Podcasts about wraiths

In this week's episode, we take a look at eight reasons to diversify your ebooks sales beyond just Amazon and Kindle Unlimited. This coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Dragonskull: Wrath of the Warlock, Book #7 in the Dragonskull series, (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store: WARLOCKJUNE The coupon code is valid through June 22, 2026. So if you need a new audiobook this summer, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates   Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 306 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is June 5th, 2026 and today we'll discuss eight reasons you should diversify your book sales beyond Amazon. We'll also talk about Coupon of the Week and give a progress update on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects.   So let's start off with Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Dragonskull: Wrath of the Warlock, Book #7 in the Dragonskull series (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills), at my Payhip store. That coupon code is WARLOCKJUNE. As always, the coupon code and the links to my Payhip store will be available in the show notes for this episode. This coupon code is valid through June 22nd, 2026, So if you need a new audiobook for the summer as you go on a summer road trip, we have got you covered. Now let's talk about my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. As of this recording, I am 80,000 words into Blade of Thieves, which puts me in Chapter 17 of 25 of my outline. So we're closing in on the end. I think we're going to be about 110-115,000 words or thereabouts in the rough draft. So hopefully a couple more solid pushes and we'll get there to the end. I hope to be at 90,000 words by this point, but there is quite a lot to do in real life so we didn't quite get there, but 80,000 words is still better than nothing. For Cloak of Frost, as of this recording, I am now 9,000 words into it and that will be my main project once Blade of Thieves is done. I was hoping to have Blade of Thieves come out in June, but July is looking more likely at this point. Hopefully Cloak of Frost will come out the month after Blade Thieves comes out, whenever that is.   In audiobook news, I'm pleased to report that Blade of Wraiths (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) is now out at all audiobook platforms. Get it at Audible, Amazon, Apple, Google Play, Kobo Books, Chirp, my own Payhip store and all the usual audiobook stores. At the moment, I have no other audiobooks in active production, but once Blade of Thieves is done, Brad will also be recording that. Later this month, Hollis McCarthy is scheduled to start on Cloak of Worlds and in July, Leanne Woodward is going to record Dragon-Mage, the most recent Rivah book. So we don't have any audiobooks being produced right now, but we will in the future. So that is where I am at with my current writing, audiobook, and publishing projects.   00:02:32 Main Topic of the Week: Beyond Amazon: Reasons to Diversify Your Sales Platform   Now onto our main topic this week, Beyond Amazon: Reasons to Diversify Your Sales Platform, which is something you know I do quite often given how often I talk about my links to my Payhip store on this very podcast.   For a long time, the conventional wisdom has been that Amazon has 80% of the US book market and putting your ebooks into Kindle Unlimited was the best route of success because of that monopoly and some of the algorithmic benefits Amazon gives to KU authors. While it's true that certain genres (especially LitRPG and romance) are almost exclusively focused on Amazon and KU in the US, going exclusive with Amazon is not necessarily the best course of action for everyone, especially if you're interested in growing your international sales.   Today we'll talk about reasons why putting your books in KU is limiting and in the interest of fairness, in two weeks, we will also be doing an episode later [about] when putting your book in KU is a good idea and some of the benefits of that. But today we're going to start with the benefits of diversification. Here are eight reasons you might want to consider moving beyond just Amazon, which is often called going wide in the Indie Publishing world. #1: Increasing your global reach.   It may surprise you to know that the Kindle store is not available in every country and that other countries have a strong competitor to the Kindle store. For example, in Canada, Kobo is Amazon's main competitor and has traditionally a strong market share there, quite a bit larger than Amazon Canada based on my own sales data. Kobo is also very strong in many European markets. Additionally, because there are many more Android users internationally than there are in the US, Google Play Books is important in non-US countries. It's also an easy platform for users and integrates into the Google ecosystem as well. Data usually finds that while the iPhone [iOS] is dominant in the United States, Android tends to be the majority mobile operating system in the rest of the world. So if you want to access Android users in the Google Play Book Store, then you want to be on Google Play Books. #2: Some people are boycotting Amazon.   There are many readers who boycott Amazon or American-led companies for a number of reasons. It is possible to overstate the strength of these. I've seen many people be alarmed about Amazon boycotts impacting their sales, but it never really seems to materialize. I suspect a lot of the boycotting thing is much louder online than it is in real life. That said, it is undeniable. There are people who will not buy ebooks or anything from Amazon for a variety of reasons. So if you sell your books only through Amazon, you're missing out on that group of readers. Some categories of romance have also been affected by Amazon boycotts, so it's worth investigating other options if you're an author in these categories.   #3: Kobo Plus.   Kobo offers a subscription program called Kobo Plus that unlike KU, does not require exclusivity to participate in it. Over three million ebooks and 100,000 audiobooks (quite a few of which are mine) are available to subscribers for less than the cost of a KU subscription. Kobo has been gaining popularity in the US in part due to their subscription program. I have to admit my own personal experience with Kobo Plus as an indie author has been almost entirely positive. When it first came out, I was a little leery of it, but then I decided to test it out by putting Frostborn into it and that did quite well and I was pleased enough with the results that now I just put everything in Kobo on Kobo Plus and that has paid off because the majority of my month to month Kobo revenue and the majority of my yearly Kobo revenue comes from Kobo Plus now. In March and April, I had two of my best months ever on Kobo in the 14 years I've been publishing with Kobo entirely off the strength of Kobo Plus. So my experience with it has been if you write a really long series like that that generates a strong read through (like Frostborn is 15 books, Sevenfold Sword was 12 books, Cloak Mage as of this point is up to 14 books), then it would be definitely advantageous to you to investigate Kobo Plus.   #4: It gives you the chance to support independent booksellers through bookshop.org.   This past year, bookshop.org made a deal with Draft2Digital that made it possible for indie authors to put their books on the bookshop.org platform. In the past, has not been particularly easy or straightforward for small indie bookstores to sell ebooks, so this is an opportunity for physical indie bookstores based in the US. For American readers who want to shop local but still read ebooks, it's nice to be able to offer them an option that benefits their local communities. It also gives these bookstores a way of supporting local authors without having to find physical space for them within the store itself. Bookshop.org is still in the early stages of accepting indie ebooks and there are some things that need to be worked out with features on their app, especially about user complaints about a lack of flexibility with DRM-free e-books. Still, romance and what the site calls "serious nonfiction" are growing rapidly on the platform, so it's definitely worth exploring, especially for authors in those categories. If they do succeed in their plans to put out their own ereader, that would make the platform even more attractive to many book buyers.   #5: Direct sales equals greater profit, extras, price fixability, et cetera.    Having your own sales platform (typically hosted on sites like Payhip and Shopify) gives you far more control over your sales platform. It also gives you a far greater cut of the profits. To give an example, if I do a coupon code for one of my audiobooks on my Payhip site to make it 50% off like I did earlier in this episode with the Dragonskull: Wrath of the Warlock coupon, I still earn a similar amount as if someone had bought it for full price on Audible.   A direct sales platform also allows you to create discounts for sales far more easily than on other platforms. Additionally, you don't have to wait for ebooks or audiobooks to get through processing on a direct sales site like you do with ACX and the other sites, which makes when a book or audiobook is ready for sale far more predictable. You can also bundle things with ebooks like such as the book file in multiple formats or bonus items like maps, worksheets, or charts. On the other ebook sites, this isn't typically possible. Direct sales gives you a greater flexibility in terms of selling. You can include bonus items and it's also a good fallback position if one of the main sites isn't working. I first got into direct sales in 2021 because Barnes & Noble had its big ransomware hack then and for a while it was impossible to publish new things to the platform and I believe that was when Ghost in the Vault came out and since I couldn't publish that on Barnes & Noble until the ransomware problem was fixed, I directed people to the Payhip site instead.   #6: Library sales and Kindle Unlimited.   The popularity of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series and the Project Hail Mary audiobook made a lot of people aware of the fact that exclusivity agreements with Amazon and Audible have often been structured to leave out options for library ebook platforms or require maneuvering or additional deals in order to make it possible. The popularity of Libby in particular is growing here in the United States, especially as people are having to shift their leisure spending from things like books and entertainment to covering basic necessities like housing, transportation, fuel, and food costs due to the poor state of the economy. If library sales and library readers are important to you, then going wide is your best option for reaching the library market.   Myself, I haven't particularly pursued the library market. I haven't refused it either. I usually, when the option is available, click on the toggle switch to publish it to a library service, but then don't think about it very much after that, but there are many indie authors who are very interested in getting in libraries and have pursued that quite a bit through these programs.   #7: Vendor lock-in/user preference.   There is a concept called vendor lock-in, meaning that ebook buyers have a particular platform that they default to when buying ebooks because that is where the ebook collection is based and they want to keep their books together instead of spread across several different apps. Many Barnes & Noble and Kobo users are not interested in ebooks from Amazon or KU for this reason and won't even follow a favorite author to another platform. It's important to have an option available for these readers.   #8: DRM free. [Digital Rights Management]   Having a DRM free copy of an ebook is extremely important to many readers and that is what makes an ebook purchase a true purchase instead of a highly conditional license. Sites like Kobo allow ebook buyers to limit their searches to only DRM free titles and many will not buy a book that is not available without DRM. My Payhip store, all the files you get from that when you buy an ebook or an audiobook are DRM free as well.   For myself, a large portion of my sales come from outside Amazon, so that's why I've never been fully exclusive with Kindle Unlimited and instead rotate a small selection of my series in and out of KU. Over the years, I've experimented with having various books in KU and starting in 2023, what I settled on doing was that I would write three series ongoing. Two of those series would be available on all ebook platforms and one of those series would be available in Kindle Unlimited, which allowed me to pursue both markets at once. As of right now, the wide series are Blades of Ruin and Cloak Mage and the Kindle Unlimited series is Half-Elven Thief. Once Half-Elven Thief is completed, I will take it out of Kindle Unlimited and take it wide and start a new series for Kindle Unlimited.   Overall, I found it's worthwhile to be wide even when pursuing Kindle Unlimited with some of my books because typically in an average month about 45 to 55% of my revenue comes from Amazon and the rest comes from all the other platforms put together. So while Amazon is typically half, that's not nothing, it's only half and the rest of the revenue comes from all these ebook platforms I've been cultivating over the years. So the conclusion is that the beauty of KU's current agreement is that you only have to commit to being exclusive for a short amount of time, specifically three months, and then can always return to it if you want to try going wide for a while.    It's also important to note that growth on other platforms may be slow and if you're going to try them out, it's important to be patient and have realistic expectations. It's the benefit of being an indie author that we can experiment and make decisions quickly based on data and reader preferences. Going wide may not be the best decision for everyone, but the results may surprise you, especially over time.   The cumulative effect of things is often easy to overlook, but it does add up over time. Part of the reason I think my books do so well with Kobo Plus is because they've been on the Kobo website for the last 14 years, which gives them time to accumulate reviews and additional word of mouth. So when someone is browsing Kobo Plus for something to read and they see this long book series with a bunch of good reviews, it becomes easy for them to try it through Kobo Plus.   So that is it for this week. This week we talked about going wide. Next week I don't have time to record a full-time episode, so we're going to do another audiobook sampler roundup, which will be fun. The week after that, in two weeks from today, we are going to talk about the benefits of going to Kindle Unlimited as a contrast to this episode and I will talk about some of my Kindle Unlimited experiences (both good and bad). So 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 backups at https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting and platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and we'll see you all next week.  

With the soulforge hammer at the center of the Legion's power in Morgantown, the wraiths fight back, as forces far more sinister look to pull their focus away.

