. Before we get to our other topics, let's have Coupon of the Week. To celebrate the release of Ghost in the Veils, let's get caught up with some of Caina's older adventures in the Ghost Night series. This coupon code will get you 25% off any of the Ghost Night ebooks at my Payhip Store:  SPRINGNIGHT and that is SPRINGNIGHT. And of course that will be in the show notes, along the link to the Ghost Night ebooks on my Payhip store. This coupon code is valid through April 16th, 2024, so if you're looking for some spring reading, we have got you covered. Let's have an update on my current writing projects. As we mentioned with the Coupon of the Week, Ghost in the Veils is done, it is out, and selling briskly. Thank you for that, everyone. You can get it at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, Smashwords, and Payhip. The reviews so far have been good, and it's been selling briskly. So thank you everyone for that. Now that that is done, my next main project will be Wizard-Thief, the second book in the Half-Elven Thief series, and I am in fact almost done with that. I'm on Chapter 11 of 12 though it might turn out to be 14 chapters in the edit. I would in fact be finishing it tomorrow, but I am taking the weekend off for Easter so hopefully I will get the rough draft wrapped up in the first week of April and the book out and available on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited before the end of April. After Wizard-Thief is out, my next two main projects will be Cloak of Titans (I am 17,000 words into that) and then Shield of Darkness, the sequel to of the sequel to Shield of Storms from earlier in the year. In audiobook news, the Half-Elven Thief audiobook is done and I'm pleased to report it was narrated excellently by Leanne Woodward (the first book she has narrated for me). That should be available in the next couple of weeks at all the audiobook stores. Recording will start in a few weeks for the audiobook version of Ghost in the Veils, and that will also be excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. 00:02:20 Question of the Week/Title Change to the Sevenfold Sword Online Series Before we get to our main topic, we will do Question the Week and then an update on my books formerly known as Sevenfold Sword Online. Our Question of the Week was: what is your all-time favorite video game, like the one you keep coming to back play at to play again and again across decades? No wrong answers obviously and we had some good comments on this. Todd said, well, this is an easy one. Diablo and then Lands of Lore. Patrick Stewart really did give the King Richard character gravitas. Sam says Final Fantasy 14, an MMO with an amazing story and an amazing community. Justin says World of Warcraft, though I'm not very good at anything but the Auction House and Conquest of the New World, a DOS turn based strategy game I've played for 30 years now. For myself, I think I might be one of the few people who have played computer games in my generation who never played World of Warcraft. I spent a lot of time supporting it and fixing computers that broke when they tried to run World of Warcraft, but I never actually have played it. Pamela says, I play Lord of the Rings Online every day with my husband. I occasionally go back to Age of Empires. Ross Logan says Morrowind, though TIE Fighter is pretty solid also. For myself, I have played both TIE Fighter and Morrowind and thought they were both great, great games. Jay says XCOM 2: War of the Chosen. John says, played the old Wizardry series in the early ‘80s fanatically. I've played Eve Online since 2006, but lately I just refuel alliance stations. Also used to play a lot of the real time strategy Warcraft and StarCraft games, Age of Empires, Homeward, and also the first Diablo. Becca says the Mass Effect trilogy for me. Michael says, I spent a lot of hours on Skyrim, played it on PS3, 4, and 5, but spent even more time on Final Fantasy 14. They keep adding more DLCs with the newest one and the whole new storyline coming at the end of June. Ultimately, the whole Final Fantasy franchise has been my favorite ever since about 1990. I can relate with Michael there because I have played Skyrim on PC, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox, but I've only actually beaten it on Switch and Xbox, never on PC. Brandy says all the Diablo games I don't have the hand eye coordination or computer to play much these days. My partner is much more game-oriented, from tabletop to 40K to Fallout, and Franken Fallout. I read a lot, which I suppose works out. As a writer, I support that! Jason says Dragon Quest 9 on 3DS is my ultimate going back to game. I'm waiting for port remaster, aiming to be able to play it somewhere than other on that tiny 3DS screen. Justin says Elden Ring. Before Elden Ring came out, it was probably Diablo 2. Yogi says Skyrim, can't get enough, want a new version come out. Had to get into New World to satisfy that need. Mike says I have not played as much over the last few years, but I enjoyed the Diablo series. A different Michael says, some epic answers here already. Morrowind is my all-time favorite, but not because I keep going back to it. In fact, the opposite. The game moved and impressed me so much that I've never played it again as to not dim the memory with repetition. Also, the old Infocom text adventures, Zork III in particular. For games I keep going back to, probably Master of Magic, Medieval 2: Total War, and Lord of the Rings Online. Rhion says, Master of Magic. I still have my DOS diskettes for it! For myself, I think it comes down to a toss-up between two titles. The oldest one is Master of Magic from 1994, though I think the remake from 2022 is a worthy successor. Admittedly, the 2022 remake took a bunch of patches to get there, but in the original form from 1994, the game also required many patches, so it's just continuing the legacy of the original game. The newer one is Skyrim, which as I mentioned, I've been playing on and off since 2011 and even though I finally beat the main campaign during COVID in 2020, I still keep coming back to the game. Though if we are measuring by the length of time I've been coming back to the game, Master of Magic wins since I first played that in 1994 and Skyrim was first in 2011. A semi-important announcement: I have decided to rename the Sevenfold Sword Online series to the Stealth and Spells Online series. The motivation for this decision came from the many, many, many emails I have received asking where Sevenfold Sword Online fit in between Dragontiarna, or Sevenfold Sword, or if the Calliande Arban NPC in the books will turn out to be the real Calliande Arban from Frostborn. And the answer to all these questions is no, of course not. Sevenfold Sword Online is something totally different than the Frostborn epic fantasy series. It's a LitRPG series with many science fiction elements. The premise is that 700 years in the future, an evil corporation made a virtual reality MMORPG game based on my Frostborn books and a former developer sets out to expose the evil corporation from within by playing the game. It's not part of Frostborn or the other Andomhaim series, but all this confusion is not the reader's fault. It's my fault. By naming it Sevenfold Sword Online, I think I set the table wrong, so to speak. What do I mean by setting the table wrong? Imagine that you sit down to a meal. The tablecloth is the red and white pattern traditionally associated with Italian restaurants. On the table you see a shaker of garlic salt and another of Parmesan cheese. Next to your plate is a pizza cutter, and in front of it is a basket of garlic breadsticks. Your beverage is in one of those red plastic cups that Pizza Hut had back in the ‘90s. Naturally, you're expecting the waiter to bring out a pizza. Instead, the waiter brings out a plate with carne asada tacos and lime and jalapeno tortilla chips. You're going to be very confused. Why is there a pizza cutter next to your plate if you're having tacos? I mean, they could potentially be the best tacos in the history of Mexican cuisine, but it's still weird because you sat down and everything indicated that you were about to get a pizza. By naming the LitRPG series Sevenfold Sword Online, I think I set the table wrong and created incorrect expectations that it was actually part of the main Frostborn, Sevenfold Sword, Dragontiarna, Dragonskull, and the Shield War series. It probably also kneecapped sales for the series, since people assumed it was part of Sevenfold Sword. Therefore, Sevenfold Sword Online has been renamed to the Stealth and Spells Online series. Hopefully this will be a better indicator of what kind of book it really is. Now after talking about all of that, I really want some tacos. 00:08:58 Main Topic: Eight Pieces of Advice from Famous Authors So let's look at eight piece of advice from famous authors and see what I think about them and if I agree with them or not. The first one is from Robert Cormier, who says “the beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time unlike, say, a brain surgeon.” I would definitely agree with that. For instance, when I published Ghost in the Veils, I forgot that in the first book I said that Calliope's eyes were green and in the second book her eyes were suddenly dark and reader Juanna pointed that out. So I made sure to go back and quickly change the color of Calliope's eyes to the correct green color in Ghost in the Veils. But you know, a little annoying to make that mistake. It's not a big deal, whereas if you make a mistake in brain surgery, that is pretty much a one and done situation. Our second piece of writing advice is from George Orwell, who of course wrote 1984 and Animal Farm and other classics of dystopian fiction. He says, “writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.” I think that applies more to authors who are traditionally published than indies, because I've never found writing a book to be objectively painful. It helps to have perspective. I mean, I used to spend eight hours a day unloading trucks. That got painful, especially when it happened to be 100° out in the summer. By contrast, when I write a book, I'm sitting in my office chair pressing buttons on a keyboard. That is objectively less painful, and I suppose the like the mistake I mentioned earlier about Calliope's eye color would have been more painful if it was traditionally published and I couldn't just change it myself as opposed to if it was traditionally published and then, well, that's it. It's going to be that way forever now. So I think that writing in general is less painful for indies than it is for the traditionally published. Our third piece of writing advice is from Margaret Atwood. She says, “If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word.” That is also very true. As we mentioned earlier, you definitely don't have to worry about your rough draft being perfect. You just got to get it on the page and then I would also suggest you don't have to worry about your final draft being perfect. You have to worry about being good enough and get it to the point where it is good enough because perfection does not exist in this world. Our fourth piece of advice comes from Stephen King, who says, “Good fiction almost always starts with the story and progresses to theme. It almost never starts with the theme and progresses to story.” If you swap out the word story for conflict, I definitely agree with that because I know some writers tend to worry a great deal about what is my book going to be about when I think instead they should be worrying about what's the conflict in my book going to be and how is that conflict get resolved? Our fifth piece of radio advice is from Elmore Leonard. He says, “Cut all the parts people will skip.” I agree with that very much. The tricky part is learning what the parts that people skip are going to be. So overall you want your book to be not boring and you want to cut out as many of the boring parts as is physically possible to do so. Our six piece of advice is from Neil Gaiman, who says simply, “Finish things.” That is very good advice because I've noticed that a trouble many new and starting out face is actually finishing the books and I often say that when a new writer says, do I need to be working on, you know, my website or my mailing list or my social media or all that? I say no, the best thing to learn how to do is to finish a book, because that is a skill that will serve you well for the entirety of your writing career. If you can't finish the book, then there's no point in having the social media and the website and the mailing list and all that. So learning to finish things is the vital skill for any writer. Our seventh piece of writing advice is from Harper Lee, who said, “I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent, he would be wise to develop a thick hide.” There is also good advice, especially considering she wrote To Kill a Mockingbird, which when it came out engendered a fair bit of unfair criticism for her. It is definitely important to have a thick hide when you are a writer. We've all seen the news reports of a writer who gets a bad review on Goodreads and flips out and melts down on Twitter. Or, in the worst cases, drives across the country to confront the reviewer in person. That is always a bad idea, do not do that. The trick to deal with any kind of criticism, especially online criticism, is to just not respond to it. The Internet criticism cycle tends to have a very short attention span, and so if you just wait it out, eventually some other bright shiny object will capture people's attention and that will be that. So the best way to cultivate a thick hide in the in the era of the Internet and Twitter and social media and all that is to learn to not to respond to things. Our eighth and final piece of advice comes from Kurt Vonnegut, who says, “No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them in order that the reader may see what they are made of.” That ties in with our earlier talk about conflict and that is how you indeed see what your characters are made of and how you find the bones of your story. What is the conflict and how will the conflict test and put the characters to the trial and how will the characters grow, develop, and change as a result of the trial to which they have been subjected? If you want your characters to have a happy ending, they have to suffer for it first. So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful and a quick note of thanks to my transcriptionist for helping me to pull together the quotes for this episode. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com, many with transcripts. 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 discuss why I decided to return to the character of Caina after twenty-nine novels. This week's coupon is for the audiobook of GHOST IN THE INFERNO as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of GHOST IN THE INFERNO for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code: WINTERINFERNO The coupon code is valid through March 14th, 2024. TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 189 of the Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is February the 23rd, 2024 and today we are talking about the return of Caina Kardamnos. Before we get to our main topics, we will have Coupon of the Week and then an update on my current writing projects. First up, let's do Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon is for the audiobook of Ghost in the Inferno, as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of Ghost in the Inferno for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code: WINTERINFERNO and that is WINTERINFERNO. The coupon code is valid through March the 14th, 2024. So if you find yourself needing an audiobook to break up the winter doldrums and weather, we've got one ready for you. So now for a progress update on my current writing projects. I'm pleased to report that Sevenfold Sword Online: Leveling is out at Amazon and Kindle Unlimited, since I have found that LitRPG books tend to do the best while they're in Kindle Unlimited. It is going a little better than expected, which is nice, and if you want to check out the book, you can read it at Amazon. My main writing project now is Ghost in the Veils, hence The Return of Caina Kardamnos title for this episode and I am 25,000 words into it, which puts me on Chapter 6 of 21. I am also 31,000 words into Wizard Thief, the second book in the Half-Elven Thief series and that should come out after Ghost in the Veils. I'm also 3,000 words into Cloak of Titans, the next Nadia book. So the order these will all come out in is Ghost in the Veils needs to come out first because it has recording slot scheduled for the middle of April. So it needs to be done and out by then. I will finish Wizard Thief after that and then Cloak of Titans. In an audiobook news, the recording and proofing for Shield of Storms' audiobook is done, and it's currently working its way through quality assurance on the various platforms, so hopefully it should be available on your audio platform of choice before much longer. 00:02:07 Reader Comments and Questions Now, before we get to our main topic, let's have a few questions and comments from listeners and readers. Reader NK asks: Hi, I would like to know what LitRPG is. Haven't come across it before and also do we need to complete reading the Sevenfold Sword series before Sevenfold Sword Online to better enjoy this story? In answer your question NK, LitRPG is generally defined as a story that uses the conventions and structures of online role-playing games like MMORPGs. They can be either fantasy or science fiction or blend a bit of both. Typically in these stories, either the protagonist is magically zapped into a game world or is playing the game while trying to balance some sort of crisis in both the game and real life, which is the approach I took for Sevenfold Sword Online. In answer to the second half of your question, Sevenfold Sword Online isn't actually connected to Sevenfold Sword. The premise is that it's 700 years in the future and that an evil corporation has built a hit virtual reality MMORPG using the books of a long dead author (i.e. me) as source material for the setting. In hindsight, I wish I had made the setting completely unconnected to anything else I had written, because it seems to confuse some readers, but too late now I suppose so, hopefully that will answer your question. Now we have a question from reader Justin. For context for that question, I recently had to get a new desktop computer after my old one died and this is in fact the first podcast episode I am recording using the new computer. So if it sounds really weird, I blame the computer, or more accurately, I probably should blame Windows 11. But anyway, with that in mind, here is our question from Justin: Good luck to you with your new computer. I switched to laptops for my computing needs. The lower power draw and portability are handy when you're going off grid. I'm used to you working on three series at once. You put that up a notch. Is this to reduce burnout and possibly writer's block? In answer to that question, the reason I got a desktop was because I do a lot of cover design and graphic design, which is not always the greatest on laptops because that needs a lot of processing power, a lot of RAM, and perhaps most importantly, a lot of storage. In answer to the writing question, the only thing that's changed is I'm not doing a Ridmark and Andomhaim book every other month. I am going to keep writing Ridmark and books set in Andomhaim but I've been writing a Ridmark/Andomhaim book every other month pretty much since summer 2013, so I'd like to change it up a little bit and do more of other things. So while I am going to continue the Shield Wars series and I am going to write Shield of Darkness soon, I'm not going to start writing it until after Cloak of Titans is done, if you remember my order of projects from earlier in the show. I don't feel at risk of burnout or getting exasperated with writing. I just have been writing Ridmark and Andomhaim setting for so long that while I would like to continue writing that I would like to write more of other things as I go along. 00:05:08 Main Topic: The Return of Caina Kardamnos Now to our main topic: the return of Caina Kardamnos. As I mentioned earlier on the show, I'm now 25,000 words into Ghost in the Veils, which puts me also at chapter six in the second book of the Ghost Armor Series, the immediate sequel to Ghost in the Serpent from late 2023. I have to admit that when I finished Ghost in the Sun in the Ghost Night series in 2021 (I believe that was), I thought I was done with Caina. The reason for that was I just didn't have any idea of what to where to go or what to do with the character after Ghost Night. Part of that, I admit, was that Caina had become powerful and influential and I am cynically suspicious of people like that and wasn't sure I could write someone like that as a protagonist. Though that was less a concern as I went on since writing Ridmark and Tyrcamber, and Dragontiarna and then Dragonskull and the Shield War gave me a good bit of practice. So I finally had a good enough idea to return to Caina as a protagonist, and I think it was a confluence of four different ideas. The first idea was perhaps the most obvious one: what if Caina found out she had stepchildren? There are lots of potential story dynamics with stepchildren, but I thought the most interesting setup would be if Kylon had children he didn't know about and the mother Kalliope Agramemnos had kept them secret from him, except Kylon loves Caina and Kalliope is in awe of Caina. So Caina, out of necessity, becomes the linchpin holding this family together, since neither Kylon nor Kalliope can stand each other. There are a lot of potential character arcs and conflicts that can be generated in the inherent tension of that situation. The second core idea came from medieval nobles. If you've read any histories of medieval Europe, one of the main themes of the Middle Ages is that men primarily wielded the political and military power. But some women, by sheer force of will, charisma, tenacity, and cunning came to wield great power themselves. There are in fact quite a few examples. Probably the most famous one nowadays would be Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, who was married to two different kings and the mother to two more or three (depending on how you count and if you include Henry II's eldest son, Young Henry, as the actual king or not). She kept her son Richard on the throne of England during his captivity after the Third Crusade and she was one of the chief architects of his release. Had Eleanor lived longer, and her son John listened to more of her advice, probably King John's reign would have been more successful and he would not be remembered primarily in the United States as the cowardly Prince John from that one animated Disney movie with the anthropomorphic animals. Perhaps the most successful example is Margaret Beaufort, who basically engineered her son Henry VII's ascension to the English throne at the end of the Wars of the Roses, and then served as one of his primary advisors for the entirety of his reign. In fact, she even outlived Henry VII by a year and then lived long enough to advise her grandson Henry VIII for the first year after he became king. A less successful example and contemporary with Margaret Beaufort, would be Margaret of Anjou, wife of King Henry VI and mother of his heir. Margaret of Anjou was one of the driving forces behind the Wars of the Roses but lost everything when her husband and son were killed and she died in poverty in France while her enemy Edward IV ruled in England. Blanche of Castile was her son Louis IX's regent when he went on crusade. Countess Matilda of Tuscany helped force the settlement in the Investiture Controversy and the Holy Roman Emperor, the southern dukes of the Holy Roman Empire, and the Pope all wanted Matilda as their ally. Perhaps the most striking example would be Sichelgaita of Lombardy, wife of the rapacious Norman adventurer Robert Guiscard. Guiscard started out as a penniless, landless knight and ended up conquering Sicily and a lot of Italy. He was known as greedy, cunning, and ruthless. His eventual tomb had the epitaph “Here lies Guiscard, the terror of the world.” It seems that Sichelgaita was in every way suited to be the wife of a freebooting warlord like her husband. Guiscard fought a lot of wars and Sichelgaita usually donned armor to battle alongside him. At the Battle of Durham in 1081 Guiscard's troops started to break and run while fighting the soldiers of the Byzantine Empire. Sichelgaita rode after the fleeing troops, berating them for their cowardice, and evidently the prospect of her displeasure was so fearsome that Guiscard's troops turned around and won the battle. It should also be known at this point in her life, Sichelgaita was in her forties and had borne Giscard eight children, so clearly a very resilient lady. So now that Caina is powerful and influential maybe historical events like these can provide inspirations for plot lines. Caina would still occasionally put on a shadow cloak and go out and break into places because this is, after all, a fantasy novel. The third idea was that someone must be in charge. I mentioned earlier that I had misgivings about writing protagonists with power and influence, but I've come to realize that is an incomplete view. The thing about power and influence is that someone is going to be in charge. It's just human nature. No matter how something is organized, someone must be in charge and bear the burden of leadership, and hopefully it will be someone with an eye on the greater good. I've thought about this concept a lot in 2023. I know several people in 2023 who, after much agonizing, left some of the traditional helping professions like medicine and education not because of dislike of the admittedly stressful work, but because the leadership was so stupid and so malicious as to create an unsustainable work environment. Like a leader can be stupid and well-intentioned, and a leader can be malicious and clever and an organization can still function, but stupidity and malice together are unsustainable. Alas, the contemporary United States and United Kingdom have no shortage of malicious and stupid leadership, but that's beyond the scope of the podcast about writing. So in the end, someone is going to be in charge, someone is going to have to wield power and influence. Hopefully it is someone who will act in the name of the greater good (I already did some of that with Caina in Ghost in the Council towards the second half of the Ghost Night series). That can make, in my opinion, for in a compelling protagonist. Fourth and finally, fantasy creatures. Way back in the 2000s when I was originally trying to sell the first Caina novels, all the agents and publishers fulminated on how they didn't want to see any novels with traditional fantasy creatures like elves and orcs and dwarves and serpent men and so forth. So when I wrote the kind of books I wrote them without any of that, which continued when I moved into self-publishing, though I was always a little sore about that, even years later. Now I think I have a firm enough grasp on the setting that I can introduce some traditional fantasy creatures into the Caina books, hopefully in a way that makes sense within the context of Caina 's very well-established world. So those four ideas came together for Ghost in the Serpent, and we shall hopefully see more of them in Ghost in the Veils. So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. Our reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com and many of them now have transcripts (note: Episodes 144-189 currently have transcripts). 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 different models of ereader devices and try to determine which is the best one. I also reflect on the experience of watching the Super Bowl for the first time in several years. This week's coupon is for the audiobook of GHOST IN THE RAZOR as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of GHOST IN THE RAZOR for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code: WINTERRAZOR The coupon code is valid through March 1st, 2024, so if you find yourself needing an audiobook to break up the winter doldrums, we've got one ready for you! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 188 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is February the 16th 2024 as I record this, and today we are looking at the best ereader devices. I also talk a little bit about what it was like to watch the Super Bowl for the first time in like 20 years. Just a little word of warning, there is some fairly substantial construction noise going on the street outside that may intrude in the background. Additionally, yesterday the computer I use for recording for received a Windows Update that messed it up rather severely, and the processor is constantly maxing out, which means it makes a loud fan noise. So if you hear hissing noise in the background, that is what is happening. I just haven't had time to fix it yet, so between the construction noise and that hissing noise, we are going to have an adventuresome podcast today. Before we get to our main topics, let us do Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon is going to be for the audiobook of Ghost in the Razor, as excellently narrated by narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of Ghost in the Razor for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code: WINTERRAZOR. That is WINTERRAZOR and that will be included in the show notes. That coupon code will be valid until March 1st, 2024. So if you find yourself needing an audiobook to break up the winter doldrums, we've got one ready for you. Now let's have some updates on my current writing projects. I'm pleased to report that Sevenfold Sword Online: Leveling, the second book in my LitRPG series, is now out and you can get it at Amazon and Kindle Unlimited. After a year's worth of sales data from the first book, I have concluded that LitRPG really does seem to perform best in Kindle Unlimited and audio so that is where it's going to go. It's currently in Kindle Unlimited and hopefully we should have audio in a few months, but we'll see how that works out and remind you that it's at Amazon and Kindle Unlimited. I'm not sure how long the series is going to be. I am leaning towards making it a trilogy and wrapping it up with the next book, but we will see how Leveling performs for the first 30 days it's out in the marketplace and maybe it would merit becoming a longer series, but if it sells at the level I expected it to, I think it will probably be trilogy. My next big project will be Ghost in the Veils, the second book in the Ghost Armor series with Caina, and I am 8,000 words into that, putting me on Chapter 2 and hopefully that will come out towards the end of March. It does need to come out before April because that's when I have a recording slot scheduled for it, so it does need to come out by then, so it's going to come out by then. I'm also about 26,000 words into Wizard Thief, the second book in the Half-Elven Thief series, and hopefully that will come out fairly quickly after Ghost in the Veils comes out. I am also writing the outline for Cloak of Titans, which would be the eleventh Cloak Mage book, and that will be my main project after Ghost in the Veils and Wizard Thief are out. In audiobook news, recording is underway for Shield of Storms, and hopefully that should be out in March sometime, but we will see how things go. 00:03:17 Reader Comment Before we get to our main topics, let's have a comment from a reader. James says: having just finished the Dragonskull series while waiting for Cloak of Titans, I thought how great it would be if there's a short story about Gareth's return home with Niara would be. His mother's reaction would be precious. Just starting on the Sevenfold Sword series. I love all your books and you have totally taken over my Kindle. Thanks, James. I am glad you have enjoyed all those books. In answer to your question, that is a fairly major part of the plot in Shield of Storms, where Gareth and companions return home. Just the difference is in the Shield War series, Gareth and his friends aren't the main characters. They're supporting characters and Ridmark is one of the main characters.   00:03:57 Thoughts on the 2024 Super Bowl Now let's talk about something a bit uncharacteristic: The Super Bowl. I did something I haven't done since the early 2000s, and I watched the entirety of The Super Bowl last week. The reason I did that was that some family members wanted to watch it, and I had no objection. So I watched The Super Bowl. Though to be fair, when I say watched, what I really mean is I had it on in the background while playing Icewind Dale on my iPad for the most part, along with some Skyrim on my Switch. I admit that when I was younger and more insufferable, I would make a point of refusing to watch The Super Bowl. Then I realized such an approach was self-defeating. Professional football is no better or worse than any other form of recreation. Additionally, connecting with people socially is not among my strengths, and very often sports discussions are the low hanging fruit of easy social engagement. That said, I don't exactly pay close attention to professional sports, so here is what I found interesting about The Super Bowl as an outsider, so to speak. I think an observer completely unfamiliar with American culture and professional sports, upon watching The Super Bowl, would conclude it was a 3 1/2 hour block of commercials infrequently broken up by two-minute clips of football. That said, the Christopher Walken commercial was the funniest one and also the one with Dunkin' Donuts. The NFL may not be a cartel in the strict legal definition of the term, but we all know it's totally a cartel, which is a pretty sweet position to be in because you have massive corporations like Apple and Verizon shelling out big bucks. So it's the Apple Music Halftime Show or the Verizon Pregame Show or whatever. I do think from an objective viewpoint that it is rather surprising that football became the predominant sporting event in America. And I think the reason has to do with the football commissioners rather foresightedly seeing the potential of broadcast television in the 1950s and the 1960s. American football, if you look at it from the outside, is this really weird mutant form of rugby with a lot of arcane terminology and non-intuitive rules, and compared to soccer or basketball, it's just a very slow and plodding game. There's 15 seconds of action and then everyone stands around for two or three minutes. It's time for a commercial break, brought to you by Verizon. Soccer and basketball are much faster paced If American football is the imperial system, then European football/soccer is the metric system that everybody else in the world uses. I suspect to really appreciate American football, you have to get into it as a child and grow up with it so all the weird rules become second nature, which is probably why the NFL embraced Taylor Swift so much this year, which did annoy some long-term NFL fans who are not fans of Swift's music. I don't really have an opinion on Taylor Swift one way or another, since I mostly listen to computer game soundtracks, that