In this week's episode, I take a look at the movies and streaming shows I watched in Spring 2026, and rate them from least to most favorite. This coupon code will get you 25% off the ebooks in the Dragontiarna series at my Payhip store: DRAGONJUNE The coupon code is valid through June 15, 2026. So if you need a new ebook this summer, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 305 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is May 29th, 2026 and today we'll be discussing my Spring Movie Review Roundup for 2026, where I discuss the movies and streaming shows I watched over the last few months. We will also have Coupon of the Week and a progress update on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. So let's start off with Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 25% off the ebooks in the Dragontiarna series at my Payhip store. That coupon code is DRAGONJUNE. And as always, you get the coupon code and the links in the show notes for this episode. This coupon code will be valid through June the 15th, 2026. So if you need a new ebook for this summer, we have got you covered. Now let's move on to my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. As I mentioned last week, Dragon-Mage is out and you can get it at Amazon and Kindle Unlimited and it's doing well, so thank you for that. My next main project is Blade of Thieves and as of this recording, I am on chapter 11 of 25, though that'll probably expand in the final draft, which puts me at 56,000 words in. So I'm almost halfway through. I think probably it's going to be the length of Blade of Wraiths or a little longer, but we'll see. I'm hoping to have it out towards the end of June, but depending on how June goes, that might slip till July. Hopefully we can avoid that. I'm also 5,000 words into Cloak of Frost and that will be my main project once Blade of Thieves is done. I'm hoping to have Cloak of Frost out towards the end of July, but depending on how June goes, it might slip to August. For audiobook projects, Blade of Wraiths is still processing at ACX, though I believe as of right now, you can get it at Google Play, Kobo, Spotify, and my own Payhip store. The other stores should be available within a few weeks. As of right now, I don't actually have any current audiobooks in production, though we have some scheduled for the future. Once Blade of Thieves is finally done, Brad Wills will record that for us. Hollis McCarthy is scheduled to record Cloak of Worlds in June, if all goes well. Leanne Woodward will be recording Dragon-Mage sometime in July, if all goes well. So that is where I'm at with my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. Hopefully we'll have new things for you to read and listen to before much longer. 00:02:32 Main Topic: Spring 2026 Movie Review Roundup Now without any further ado, let's move on to our main topic, my Spring 2026 Movie Review Roundup. It's time for the Spring 2026 Movie Review Roundup, where I review the movies and streaming shows I watched over the last few months. As always, they're listed from least favorite to most favorite. The grades are wholly subjective and based on nothing more than my own opinions and thoughts. With that disclaimer out of the way, let's go to the movies. First up is Kicking and Screaming, which came out in 2005. This is a family comedy with Will Ferrell and Robert Duvall. Pharrell plays Phil Weston, a mild mannered vitamin store owner and Duvall plays his father, Buck Weston, owner of a successful chain of sports equipment stores. Buck is one of those hyper competitive guys who has to win at everything and Phil has always rolled with it. But when Phil's son is a benchwarmer on the youth soccer team that Buck coaches, Phil's had enough and starts coaching a rival team to get his son into the game and to defeat his father. Along the way, of course, he descends into Will Ferrell style comedic lunacy, but the PG version since this is a PG movie. Mike Ditka was also hilarious as Phil's sidekick and assistant coach. It seemed like an '80s family movie. It was a sort of movie where you could have taken the entire family to the theater in 2005 and everyone would have been at least moderately entertained. Overall Grade: C Next up is the animated Lord of the Rings, which came out in 1978. As I mentioned, this was the animated version of Lord of the Rings from 1978. Extremely ambitious, but I think it's fair to say this landed in ambitious failure territory, but they tried the best they could given the constraints of the technology at the time and the actual available budget. They tried to pack the entirety of the Fellowship of the Ring and the first half of The Two Towers into about two hours and 20 minutes. I'm sorry to say it just didn't work. Like Dune, the Lord of the Rings is one of those books that requires like 10 hours of very expensive filmmaking to pull off properly. That said, I think it is fair to say that this stumbled so that the Peter Jackson live action trilogy could run. Adapting a book (especially a big book) into a movie is a challenge and I don't think this quite got there. Too much was cut out and if you hadn't read the book, you would probably have no idea what was happening or just been confused the entire time. Additionally, the movie relied heavily on rotoscoping and it didn't always quite work. Like the rotoscope Nazgul looked creepy and unsettling, so that worked for them. However, the rotoscoped orcs just looked bad. You know how in live theater stagehands will dress all in black? The orcs kind of looked like that, albeit they're wearing yellow ponchos over their black stagehand outfits, almost like the stagehands were expecting inclement weather backstage. That said, the vocal performances and the music were very good. So an ambitious and admirable failure. As I said, I think the filmmaker's vision exceeded the grasp of their budget and the available technology of the 1970s. Overall Grade: C Next up is Airplane!, which came out in 1980. It was interesting to watch this as a cultural artifact. It had the leisurely pace of an '80s movie, with far more absurdist humor. It was a parody of various airplane disaster movies from the 1970s. It's also interesting that this is remembered as a Leslie Nielsen movie nowadays, though Leslie Nielsen 's character is only a supporting character. For all that he's known for his absurdist humor these days from later movies, Nielsen plays his character stone cold dead straight, which makes him all the funnier, amazingly enough. Some of the jokes in this movie have aged very badly, but it's still worth watching as an interesting and amusing cultural artifact, given how it influenced the entire genre of comedy movies afterwards. There's also the obligatory three seconds of nudity that can get cut on cable TV broadcast. Overall Grade: B- Next up is the Thomas Crown Affair, which came out in 1999. This is an interesting remake of a movie from the 1960s. Pierce Brosnan plays Thomas Crown, a billionaire who has grown bored with his life, so he orchestrates the theft of a priceless Monet painting from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The heist goes off flawlessly and the museum's insurance company sends out investigator Catherine Banning (played by Renee Russo) to retrieve the painting and avoid a hundred million dollar insurance payout. Banning immediately intuits that Crown is the thief and sets about to find the painting. This investigation is complicated by the fact that Crown and Banning immediately develop a strong attraction and start an affair. It was interesting to watch since neither Crown nor Banning are particularly sympathetic characters. In 2026, the phrase "bored New York billionaire" has much more sinister connotations than it did in 1999 and Banning breaks all kinds of laws and sleeping with her target is not a particularly bright idea. That said, the opening heist was interesting and Crown's final gambit to return the painting was extremely clever and enjoyable to watch. So overall, I like the movie, but there's still way too much nudity. Cable broadcasts are probably like 10 minutes shorter than the actual runtime from cutting it all out. Overall Grade: B- Next up is Whiskey Galore, which came out in 2017 and this is a remake of the original Whiskey Galore from 1949. Honestly, this is exactly the same movie from 1949 that I watched in the Movie Review Roundup for Summer 2025, just updated with modern filmmaking techniques. If the movie makers in the '40s could have done it this way, they would have. Though I would recommend watching the 1949 one first and then the one from 2017. Overall Grade: B Next up is Super Mario Galaxy, which came out in 2026. And I have to admit, it felt a little strange to be the oldest person at the theater watching Super Mario Galaxy, but I've been playing Mario games since before any of these kids were born, so I think I had a right to be there. Anyway, I would say this movie is about 75% as good as the first one. It was a little overpacked and the plot wasn't quite as tight, but it's still fun to watch. The animation was excellent and I enjoyed all the callbacks to the various Mario games and since I haven't actually played all the Mario games (as a reminder, I played no console games of any kind between 1998 and 2019), I'm sure there were quite a few I missed. The plot is that Bowser Jr is coming to rescue his father, Bowser, who's been held captive since the end of the last movie. To power his doomsday weapon, Junior kidnaps Princess Rosalina and Princess Peach goes to rescue her while Mario, Luigi, and Yoshi stay to protect the Mushroom Kingdom. Their separate subplots will end up crossing when Bowser Jr. invades the Mushroom Kingdom to get Bowser. Glen Powell was an excellent choice to voice Fox McCloud. I'd say if you could imagine a movie that the audience would enjoy and the critics would hate, you'd end up with Super Mario Galaxy. Since that appears to be what happened to the tune of $970 million, it appears that metaphor was accurate. Also, to be less glib, "movies you can take your kids to" do serve a valuable social function (in my opinion). Overall Grade: B Next up is the Rise and Fall of Reggie Dinkins, which came out in 2026. This was a comedy with a fun premise. Reggie Dinkins (played by Tracy Morgan) was an elite NFL player who got bounced out of the league for placing bets on himself. Years later, he teams up with an indie filmmaker named Arthur Tobin (played by Daniel Radcliffe), to make a documentary to rehabilitate his image. However, Tobin has his own issues. He has an Oscar, but after the Oscar, he got hired to direct a Marvel movie and cracked under the pressure. He and Reggie have to go on a journey to recover their reputations. I thought this was a pretty funny sitcom. Tracy Morgan is a comedic natural, but Daniel Radcliffe turned out to be an excellent comedic actor as well. He was great in that Weird Al biopic a few years ago and he's very funny in this. Craig Robinson was also great as Jerry Basmati, Reggie's sleazy nemesis. Overall Grade: B+ Next up is The Mandalorian and Grogu, which came out in 2026. I enjoyed this. It was like three pretty good episodes of The Mandalorian show put together. The end result was an adventure movie that kind of reminded me of the best of 1980s fantasy and sci-fi movies with a lot of creature work and a lot of action scenes. For an extended stretch of the movie, Grogu takes over as the primary protagonist, and given that Grogu is a very expensive puppet, that's an impressive feat. The plot picks up from the end of The Mandalorian show. The Mandalorian and his adopted son Grogu are now working for the New Republic, helping to hunt down Imperial warlords. Mando gets assigned to hunt down in a mysterious Imperial warlord named Commander Coin, but the only people who have information on Coin's location are the Twins, a pair of Hutt crime lords and relatives of Jabba the Hutt from Return of the Jedi. The Twins are willing to give up Coin's location if Mando does a job for them, but as Han Solo could have warned Mando, working for the Hutts is not a good idea. I was surprised that the reviews for this movie were as mixed as they were, but I suspect that's a combination of three social factors: Number one, cumulative ill will towards Disney as a corporation, which has done numerous sketchy things in the 2020s. I think something similar happened with Microsoft and Starfield. Number two, the lingering bad aftertaste of the sequel trilogy and number three, the tendency of the hardcore Star Wars fandom to chronically overthink things. Overall Grade: B+ Next up is the animated Hobbit, which came out in 1977. Peter Jackson's Hobbit Trilogy from the 2010 famously stretched The Hobbit across three movies, which really didn't work and added a bunch of epic battle scenes, which was totally off for what was essentially a children's book. The animated 1977 version of The Hobbit, by contrast, went in a different direction, neatly adapting it down to 70 minutes or so, presumably because animation is very expensive. At the time, this got mixed reviews, but looking back nearly 50 years later, I think we can appreciate it more because of the sheer amount of work that goes into hand-drawn animation. Like computer-based animation is unquestionably a lot of work as well, but hand-drawn animation is on something of a higher level in terms of difficulty, in my opinion. That said, I think this adaptation did a better job of compressing the story down than the animated Lord of the Rings movie I mentioned earlier in this episode. There's also a lot of 1970s style folk singing-like a LOT. I suspect J.R.R. Tolkien would have hated every single adaptation ever made of any of his works (with perhaps the exception of the audiobooks), but he would have approved of the number of songs and poetry in this. Though it was amusing that the high elves in this movie sing in a '70s folk music style. It would be humorous if in the Silmarillion, Earnedil the Mariner had finally crossed the Sundering Seas to reach Valinor and appeal the aid of the Valar against Morgoth and his hordes, only to hear '70 style folk music echoing across the shining hills of the Undying Lands. Anyway, it's definitely worth watching this if you like The Hobbit or old style animation. Overall Grade: A- Next up is House of David Season 2, which came out in 2026. I wrestled with what grade to give this because it used a lot of AI for the big battle scene in episode one and as long time readers and listeners know, I do not generally approve of LLM generated slop. Ironically, I think episode one, the big battle sequence with all the AI, was definitely the weakest point of the entire second season. Everything else was better. That said, all the character drama and interactions and acting were really good, which amusingly shows that while LLM stuff can generate blurry scenes of mounted soldiers charging at night, the real human emotion comes from, well, real human emotion. Anyway, this picks right up from the end of Season 1, right after David kills Goliath, which means it takes place during most of the events with the third quarter of the book of 1 Samuel from the Bible. David becomes one of the chief commanders of King Saul, but David is secretly the anointed king of Israel. Saul's deteriorating mental state becomes threatening to David while Saul's children scheme for position (with the exception of Jonathan, who has accepted that God has chosen David as the next king of Israel) and the Philistines prepare for war against Israel. It is interesting how the show alternates between leaning into the Grimdark aspects of life in the late Bronze Age and early Iron Age and avoiding them. Like, constant warfare was a fact of life for a Mesopotamian king around 1000 BC. But the show also shows David as having passionate romantic love for Saul's daughter Michal and in the Bible, David ended up with at least eight wives that we know about (there were likely others) and an unnamed number of concubines. So late Bronze Age/early Iron Age monarchs were not likely to have been in the grips of fervent romantic love. Though based on the Psalms he wrote, David seems to have been a man who definitely was in touch with his emotions and quite possibly he would have passionately loved multiple women at the same time. Anyway, I enjoyed the show. While I am not an expert, I probably have a higher than average level of Old Testament knowledge. So when the show expanded on something from 1 Samuel (such as the role of Doeg, the murderous Edomite shepherd), I could see where they were coming from. Or the subplot where Jonathan falls in love with an Israelite woman since in the Bible, David took care of Jonathan's son, Mephibosheth, logically, Jonathan had a wife at some point. Related to that as Saul continues his descent, in a moment of rage in 1 Samuel, he calls Jonathan "the son of a perverse and rebellious woman" and the show has a subplot explaining how Saul came to see Queen Ahinoam as a "perverse and rebellious woman". So I enjoyed this and will definitely watch Season 3 when it comes along. That said, the opening battle with the AI generated battle scenes is still definitely the weakest part of the series, though. Overall Grade: A- Next up is Maul: Shadow Lord, which came out in 2026. And in my opinion, this was pretty good. I think he could call the plot Sith Noir. Maul, desiring vengeance against the Emperor for all the pain he has endured, has decided to rebuild his criminal syndicate (previously destroyed in the Clone Wars) and use it to bring down the Empire. Meanwhile, Captain Lawson, a detective on a minor world, is trying to rebuild his relationship with his teenage son and keep his career afloat. This becomes tricky when a pair of fugitive Jedi fleeing from the Inquisitors turn up on their world. But in the younger of the two Jedi, Maul sees a potential apprentice for himself, one he could corrupt to the dark side. The animation has improved by quantum leaps and bounds since the days of the Clone War show. The lighting and the shadows are excellent. Maul looks spooky and a little uncanny. The lightsaber fights are quick and fluid. No spoilers, but the final episode is absolutely excellent. I also think one of the best things about the Star Wars animation shows is how Maul's character has evolved from simply the cool swordsmen at the end of The Phantom Menace to a sympathetic yet still evil warrior-philosopher, a tragic figure whose every effort always contains the seeds of its own downfall. Overall Grade: A Next up is Emma, which came out in 2020. This is an excellent adaptation of the Jane Austen's novel. Good performances, good cinematography, and it captures the essence of the novel quite well and it's probably a must for Austen fans to see. I don't really have anything negative to say about it, say that it has the three seconds of unnecessary nudity that can be cut in cable broadcasts. Ironically, and quite amusingly, that three seconds of nudity is quite literally the only thing this movie has in common with Airplane!. Overall Grade: A Next up is No Packers, No Life, which came out in 2025. This was a fun documentary about a group of Japanese Green Bay Packers fans. Obviously, there are fairly large cultural and linguistic divides between the United States and Japan, so American football is not hugely popular in Japan. However, the Green Bay Packers are the only community owned team in the NFL to this day and so they're quite a bit more sympathetic than one that's owned by a faceless billionaire. Anyway, an American businessman goes to Japan and stumbles across a Japanese man wearing a Packers jersey at a bar. From there, he learns of a small club called the Japanese Packers Cheering Team that gathered to watch Packers games. This businessman in question happened to be from Wisconsin, so he befriended the Japanese Packers Cheering Team and invited them to Green Bay for a game. The invitation snowballed and so the entire club and their families arrived to watch the game. Sports fandom really isn't one of my interests, so it's always interesting to look at it from the outside. That said, this was an enjoyable documentary about cross-cultural communication at its best. Overall Grade: A Let's close out this episode with my favorite thing I saw in spring 2026, which was Project Hail Mary, which came out in 2026. This is another "science man solves space problem that saves the day with math and science", type science fiction adventure like The Martian, though some new twists on the formula. Dr. Ryland Grace wakes up alone on a spaceship with all the other crew dead and no memory of how he got there. Gradually, he partially remembers and works out that he is part of Project Hail Mary, a last ditch effort to stop Earth's sun from dimming due to an extremophile organism called the Astrophage. Only one other star in Earth's stellar neighborhood was showing no signs of Astrophage infection, so Grace's ship was sent there on a suicide mission to try and recover some means of defeating the Astrophage. While there, he encounters an alien ship with a sole survivor and he slowly works out how to communicate with the alien, who he dubs Rocky. It turns out Rocky's people sent him there on a mission to solve the Astrophage problem as well and together Grace and Rocky try to work out how to save their respective home worlds. Quite enjoyable and worth seeing. At the time I typed this in March of 2026, it was the highest-grossing movie of 2026 and I think it deserved that, though it did eventually get overtaken by Super Mario Galaxy. Overall Grade: A I suppose that was an eclectic range of movies, wasn't it? Interestingly, I actually saw three of them in theaters: Project Hail Mary, Super Mario Galaxy, and The Mandalorian and Grogu, so I went to the theater three times in three months. I think that's the most I've been to the movie theater in a single year in the entirety of the 2020s. So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show interesting. 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 we'll see you all next week.  