is my preferred musical genre. But like I said above, I think to really appreciate American football you have to grow up with it. Football doesn't quite have the cultural hegemony it had in the ‘80s and the ‘90s. It's still massively popular, but more and more parents are keeping their kids away from playing it because of the danger of long-term head injuries or because of all the many sketchy things the NFL has done over the years. Though, to be fair, it's not like FIFA is a paragon of business ethics either, so you have more young people who don't grow up with it and therefore can't be bothered to pay attention. But Swift is popular with the young people, and the NFL desperately wants more of the young people watching the games. I don't think the Super Bowl or the NFL season is scripted in advance, but I can definitely see how people come to that conclusion, partly because the NFL's broadcasts are so slick and media savvy that they feel like they should be scripted. I think it's mostly because the human brain has this tendency to see systems and order where there is in fact, nothing more than chaos. Though this year's Super Bowl game was so dramatic, with the Chiefs squeaking out a win in overtime, that it feels like it should have been written in advance. Finally, are football and professional sports the modern “bread and circuses” like they had in the Roman Empire? Maybe. But if they are, is that necessarily even a bad thing? If you look at history, every large civilization has had games and public spectacles as part of the maintenance of social and public order. Some aspect of human psychology really seems to require it. There's lots to criticize about the NFL, but it's certainly better than a lot of the stuff the Romans got up to or early medieval tournaments, which were mock battles that sometimes escalated into actual battles that turned into actual local wars. Perhaps modern professional sports or a more efficient and usually more bloodless method of public spectacle. So I don't really have any grand conclusions here, just observations from an outsider's perspective made while watching the Super Bowl and mostly playing Icewind Dale on my iPad, though I am pleased to report that in Icewind Dale during The Super Bowl I defeated an ogre with a bunch of Level 1 characters and my thief and my cleric both leveled up during the game. When I talked about this on my Facebook page, my readers had some good comments, so I thought I'd read a few of the few of few of them here.   00:09:11 Reader Comments on the 2024 Super Bowl Our first comments from William, who writing from the perspective of someone in the UK, says: I've seen the Super Bowl described as one of the great shared cultural experiences of the US and one of those times you can enjoy American football even if you're not really into the sport otherwise. It's one of those times you get together with family acquaintances you have few, if any common interests with. I think that's true and that's some good insight there. An opposing comment comes from reader named Mary, who says: I grew up breathing NFL. My sons played football through high school. As an adult, I watched consistently until I moved to an area without many services. Went four years without TV. Ordered a new streaming device and service. I hoped to bring some of those great memories forward. My goodness, what a disappointment. The commercials are heavily pharma-based or bad food. Gambling is another frequent advertisement. You're correct, the advertising is the point. I spend most of my free time reading, a much more immersive experience. Cancelled my service today with relief. So we can also see that the emphasis on ads during The Super Bowl and I think during regular football games as well, really does turn off some viewers. I definitely approve of reading as someone's main form of recreation, though I admit that might be a bit of self-interest on my part. 00:10:24 Main Topic: Best ereaders for 2024 in the US Now let's continue on to our main topic: the best ereaders available for 2024 in the US market. A couple of notes before we start. This is not sponsored. There are no affiliate links here. I'm not getting paid for anything I say here and these are just my opinions and research we are talking about on the show today. Because technology changes so quickly, I want to emphasize that this is current information or current information to the best of my ability as of February 2024, and since I'm based in the US, this mostly applies to the US market. It's definitely a good idea to do your own research when you're buying an electronic device, especially regarding specs, and especially if you have very specialized needs. The information was pulled together with a lot of help from my podcast transcriptionist by combing through user reviews and looking at testing from popular magazines such as Consumer Reports, Wired, PC Magazine, Good Housekeeping, and similar magazines. So I suppose we should start with the obvious question. Why have a dedicated ereader when you can easily read ebooks on your phone or tablet? An ereader does have several advantages that you don't get with a phone or a tablet. For one thing, it's lighter. It's easier to use with one hand, which, depending on the size of your tablet or phone, may be impossible. It also helps with eye strain if you're using a dedicated grayscale ereader. It doesn't have a backlight or it has a much weaker backlight than a tablet or phone will have, and therefore it is generally easier on the eyes, though that can vary from person to person. And it can also help you to focus on reading and minimize distractions, because if you're reading on a tablet or a phone, you might get a lot of notifications coming in from text messages or emails or social media and all that, all of which can pull you out of the book you are trying to read. So if you are a serious reader and you don't mind reading ebooks, it can be definitely worth your while to have a dedicated ereader. So let's look at the most popular model of ereader, which of course in the US and several other countries is the Amazon Kindle. In general, Kindles are superbly integrated with the Amazon ecosystem, but they generally don't work well with non-Amazon or non-Kindle products. I've run into that a few times myself on my Payhip store (which hopefully you will visit soon to get your discounted copy of the audiobook of Ghost in the Razor). I often have to include several different kinds of file formats to work with whatever generation of Kindle people might be using. Additionally, if you use your local library's ebook service and they use Libby, not all Libby books are available for Kindles. A couple of times I've run into that, where I want to check out an ebook from Libby and it turns out that it's not available for Kindle, which is kind of disappointing because then you have to read it on your phone, which defeats the purpose of this episode. For specific Kindle models, the Kindle Oasis seems to be the high end one, and because it has the strongest backlight, it is considered generally best for reading at night. The Kindle Paperwhite seems to be overall the best reviewed and most popular model. It is lightweight. It weighs less than half a pound and it is waterproof. It has strong reviews from many review publications like Wired and Good Housekeeping and has a major fan following. Finally, the perhaps most esoteric Kindle ereader would be the Kindle Scribe. It's the biggest one, designed for note taking. So that's something that interests you that might be worth investigating, though it would be harder to hold the Kindle Scribe with one hand. After the Kindles, probably the most popular model of ereader in the US is the Kobo family. I'm a big fan of Kobo. Most of my books are available on Kobo, and most of them are also in Kobo Plus, their subscription program. In general, Kobos are best for people who do a lot of side loading, which involves taking ebook files and loading them manually onto your device and people who want a lot of customization. The one weakness of Kobo is that we're not entirely sure how well it will work with the various library services. The OverDrive app is being retired in favor of Libby and Kobo relies heavily on OverDrive because Kobo's parent company, Rakuten, used to own OverDrive for a while until they sold it off. So with OverDrive going away in favor of Libby, it's sort of an open question how well Kobos will integrate with library services in the future. Additionally, it's important to note that audiobooks and magazines from Libby are not presently available for Kobo devices. Hopefully that will change in the future, but that is the case right now. For specific models of the Kobo, Eclipsa is considered the best for people who like to take notes and annotate the actual pages, and it has the feature where you can convert handwriting to type text and then export those notes to Dropbox. The Kobo Clara model is the budget option that still has waterproofing, which is different from the Kindle base model, which doesn't. The Paperwhite does. I don't think the Oasis has waterproofing, but the Kindle Paperwhite does. If you are one of those people who likes to read in the bath and you drop your ereader, hopefully it will survive the immersion till you get it out of the water. Clara does have that waterproofing feature. The most popular model seems to be the Kobo Libra and it's best for those who are not locked into the Amazon ecosystem or another specific vendor. It has a very loyal cult following. It has physical page turn buttons, for those who prefer that feature, and it is highly regarded for its screen clarity. It also has very good battery life, which again is one of those strengths of ereaders over phones and tablets, which tend to be charging every other day, especially because the Libra settings allow you to easily shut off the Wi-Fi, dial back the lighting, and so forth to extend the battery life. So Kindle and Kobo are the big ones, but there's a couple others we should address. One of them is the Nook Glowlight, which is the current ereader available from Barnes and Noble. The tricky part with Barnes and Noble is that while they do have ebooks, it is not really a priority for the the company's current management, which has chosen to focus primarily on physical bookselling and which has apparently kept Barnes and Noble from going bankrupt. So good thing. But they're not hugely as interested in ebooks as they used to be. The Glowlight is best for those who have a lot of Barnes and Noble gift cards to use, since that's a popular present or who already have a lot of ebooks from Barnes and Noble. Unfortunately, it does not integrate very well with public library software like Libby. It can be done, but it is a lot of work and not nearly as easy as it is with the Kindle or the Kobos. And there are complaints of system problems like it's difficult to set up or prone to freezing. Another popular but niche ebook reader is the Onyx Boox Tab, which is a tablet with a color E ink display and the picture quality resembles color newspapers (for those of you who are old enough to remember when newspapers had color pictures). It has a loyal cult following, especially with comics and manga readers, and it has good note taking features. However, the big weakness is it is expensive and costs around $600.00 USD. Now, while we've mostly focused on dedicated ereaders, the truth is that tablets can in fact be very good ereaders if you know what you want and you know what you want to use them for. The advantages tablets have over ereaders is that they are more versatile than ereaders. And if, like nearly all of us, you are on a budget and limited what you can spend, which, let's be honest, is true of everybody, it may make more sense to buy a device that can do many things instead of an ereader which can do just one thing. Tablets are also good for those who aren't committed to a single source for their ebooks. You can easily download apps for all of the main ebook stores on an iPad. You can have the Kindle app, the Barnes and Noble app, the Kobo app, and a bunch of library services such as Libby and Hoopla, and you can enjoy them all on one device. Tablets are also good for those who enjoy reading manga or magazines often because if you have a color display, you can see the illustrations that come in a magazine or an ebook that has a lot of color illustrations, like a technical manual or a history book that has a lot of color plates, and the larger screens minimize the need for constantly zooming text. This is something I have done myself. I have a Kindle Fire HD-10 and I also have a bunch of various PDFs I bought from the Pathfinder company from a Humble Bundle and it's a lot easier to read PDFs in color on a Kindle Fire than it is on a dedicated ereader because you can move around the page easily. The screen is big enough you can see most of the text. You can see all the illustrations in color. It's really nice. So let's take a look at the specific families of tablets and nowadays, for all practical purposes, there are three major tablet families. The first and the most successful one is the iPad. Everyone knows what the iPad is. It's the best device for those who want to use it for web browsing, media use, and ebook reading. The iPad Pro models are rather overpowered for normal reading and web browsing and media use. They're also quite a bit more expensive. The base model iPad is the cheapest it's ever been. I think as of right now, as of this recording you get a base model iPad for about $329, which while a lot of money, is still significantly cheaper than has been in the past. And it also is a very capable device that can do everything we've listed above. The second major family is the Samsung Galaxy Tab, which is generally well regarded and is the iPad's chief competitor, and it gets high reports for reliability and performance from all the reviews. You get access to the full Google Play Store so you can install a bunch of apps and you can get all the different ereader apps and all the different library apps on Samsung Galaxy Tab. The third major tablet family is Amazon Fire tablet line. I have one and I'm quite happy with it. It's better for those who play games or watch videos heavily, since it's very strongly tied into Amazon's media ecosystem. So it does make a pretty good portable video player if you are tied into Amazon's Prime Video ecosystem. It's not as convenient for sideloaders, and the biggest weakness of the Amazon Fire is that you only have access to Amazon's curated App Store. You don't have access to the full Google Play ecosystem, which is a lot bigger and more vibrant than Amazon's App Store. Very often you will find popular Android and iOS apps that are available for regular Android tablets like the Samsung Galaxy or for the iPad are just not available on the Amazon Fire. So I'd say overall that's it's biggest weakness. It is possible to install the Google Play Store on the Amazon Fire, though, it does take a bit of finagling, and given the rumors that that Amazon is planning to develop its own operating system for its Fire tablets, that option may go away in the future. So that is something to bear in mind. And I thought it would be interesting to wrap up the show by sharing what I personally use for ereading and what my podcast transcriptionist personally uses for ereading, since she did most of the research for this episode and helped me pull it all together. The transcriptionist's favorites that she likes are the Kindle Paperwhite for outdoor reading. It's easier than eyes on the eyes than the tablet screen. She prefers the iPad for magazines and books with lots of color photographs, like cookbooks. For myself, I do most of my reading on a Kindle Oasis that I bought before COVID broke out in 2020, which, given the amount of reading I did during COVID, turned out to be a really good investment. After four and a half years, it's still going pretty strong and I'm hoping to keep on using it for several years to come. For a tablet, I have an iPad that I use pretty regularly. I do some reading on it when I have some with a lot of photographs, though for most color reading I have a Kindle Fire 10 that I got for editing because in my final stage of editing my books, I use it to read the book aloud to catch anything weird and hopefully fix any lingering problems, but it's also really great for viewing full color PDF files because you can load the PDFs on the Kindle Fire and then they show up in your library. It's very easy and convenient and smooth to read them on the Kindle Fire HD-10. So that is what I personally use for ereading. 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 of the show with frequent transcripts on https://thepulpwritershow.com. Speaking of transcripts, I'd like to once again thank my transcriptionist for helping me to do the research for this episode. So 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 my ten favorite scenes to write in 2023. I also discuss how my advertising efforts fared in December 2023. TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 182 of the Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is January the 5th, 2024, and today we're going to talk about the favorite scenes I wrote in 2023. We also have an update on how my ads did for my books in December 2023. This is the first episode I'm actually recording in 2024, so Happy New Year to everyone. If you are listening now, however 2023 treated you, I hope 2024 treats you even better. Before we get to our main topics, let's have an update on my current writing projects. My main project right now is Shield of Storms and I am 71,000 words into it. I'm hoping I can get that out in January. It might slip to February. We will see how the rest of the month goes. My side projects right now: I am also working on Sevenfold Sword Online: Leveling and I am 55,000 words into that. That will come out after Shield of Storms, so February or March depending on how long Shield of Storms takes to write. And I am 8,500 words into Wizard Thief, which is going to be the sequel to Half-Elven Thief from December. Not sure when that one's going to come out. I have to write Ghost in the Veils first because I have a recording slot scheduled for that in April that I really need to meet, but so it will probably be late spring, if all goes well. In audio news, the audiobook for Sevenfold Sword Online: Creation is now available at all the usual audiobook stores except Apple, and it should be showing up there later. It's narrated by CJ McAllister, comes to just under 10 hours long, and it's a very good audiobook and worth the listen. So if you have spare credit to or some audiobook money to use, I recommend giving that a chance, and that is where I'm at with my current writing projects. Before we get to the main topic, let's see how ads did in December 2023. Advertising in December is always tricky, both for authors and regardless of what business you're in because every consumer facing business in the world is dumping a ton of money into ads for Christmas and so the cost gets all screwy. But I'm pleased to report some good results for December. First, let's see how the Facebook ads did. For the Ghost series, I got back $4.82 for a dollar I spent, with 16.7% of the profit coming from the audiobooks. For Cloak Games and Cloak Mage, I got back $6.42 for every dollar I spent, with 6% of the profit coming from the audiobooks. For Malison and Dragontiarna, I got back $1.82 for every dollar spent. For Silent Order, I got back $1.98 for every dollar spent. I think for January, I will shut off the Facebook ads for Malison and Dragontiarna and Silent Order and let them rest until the next time and get a Bookbub for one of them. Next up, let's see how my Bookbub ads did. As before, I advertised Frostborn on Bookbub and for Frostborn I got back $6.52 for every dollar spent, with 37% of the profit coming from the audiobooks. Complete series of audiobooks seems to do really well on Bookbub. I need to expand my targeting data for the platform so I can advertise Ghosts there as well, and maybe urban fantasy and perhaps science fiction at some point. Finally, let's look at my Amazon ads. This month, I advertised Dragonskull: Sword of the Squire, Cloak Games: Omnibus One, and Sevenfold Sword Online: Creation on Amazon ads. I'm not entirely sure how Sevenfold Sword Online: Creation did, because the audiobook came out and I'm not entirely sure what the per sale rate for that is going to be, but I think that ad doubled its money, but I'm not entirely sure. For the ones I am sure about, here's how they did. Dragonskull: Sword of the Squire got back $3.06 for every dollar spent, with 18% of the profit coming from audiobook. Cloak Games: Omnibus One got back $3.63 for every dollar spent, with 22% of the profit coming from the audiobook. So, overall I think it is safe to say that my December campaigns went pretty well. So thanks for reading the books, everyone and hopefully we'll have more books to come very soon. 00:04:15 Favorite Scenes of 2023 (SPOILER WARNING FOR REST OF PODCAST) Now our main topic of the week: my ten favorite scenes that I wrote in 2023. First, I should note very strongly that this podcast episode will have spoilers for every single thing I published in 2023, so stop listening right now if you're not caught up and you want to avoid spoilers. That said, I thought it would be interesting to look back at 2023 and talk about some of the favorite scenes to write from the past year. As an added bonus, when I prepared this list, it turned out to be 10 scenes, which is convenient since all the news sites from their top ten articles in December and January anyway. Reminder: spoilers, and there are spoilers after this point. And here are my favorite scenes of 2023, in no particular order. Number One: when Nadia bursts through the roof with Delaxsicoria in Cloak of Dragonfire. That was a fun one to write. I used to joke that I originally intended Nadia's character arc to be a bad person, reluctantly and against her will slowly turned into a good one. But what her plot arc actually turned out to be was Catwoman slowing turning into Gandalf. Exploding through the roof of an athletic complex to save the day while riding a dragon was definitely one of the more Gandalf-esque things that Nadia has done. The scene immediately after that where Nadia, Delaxsicoria, Varzalshinpol, and Tarthrunivor all chase Ferrunivar through the skies of southern California was pretty great as well. Number Two: Caina deduces who Kalliope Agramemnos is in Ghost in the Serpent. I have to admit, for a while I knew it was likely that Caina would have stepchildren she didn't know about since she's married to Kylon, who used to strive to be a model Kyracian noble and Kyracian nobles in general tend to regard abstinence as something to be avoided at best, and a disgraceful vice at worst. Not their most admirable character trait. But for a while I didn't know how to write that situation in a way that would be interesting. If the mother died and Caina was left to raise the stepchildren, that would be lazy writing. It would also be lazy writing if everyone got along. There is an apocryphal story that for a while in the 2000s, all these newly remarried middle-aged screenwriters kept pitching sitcoms where a screenwriter, his new younger wife, and his ex-wife all lived in harmony together. The studio executives, who as a class are not always known for their firm grasp upon reality, always rejected these ideas because they knew a majority of the female half of the audience would absolutely hate it. So a scenario where Caina, Kylon, and Kalliope all got along seemed likely equally lazy writing. But what if Kylon and Kalliope couldn't stand each other? And Kylon had further grievances against Kalliope because she had never told him about the children? But Kalliope ends up being in awe of and a little frightened of Caina? So the dynamic is that Kylon and Kalliope can't stand each other, but Caina keeps the peace between them? I thought that might turn out to be pretty interesting to write and Ghost in the Serpents sold enough that I think people agree with me. It's also interesting to write because this is happening while Caina is one of the few people who know how dangerous the Cult of Rhadamathar really is. But more about that to come in future Ghost books. Number Three: Delaxsicoria tells Nadia not to be so hard on herself in Cloak of Dragonfire. The unlikely friendship between Della and Nadia has been fun to write throughout the Cloak Mage series and side stories. From Della's perspective of course they would be friends – Nadia caught the murderer of her uncle, and Nadia is wound up tighter than a spring and doesn't relax very much. Nadia, of course, is a little baffled by this, especially since she doesn't really have any interest in music, which is Della's great passion. So they have a great dynamic, and we'll see more of that in future books. Number Four: Sir Telemachus and Niara kill Mharoslav in Dragonskull: Wrath of the Warlock. This was fun to write because Mharoslav always got away from or at least got the best of the heroes in their previous encounters, including nearly killing Telemachus in the process. Telemachus decided that he would sacrifice himself in seeking vengeance against Mharoslav and save his friends in the process. Then he met Niara. Niara comes from the General Patton school of warfare – dying for your country is a fine thing, but it's way better to make the other jerk die for his country. Her utter loathing for all wielders of dark magic played into that as well, allowing her to show the way for Telemachus to defeat Mharoslav at last. Number Five: Myotharia versus Xothalaxiar in Dragonskull: Doom of the Sorceress. I have to admit Myotharia was originally going to die in the final battle of Dragonskull: Fury of the Barbarians, but she was such a great character that I felt I could get more narrative mileage out of the poor woman. I always knew from the beginning of the series that Niara was going to have to fight Xothalaxiar for the final time, and Myotharia lost everything to the urdmordar. So I realized that having Myotharia join the fight against Xothalaxiar would give her a sort of emotional catharsis, and help set Niara onto a path other than seeking her own death in battle. Number Six: Thunderbolt. I lucked out with Thunderbolt's character in the Silent Order series. I charted out the rest of the Silent Order series way back in 2021, which is when Thunderbolt was first mentioned in Silent Order: Royal Hand. I originally envisioned her as the sort of classic Star Trek Evil Sentient Computer, the sort of computer Captain Kirk would have to talk into a logic loop every other week. But then in 2022 and 2023 ChatGPT and Bing Chat came along, and they were terrible! For a while, the various insane ramblings of ChatGPT and Bing Chat regularly made the news. So when it was time to write Silent Order: Thunder Hand, I based Thunderbolt's personality off some of ChatGPT's more hilarious public meltdowns, though I left it ambiguous just how insane Thunderbolt actually was and how much of her behavior was just screwing with people to put them off their balance. By the end, Jack March definitely suspected the latter. Number Seven: The Battle of Calaskar. The entire Battle of Calaskar sequence in Silent Order: Pulse Hand was fun to write because I've been thinking about it for ages, since I've had a clear endpoint for the Silent Order series in my head for a while. I liked how it was able to bring back Admiral Stormreel, the Navigators, the Calaskaran Navy, and a bunch of other elements from the series for the Grand Finale. Number Eight: Gareth Figures out the Dragonskull. I also liked the final confrontation with Azalmora in Dragonskull: Crown of the Gods. Azalmora was such a self-controlled and intellectual villain that I wanted her demise to be intellectual, a sort of a moment of revelation that kills her. When Gareth figures out the nature of the Dragonskull itself and the way the xortami twisted it with their dark magic, he's able to use that against Azalmora, and in her final moment she understands the true nature of the Dragonskull, albeit briefly. Number Nine: Riordan MacCormac vs Michael Durst. This was a fun scene to write in Cloak of Embers. Durst had been an arc villain over the last few books. He proudly considered himself a monster, but then he had the bad luck to start working for Maestro, who was just as evil as he was but without any of his self-destructive indulgences. So it was little wonder that Durst found himself dragged into Maestro's orbit, even if he didn't realize what was happening. (The scene where Durst goes to kill Maestro and instead she talks him into doing exactly what she wants was also pretty great to write.) Even if Durst didn't want to kill Nadia, Riordan would still have fought him to the death, because Durst represents a rejection of self-control and responsibility, something Riordan finds utterly abhorrent. And unlike Durst, Riordan knew that a moment of reckoning was coming, which was why he practiced and trained so much with Sir Trandor, while Durst simply went begging to the Dark Ones for power, so the final showdown between Riordan and Durst was quite fun to write. And finally, Number Ten: Rivah and the Magister's Tower. When I plotted out Rivah's heist of Ramarion's tower in Half-Elven Thief, I didn't get too detailed in my outline as to what the inside of the tower would look like. I just knew I wanted it to be as weird and freaky and unsettling as possible, with a lot of Evil Wizard Stuff cluttering up the place. Several people have told me Rivah's venture into the tower was their favorite part of the book, so I think I succeeded. So those were my ten favorite scenes that I wrote in 2023. Thanks for reading, everyone. So that's 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 enjoy 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 my 2023 writing goals and see how many of them I met, while looking ahead to my writing goals for the coming year of 2024. 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 180 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is December the 21st, 2023 and today we're going to talk about how many of my writing goals I met in 2023 and what my writing goals are for 2024. Before we get into all that, let's have an update on my current writing projects. I am 37,000 words into Shield of Storms, the first book in my new The Shield War epic fantasy that I'm hoping to have out in January. We will see if that it turns out to be feasible or not, but I am hoping to have it out in January if possible. I am also 51,000 words into Sevenfold Sword Online: Leveling, which will be the sequel, the second book in the Sevenfold Sword Online series, and I'm hoping to have that out in February. I'm also 4,000 words into Half-Wizard Thief, which is the sequel to Half-Elven Thief. I am not sure when that's going to come out, but sometime in 2024 would be my guess. For free short stories, if you want to go to my website jonathanmoeller.com/writer, you will find that I'm giving away 12 free short stories from my Payhip store for the 12 Days of Christmas and all twelve of them are free right now and they will be free through December the 31st, 2023. So if you're looking for a bunch of short things to read during your holiday travels, now would be the time to get them.   00:01:26 Main Topic: 2023 and 2024 Writing Goals So, let's get right to our main topic. Did I meet 2023 writing goals and what are 2024's writing goals? 2023 without doubt was a year that brought many challenges and changes. So did I end up meeting most of my writing goals? First off, I would like to thank everyone who bought or read or listened to a book of mine this year. Thanks for coming along on the adventures of Gareth, Nadia, Caina, Jack March, and Rivah Half-Elven. That said, I have to admit from February to about mid-July this year was rather a challenging patch. Everyone's got their own difficulties, so I won't ramble on about mine, but I did get COVID pretty strongly in May and that messed up things for a while. Before May I was doing three and a half mile runs on the treadmill three times a week. After COVID I could barely do two minutes before the wheezing got too bad. And most of May and June are kind of a vague haze in my memory. One amusing anecdote to illustrate that time: about halfway through June, I spent most of a day watching a very energetic three-year-old child. We walked to the park in the morning, but it eventually got too hot and he wanted to go back inside. When we went back, he discovered the house's laundry chute and once I stopped him from hurling various small and expensive items down that chute, we compromised on letting him drop one of his stuffed animals down it. This delighted him to no end, and it seemed like good, harmless fun that would keep him out of trouble, though obviously I followed along as he did this to make sure he didn't accidentally lock himself in the dryer or fling his parents' iPads down the chute or something. So he dropped his stuffed animal down the laundry chute on the 2nd floor, hastened down to the basement to retrieve it, and then ran back upstairs to do it again. Over and over and over and over and over and over. And as I followed him up the stairs for, like, the tenth time, I had the profound realization, deep in my bones that I had gotten in very, very out of shape. For a while I wondered if I was going to fall over and if the three-year old in question would empty out my pockets and drop my keys and wallet down the laundry chute (which in fairness to him, would make a very cool noise), but fortunately I kept my feet. Eventually, the three-year old got bored with the laundry chute and decided he wanted to watch YouTube instead. Fun fact: I did not know before that day, but apparently there are people who make YouTube videos featuring action figures fighting each other and to judge from the millions of views, apparently toddlers love that stuff. Anyway, the next morning when I got out of bed and stood up, every single muscle was very eager to inform me that I had really overdone it the day before. Once the muscle aches had subsided and I had driven home, I set about trying to fix things systematically. The first week in July, I made myself run one mile on the treadmill at the gym every day and the week after that I raised it to 1.1. The week after that I pushed it up to 1.2. I am pleased to report that this week, the second to the last week in December, I ran 3.2 miles on the treadmill every day and I did lose nearly all the weight I gained when I had COVID. Many other problems in real life settled down around mid-July as well, which was a pleasant change. Things improved enough that I did 12 ten thousand word writing days after July. Compare that to 2022, when I did only one. I might have missed some of my writing goals for 2023, I still reached some and even exceeded others. Let's see how I did, then we'll take a look at what I would like to do writing-wise in 2024. 