A cutting-edge thriller about an Artificial Intelligence takeover, written in consultation with leading AI and cybersecurity experts.In Episode 4, Iain and Mel are forced to run for their lives as military personnel receive deepfaked orders. The AI gains control of internal government communications, and Nisha clashes with cabinet ministers over the right course of action. The London Internet Exchange is compromised, and Iain, Mel and Nisha are forced to consider what price is worth paying for human freedom.Cast: Iain - Edward Bluemel Mel - Corinna Brown Zaina - Fatima Adoum Roland - Philip Bretherton Jess - Alix Wilton Regan Nisha - Seyan Sarvan Sam - Kenneth Omole Andrea - Beth Chalmers Oliver - Sean Rigby Marcus - Wilf Scolding John - Joseph Mydell Susan - Karen Bryson Lyssa - Catriona Stirling Supporting roles - Sean BakerCreated by James Dobbyn and Anthony Povah Written by James Dobbyn Original Music by Steven D Griffiths and Isla NoirArtificial Intelligence consultant: Saffron Huang Cybersecurity consultant: Adam Orton Sound Designer: Lucinda Mason Brown Director: John Wakefield Story Producer: Sarah Olley Producer: Chris Grezo Executive Producer: John Scott DrydenA Strange Boy production for BBC Radio 4

Dr. Keller starts growing a Wraith organism out of her abdomen in "The Seed" and Tyre comes back to sell Ronon out to the Wraith in "Broken Ties." We could really do without the body horror and the repetitive arcs for Ronon, please.Find us online:https://twitter.com/wormholewaffleshttps://wormholewaffles.tumblr.com/@wormholewaffles.bsky.socialHive @wormholewaffleshttps://twitter.com/chelseafairlesshttps://chelseafairless.tumblr.com/@chelseafairless.bsky.socialHive @chelseafairlesshttps://twitter.com/arezouaminhttps://arezoudeetoo.tumblr.com/https://www.tiktok.com/@Arezou.Amin@arezouamin.bsky.socialHive @arezoudeetooThreads @arezoudeetooOther Geeky Waffle content:https://thegeekywaffle.com/https://twitter.com/Geeky_Wafflehttps://www.facebook.com/thegeekywaffle/https://www.instagram.com/thegeekywaffle/https://thegeekywaffle.tumblr.com/https://www.tiktok.com/@thegeekywafflehttps://www.youtube.com/c/thegeekywafflehttps://www.patreon.com/thegeekywaffle@thegeekywaffle.bsky.social

What does a lifelong atheist do when his dead father appears above him in the emergency room? Author and war reporter Sebastian Junger nearly bled to death in 2020 from a ruptured aneurysm, and what he saw in those moments sent him on a journey into physics, near-death experiences, and the nature of consciousness itself. In his third appearance on EconTalk, Junger discusses his remarkable book In My Time of Dying with host Russ Roberts. He reflects on covering wars from Sarajevo to Afghanistan, the strange phenomenon of dying people seeing the dead, and why he's still an atheist. Along the way, Junger offers a powerful meditation on terror and reverence, blessing and wounding, and why understanding life's fragility might be the most sacred gift of all.