2023's Writing Goals Number One: Write as many words as possible, but try to publish 1,000,000 new words. I didn't quite make this one. The last time I wrote over 1,000,000 words in a single year was 2020, when I hit 1.27 million words. In 2022, I only did 814,000, but this year, in 2023, I did 929,000 words. So that was a significant improvement and probably was helped a good deal by the 10, no by excuse me, the 12 thousand word days I was able to accomplish in 2023. Number Two: Continue Dragonskull. Not only did I continue with the Dragonskull series, I actually finished it with the Dragonskull: Crown of the Gods this summer. Additionally, thanks to the hard work of narrator Brad Wills, the entire series is also available in audiobook, which is the fastest I've ever gotten a complete series of audiobooks out. Dragonskull was overall the strongest selling series of 2023, so I'm glad I was able to bring it to a satisfying conclusion. Number Three: Continue Cloak Mage. I did get two new Cloak Mage books out, Cloak of Dragonfire and Cloak of Embers. Three would have been nice, but I didn't quite get there. Number Four: Continue Silent Order. I did that as well. Not only did I continue the Silent Order series, I decided to push onward and finish it completely for a total of 14 books, which officially made summer 2023 my Summer of Finishing Things since I finished Dragonskull and Silent Order back-to-back. Number Five: Write in a new genre of fantasy. I did that as well with Sevenfold Sword Online: Creation, which was LitRPG. It didn't do as well as I hoped but I'm about halfway through the sequel (as I mentioned earlier in the show, which I hope to put out in February 2024). So we'll see how that does. I also wrote Half-Elven Thief, which while not in a new genre of fantasy, did quite well out of the gate, better than Creation did, in fact. So I did meet most of my 2023 writing goals and even exceeded the continuing goals for Dragonskull and Silent Order by finishing the series. Let's see what my writing goals will be for 2024, bearing in mind, of course, these wise words that were written some time ago: “Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.” Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, ‘If it is the Lord's will, we will live and do this or that.' “ With that in mind, if it is the Lord's will, here is what I would like to do next year, 2024's writing goals. Number One: Write as many words as possible while trying to hit 1,000,000 new words. I have not published 1,000,000 new words in a year since 2020, but it would be nice if I get over 1,000,000 words. Again, we'll see what happens this year. Number Two: Start The Shield War. I want to start my new epic fantasy series, The Shield War, which will be set back in Andomhaim. Currently, I'm over 30,000 words into it, 37,000 words, I believe, as of this recording on December 21st. So hopefully the book will be on track to come out by the end of January 2024. Hopefully I can get one or two more out in the series before 2024 ends. Number Three: Continue Cloak Mage. I also want to continue the Cloak Mage series. Next up in the series will be Cloak of Titans, which will be the 11th book and I think I will be starting writing that in late spring. I'm not entirely sure how many books Cloak Mage will end up having, but I think it will be 15 or 16 in total. Number Four: Continue Ghost Armor. Next up in this series will be Ghost in the Veils. I am really hoping to start writing this towards the end of February because I have a recording slot scheduled for it in the second half of April, but more on audiobooks in a little bit further on in the show. Number Five: Continue Half-Elven Thief. Half-Elven Thief, I basically started writing on impulse in April or so. For a while I've wanted to start writing shorter series that come out more quickly and I gave some thought to writing the entirety of Half-Elven Thief after Dragonskull was done, but then I got sick with COVID in May, as I mentioned earlier and I didn't have the energy to do anything but the bare minimum for a while. So I set Half-Elven Thief aside and didn't think about it again till November when I decided to come back to it and have it be the last book I would publish in 2023. I'm glad that I did. It had a strong response and sold much better than the last two times I tried something really new. I'm about 4,000 words into the sequel and we'll work on it as a side project for a while until I get to a good spot where will become the main project and then I will publish it. Number Six: Continue Sevenfold Sword Online. I almost walked away from this series this summer, but I was persuaded to continue it. I'm about halfway through the second book and I'm hoping that will come out in February 2024 if everything goes well, but we will find out shortly. And finally, Number Seven: new audiobooks for new books. I think at this point in my self-publishing adventure, I'm only going to do audiobooks for some of my new books as they come out. Like, I've done as many of my old books in audio as I think I want or is feasible to do. Frostborn is completely in audio from Tantor and through my ACX productions with Brad Wills, Sevenfold Sword and Dragontiarna are from Podium publishing as narrated by Steven Brand, The Ghosts and Ghost Exile are done and I did them through ACX with Hollis McCarthy. I could try to get Silent Order, Ghost Night, Demonsouled, or the rest of Cloak Mage in audio, but it would be a massive amount of work that would take years to turn a profit. Doing the Dragonskull audiobooks so close to the publication date of the ebooks worked pretty well, so I think I'm going to do that or as close to that as possible in the future. I have Shield of Storms and Ghosts in the Veils scheduled for recording next year and hopefully I should have good news about Sevenfold Sword Online audiobooks soon. If Half-Elven Thief reaches a certain sales threshold in the first thirty days, I will consider doing audiobooks for that series as well. So that is what I hope to do for writing in the coming year of 2024. As always, thanks for coming along and reading and listening to those books and as always, thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder, you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com and don't forget to visit jonathanmoeller.com/writer and get your 12 Days of Christmas free short stories, which will be free until December 31st. 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 examine my reasoning for putting HALF-ELVEN THIEF in Kindle Unlimited. I also discuss THE SHIELD WAR, my upcoming epic fantasy series. TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello everyone. Welcome to Episode 179 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is December 15th, 2023, and today we're going to talk about why my new book, Half-Elven Thief, went into Kindle Unlimited. Before we get into that, let's have an update on my current writing projects. First up, as you might have guessed from the opening of the show, my new book, Half-Elven Thief, is out. The last book I will publish in 2023 is now available at Amazon and Kindle Unlimited, so if you're a Kindle Unlimited subscriber, you can read that for free as part of your Kindle Unlimited subscription. Now that that book is out, my next big project will be Shield of Storms, the new Andomhaim book, which I will be talking about more later in the show. Hopefully that will come out in January. I'm also almost 50,000 words into Sevenfold Sword Online: Leveling, and I think that will probably be out in February, if everything goes well. I've also written about 1,500 words of the sequel to Half-Elven Thief, but I haven't decided when that's going to come out yet. It depends on what happens over the next few months and what the coming year brings us. In audiobook news, Dragon Skull: Crown of the Gods just went live as of the time of recording. It is currently on Audible and Amazon. It should be showing up on Apple in another few days and then hopefully it should be showing up on Chirp, Google Play, Kobo, and the various library services in a couple of days after that. So that is where I'm at with my current writing projects.   00:01:39 Shield of Storms News/ 12 Days of Short Stories Christmas Let's talk a little bit about more about one of those, Shield of Storms. I am now (as of recording) about 11,000 words into it and it will be the first book of my new The Shield War epic fantasy series. If all goes well, it will be the first book I published in 2024 on Kindle, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Apple Books, Google Play, Smashwords, and Payhip.  I think the series is going to be about six books long. It might get up to seven, but I'm going to try to keep it at six and will be set in Andomhaim immediately after the events of Dragonskull. So what will this book be about? Well, we will have four protagonists and three chief villains. The protagonists: the first protagonist will be Ridmark Arban, who is returning again. He knows that while the Heptarchy might have been repulsed, someday the Armies of the Seven Temples will attack Andomhaim again and that they will use their stronghold on the Isle of Kordain as a base for a new invasion. Will Andomhaim be ready? Ridmark doesn't know, but if you can find a way to wrest the Isle of Kordain from the Heptarchy's grasp, that might go a long way to deciding the coming war. The problem is that the Heptarchy has more warships than Andomhaim and attacking the Isle of Kordain from the sea might bring disastrous defeat unless he can find another way. The second protagonist will be Lika, the leader of the thieves of Teramis, the chief city of the Isle of Kordain, currently ruled with an iron fist by the Exarch of the Heptarchy. Once Tyrannus was the city of the Corsairs, free men who bowed to no king, and certainly not to the High King of Andomhaim. Then ten years ago Warlord Agravhask, exterminated the Corsair Lords, and the Heptarchy has ruled the Isle of Kordain ever since. Lika needs to protect her people until her father is returned, for her father went to the abandoned halls of the Mountain House to seek a weapon to defeat the Heptarchy. She knows that he will return, even though he left eight years ago. Our third protagonist is Niara Arban, who has returned to Andomhaim far different than the one she left, far different and far weaker. The modern Magistri are weak and feeble and no match for the first Magistri who drove back the ancient urdmordar (at least in her opinion), but the realm still has enemies and Niara will show them what war is really like. And our final protagonist will be Nikomedes. He was once an assassin of the Heptarchy, and now he serves the Master of the Mountain House. He still isn't entirely sure about the difference between right and wrong, but he's trying really hard to find out. All he knows is that the Master will make a better world in the end, and if Nicomedes has to kill a lot of people to make that happen, it will all be for the greater good. Now on to our three main antagonists. The first antagonist will be Seziravorna, the Exarch, the High priestess of the Temple of the Crimson and the head Tarkey governor of the Isle of Kordain. It is her task to make the isle a stronghold of the Heptarchy to prepare for the return of the Seven Temples in the decades to come. But so many senior priestesses and battlemages perished in Agravhask's invasion that Seziravorna sees her chance of complete victory. She will lure the armies of Andomhaim into a final catastrophic battle, and then she will be the exarch not just of the Isle of Kordain, but all of Andomhaim. Our second antagonist will be the Master of the Mountain House. The Mountain House is a dangerous ruin beneath the mountains at the center of the Isle of Kordain, and long the Corsairs have had legend about the mysterious wizard who dwells there and the terrible powers he wields. No one who ever crosses the ruined gate of the Mountain House ever returns, for the master of the Mountain House has been laboring for millennia to prepare a new and better world, even if he has to burn away the old one to make it. Our final antagonist is Urzo and Urzo is…. well….Urzo is hungry. We will find out more about all these characters soon. Anyway, if all goes well, Shield of Storms will be my first book of 2024, hopefully coming out sometime towards the end of January. Before we get to our main topic, I also want to mention our 12 Days of Short Story Christmas. In the lead up to Christmas, I am giving away twelve of my short stories for free through my Payhip store and then will wrap it up with a coupon for a big discount on any of the paid items on the store. So if you go to my website, Jonathanmoeller.com, and look at the top page, there will be many links to the 12 Days of Short Story Christmas and you can get quite a few free short stories. The short stories will remain free on my Payhip store until December 31st, the last day of 2023. So head on over to jonathanmoeller.com and get yourself some free short stories to read during your holiday travels. 00:06:15 Main Topic: Half Elven Thief and Kindle Unlimited Now let's come to our main topic of this week's episode: why I put my new book Half-Elven Thief in Kindle Unlimited. First, I want to say it had a very strong launch, especially for something new and unconnected to any of my previous settings. It wasn't a tie in for The Ghosts or Nadia's world or anything in Frostborn and Andomhaim. It was a completely new setting with completely new characters. The last two completely new things I've tried in the last couple of years were Covering Fire in 2021 and Sevenfold Sword Online: Creation in 2023 and Half-Elven Thief had a stronger first day than both of them and came within two copies of having a stronger first day than both books combined. So thank you for reading, everyone. That means Rivah Half-Elven will join Caina, Nadia, Victoria Carrow, and Moriah Rhosmor as one of my Angry Thief Girl characters. The series with Rivah will have six books. I'm going to work on them as I do other stuff in 2024. I did, as I mentioned, put Half-Elven Thief in Kindle Unlimited, which means it's only available on Amazon. I do regret that it's only on Amazon, but once the series is complete, I will take it wide. I think I have good reasons for this decision, which I will now enumerate in the Internet's performed format for discourse: a numbered list. Number one: I did this before in 2020 and it worked pretty well. We all dealt with the great COVID panic in different ways, some for better, some for much worse. Myself, I spent 2020 learning how to use Photoshop and writing an entire epic fantasy series (specifically, Wraithshard). I ended up writing all five Wraithshard books in 2020, and I originally put them in Kindle Unlimited and then phased them over to all the other stores in 2021 once their Kindle Unlimited term ran out. This had a very good result in terms of sales and I'm hoping to have something of a repeat with Half-Elven Thief. Reason Number Two: Amazon and its AI problems. Amazon had a bad problem with ChatGPT over the summer of 2023. Scammers were using ChatGPT to churn out content formatted as ebooks uploaded to Kindle Unlimited and then used click farms to harvest page reads. This caused widespread problems, since the best seller lists on Amazon were filled with this AI generated nonsense and the page payment rate for authors plummeted because so many of the page reads were going to these AI generated click farm books. Amazon finally responded by limiting the number of new books an individual author could publish to three a day. Some of the scammers were uploading hundreds or even thousands of new books every day, so this put a serious crimp in their operations. I had avoided Kindle Unlimited entirely for that time, but since it seems to be stable again, I'm willing to give it another try. We'll see how things go. The third reason why I put the short story The Jeweled Curse wide and not in Kindle Unlimited is because then I can give it away for free on my Payhip store. Everyone gets something. Reason #4: The bad economy. Don't believe what you see on the news about good job numbers or investments and so forth. The real economy is very bad and has been that way for some time for many complicated reasons, so subscription services are a really important part of people's entertainment because the value for the cost is in fact pretty good. That's why nearly all of my books are in the Kobo Plus subscription program, and most of my ebooks and audiobooks are in Scribd or whatever Scribd is calling itself now (I think it's like Everand or something like that) and many of my audiobooks are on Spotify. Even though the money from those particular channels isn't always super great, it does add up over time, and it's nice to have a lower cost option for people on tight budgets. Reason #5: Everything else will stay wide. Indie authors sometimes gets stuck in binary thinking about Kindle Unlimited and wide, but why not both? I write enough that I can put books into both on a pretty regular basis. The Shield War series we already discussed, the new Nadia books, and the new Caina books in 2024 will be wide and not exclusive to Amazon, which is similar to what I did in 2020. Wraithshard was in KU, but Dragontiarna and Cloak Mage were wide, and in 2024 the Shield War, Cloak Mage, and Ghost Armor will be wide, but Half-Elven Thief will be in Kindle Unlimited and I think Sevenfold Sword Online will perform better in Kindle Unlimited than it did wide, so those books will be in Kindle Unlimited as well. So that is my reasoning. Hopefully that makes sense. If you are a wide reader, I apologize for the inconvenience, but once the Half-Elven Thief series is finished, it will go wide and the Shield War, Cloak Mage, and Ghost Armor will also all be wide in 2024. Hopefully we will soon see more from Rivah Half-Elven in 2024 as well. 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. And don't forget also to go to jonathanmoeller.com and get your free short stories from now until December 31st, 2023. 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.

Why aren't books hitting like they used to? Partly it's because of how they're sold, Dan Sinykin says in Big Fiction. We talk about how everyone from Cormac McCarthy to Stephen King and the Million Little Pieces guy explains the Conglomeration Era of fiction. Music by Fawn Limbs & Nadja and Panopticon. Theme tune by Caina.

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 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.

This episode features a review of the history of the Blessed Virgin Mary's apparitions at Lourdes and highlights some of the amazing cures attributed to Our Lady's intercession. The presenters are Steve Hemler, the president of the Catholic Apologetics Institute of North America (CAINA); Tony Gibert, CAINA's vice president of Hispanic outreach; and Mary Petrino, a longtime Basilica parishioner and Dame of the Order of Malta. This event was recorded in our Lyceum Auditorium n October 17, 2023. 

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 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 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.

S2. Ep. 49.2 Aftermath for Episodes 46-49 Caina, Antenora Part One and 2, and Canto 32 Treachery Against Kin and Country   A fast-paced jaunt through the world of treachery! You can find me on TikTok: @DarkDorothyG   You can contact me at ⁠DarkDaysOfDorothyGale@outlook.com⁠   You can find even more on my other TikTok, and Instagram accounts under the alias @TheOrdinarySun   If social media isn't your jam, check out the official website! ⁠https://www.DDofDG.com⁠   I'm not doing this to make money, and I'm not asking for any. But if for some reason you want to support me as an artist, you can by going to ⁠https://buymeacoffee.com/OrdinarySun⁠... It's cool if you don't. I'm happy to do this either way.   Thanks for listening. I love you all. Music for Darker Days of Dorothy Gale, “The Darkness Remains” and “Darkness Undone”, was created, and performed by Mariano G. Romero. Additional mixing and sound design for “Darkness Undone” by Tyler Martinez

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.

You are promised only two things in this life. You can find me on TikTok: @DarkDorothyG   You can contact me at DarkDaysOfDorothyGale@outlook.com   You can find even more on my other TikTok, and Instagram accounts under the alias @TheOrdinarySun   If social media isn't your jam, check out the official website! https://www.DDofDG.com   I'm not doing this to make money, and I'm not asking for any. But if for some reason you want to support me as an artist, you can by going to https://buymeacoffee.com/OrdinarySun... It's cool if you don't. I'm happy to do this either way.   Thanks for listening. I love you all. Music for Darker Days of Dorothy Gale, “The Darkness Remains” and “Darkness Undone”, was created, and performed by Mariano G. Romero. Additional mixing and sound design for “Darkness Undone” by Tyler Martinez.

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.

Siete pronti per un nuovo episodio del inferno? Nel 32° canto dell'Inferno di Dante, il nostro protagonista si ritrova immerso nel gelido lago Cocito, dove le anime sono punite per i loro terribili peccati.Dante incontra Napoleone e Alessandro Alberti, signori della valle del Bisenzio, condannati al ghiaccio della Caina per aver tradito i loro parenti. Ma non finisce qui, perché il nostro eroe viene attaccato dal dannato Bocca degli Abati, che ha tradito la patria durante la battaglia di Montaperti e giace nell'Antenora insieme ad altri traditori.Dante ha anche modo di assistere ad una scena drammatica tra Ugolino e Ruggieri, entrambi condannati alla zona della Caina. Ugolino viene ucciso da Ruggieri e il poeta assiste incredulo alla scena.In questo nuovo episodio, Dante continua a scoprire i segreti e le pene dei dannati dell'Inferno, incontrando personaggi sempre più inquietanti e spaventosi. Non perdete il prossimo appuntamento.Dante l'inferno nella divina commedia: Canto trentunesimo 32 traditori di parenti e patria (Camicione de' Pazzi (Caina), Bocca degli Abati (Antenora), Alessandro e Napoleone degli Alberti, Mordret, Focaccia dei Cancellieri, Sassolo Mascheroni (Caina); Buoso da Duera, Tesauro dei Beccheria, Gianni de' Soldanieri, Gano di Maganza, Tebaldello de' Zambrasi; Ugolino della Gherardesca, Ruggieri degli Ubaldini (Antenora)se hai voglia di farti quattro risate con amici, parlare di attualità, ascoltare cicli interessanti, farci domande e passare un po di tempo in modo spensierato seguici. siamo anche su podcast seguici su www.ioluielaltro.it telegram https://t.me/ioluielaltro facebook https://www.facebook.com/paginaioluielaltro #ioluielaltro #umorismo #risate

Macchie di Leopard sulla titubanza tedesca. Oscar Giannino, Don Chisciotte, ne parla con Carlo Alberto Carnevale Maffé, Ronzinante, e Renato Cifarelli, Sancho Panza.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this week's episode, I talk with Troy Lambert of Plottr, 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

María Guadalupe Pérez Ferra (Luu Noise) (CDMX, 1996). Pasante de Creación Literaria en la UACM y estudiante de Lingüística en la ENAH. Ganadora del segundo lugar en el primer concurso Leyendas en el extremo sur de la Revista 3ES. Ha participado en festivales como Semillas UACM y EnRolArte.Arte. Becaria de programa Voces flamantes 2021. Ha publicado en Revistas como: Revista Tlacuache, La Pulcata, Caina fanzine, FemFutura, Acuarela humanística de la UAEMy algunos cuentos en la antología Voces violeta de la editorial Voces indelebles.

Max Carr and Mikael Sebag, the creative force behind Hellguard: Curse of Caina, both join me on the podcast today. We dive into gamemaster advice and game design. The conversation is wide-ranging and then we focus on Hellguard.

In this episode, I had two special guests join me: Max Carr and Mikael D. Sebag. Each of them is a leadRead More

Um dos escritos mais usados pela cultura pop foi o de Dante Alighieri, quando ele escreveu a Divina Comédia. A história é dividida em três atos: Inferno, Purgatório e Paraíso. E a parte que mais afetou o imaginário coletivo dos homens medievais foi justamente o primeiro. Em Inferno, Dante volta das Cruzadas mas quando chega, vê sua esposa Beatrice sendo raptada pelo diabo. Ele decide então ir atrás dela: no Inferno. Ele descobre com a ajuda do poeta romano Virgílio, ele percebe que o inferno possui círculos. E cada um deles é específico pra receber as pessoas que cometeram pecados específicos durante a vida. Os círculos são: Limbo Aqueles que por acaso nunca ouviram falar que Cristo existiu acabam no Limbo, o primeiro círculo do inferno. Então, elimine esse da sua lista... Já que se você nunca ouviu falar do cara, acabei de te falar sobre ele. No livro, Dante encontra nesse círculo algumas figuras conhecidas como Sócrates, Aristóteles e Júlio César, entre outros. Luxúria Esse é autoexplicativo. Gostar da coisa não tem nada errado, mas o desejo do corpo, de forma exacerbada, pode te levar ao segundo círculo do inferno. De acordo com a história medieval, Dante encontra lá Aquilles, Cleópatra, Tristão e outros notáveis. Gula Ninguém nega que comer é bom. Calma. Mas gostar demais da hora do rango pode te levar para o terceiro círculo: a Gula. “Divina Comédia” narra Dante encontrando pessoas comuns e não figuras lendárias como antes, dando a entender que é um pecado bem comum de se cometer. Ganância O quarto círculo do inferno é a ganância. Um lugar onde as pessoas que pensam demais em adquirir dinheiro ou poder e acabam ficando. Na história, Dante passa com Virgílio sem falar com ninguém, mas comenta sobre a ganância ser um pecado mais sério que os outros. Ira Dante e Virgílio encontram pessoas furiosas no quinto círculo do inferno. Permitir que a Ira se torne um sentimento dominante na sua vida pode te levar a esse lugar. Na própria obra, Dante se questiona se ele pode ir para lá quando morrer, afinal, participou das Cruzadas e definitivamente permitiu que o sentimento o dominasse algumas vezes. Heresia A rejeição das normas religiosas (ou políticas) da época poderiam te levar para o sexto círculo. E isso no mundo moderno vai levar uma galera pra lá, não é? Dante encontra figuras conhecidas como Epicuro, o imperador do Sacro Império Romano Germânico Frederico II e o Papa Anastácio II. Violência O sétimo círculo é onde começam os chamados subcírculos. Dependendo do tipo de violência que você cometeu em vida, pode parar nesse nível profundo do inferno. O primeiro subcírculo do sétimo círculo – um pouco confuso, né? – é o externo; o segundo é o do meio e o terceiro é o interno. No externo ficam as pessoas que foram violentas com outras pessoas e com propriedade. Na história, Dante encontra Átila o Huno. O subcírculo do meio é onde ficam as pessoas que cometeram violência contra elas mesmas – automutilação, suicídio etc. O subcírculo interno é o local reservado às pessoas que cometeram blasfêmia ou violência contra Deus. Na história, Dante encontra Brunetto Latini, um sodomita que foi mentor de Dante – que climão, né? Fraude Pessoal que tem CNPJ tem que prestar atenção nesse oitavo círculo do inferno. Pessoas que cometeram fraudes conscientemente, sendo sedutores, elogiadores, falso profetas, políticos corruptos – imagine Brasília lendo isso –, ladrões, hipócritas e outros. Basicamente, para você não parar nele é só não tentar enganar alguém de forma consciente. E pelo nível que estamos nesse momento do texto, deu para perceber que Deus não gosta mesmo de quem faz isso, né? Traição É muito curioso como funciona o último círculo do inferno, onde o próprio Satanás reside. Ao criar esse local no livro, Dante Alighieri acaba divulgando um pouco da sua própria visão sobre a traição. Esse círculo é dividido em quatro. O primeiro se chama Caina, referenciando Caim, que matou seu próprio irmão. É o lugar onde ficam aqueles que traíram seus próprios familiares; o segundo, Antenora, faz alusão a Antenor de Troia, que traiu os gregos na guerra. Nesse lugar ficam aqueles que traíram governos; o terceiro se chama Ptolomea, em referência a Ptolomeu, conhecido por ter matado Simão Macabeu e seus filhos após um jantar em que eles foram convidados pelo próprio. Ficam nesse lugar aqueles que matam seus convidados; o quarto se chama Judecca, em homenagem a Judas Iscariot, que traiu Jesus Cristo. Esse é reservado pra quem trai seus mestres, senhores e bem feitores. Centro do Inferno Após passarem pelos nove círculos do inferno, Dante e Virgílio chegam ao Centro do Inferno e conhecem Satanás. O capeta é descrito como uma besta de três cabeças e cada boca está comendo uma pessoa específica: uma está comendo Brutus – aquele do "até tu?"; outra, Cassio, que também traiu Júlio César; na terceira está Judas Iscariot – dá pra perceber que Dante realmente odiava o cara que traiu Jesus.