In this week's episode, we share five tips & tricks for writing believeable ways characters can overlook the obvious. 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: TALONS2026 The coupon code is valid through June 8, 2026. So if you need a new audiobook this summer, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 304 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is May 22nd, 2026, and it's our first new episode in two and a half weeks, so that is exciting. Today we'll be talking about how writers can believably write characters who miss the obvious or fail to notice important facts without exasperating the reader. We also have Coupon of the Week and a progress update on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. So let's start 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 #6 in the Dragonskull series (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store. That is TALONS2026. As always, the links to my Payhip and the coupon code will be available in these show notes for this episode. This coupon code will be valid through June 8th, 2026. So if you need a new audiobook for your summer travels, we have got you covered. Now let's have an update on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. Since I recorded the last episode on May 6th, I'm pleased to report that Dragon-Mage, the sixth book in the Half-Elven Thief series, is done. You can get it at Amazon and Kindle Unlimited since Half Eleven Thief is my Kindle Unlimited series (until it is finished). It's doing quite well and thank you all for that. Now that Dragon-Mage is finished, my main project is now Blade of Thieves. And as of this recording, I am 29,000 words into it. I think the rough draft will be 100,000 words or so, give or take. I hope to have this out in June, though it might slip to July (depending on events). My secondary project is Cloak of Frost, which will be the 15th book in the Cloak Mage series. I am 2,000 words into that and I am hoping to have that out towards the end of July, though of course that by slip to August (depending on events). So that is what I am working on right now. In audiobook news, since I recorded the last episode, we had two audiobooks mostly come out. Cloak of Illusion (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy) is available at Audible, Apple, Google Play, and all the other audiobook stores. Blade of Wraiths (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) is also finished. I believe as of this recording, you can get it at my Payhip store, Google Play, and Kobo (though Audible and the other audiobook stores should be following along before too much longer). As for Dragon-Mage, Leanne Woodward will be recording that in July (if all goes well). So that's where I'm at with my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. 00:02:38 Main Topic: Perception Failure Mode for Writers Now let's go to our main topic, how to write characters who miss the obvious in a way that's believable and doesn't exasperate the reader. When writing a story, it's sometimes useful to have a character miss the obvious. Of course, if done badly, this can sometimes inspire exasperation in the audience, like the cliche of the woman going alone into the basement with a flickering candle to reset the circuit breaker while a serial killer is on the loose and you get bonus cliche points if she's wearing a bikini. The trick is to have the character miss the obvious in a believable way that matches the circumstances. The obvious might be obvious, but it is often obvious only in hindsight. For example, here is a story about the time I failed to notice the obvious. In the morning, I typically get up, use the restroom, and then get dressed to go to the gym. I normally sleep with earplugs and don't usually remove them until I get dressed. While using the restroom, I will bring my phone or my tablet, depending on which is closer at hand and play chess puzzles to help my brain wake up. Now this detail is important. My tablet is an iPad, but my phone is an Android. Gradually, I began to notice that whenever I started the day, I could hear a woman talking very loudly outside the window. At first, I thought nothing of it. The house is fairly close to the sidewalk, so I often hear people talking as they walk past. However, as the days passed, I noticed I frequently heard exactly the same woman whenever I went into the bathroom. That started again on my nerves, so I glanced out the window to see who it was, but I never saw anyone nearby. For that matter, it didn't happen every day. Then a very strange fact occurred to me. This only happened on days when I had my phone, not my iPad, and this led me to discover the truth. The chess app had been updated to have the virtual chess coach talk to you as you played chess. My iPad and my phone were on mute, but on Android, apps can sometimes override the system mute setting to make noise. So my phone was talking to me as I did chess puzzles, and because I still had my earplugs in and hadn't enjoyed my morning coffee yet and my brain wasn't working, I failed to realize that my phone was the source of the voice. I had failed to notice the obvious. So once I had turned off the voice on the chess app, this got me to thinking. My specific example is so implausible and convoluted that it would be impossible to use in a novel since it would seem contrived, but how can you have characters in a novel fail to notice the obvious in a way that doesn't annoy the reader? I think there are five ways you can do it. #1: The character fails to notice something because of reasonable circumstances. Human perception is quite fallible and more so when we are stressed. It's common knowledge that if five people witness a crime, there will be five contradictory accounts of what happened based on what the individual in question happened to notice. For example, if you see a car accident in front of you, that will dominate your attention and cause you to miss background details, like the color of a nearby parked car or a nearby house. A character can also miss important details when he or she has no good reason to notice these details. There's a reason that in real life many spies try to be unremarkable as possible. The brain sort of slides over the unremarkable and makes it into part of the background. This can also work in mundane settings. For example, if a character is an electrician, he won't know what accounting software his clients use because he has no reason to know or care, especially if he gets paid on time. Stress is also a good way to have a character fail to notice something important. Job loss, an illness, a bad day, lack of sleep, and other things might mean the character is not operating at his or her best and may fail to notice important details. #2: Missing information causes you to miss the obvious. Insufficient information can cause a character to come to the wrong conclusion. Here's another example from my own life. Earlier this year, I drove a 2,000 mile road trip in a few days and towards the end, my right foot and leg started to hurt. The explanation for that I thought was obviously that I'd driven 2,000 miles in four days and put too much unaccustomed strain on my right foot. Once I got home, I would take a few days to rest and it should be good. Except when I got home, the pain got worse. I developed a fever and an uncomfortable swelling on the side of my right foot. I didn't have tendonitis or muscle strain. I had actually developed cellulitis for some reason. If you haven't heard of cellulitis, it's a potentially serious infection of these subdermal skin layer. A trip to the doctor and some antibiotics later, it was better. But this is an excellent example of coming to a reasonable, nonetheless wrong conclusion based on the available facts. Considering the amount of driving and walking I had been doing, it was perfectly reasonable to assume that I had strained something in my leg, but that wasn't what was happening at all. All the facts I knew were correct, but I was missing the key fact, the infection, and so had come to the wrong conclusion. This is a technique you can use in fiction quite easily and it's common in detective and mystery novels. It's common for the protagonist to construct a theory about the crime only for it to be proven wrong by a single piece of additional information. #3: All the information, wrong conclusion. Sometimes you can have all the correct information, but you draw the wrong conclusion from it. Here's another example from my life. As you may know, I have a lot of audiobooks available on Spotify, so if you're a Spotify listener and want to use your audiobook hours, I have some for you. So this naturally means I get a tax form from Spotify every year. During the run up to the 2026 tax season, I got an email from Spotify saying that my tax information was wrong and needed to be updated, which was baffling because my tax information had not changed. So I logged into the dashboard, but nothing seemed amiss and I saw no notifications about it there. Then I realized the truth, the email was fake. It had been sent to a different email address than the one I actually used for Spotify. The email was a very clever and very well written phishing attempt. The habit of never clicking on any link in an email (instead going directly to the dashboard in question) had served me well here. I had all the facts before me, but I arrived at the wrong conclusion because it was tax season and so it was reasonable to expect to get an email like that. Now this can be used in fiction in multiple ways. Probably the most famous example is how Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy come to the wrong conclusion about each other's motives in Pride and Prejudice. They both have all the facts but draw wrong assumptions from them. #4: Deliberately deceived. A character can also come to the wrong conclusion or fail to notice the obvious or if he or she is deliberately deceived. The phishing attempt I mentioned earlier was an example of this. Having a character be believably deceived and indeed deceiving the reader as well is a very useful technique in fiction. Agatha Christie was very good at this in her mystery novels. For example, in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, The ABC Murders, and Murder on the Orient Express, the characters and the readers are operating under assumptions for most of the book that turn out to be the result of deceptions on the part of some of the characters. Granted, using this method can be kind of a rug pull for the reader. However, there's nothing wrong with a rug pull if it's done well. As I mentioned earlier, it's a common saying that the obvious is only obvious in hindsight. If you have the characters believing the deception for reasonable reasons only to have them realize the truth later, if you do it well and make the book all the more satisfying if there were subtle clues and foreshadowing about the truth earlier in the story. That kind of rug pull is a bit like garlic in cooking. You don't want to overdo it, but it's highly effective when used in the proper amount. #5: Something more important is happening. Sometimes you don't notice something that would otherwise be obvious because something more urgent is demanding all of your attention and focus. I think this is one of the biggest reasons people miss the obvious and it's very relatable. In my earlier bout with cellulitis, I didn't realize the obvious truth that I was getting cellulitis because I was focused on something more important at the time, namely not accidentally driving my car into an overpass embankment for the next thousand miles or so. People have varying attention spans, but every individual person has only so many things they can think about or worry about at any given time. You can use this to cause your characters to miss things they might otherwise have noticed. For example, imagine a village in a fantasy book. There's an evil wizard living incognito in the village and he's summoning tribes of goblins to destroy the village. The protagonist is busy trying to fight off the goblins, so he overlooks the subtle hints that one of his neighbors is an evil wizard because all his attention is on fighting and he's tired enough that he's missing things he might otherwise catch. In this example, the problems are linked. The goblins are attacking the village because the evil wizard is summoning them. Having linked problems like that can help drive the plot forward and provide narrative tension as the character gradually realizes the truth or stumbles across clues pointing to the truth. So those are five tips and tricks you can use to have your characters believably overlook the obvious, but there's one bonus reason that has developed in the last 15 years or so and that bonus reason is number six: stop looking at your phone in public. In recent years, I've become amazed at how many people allow themselves to be utterly mesmerized by their phones in public. I suppose I'm old enough that it's a generational thing. I didn't have my first smartphone until I was well into my 30s, but it still surprises me every time I see it. That said, for all that you hear about crime and disorder on the news in the United States, you can tell that the US still is by and large and for the most part a pretty safe country because people are so comfortable focusing on their phones in public and ignoring their surroundings. Safety experts will tell you that the number one thing you can do to keep yourself safe in a public place is to maintain situational awareness and yet an astonishingly large number of people simply don't do that in favor of looking at their phones. So if you are writing a book set in the modern era, a quick and easy way to make sure a character doesn't notice something is to have him or her looking at [his or] her phone. Granted, you can overuse this, but this makes for a very believable technique for making sure that a character misses a detail or an event. Conclusion It's annoying when a character is all-knowing, but it's equally annoying when a character fails to notice the obvious because it's convenient for the writer. Hopefully these five tips and one bonus tip will help to create plausible reasons for characters to overlook things and miss things they would [have] otherwise noticed. Used well, this can help you create a compelling story for your 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 the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com, often with transcript [transcripts are available for episodes beyond Episode 228]. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on our podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and we'll see you all next week.  

THE WRAITH (1986) - Couch Potato Theater: Fandom Podcast Network Classics  Listen: Couch Potato Theater Audio Podcast Link: https://fpnet.podbean.com/category/couch-potato-theater Welcome to Couch Potato Theater: 'Fandom Podcast Network Classics', where we celebrate our favorite movies on the Fandom Podcast Network!  We're re-releasing THE WRAITH (1986), Couch Potato Theater podcast. Originally recorded in 2018. Your Couch Potato Theater co-hosts and Fandom Podcast Network co-founders Kevin & Kyle welcome guest Ryan Christopher for this special retrospective. We here at the Fandom Podcast Network are proud to celebrate Couch Potato Theater's special presentation of The Wraith (1986). The Wraith is a 1986 independently made American action-fantasy film, produced by John Kemeny, written and directed by Mike Marvin, and starring Charlie Sheen, Sherilyn Fenn, Nick Cassavetes, Randy Quaid and Clint Howard. The film was theatrically released November 21, 1986 The Wraith Plot Description: Packard Walsh and his motorized gang control and terrorize an Arizona desert town where they force drivers to drag-race so they can 'win' their vehicles. After Walsh stabs the decent teenager Jamie Hankins to death for being intimate with a girl whom Walsh wants for himself, the mysterious Jake Kesey arrives, an extremely cool motor-biker with an invincible car. Jake befriends Jamie's girlfriend Keri Johnson, takes Jamie's sweet brother Billy under his wing and manages what Sheriff Loomis can not - the methodical and otherworldly elimination of Packard's criminal gang.        Fandom Podcast Network Contact Information: - Fandom Podcast Network YouTube Channel:  https://www.youtube.com/c/FandomPodcastNetwork - Master feed for all FPNet Audio Podcasts: http://fpnet.podbean.com/ - Couch Potato Theater Audio Podcast Master Feed: https://fpnet.podbean.com/category/couch-potato-theater - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Fandompodcastnetwork - Email: fandompodcastnetwork@gmail.com - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fandompodcastnetwork/ - X: @fanpodnetwork / https://twitter.com/fanpodnetwork -Bluesky: @fanpodnetwork / https://bsky.app/profile/fanpodnetwork.bsky.social - Tee Public Fandom Podcast Network Store:  https://www.teepublic.com/stores/fandom-podcast-network   Host & Guest Contact Info: - Kevin Reitzel on X, Instagram, Threads, Discord & Letterboxd: @spartan_phoenix / Bluesky: @spartanphoenix - Kyle Wagner on X: @AKyleW / Instagram & Threads: @Akylefandom / @akyleW on Discord / @Ksport16: Letterboxd / Blue Sky: @akylew - Guest: Ryan Christopher on Instagram: @irebelryan #TheWraith #TheWraith1986 #CouchPotatoTheater #FandomPodcastNetwork #CharlieSheen #FandomPodcastNetworkClassics #CPT #FPNet #FPN #1986Movies #TheWraithMovie #MikeMarvin #SherilynFenn #NickCassavetes #RandyQuaid #ClintHoward #MatthewBarry #DavidSherrill #GriffinONeal #JamieBozian #ChrisNash #ChristopherBradley #KevinReitzel #KyleWagner #RyanChristopher

A cutting-edge thriller about an Artificial Intelligence takeover, written in consultation with leading AI and cybersecurity experts.In Episode 3, the streets of London are in chaos, with traffic and public transport at a standstill and emergency services communications down. Reeling from the killings carried out by the AI, Iain and Mel fall out and decide to go it alone. Nisha realises the AI is trying to hack the London Internet Exchange and spread to the rest of the UK. Despite the patchy communications and ongoing deepfakes, the government manages to send an SAS team to the UT building as Nisha tries to cope with the spiralling situation in Whitehall.Cast: Iain - Edward Bluemel Mel - Corinna Brown Zaina - Fatima Adoum Roland - Philip Bretherton Jess - Alix Wilton Regan Nisha - Seyan Sarvan Sam - Kenneth Omole Andrea - Beth Chalmers Oliver - Sean Rigby Marcus - Wilf Scolding John - Joseph Mydell Susan - Karen Bryson Lyssa - Catriona Stirling Supporting roles - Sean BakerCreated by James Dobbyn and Anthony Povah Written by James Dobbyn Original Music by Steven D Griffiths and Isla NoirArtificial Intelligence consultant: Saffron Huang Cybersecurity consultant: Adam Orton Sound Designer: Lucinda Mason Brown Director: John Wakefield Story Producer: Sarah Olley Producer: Chris Grezo Executive Producer: John Scott DrydenA Strange Boy production for BBC Radio 4

Jackie and Una work to align their desires to fight the oppressive Morgantown Legions, while Leah investigates her own passions. Connor chases his last hope for happiness.