Um dos escritos mais usados pela cultura pop foi o de Dante Alighieri, quando ele escreveu a Divina Comédia. A história é dividida em três atos: Inferno, Purgatório e Paraíso. E a parte que mais afetou o imaginário coletivo dos homens medievais foi justamente o primeiro. Em Inferno, Dante volta das Cruzadas mas quando chega, vê sua esposa Beatrice sendo raptada pelo diabo. Ele decide então ir atrás dela: no Inferno. Ele descobre com a ajuda do poeta romano Virgílio, ele percebe que o inferno possui círculos. E cada um deles é específico pra receber as pessoas que cometeram pecados específicos durante a vida. Os círculos são: Limbo Aqueles que por acaso nunca ouviram falar que Cristo existiu acabam no Limbo, o primeiro círculo do inferno. Então, elimine esse da sua lista... Já que se você nunca ouviu falar do cara, acabei de te falar sobre ele. No livro, Dante encontra nesse círculo algumas figuras conhecidas como Sócrates, Aristóteles e Júlio César, entre outros. Luxúria Esse é autoexplicativo. Gostar da coisa não tem nada errado, mas o desejo do corpo, de forma exacerbada, pode te levar ao segundo círculo do inferno. De acordo com a história medieval, Dante encontra lá Aquilles, Cleópatra, Tristão e outros notáveis. Gula Ninguém nega que comer é bom. Calma. Mas gostar demais da hora do rango pode te levar para o terceiro círculo: a Gula. “Divina Comédia” narra Dante encontrando pessoas comuns e não figuras lendárias como antes, dando a entender que é um pecado bem comum de se cometer. Ganância O quarto círculo do inferno é a ganância. Um lugar onde as pessoas que pensam demais em adquirir dinheiro ou poder e acabam ficando. Na história, Dante passa com Virgílio sem falar com ninguém, mas comenta sobre a ganância ser um pecado mais sério que os outros. Ira Dante e Virgílio encontram pessoas furiosas no quinto círculo do inferno. Permitir que a Ira se torne um sentimento dominante na sua vida pode te levar a esse lugar. Na própria obra, Dante se questiona se ele pode ir para lá quando morrer, afinal, participou das Cruzadas e definitivamente permitiu que o sentimento o dominasse algumas vezes. Heresia A rejeição das normas religiosas (ou políticas) da época poderiam te levar para o sexto círculo. E isso no mundo moderno vai levar uma galera pra lá, não é? Dante encontra figuras conhecidas como Epicuro, o imperador do Sacro Império Romano Germânico Frederico II e o Papa Anastácio II. Violência O sétimo círculo é onde começam os chamados subcírculos. Dependendo do tipo de violência que você cometeu em vida, pode parar nesse nível profundo do inferno. O primeiro subcírculo do sétimo círculo – um pouco confuso, né? – é o externo; o segundo é o do meio e o terceiro é o interno. No externo ficam as pessoas que foram violentas com outras pessoas e com propriedade. Na história, Dante encontra Átila o Huno. O subcírculo do meio é onde ficam as pessoas que cometeram violência contra elas mesmas – automutilação, suicídio etc. O subcírculo interno é o local reservado às pessoas que cometeram blasfêmia ou violência contra Deus. Na história, Dante encontra Brunetto Latini, um sodomita que foi mentor de Dante – que climão, né? Fraude Pessoal que tem CNPJ tem que prestar atenção nesse oitavo círculo do inferno. Pessoas que cometeram fraudes conscientemente, sendo sedutores, elogiadores, falso profetas, políticos corruptos – imagine Brasília lendo isso –, ladrões, hipócritas e outros. Basicamente, para você não parar nele é só não tentar enganar alguém de forma consciente. E pelo nível que estamos nesse momento do texto, deu para perceber que Deus não gosta mesmo de quem faz isso, né? Traição É muito curioso como funciona o último círculo do inferno, onde o próprio Satanás reside. Ao criar esse local no livro, Dante Alighieri acaba divulgando um pouco da sua própria visão sobre a traição. Esse círculo é dividido em quatro. O primeiro se chama Caina, referenciando Caim, que matou seu próprio irmão. É o lugar onde ficam aqueles que traíram seus p

A pergunta que volta e meia refletimos: o que define um mochileiro? Será que existe características que são típicas do viajante mochileiro? Para saber nossas percepções e opinião sobre, venha ouvir pela primeira vez um podcast do mochileiros sem pauta feito ao vivo com todos da bancada presencialmente. Nesse retorno de férias, o episódio foi gravado ao vivo! junto num crossover com o canal Vida de Mochila no youtube. www.curtlo.com.br cupom: msp10 Grupo telegram: https://t.me/mochileirossempauta Para ser um apoiador do podcast! https://www.catarse.me/mochileirossempauta Para adquirir o livro Roda América, só entrar em contato pelo e-mail ou Instagram. Caina@mochileirossempauta.com.br Apresentação: Cainã Ito Arte Vitrine: Guto Arrigoni Convidados: Lanna Sanches https://www.instagram.com/lsdogo/ Richard de Oliveira https://www.instagram.com/vidademochila/ Carla Boeacht https://www.instagram.com/fuigosteicontei/ José https://www.instagram.com/vidaentremundos/

Dando continuidade ao programa dos golpes, nos deparamos com falsos policiais, macacos que roubam, furtos de papel higiênico e até roubo para fazer refil no frasco de shampoo! Pode isso? Qual o limite para o pega turista na estrada? Massagens e atrações turísticas por conta da casa são boas de mais para ser verdade não é mesmo? Nem mesmo um banho após entrar na lama medicinal conseguimos fugir dos pega turistas! Vem cair na cilada junto com a gente! Equipamentos e vestimenta para seu mochilão com a marca que está junto com a gente! www.curtlo.com.br cupom: msp2021 Grupo telegram: https://t.me/mochileirossempauta Para ser um apoiador do podcast! https://www.catarse.me/mochileirossempauta Para adquirir o livro Roda América, só entrar em contato pelo e-mail ou Instagram. Caina@mochileirossempauta.com.br Apresentação: Cainã Ito Arte Vitrine: Guto Arrigoni Convidados: Lanna Sanches https://www.instagram.com/lsdogo/ Richard de Oliveira https://www.instagram.com/vidademochila/ Riq - Pandas pelo mundo https://www.instagram.com/pandaspelomundo/

In this week's episode, I discuss what might be next for Caina after the conclusion of GHOST NIGHT. We also talk about vintage cyberattacks and Spotify's acquisition of audiobook distributor Findaway. 

Que atire a primeira pedra quem nunca caiu num golpe de estrada, ou se não caiu, talvez sequer saiba que foi alvo um dia. Todos estamos sujeito as artimanhas que a viagem nos apresenta, e golpes não poderia ser diferente. Um programa que além de contar nossas resenhas, também divagamos e ponderamos sobre termos como "gringo Price"e a famosa barganha. Seria justo cobrar preço pra turista ou não? Além disso um mundo a parte dos tão queridos e amados taxistas! Sem muito spoiler aqui, vem rir e chorar junto com a gente! Equipamentos e vestimenta para seu mochilão com a marca que está junto com a gente! www.curtlo.com.br cupom: msp2021 Grupo telegram: https://t.me/mochileirossempauta Site da worldpackers que conecta você aos projetos e anfritriões por esse mundo. www.worldpackers.com.br Para ser um apoiador do podcast! https://www.catarse.me/mochileirossempauta Para adquirir o livro Roda América, só entrar em contato pelo e-mail ou Instagram. Caina@mochileirossempauta.com.br Apresentação: Cainã Ito Arte Vitrine: Guto Arrigoni Convidados: Amanda Areias https://www.instagram.com/amandaeareias/ Richard de Oliveira https://www.instagram.com/vidademochila/ Riq - Pandas pelo mundo https://www.instagram.com/pandaspelomundo/

Todos na estrada precisam lidar com ela, a tão chegada despedida. Como cada viajante lida com ela? Alguns fogem, outros choram, os que evitam abraço, os que fazem piada para amenizar o momento. São várias as formas de dar tchau. E não somente falamos de despedir de pessoas, a estrada envolve dizer adeus para sonhos concretizados, comidas, costumes de algum país, ou mesmo os famosos amores. Um programa emotivo e reflexivo do que a estrada nos apresenta. Despedidas! www.curtlo.com.br cupom: msp2021 Grupo telegram: https://t.me/mochileirossempauta Para ser um apoiador do podcast! https://www.catarse.me/mochileirossempauta Para adquirir o livro Roda América, só entrar em contato pelo e-mail ou Instagram. Caina@mochileirossempauta.com.br Apresentação: Cainã Ito Arte Vitrine: Guto Arrigoni Convidados: Carol Ussier https://www.instagram.com/carol.ussier/ Richard de Oliveira https://www.instagram.com/vidademochila/ Lanna Sanches https://www.instagram.com/lsdogo/

Quando se pensa num continente vasto com 54 países, quais pensamentos lhe vem a cabeça sobre a comida numa área territorial tão grande? Quais sabores e cheiros permeiam o continente africano? Se for viajar por alguns países da África Ocidental, você vai se sentir em terras baianas comendo acarajé! Em terras africanas, é uma pluralidade de vegetais, frutas e pratos, que sequer imaginamos isso ao associarmos ao continente. Esperamos que esse programa desperte suas papilas gustativas, e não deixa de ir a um restaurante africano! www.curtlo.com.br cupom: msp2021 Grupo telegram: https://t.me/mochileirossempauta Para adquirir o livro Roda América, só entrar em contato pelo e-mail ou Instagram. Caina@mochileirossempauta.com.br Apresentação: Cainã Ito Arte Vitrine: Guto Arrigoni Convidados: Carol Ussier https://www.instagram.com/carol.ussier/ Melissa Ferreira https://www.instagram.com/mel.s.ferreira/

Para muitos o primeiro contato com a palavra Afeganistão talvez tenha sido pelo livro caçador de pipas. Um país que pouco sabemos do que acontece no seu dia dia fora o alarde das manchetes Sabemos tão pouco que sequer imaginamos que pipas fazem parte de uma tradição em que datas comemorativas elas preenchem o céu de Kabul. Terras de montanhas majestosas ao fundo, Afeganistão, detentora de uma cultura autêntica e intacta com o passar dos anos, é um país onde pouco se sabe e muito se especula sobre seu povo na visão ocidental Neste programa uma conversa leve e sem exageros, e que permita ressignificar através do áudio a percepção em todos aspectos que os englobam. Música, gastronomia, vestimenta, natureza e tantos outros. O nosso olhar ocidental é tão lúdico quanto pensar nas incríveis belezas e paisagens desse lugar. Apresentação: Cainã Ito Arte Vitrine: Guto Arrigoni Convidados: Ana Maria Brogliato https://www.instagram.com/viagensebeleza/ Mike Weiss https://www.instagram.com/mikeweissaonde/ Kaleb https://www.instagram.com/avilovskyi/ www.curtlo.com.br cupom: msp2021 Grupo telegram: https://t.me/mochileirossempauta Site da worldpackers www.worldpackers.com.br Para adquirir o livro Roda América, só entrar em contato pelo e-mail ou Instagram. Caina@mochileirossempauta.com.br

Hey guys! Today, we're back with once familiar guest and one new guest, so tune in as we talk about the most obvious ways to time travel and some of our guilty pleasures ;) #smithbrookandcoe #comedy #timetravel You can find us at: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SmithBrookandCoe/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6VS_kNu4PCH7jonb3OpA0A/videos StoryFire: https://storyfire.com/user/15x6021kdakq3v7/video Twitter: https://twitter.com/SmithBrookCoe Instgram: smithbrookandcoepod Michael's personal Instagram: missersmiffy You can also support us at the link below!! The intro music heard is a collab with Michael and our good friend, Skelebones! Go check out his music wherever you stream your tunes! ;) You can find Nntndork at: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/search/top?q=nintendorks%20gaming%20extravaganza Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/nntndork Instagram: NNTNDORK Twitter: http://Twitter.com/nntndork You can also support us directly at the link below!! --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/smithbrook/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/smithbrook/support

As Dante and Virgil approach and enter the final circle of Inferno join Donovan and Fr. Branson to talk about a the nature of hope, and who these Giants are. Next, into the Cocytus we'll travel through Caina (betrayal of brothers) and Antenora (betrayal of countrymen) as we also briefly discuss sports/politics, the connection between sin and outward actions, and our foreshadow of next part of the ninth circle. Join our reading group here: https://gtcc.co/dantegroupme Listen to our main podcast here: https://gtcc.co/podcast

In the second part of the "Core Group of Friends" Episode Danny and Amber are still joined by Emma Schremp and Caina Weiner. In this part, the group switches gears from discussing Relationship Goals in the romantic sense, to talking about Relationship Goals in the friendship sense. Amber, Caina, and Emma have been friends for over a decade and have gone through breakups, moves, family hardships, and talk about what they value in long term friendships as well as looking to the future in making new friends. The episode ends with an unfiltered "Ask Damber" segment where our hosts Danny and Amber answer all of Caina and Emma's burning questions.

In part 1 of the two part episode titled "Core Group of Friends" Danny and Amber welcome their first guests, Emma Schremp and Caina Weiner. Emma and Caina have been Amber's closest friends for over a decade, and are on the podcast talking about what they find to be relationship goals, as well as giving us all a sneak peak into their own relationships. Emma is newly engaged to her boyfriend of approximately 15 years (on and off, don't worry she explains). And Caina is newly dating her high school boyfriend, who she hasn't been with in over 12 years. This episode gives great insight into two unique relationships all on their own.

Antenora created by Robert Rowlands (Auraumua). "Indolent Belaqua, much loved by Beckett, is met in Ante-Purgatory by Dante, and I like to imagine that as an instrument player he sat under his rock with a lute, or guitar. "My research into treasonable music led me to discover that there was a time when women who killed their husbands could be considered to have commited treason;  "Husband-murder, in particular however, was seen more as an affront to social hierarchies rather than any one particular person or rank. Killing the patriarch of a household was a threat to the social order—akin to disobedience against a feudal lord or the monarch—and the delicate balance of power and gender roles that governed early modern England, as strengthened by Protestant doctrine: “if any servant kill his Master, any woman kill her husband, or any secular or religious person kill his Prelate to whom he owes Obedience, this is treason.”(1) Special legal status thus existed for husband murderers, and they were subjected to the same punishment as those convicted of high treason. (2)" "With this in mind I reasoned that they may have found themselves condemned to an eternity in Antenora (traitors to country), rather than Caina (traitors to kindred). A popular (and lost) melody at the time was that of  Bragandary to which tales of 'evil and wrongdoing' were set.  "I found another 16th century melody which is said to be similar to Bragandary, called 'Robin and Jeck', and it is fragments of this melody, idly played by Belaqua, which echo in the wind of my piece. I would hope that people might reflect on the battle for an equality of justice and rights that women are still fighting for at this very moment when they consider the background to the melody that haunts the piece; not an eternity, but a life of anguish. "The soundtrack was created from manipulated sound recordings of ice that I made some years ago; walking on ice, sliding pieces of ice along the fragile surface of ponds and lakes, and breaking up pieces of ice in the wind. Other sounds were produced in the Supercollider coding environment as I needed them. I played the lute melody on guitar, and moans and wailing were captured in the studio." (1) William Rastall, A Collection in English of the Statutes Now in Force (London: Printed for the Societie of Stationers, 1603), 460.b. (2) Sarah F. Williams. Damnable Practises: Witches, Dangerous Women, and Music in Seventeenth-Century English Broadside Ballads. Seventeenth-Century News. 2016;74(1-2):41. Part of the Inferno project to imagine and compose the sounds of Dante’s Hell, marking the 700th anniversary of The Divine Comedy. To find out more, visit http://www.citiesandmemory.com/inferno

Caina created by Nigh Infernal. "We tried to really tap into the icy atmosphere of Caina by utilizing vibrating treble tones and wide reverb to evoke a vast, arctic plain.  Listeners will be comforted by the lushness of the sounds but listen for how the chords shift to mimic the ever fickle ice winds." Part of the Inferno project to imagine and compose the sounds of Dante’s Hell, marking the 700th anniversary of The Divine Comedy. To find out more, visit http://www.citiesandmemory.com/inferno

Caina created by Midmight. "To quote the Longfellow translation of Canto 32 (Caïna: Traitors to Kindred), “ ’Tis no enterprise to take in jest, to sketch the bottom of all the universe.” Like Dante, I called on the Muses to help compose “rhymes both rough and stridulous . . . appropriate to the dismal hole” that is the Ninth Circle. I was inspired by Dante’s choice of this hell circle as a place of brutal cold—instead of the typical burning fire—for the worst of the worst sinners.  "As Dante walks on thick ice, he at first doesn’t see the thousands of traitors’ bodies frozen up to their necks, their heads sticking out, eyes crying, teeth chattering, “shivering in the eternal shade”—much as how family turmoil can be hidden under the surface. But once he does, the scene turns savage, with Dante spotting brothers, fathers, nephews, who have killed their own family members. So in the midst of this frigid, deathly scene, and this piece, are harsh rhythms and flashes of raging unfrozen hearts, whether hatred or even memories of familial love.  "The ice stores and reflects and emits a feedback loop of the betrayals and ties passed down through generations and amassed in a violent collective history.  "I used field recordings (from San Francisco, Naoshima, and wintry Buffalo, NY), a MicoKorg, Sirkuit SNB, Jomox Resonator Neuronium, 4ms Noise Swash, and BugBrand PT Delay to create the icy hellscape." Part of the Inferno project to imagine and compose the sounds of Dante’s Hell, marking the 700th anniversary of The Divine Comedy. To find out more, visit http://www.citiesandmemory.com/inferno

Illugi Jökulsson les úr nýrri þýðingu Guðmundar J. Guðmundssonar á verki Sallustiusar um þennan fræga rómverska uppreisnarmanna. Komin er meðal annars til sögunnar stuðningskona hans Sempronia, sem svo er lýst: „Hún var vel heima í grískum og latneskum bókmenntum, lék listavel á lýru og dansaði betur en hæfði heiðvirðri konu. Hún var einnig prýdd mörgum öðrum nautnalegum eiginleikum.“

Illugi Jökulsson les úr nýrri þýðingu Guðmundar J. Guðmundssonar á verki Sallustiusar um þennan fræga rómverska uppreisnarmanna. Komin er meðal annars til sögunnar stuðningskona hans Sempronia, sem svo er lýst: „Hún var vel heima í grískum og latneskum bókmenntum, lék listavel á lýru og dansaði betur en hæfði heiðvirðri konu. Hún var einnig prýdd mörgum öðrum nautnalegum eiginleikum.“

Illugi Jökulsson les úr nýrri þýðingu Guðmundar J. Guðmundssonar á verki Sallustiusar um þennan fræga rómverska uppreisnarmanna. Komin er meðal annars til sögunnar stuðningskona hans Sempronia, sem svo er lýst: „Hún var vel heima í grískum og latneskum bókmenntum, lék listavel á lýru og dansaði betur en hæfði heiðvirðri konu. Hún var einnig prýdd mörgum öðrum nautnalegum eiginleikum.“

Chuck continues our series looking at the Lord's Prayer and the phrase "give us today our daily bread." He encourages us to seek and ask God for three vital things - connection, hope & vision.

On this episode we spoke to Jake and Chris from Pittsburgh hardcore bands Hurtpiece and Circle of Caina. You can get the new Hurtpiece and Bovice split "Flatline" out on Upstate Records. Songs By: Circle of Caina Hurtpiece Envy Thanks for all the support and share and subscribe!! YOU CAN FOLLOW US ON.... Twitter - @ISN_podcast Facebook - www.facebook.com/theillstreetnewspodcast Facebook Group Page - illstreetnews  Instagram - @illstreetnews Email us - illstreetnews@yahoo.com Leave us a voicemail: 267-297-4627 YOU CAN LISTEN ON..... Soundcloud - https://soundcloud.com/illstreetnews iTunes - itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/ill-s…d1111993800?mt=2 Stitcher - www.stitcher.com/podcast/ill-street-news Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/1G2SBJEWGhQLxbL4c7tsPO Google Podcasts and many other podcast platforms!

Podcast#7 Caina Araujo E Fabiano Santana

In this episode, I answer reader questions about Caina Amalas and THE GHOSTS series of epic fantasy novels. Thanks to Michael Philips, Justin Bischel, Juana Bargus, Edward Barry, Sue Manvell, William Duckett, Cindy A, Jack, Elizabeth Upp, Emery Dueck, and Christina O'Neill for their questions!

What carved the Pieta? Michelangelo or his chisel? Steve Hemler from CAINA (Catholic Apologetics Institute of North America) joins us for this show on how evolution, science, and God work together. Check out the good work Steve is doing with CAINA here: http://cainaweb.org/Also, check out Steve's books here: https://www.tanbooks.com/index.php/author-steven-r-hemler.html

Sandro Catenacci är vd och huvudägare i Nobis-koncernen som omsätter 700 miljoner. I den här intervjun berättar Sandro om hur bolaget ska växa, öppna fler hotell och hur mycket vinst ett hotell bör göra.-Tjänar vi mer än tio procent på omsättningen skulle det inte vara rätt mot gästerna.Allt började med att Sandro tjugo år gammal öppnade krogen Caina på Folkungagatan med sin pappa.-Han var en duktigt kock och jag gjorde allt annat. Jag byggde krogen med mina egna händer.Sedan dess har det rullat på och idag innehåller verksamheten ett stort antal krogar och hotell i Stockholm, ett hotell i Köpenhamn och snart ytterligare ett hotell i den danska huvudstaden och två i Palma på Mallorca. I dag arbetar två av hans barn i verksamheten, men förhoppningen är att alla fem ska ta över och driva verksamheten vidare i minst 40 år. -Jag utgår från min egen smak och tittar inte på våra konkurrenter. Det har funkat i 40 år så något måste jag göra rätt.Men tro inte att Sandro Catenacci är en festprisse. Han beskriver sig själv som reserverad och ingen peoples person. Helst går han och lägger sig före klockan tio på kvällen. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Wrenn’s trial by fire continues as he and his allies confront Caina’s infernal lord, while elsewhere in world another war is just reaching a fever pitch.

Filippo Gambetta, Pria Goaea, La lumaca equilibristaMarino De Rosas, femina e mare, IscrareaMarino De Rosas, femina e mare, SolianaElenna Ledda + Andrea Parodi, Rosa Resolza, RusujuMarino De Rosas, Meridies, TransumanzaMarino De Rosas, Meridies, Reina EleonoraTenore de Oniferi San Gavino, E prite tottu custu, Sa tia de filareMauro Palmas, Caina, S'omu e su foguFilippo Gambetta, Pria Goaea, slatnarPeppino D'Agostino, A glimpse of times past, Moving onRidillo, Soul Assai Brillante, Com'e buia la cittaCedric Watson, Cedric Watson, Cochon de laitCedric Watson, Cedric Watson, Zozo NoirCedric Watson, Cedric Watson, La vielle chanson de mardi grasMichael Jerome Browne, Twin Rivers Stringband, La danse carre - La belle CatherineCharivari, A trip to the holiday lounge, Reel De Barzas/Wayne Perry's ReelCedric Watson + Corey Ledet, Goin' down to Louisiana, Madae Faielle