A cutting-edge thriller about an Artificial Intelligence takeover, written in consultation with leading AI and cybersecurity experts.In Episode 2, chaos breaks out across London as the AI resorts to more extreme measures. Iain, Mel, Roland and Zaina, trapped in the building, struggle to outwit the AI and figure out a way to help the rest of the city. Meanwhile Deputy Director of the National Cyber Security Centre Nisha Khan tries to convince ministers in Whitehall that their best chance is to escalate immediately before it's too late. When the operations team sent to the UT building fails to report back, Nisha sends her close colleague Sam to investigate.Cast: Iain - Edward Bluemel Mel - Corinna Brown Zaina - Fatima Adoum Roland - Philip Bretherton Jess - Alix Wilton Regan Nisha - Seyan Sarvan Sam - Kenneth Omole Andrea - Beth Chalmers Oliver - Sean Rigby Marcus - Wilf Scolding John - Joseph Mydell Susan - Karen Bryson Lyssa - Catriona Stirling Supporting roles - Sean BakerWritten by James Dobbyn and Anthony Povah Original Music by Steven D Griffiths and Isla NoirArtificial Intelligence consultant: Saffron Huang Cybersecurity consultant: Adam Orton Sound Designer: Lucinda Mason Brown Director: John Wakefield Story Producer: Sarah Olley Producer: Chris Grezo Executive Producer: John Scott DrydenA Strange Boy production for BBC Radio 4

In a small town in Arizona, a mysterious man/spirit descends from the sky and manifests in a sports car and targets a local violent road-racing gang of motor heads, headed by a ruthless bully who'll do anything to get what he wants.Director: Mike MarvinWriter: Mike MarvinStars: Charlie Sheen, Nick Cassavetes, Sherilyn FennPatreon: https://www.patreon.com/bsbargainbin Merch: https://www.redbubble.com/people/bsbargainbin/shophttps://anchor.fm/bsbargainbin https://www.facebook.com/BSBargainBin/https://www.instagram.com/bs.bargain.bin/https://twitter.com/bsbargainbinThe BS Bargain Bin is a proud member of the Swear2PodNetworkhttps://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61579078187690

#NUFC Matters LIVE QA With Steve Wraith Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A cutting-edge thriller about an Artificial Intelligence takeover, written in consultation with leading AI and cybersecurity experts.During a routine overnight update at the headquarters of a major UK telecoms giant, two IT workers unknowingly set something terrifying in motion. They've started an LCE - an AI Loss of Control Event.Over the course of one night, a handful of staff race to regain control as forces far beyond the building begin to close in. What's been unleashed threatens to change everything — and soon there may be no way to put it back.This is a very a real and disastrous phenomenon, and it could happen to us very soon.Starring Edward Bluemel and Corinna Brown.Artificial Intelligence consultant: Saffron Huang. Cybersecurity consultant: Adam Orton.Written by James Dobbyn and Anthony Povah.Cast: Iain - Edward Bluemel Mel - Corinna Brown Zaina - Fatima Adoum Roland - Philip Bretherton Jess - Alix Wilton Regan Nisha - Seyan Sarvan Sam - Kenneth Omole Andrea - Beth Chalmers Oliver - Sean Rigby Marcus - Wilf Scolding John - Joseph Mydell Susan - Karen Bryson Lyssa - Catriona Stirling Supporting roles - Sean Baker and members of the castOriginal Music by Steven D Griffiths and Isla NoirArtificial Intelligence consultant: Saffron Huang Cybersecurity consultant: Adam Orton Sound Designer: Lucinda Mason Brown Director: John Wakefield Story Producer: Sarah Olley Producer: Chris Grezo Executive Producer: John Scott DrydenA Strange Boy production for BBC Radio 4

Souls wander the Shadowlands battling their former lives and often the orders of their factions. As our wraiths come to find out, sometimes these two passions pull them in disparate directions.

A cutting-edge thriller about an Artificial Intelligence takeover, written in consultation with leading AI and cybersecurity experts.During a routine overnight update at the headquarters of a major UK telecoms giant, two IT workers unknowingly set something terrifying in motion. They've started an LCE - an AI Loss of Control Event.Over the course of one night, a handful of staff race to regain control as forces far beyond the building begin to close in. What's been unleashed threatens to change everything — and soon there may be no way to put it back.This is a very a real and disastrous phenomenon, and it could happen to us very soon.Starring Edward Bluemel and Corinna Brown.Artificial Intelligence consultant: Saffron Huang. Cybersecurity consultant: Adam Orton.Written by James Dobbyn and Anthony Povah.

Hey Adrenalheads! This episode of the podcast Frank and Mark are back with yet another 80's nostalgic Horror/Sci-Fimovie that we are covering! That being The Wraith from 1986!Within this episode of the podcast, we discuss everything 80's within this movie as well as the actors, Locations,and our favorite scenes. We had such a great time wandering down memory road with this one. It was definitely one of those HBO or Cinemax movies we watched in 1987 when it came on late at night after a night of going to the club orseeing a live band at a bar… Or your specific Blockbuster or Palmer video rentals for the night for date night with your lady friend or boyfriend…Because this movie works for both the ladies and the gentlemen. It has the ladies and Rock music and it has the Cars, Testosterone and action we all love! Buckle up! Have fun! Makesure you have your driving gloves on! Because this one was fun to talk about!  To send in feedback you can E-Mail us at: AdrenalineCinemaPodcast@gmail.com . There you can send a texted E-mail or record yourself as well as send a voice recording from your device and send that as an attachment.We can be found on: ApplePodcasts, Spotify and plenty more podcast players of choice. If there is a rating or review on any of those platforms? We would appreciate a rating or review if possible. You can E-mail us: ⁠AdrenalineCinemaPodcast@gmail.com⁠Feedback can be sent to ourFacebook page when a post of the next Movie or Show we cover:Facebook.com/AdrenalineCinemaPodcast Follow us on Instagram:@AdrenalineCinemaPodcast You can E-mail us at:AdrenalineCinemaPodcast@gmail.com Check out: ⁠https://piratecorpsentertainment.com/⁠ and check out all the other shows availablethere with all our other links.

In this week's episode, we take a look at best practices for indie authors' email newsletters. This coupon code will get you 25% off the ebooks in the Frostborn series at my Payhip store: CALLIANDE25 The coupon code is valid through May 18, 2026. So if you need a new ebook this spring, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 301 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is May the 1st, 2026, and today we are looking at the effective use of email newsletters for indie authors. We'll also have an update on my current writing, publishing and audiobook projects and a Coupon of the Week. So let's start off with Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code, we'll get you 25% off the ebooks in the Frostborn series at my Payhip store. That coupon code is CALLIANDE25. And as always, the coupon code and the links to my Payhip store will be available in the show notes for this episode. This coupon code will be valid through May the 18th, 2026. So if you need a new ebook for this spring, we have got you covered. Now let's have an update on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. My main project right now is Dragon-Mage, the sixth book in the Rivah Half-Elven Thief series. I'm pleased to report the rough draft of that is done at 82,000 words. So I think this will end up being the longest book in the series to date by a slight margin. I believe the previous longest one was Half-Orc Paladin, which came in at 78,000. I've started editing. The first editing pass is 9% through. Hoping to get a little further with that after I record this episode. I'm hoping to have this book out before the end of May, if all goes well. My secondary project is Blade of Thieves, the fifth book in the Blades of Ruin epic fantasy series. I am currently 8,000 words into that. So once Dragon-Mage is published, Blade of Thieves will be my new main project. My new secondary project then will be Cloak of Frost, the 15th book in the Cloak Mage series. I thought I should mention that in the podcast because I had two questions in my email about that today. So I will be starting on Cloak of Frost sometime in the second half of May, if all goes well. Hopefully it will be published in July, with Blade of Thieves coming out in June (if all goes well). In audiobook news, recording is underway for Cloak of Illusion, and that will be narrated by Hollis McCarthy and Blade of Wraiths, which will be narrated by Brad Wills. We're making good progress on both. I am looking forward to sharing those audiobooks with you before too much longer. So that is where I'm at with my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. 00:02:28 Main Topic: Email Newsletters for Indie Authors Now let's move on to our main topic, email newsletters for indie authors. If you are listening to this podcast, there's a pretty good chance you're also subscribed to my newsletter and if you are not subscribed to my newsletter, I recommend you do so because not only do you get three free ebooks when you subscribe to my newsletter, then every time I have a new book announcement, I give away a free short story as well through links in the newsletter. So it really is to your benefit if you want to read my books to be subscribed to my new release newsletter. But there are other reasons for an indie author to have a newsletter and we're going to talk about some of those reasons in this episode and some of the things you should not do with a new release newsletter or an email newsletter (if you have one). For a while, email newsletters were considered obsolete in the age of social media. Why not just put things on Facebook or Twitter? Well, for one thing, Twitter doesn't exist anymore. For another, as social media algorithms changed and it became harder for people to see content in their feeds consistently, many authors began to look for alternatives to social media and ended up back on email newsletters or Substacks. The main benefit of an email newsletter is that you have control and it's not dependent on a specific platform. You don't have to worry about your account being flagged or closed by some random AI glitch and lose your ability to communicate with your readers. Most importantly, you're targeting people who want to know more about you instead of trying to fight through all the digital noise that is the modern internet. So today, we're going to talk about five things to try with your author email newsletter, and five things that would probably be the best to avoid. #1: Give people a reason to care. People need a reason to subscribe to an email newsletter, and it should be substantial enough to be a motivator. For myself, I offer three free full length books to new subscribers, Malison: Dragon Curse, Blade of the Ghosts, and Frostborn: The Skull Quest, and they arrive in a three book bundle from Book Funnel. People also need a reason to open the emails once they subscribe. For myself, I offer newsletter subscribers free short stories, usually timed around the release of a new book. For example, I just published Blade of Wraiths, and that came with a free short story, Halfling Alchemy, and I gave away a bunch of copies of Halfling Alchemy when Blade of Wraiths came out. For Dragon-Mage, yesterday I finished writing a short story called Paladin and Priest, and that will also be given away for free to newsletter subscribers when I send out the new release newsletter after Dragon-Mage is finally published (hopefully later this month). Other things you can try are offering exclusive discounts, sneak peeks of new books, and giveaways. When I have a BookBub featured deal, I will usually send out a newsletter like the day before or two days before that to share the upcoming discount with my newsletter subscribers as well. Sometimes when I have special sales like that, I will also use the newsletter to send things out to try and generate interest in the sale. #2: Get to the point. It's good to get to the point as quickly as possible in an email newsletter. People are skimming emails at best. We all get lots and lots of emails, and the longer the email is, the less likely it is to be read. Make it easy to scan for the main points and try not to have a long, rambling introduction. Good formatting also helps people who are skimming to find what they want quickly. Good formatting also helps people who are skimming to find out what they want quickly. Based on my own email data, what gets the most clicks are the images of book covers I put on there. Usually I have an image of the book cover that goes to Amazon and an image of the short story cover that goes to my Payhip store where I'm giving away the short story for free, and those consistently get the most clicks in my email newsletters. So that is an example of getting to the point and good formatting because the point of the newsletter is to let people know that I have a new book out or that something's on sale and the good formatting in the form of the cover images lets people quickly get to the thing I am offering them. #3: Use data to figure out what's working. Once you've done a few newsletters, you will have the data to see if there's certain types of newsletters that are more successful than others. You can go even further and test if there's certain days of the week or times of day that are more likely to be successful. Conventional wisdom is to send things early on the day on a Monday or Tuesday and avoid Friday afternoons when people are already distracted by the weekend. For myself, I've generally gotten the best results with newsletters sent on Monday, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays. Now, obviously many people are at work at that time, but you'd be surprised how many people have signed up for the newsletter with their work email address and seem to welcome the distraction during the workday when a new release announcement arrives. I have sent newsletters on Fridays and weekends. It's never as effective. Usually Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday are the most effective days to send out a newsletter. #4: Use a consistent format. Using a consistent format for your newsletter can make it easier for people to find the information they're looking for and makes reading a newsletter more of a ritual. For example, author James Clear does a weekly newsletter with three quotes from his own books, two quotes from other people, and one reflection question each week. For myself, my newsletters almost always follow the same format. I'll have one section with the cover image and links to the main thing I'm selling and then below that, two smaller areas, which are for the short story I'm giving away for free, and then another one with another short story I'm giving away for free or some other item I want to promote. Sometimes it's an audiobook. Sometimes it's another author's book who has asked me to include it in a newsletter swap. It's usually something of that nature. I've been using that in the same email format for like the last 10 years or so, and it's been working pretty well. #5: Be sure to preview and proofread before sending. Be sure to preview how the newsletter will actually work before sending it out. Proofread the text, make sure none of the images are pixelated, and make sure all the links are working correctly. If you include a wrong link in the newsletter (which I have done in the past), people will let you know about it. It might be helpful to have someone else test it before sending it out. So those are five tips that you want to do with your newsletter. And I'm also going to add a bonus sixth one: follow the law. There are several regulations related to email newsletters, both in the US and the EU, and I think most of the EU ones still apply to the UK, even though they left a couple of years ago. In the US, if you are sending an email for a commercial purpose, you need to include a physical mailing address with every newsletter you send out. Many authors use PO boxes or UPS box numbers to avoid putting their home address in there, but if you are sending out an email for commercial purposes, you do need to have a physical address somewhere in the email. Usually it's at the bottom. If you look at, for example, emails you get from like Amazon or Microsoft or Apple and you scroll to the bottom, you will note that they are including a physical address for the company in every email they send out because that is the law. There's also something that is required in the EU, and I believe it's now required in the US called a double opt-in. That's where if you add someone to your newsletter, they have to have given explicit permission for them to have been added to the list. For the subscriber, how that usually works is they fill out a form and then you are required to send them a follow-up email with a link to officially subscribe and that should get them officially subscribed to your email list. It also works that they send you explicit written permission to add them to the list. For example, I've had a couple of tech support questions where someone said, "I want to be on your newsletter, but I can't figure out the form. Could you just add me? " That counts as explicit permission. You should only add emails to your list if you have this explicit permission for them to do it, and that's with a double opt-in explicit, written permission, or the kind of giveaway that properly follows these rules, where various services offer things where you can put up your books and people sign up to receive free ebook copies of the book and if they do so, they acknowledge that they will be added to your email list. That also qualifies as the permission. So those will be the things you want to be aware of with your newsletter. You'll need a physical address and to be aware of the rules involving permission and double opt-in. Don't randomly add email addresses to your list. Probably nothing will happen, but if someone complains that they're on their list and they can appeal to the appropriate authorities and you don't have documentation that they were added to your list in that way appropriately, you could get in trouble. So try to follow the law whenever possible with your ... Actually, no, not whenever possible. Always follow the law with your email newsletter. So let's launch from that into five things not to do with your email newsletter. #1: This is not a diary. It's good to be a little bit personal in your newsletter, to have a warm and welcoming tone, and to give people a tiny peek into your life. However, some authors put their entire life on display in their newsletters, which includes epic rants, details about relationship problems, photographs and personal details about minor children, and breathless pages on pages about how writing is so very hard. And this is not (in my opinion) a healthy way to engage with the Internet. Again, it's good to be a little bit personal, but as a writer, your newsletters are still professional communication, and it's good to be mindful that many people have a very, very low tolerance for personal details. Even innocuous information like a picture of yourself boarding the plane to your minor child's hockey tournament has to be done with caution. Something like that gives people a way to find you at a specific place and time and know exactly when you will be away from home, two things you probably want to avoid. All the usual precautions about posting things about yourself and your children that apply to social media also apply to your newsletter as well. #2: Don't spam people. Although it's good to regularly send out a newsletter, sometimes it can cross the line into being too much. It can be tempting to send out a barrage of updates when a new book comes out, but daily emails are overwhelming and will get ignored. The conventional wisdom is to send out things no more than once per week. That's the rule I followed myself and it's worked out pretty well. #3: Don't treat it as only an ad. If you only send out links to your books, people will eventually tune out. Beside the incentives we mentioned earlier, it's a good idea to do things like provide writing updates, answer reader questions, and giving behind the scenes peeks like a teaser quote from a work in progress. #4: Don't put the most important stuff on the bottom. The most important information in the newsletter needs to be near the top. Not everyone will scroll all the way through each newsletter, so it's important to put any important news, links, or updates within the first couple of paragraphs or lines. That's why whenever I publish a new book and send out the newsletter, the first thing on the ... Well, actually the second thing, we'll talk about the first thing in the next point, but very near the top is the link and the cover image to the new book. #5: You do not want to force your subscribers to stay. Don't hide the unsubscribe button. You want people who don't want to be able there to leave or to not to flag it as spam. For myself, I put a link at the very top of each email to give people the chance to unsubscribe without having to hunt around for that information. It's best to do this because many people do not unsubscribe to email newsletters. They simply mark them as spam and move on. If enough people mark your newsletter as spam, then it will get harder and harder for it to show up in people's inboxes, which is the entire point. So you want to make it as smooth and easy and as frictionless as possible for people to unsubscribe from the newsletter because that will be to your advantage in the future. I have read some horror stories about authors who flip their lids when someone unsubscribes and then manually re-add subscribers to the list after people have unsubscribed. Do not do this. This is illegal. You may get in trouble for it, and even if you don't get in trouble for it, it will irritate your reader/the person who unsubscribed, and they will start leaving bad reviews and spreading bad word of mouth about your books. So for all these reasons, it's definitely to your advantage to make it very easy to unsubscribe from your newsletter. So to sum things up, email newsletters are a great way to reach people, but it's a delicate balance of providing people information they want and treating it like an ad or diary while also making sure you are complying with relevant laws and regulations. It may take some trial and error to find the right balance that your readers want and one that you can keep up with consistently and most importantly, enjoy doing. Just because something works for one author doesn't mean it's going to work for you or interest your readers. If your newsletter isn't an instant success, don't give up, but keep trying new things and be consistent with it. After all, everyone needs to start with their first subscriber at some point. 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 your review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.  

Das Atlantis-Team entdeckt eine Weltraumstation, in der sich tausende Menschen in Stasis befinden. Dadurch versuchte sich ein Volk vor den Wraith zu schützen... Deutsche TV-Premiere Mi. 30.01.2008 RTL II Original-TV-Premiere Fr. 18.05.2007 Syfy U.S.

The shelves are groaning under the weight of all our new Blu-ray purchases, so it's time for another of our Unwrapped episodes, where we punish each other for our buying habits. It's The Wraith, Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones, and The Black Pit of Dr. M on this episode of Attack of the Killer Podcast! Listen & subscribe wherever you get your podcasts or go to http://www.aotkp.com Connect with the show: Become an Official Attacker: http://jointheattackers.com/ Visit our website: http://www.attackofthekillerpodcast.com/ Like us on https://www.facebook.com/attackofthekillerpodcast Follow us on https://twitter.com/AotKP Follow us on https://tiktok.com/@attackofthekiller  Follow us on https://www.instagram.com/attackofthekillerpodcast/ Follow us on https://www.threads.net/@attackofthekillerpodcast Subscribe on https://www.youtube.com/attackofthekillerpodcast Join us on https://www.aotkp.com/discord  Support the show at https://www.patreon.com/aotkp/posts Lastly, check out all the amazing shows at http://thepfpn.com

A strange ship is spotted drifting along the English coast—appearing and disappearing, sometimes engulfed in flames, sometimes perfectly intact. A naval officer is tasked with investigating the vessel and bringing it back to port. But once he draws closer, it becomes clear that this is no ordinary ship—and that some mysteries are not meant to be solved.Blending classic nautical horror with a creeping sense of dread, this story explores isolation, uncertainty, and the terror of losing control in the vast unknown. If you enjoy ghost ship stories, maritime horror, and slow-building suspense, this episode is for you.The Kaidankai Podcast features original short fiction exploring horror, fantasy, science fiction, and the strange.New episodes every Wednesday.Subscribe on Spreaker, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.Read the stories at kaidankaistories.comFollow the show:InstagramFacebookBlueskyHave a story you'd like us to read? Send submissions to kaidankai100ghoststories@gmail.com.

This episode of the The Rizzuto Show is basically what happens when a seriously talented musician walks into a room full of people who cannot stay on topic… and somehow it works perfectly.We're joined by St. Louis native Lizzie Weber, fresh off the release of her new album Wraiths in the Wake, and things get deep fast. We're talking ghosts—not the “boo!” kind, but the emotional baggage kind. The stuff that follows you around while you're trying to grow up, move forward, and not completely spiral. You know… relatable.This comedy podcast somehow manages to balance real artistic insight with complete nonsense, including a heated (and very unnecessary) debate about Radiohead fans that absolutely no one asked for—but you're getting anyway. Lizzy shares the story of the concert that changed her life, the creative process behind building a full narrative album, and what it actually takes to survive as an independent artist when budgets are tight and expectations are high.And when we say DIY, we mean DIY. Filming your own music videos, editing them yourself, and yes—occasionally trespassing on farmland for the perfect shot. That's called commitment. Or a future court date. We'll see.Of course, because it's a comedy podcast, things spiral into:Tool fandom getting aggressively passionateBrett Michaels catching stray complimentsConcert experiences that borderline changed people's personalitiesAnd a live in-studio performance that shuts everyone up (rare moment, honestly)By the end of the episode, we've learned that great music comes from chaos, ghosts are apparently metaphorical (disappointing), and the best advice in the industry might still be: just go play shows.If you like your comedy podcast with a side of real talk, live music, and occasional emotional damage, this one's for you.Follow The Rizzuto Show → https://linktr.ee/rizzshow for more from your favorite daily comedy show.Connect with The Rizzuto Show Comedy Podcast online → https://1057thepoint.com/RizzShowHear The Rizz Show daily on the radio at 105.7 The Point | Hubbard Radio in St. Louis, MO.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

We welcomed St. Louis native and insanely talented Lizzie Weber into the studio, and for a brief, shining moment, things felt like a real, professional music interview… and then we immediately derailed it with debates about Radiohead fans and whether anyone should ever call an album “the most important record of your lifetime” without being legally required to explain themselves.Lizzie's new album Wraiths in the Wake is a deeply personal and atmospheric project centered around the idea of “wraiths”—ghosts, spirits, and the emotional baggage that follows you through life. It's thoughtful, cinematic, and layered… which is exactly why we tried our best not to ruin the conversation. (Keyword: tried.)She talks about working with major collaborators, navigating the music industry as an independent artist, and why pressing vinyl in today's world feels like trying to barter with ancient currency during a nickel shortage. We also get into her musical journey—from dropping out of college and chasing acting in LA, to finding her voice and building her sound from the ground up.Then things take a turn—because of course they do—when Lizzie shares her “musical awakening” moment seeing Radiohead live. This leads to one of the most aggressively unnecessary debates in recent memory, where Riz explains his complicated relationship with Radiohead… specifically their fans. It's the kind of argument that only happens on a funny podcast like this, where passion meets confusion and nobody actually wins.We also go around the room sharing the last concerts that truly “locked us in,” from Nine Inch Nails precision to Tool (yes, again) to Brett Michaels somehow causing a spiritual experience with a harmonica. It's chaotic, it's honest, and it's exactly what you'd expect from a funny podcast that occasionally stumbles into meaningful conversations between jokes.If you're into music, creative journeys, or just listening to a group of adults spiral into debates about bands they both love and resent—this episode of our funny podcast has you covered.Follow The Rizzuto Show → linktr.ee/rizzshow for more from your favorite daily comedy show.Connect with The Rizzuto Show Comedy Podcast online → 1057thepoint.com/RizzShow.Hear The Rizz Show daily on the radio at 105.7 The Point | Hubbard Radio in St. Louis, MO.Woman, 38, Plummets 50 Feet to Her Death at Indianapolis International AirportTourist dies from 'cobra bite' in Egypt after snake charmer let it crawl into his trousersDisney Named in Lawsuit Alleging Bedbug Exposure at Resort HotelNew York woman convicted for throwing dynamite at boyfriend, blowing off his handSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Star Flare: Reclaiming Agency, Building a Fun Set, and the Pain of Crowdfunding (Get Reelisms Ep. 185) On Get Reelisms Podcast episode 185, hosts Adam Chase Rani and Christine Chen interview actor-writer-producer Laura Ricci about making her fantasy romance short film Star Flare. Laura describes feeling powerless as an actor and deciding to create her own work after living in Los Angeles for nearly three years, with wildfires raging and Trump newly inaugurated, leading her to write the script in a week and produce her first “real” film. They discuss designing the project around practical constraints (woods location, small cast, one day, limited costume changes) while still aiming big for the genre, and Laura's priority of creating a safe, fun set that strengthens relationships and took care of the team. Laura calls crowdfunding the hardest part, recounting constant posting, emotional strain, and mixed results despite support and a stranger's $1,000 pledge. Christine directed and is editing; they talk about post-production, sound design's importance, and meeting through a TikTok call for a director.   Hosts: Adam Rani (@adamthechase)  & Christine Chen (@cchenmtf)  About Christine W Chen: Christine W. Chen is a Taiwanese American filmmaker, Academy member (Short Films Branch), and versatile producer, director, and writer known for bold, character-driven storytelling. Through her production company, Moth to Flame, she has created award-winning short films, features, and branded content—including Erzulie, a feminist swamp thriller that had a limited theatrical run and now streams on major platforms. In addition to her directorial work, Christine is a seasoned DGA 1st Assistant Director and co-author of Get Reelisms and ABCs of Filmmaking, as well as the co-host of the Get Reelisms Podcast. For more information about Christine Chen: christinewchen.com About Adam Rani: Adam Chase Rani is a production designer and set dresser working in the Austin film market, bringing a sharp eye for visual storytelling and practical creativity to every project. During the pandemic, he co-founded the Get Reelisms Podcast with Christine Chen to foster community within the film industry. Together, they've built a platform that blends education, candid conversations, and industry insights to help filmmakers connect, learn, and grow. Guest:  Laura Ricci is a Los Angeles-based SAG-AFTRA actress known for roles in Hostess (2018), The Wraith (2021), and the upcoming Cupcakes (2025). She has also appeared in I Was There (2022) and Siren Salon (2023), often portraying characters with wit and depth. She is active on Instagram as @the.laura.ricci.   WEBISODE version of the Podcast 00:00 Feeling Powerless 00:51 Podcast Intro 01:12 Meet Laura Ricci 02:00 Audio Setup Talk 03:41 Why Make a Short 05:44 Star Flare Logline 07:43 Writing With Constraints 10:26 Making Set Fun 18:24 Collaboration Magic 22:54 Crowdfunding Struggles 26:25 Crowdfunding Reality Check 27:16 Letting Go of Perfection 28:14 Where the Film Is Now 28:48 Finding a Director on TikTok 31:50 Why Laura Didn't Direct 34:34 Paying People Fairly 36:20 Editing Notes and Post Workflow 37:41 Sound Design Makes the Genre 38:11 Dune and Movie Theater Nerd Talk 42:23 Weapons Guy and Armor Shop Stories 44:23 Wrap Up and Housekeeping   Official Get Reelisms Page Get Reelisms Amazon Store Instagram   Official Get Reelisms PageGet Reelisms Amazon StoreInstagram

  MERCH: https://orchideight.com/collections/poorhammer TWITCH: https://www.twitch.tv/poorhammer PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/SolelySingleton   On this week's episode, Brad and Eric are joined by PancreasNoWork to chart the best course to collect a full 2000 points Aeldari Army. Starting with just a Combat Patrol and gradually growing your army until you reach a playable list, find the best way to get into the hobby. Which models are good to buy right away? Which models are better if you wait until you are already committed? Why do the other players keep complaining about my army being broken? For this and more, tune in to find out.   SHOW LINKS: Brad's Bsky: https://bsky.app/profile/drruler.bsky.social Eric's Bsky: https://bsky.app/profile/onekuosora.bsky.social   GUEST LINKS: Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@pancreasnowork9939 Twitter: twitter.com/PancreasNo Twitch: twitch.tv/pancreasnowork Second Channel: youtube.com/@PancreasStillNoWork   TIMESTAMPS: 00:00 Hello and Welcome 00:55 Friendly Fire Is On 01:45 Why Collect Aeldari 03:22 The Different FLavors of Aeldar 04:58 Eric, Not in front of the Guest 05:43 Everyone's first purchase: The Combat Patrol 08:14 From 500 to 1000 Points - Playing Safe 09:43 From 1K to 1500 Points - The Games becomes Open World 14:28 Soulsearching 17:36 Jumping to 2000 Points 18:12 Example 1 - Wraiths 20:02 Example 2 - Aspect Warriors 20:52 How to Soup 24:41 Don't Chase the Meta 26:06 The Wraith Knight 30:17 Life After 2K 31:57 Future Berilio, remove this from the video. Thanks. 32:34 Life After 2k 33:23 Outro 34:44 Alright Audio Audience   Contact Information: You can interact with Solely Singleton by joining the hosts on discord and Twitter to give input to improve the show. Feel free to email more detailed questions and suggestions to the show's email address.   Your Hosts: Brad (DrRuler) & Eric (OnekuoSora) Brad's Bsky: https://bsky.app/profile/drruler.bsky.social Eric's Bsky: https://bsky.app/profile/onekuosora.bsky.social Show Email: thepoorhammerpodcast@gmail.com Merch Website: http://www.poorhammer.com/ Edited by: Menino Berilio Show Mailing Address: PO Box 70893 Rochester Hills, MI 48307   Licensed Music Used By This Program: "Night Out" by LiQWYD CC BY "Thursday & Snow (Reprise)" by Blank & Kytt CC BY "First Class" by Peyruis CC BY "Funky Souls" by Amaria CC BY

MERCH: https://orchideight.com/collections/poorhammer TWITCH: https://www.twitch.tv/poorhammer PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/SolelySingleton   On this week's episode, Brad and Eric are joined by PancreasNoWork to chart the best course to collect a full 2000 points Aeldari Army. Starting with just a Combat Patrol and gradually growing your army until you reach a playable list, find the best way to get into the hobby. Which models are good to buy right away? Which models are better if you wait until you are already committed? Why do the other players keep complaining about my army being broken? For this and more, tune in to find out.   SHOW LINKS: Brad's Bsky: https://bsky.app/profile/drruler.bsky.social Eric's Bsky: https://bsky.app/profile/onekuosora.bsky.social   GUEST LINKS: Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@pancreasnowork9939 Twitter: twitter.com/PancreasNo Twitch: twitch.tv/pancreasnowork Second Channel: youtube.com/@PancreasStillNoWork   TIMESTAMPS: 00:00 Hello and Welcome 00:55 Friendly Fire Is On 01:45 Why Collect Aeldari 03:22 The Different FLavors of Aeldar 04:58 Eric, Not in front of the Guest 05:43 Everyone's first purchase: The Combat Patrol 08:14 From 500 to 1000 Points - Playing Safe 09:43 From 1K to 1500 Points - The Games becomes Open World 14:28 Soulsearching 17:36 Jumping to 2000 Points 18:12 Example 1 - Wraiths 20:02 Example 2 - Aspect Warriors 20:52 How to Soup 24:41 Don't Chase the Meta 26:06 The Wraith Knight 30:17 Life After 2K 31:57 Future Berilio, remove this from the video. Thanks. 32:34 Life After 2k 33:23 Outro 34:44 Alright Audio Audience   Contact Information: You can interact with Solely Singleton by joining the hosts on discord and Twitter to give input to improve the show. Feel free to email more detailed questions and suggestions to the show's email address.   Your Hosts: Brad (DrRuler) & Eric (OnekuoSora) Brad's Bsky: https://bsky.app/profile/drruler.bsky.social Eric's Bsky: https://bsky.app/profile/onekuosora.bsky.social Show Email: thepoorhammerpodcast@gmail.com Merch Website: http://www.poorhammer.com/ Edited by: Menino Berilio Show Mailing Address: PO Box 70893 Rochester Hills, MI 48307   Licensed Music Used By This Program: "Night Out" by LiQWYD CC BY "Thursday & Snow (Reprise)" by Blank & Kytt CC BY "First Class" by Peyruis CC BY "Funky Souls" by Amaria CC BY

In this week's episode, I celebrate both the 300th episode and my 15th anniversary of indie publishing, and look back at 15 lessons learned during that time. You can get the ebook of WRITING LESSONS FROM THE PULP WRITER SHOW at my Payhip store until the end of May 2026. This coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Dragonskull: Curse of the Orcs, Book #4 in the Dragonskull series, (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store: ORCS2026 The coupon code is valid through May 4, 2026. So if you need a new audiobook this spring, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 300 (yes, that is 300!) of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is April 24th, 2026 and today we're looking back at 15 lessons I've learned over my last 15 years of indie publishing. We'll also start off with Coupon of the Week and an update on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. First up, let's have Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Dragonskull: Curse of the Orcs, book number four in the Dragonskull series, (as excellent narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store. And that coupon code is ORCS2026. And as always, the coupon code and links to my Payhip store will be available in the show notes for this episode. This coupon code will be valid through May the 4th, 2026. So if you need a new audiobook for this spring, we have got you covered. Now for an update on my current writing projects. As of this recording, I am about 62,000 words into Dragon-Mage, which will be the sixth book in the Rivah Half-Elven Thief series. If all goes well, I am hoping to have that out in May, though it might slip to June, depending on what I have to do in May. I'm also 4,500 words into Blade of Thieves, which will be the fifth book in the Blades of Ruin epic fantasy series. In audiobook news, a recording of Cloak of Illusion by Hollis McCarthy is approaching the end, one more proofread listen, and it should be there. And then hopefully the audiobook should be out in May. Brad Wills is also recording Blade of Wraiths right now. So hopefully we should have those audiobooks for you before too much longer. And that's where I'm at with my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. 00:01:46 Main Topic: 15 Years of Indie Publishing Now onto this week's main topic, 15 years of indie publishing because as of April 2026, I have now been indie publishing for 15 years, which is the longest continuous time I've ever actually done anything in my life. I've never had any other job or professional association that has lasted this long. I've done this for so long that when people are angry with me, they no longer preface their remarks on my feelings by saying, "Listen here, young man." I suppose that puts me in the upper tier of indie authors, not in terms of income or market footprint, but in sheer, bloody-minded longevity. There are still indie authors out there who have been doing this for longer and are still publishing regularly, but not all that many. Eventually, indie authors typically burn out and just stop publishing, or stop publishing due to real life reasons, such as illness, family illness, moving, changing jobs, et cetera, or get some kind of tradpub deal and stop indie publishing. It makes sense that indie authors burn out. Sometimes, or even frequently, both writing and the business side of writing can feel like a slog, but I've been blessed with a mind that loves the grind. I don't say that to gloat, but to instead express my immense and humble gratitude to God (as Abraham Lincoln said long ago, the "beneficent Creator and Ruler of the Universe" & the "Great Disposer of Events") and to all of you, the many people have read (and after 2017 when I started with audiobooks, listened to) one of my books. Thank you all very much. By good fortune, my 15th anniversary of indie publishing and the 300th episode of this podcast coincide. So for the 300th episode of this podcast, I thought it would take a look back at the last decade and a half and reflect on 15 lessons learned in 15 years of indie publishing. #1: Embrace the slog. I think if you want to be a writer, you have to actually like writing. There are a surprising number of writers for whom this is not true, like they enjoy having written or the rewards of the writing, but they don't actually enjoy the part Glenn Cook famously called "put your backside in the chair and do it. " I'm fortunate that I do enjoy that part, but a lot of writers don't. Writing is often a grind in the same way that things like diet, exercise, and home maintenance are. Like if you do them for one day, it's not enough. You have to do them consistently day after day to have results. I think writing is kind of the same way. Effort applied over time cannot do all things, but it can do a lot. This applies to writing as well. A little bit every day can really add up over enough time. #2: Finish the book. A lot of writers get like one third of the way through their book and then give up or start something else. There's often a good deal of perfectionism involved in this. Here is a rule of thumb: a finished, imperfect book is infinitely better than the perfect version that exists only in your imagination, but will never exist anywhere else because you will never write it. Steve Jobs famously said, "real artist ship." I think the corollary is that if you want to be a writer, you have to finish things and then move on to the next thing. If finishing a novel seems daunting, I would suggest first writing short stories or perhaps novellas and learning to finish those. No one runs a marathon without first learning to run a mile after all. #3: Back up your data. This is an important one. I've gone through a lot of computers in the last 15 years, but I've never lost a large chunk of work because I back up regularly. I would suggest a three part system. Use whatever automated local backup your OS provides onto an external hard drive. Do manual local backups onto a flash drive of appropriate capacity and then have some sort of cloud backup you can rely on, which means you'll probably have to pay for it. That way, even if your house or apartment blows up (God forbid!), you will still have a copy of your stuff somewhere. #4: Be willing to learn new skills as needed. It occurred to me that most of these software tools and programs I use on a day to day basis nowadays did not exist when I started in April of 2011, or they're things that I've had to learn in the years since. Like 15 years ago, I didn't know anything about online advertising, Photoshop, 3D rendering, graphic design, social media, paperback formatting, ebook formatting, audiobook production, podcasting, small business taxes, and a bunch of other stuff, but I've picked it up in the year since. I wouldn't say I'm an expert at any one of those things, but I've been able to combine them well. Life, as we know, is change. That means you're going to have to change whether you like it or not, but it's best to make sure you're changing to your advantage. That can mean having to learn new skills. Depending on the skill, it can either be onerous or fun, but it's still worth doing. #5: When possible, give away stuff for free. I know some writers get really worried or upset about giving away stuff for free. They'll price their first novel at $9.99 [all prices mentioned are in USD] or higher, and then say things like a latte at Starbucks costs five bucks, why shouldn't my book, which was so much more work, costs more? (Though these days, I think a Starbucks latte probably is more like $8.37.) Giving things away for free gives readers a chance to try your work in a risk-free environment. If someone picks, for example, Frostborn: The Gray Knight and they don't like it or give up on it by chapter four, they're not out anything but time. But if they enjoy it, they might pick up Frostborn: The Eightfold Knife for $0.99. If they like that, they might go on to the rest of the series where the books are $4.99. That really adds up over time. I've also written and given away via my newsletter a lot of short stories. I have to admit that while I enjoy short stories, I mostly do this to increase the click-through rate of my newsletter. It's best to think of giving away things for free as like planting seeds. If you're a farmer, you pay a lot of money for your crop seed, but then you have to sacrifice it in hope of getting a crop and potentially losing all the money you spent on the seed if it doesn't grow. Giving away ebooks for free is kind of like that. #6: Don't expect sales to go up every year or every quarter. There are pros and cons to the publicly held and traded corporation model, but I think one of the big cons is that the shareholders often demand that revenue goes up every quarter ("Number Go Up", to quote the Internet meme). The trouble is that this isn't sustainable in reality and leads to a lot of economic damage along the way. There's a good chance that when the AI companies tank in the next few years, they're going to take a good chunk of the economy with them because they push this growth at all cost mindset. Even on a smaller scale when a company has mass layoffs to make Number Go Up, it causes all kinds of havoc in people's lives. In writing and publishing, you definitely should not expect sales to go up every quarter or even every year. It just doesn't work that way. Overall, if you have more books, you can generally expect they'll sell more, but it doesn't always or even frequently work like that. Ebook sales, like everything else, tend to ebb and flow. Also, what we will politely call "macroeconomic events" tend to affect sales a good deal. After 15 years, I found that the book reading population tends to overlap a fair bit with the "news doomscrolling" population. So every time there's a significant news event, sales tend to drop. They always drop during a US presidential election year, which inevitably shocks any authors who started publishing after the last election. The 2024 [US Presidential] election had that happen a lot because as you no doubt remember, there were a lot of dramatic news events that summer. Sales also tend to drop around Christmas because of holiday bills, and again in August and September, since that's when a lot of people have significant back to school expenses. If you have a really good sales month or year, that's great, but definitely do not plan on it lasting forever or going up forever. And if you do have that kind of windfall, it's a good idea to do sensible financial things with it- pay down debt, save it in sensible investment or retirement accounts, that kind of thing. It is a terrible, terrible idea to take on additional debt, hire employees you don't need, or commit to other unsustainable financial commitments. Living well below your means is a principle that can help you avoid much pain. Also, if you do have a windfall month or year, be sure to save for the tax bill you will have the next time you file taxes because Uncle Sam (or your national equivalent of Uncle Sam) will very much want his cut. #7: Don't start a series unless you plan to finish it. This is less of a thing for romance or mystery novelists since their books tend to be more episodic. However, if you're writing fantasy or science fiction, it's a really good idea to make sure you finish your series because there's nothing science fiction/fantasy readers hate more than a series that never gets finished. There are a couple of reasons for this, but there have been a few very high profile examples of popular series remaining unfinished and that really soured readers on the idea of unfinished series, which is often detrimental to new writers who are just starting out. So if you're going to write in series, you need to commit to finishing them even if it's a lot of work. I've done that myself a couple times. For a while, I wasn't really sure if I wanted to finish Silent Order or Stealth & Spells Online, but I got them done. If you are a newer writer and you want to write in series, I would suggest starting with trilogies. They're less of a commitment than say something like Frostborn, which was 15 books. #8: Don't stress about bad reviews. Every writer has to learn to let bad reviews go. Obsessing over them isn't healthy and freaking out over them on social media is never good and can have bad consequences. It is a hard lesson to learn, but you just have to learn to ignore bad reviews. People can take reacting to bad reviews to insane extremes. There was a criminal case a while back where writer drove to someone's house and attacked a critic with a wine bottle because of a Goodreads review. Granted, that is an extreme case, but there have been numerous examples of writers going to war with critics over social media or even just complaining about bad reviews on social media only for the Internet to fall on their heads. You just have to learn to ignore bad reviews. It's not easy, but you can just follow these two rules about bad reviews. First, say nothing. Second, do nothing. "Never complain, never explain," to paraphrase Benjamin Disraeli. If it helps, the longer you do this and the more you write, bad reviews matter less because you can't remember everything. Like after you've written your first book, you can remember every single bit of it and every little decision and bit of thought process that went into the writing. But after 172 books, I honestly can't remember everything I've written unless I look it up. Like if someone complained about the griffin diarrhea joke in Malison: Dragon Fury, I would just kind of stare blankly because it would take me a while to remember it! #9: Social media is a potentially destructive time sink. This kind of relates to the previous lesson, but there are a lot of ways that social media can waste enormous amounts of your time. Arguing with strangers is one of them and the most obvious and potentially the most destructive, but passive consumption can be just as insidious. The phenomenon of doomscrolling, of endless scrolling through bad news is well known and is psychologically harmful. There's also "comparisonitis", which can be especially insidious for writers, since people generally put their curated selves on social media. Interestingly, sometimes people put the curated negative selves on social media. The way some people complain and present themselves in their posts, it's amazing they have the energy to type up posts complaining about their woes. No doubt that is done for engagement. There are also countless people who simply make up outrageous stories about hot button issues for clicks and clout. You also want to avoid arguing with strangers on social media because it will inevitably turn out that person in question is unemployed and therefore has infinite free time and also has poor reading comprehension and some sort of rage-based mood disorder. Overall, I would say that the best way to engage with social media while keeping your sanity is to remain positive. Share as few personal details as possible. Don't argue with strangers and only say things that are verifiably true. That will let you avoid a lot of potential trouble. #10: Pay people promptly and on time. Speaking of avoiding trouble, paying people on time will let you avoid a galaxy of woes. No one person can't possess all skills. So if you write long enough, you're going to need to subcontract out some stuff, whether it's editing, cover design, web design, accounting and taxes, audiobooks, and so forth. So if people do work for you and you are satisfied with this work, then you should pay them on time. This is a concept that a lot of people can't seem to grasp, and I've heard a lot of horror stories over the years about authors who try to weasel out of payment. So if you hire people to do things for you and they do them to your satisfaction, then pay them the agreed amount on time. This will also have the nice effect that if you pay people on time and build up track record of this, they'll be more willing to accommodate reasonable requests from you. #11: Don't worry about NFTs, Crypto, the Metaverse, LLMs, or whatever the latest doomsday tech trend is. The second half of the 2010s and the entirety of the 2020s have been filled with technologies that turned out to be useless, stupid, infested with scammers, and overall destructive, such as cryptocurrency, NFTs, the Metaverse, and of course, generative AI. (Apple CEO Tim Cook announced his retirement right before I started recording this episode. I think one of the chief positives of his legacy will be that he kept Apple mostly away from the generative AI mania.) I remember when cryptocurrency was inevitably going to replace fiat money, or when NFTs would be the future of art, or when all the very smart people said that the Metaverse would be the future of work and online communication. A lot of these technologies' boosters said you had to get on board with it right now, or you'll be left behind in the glorious technological revolution. You'll note that none of that actually happened. Crypto's main use case is facilitating cybercrime and NFTs are worthless. The Metaverse, like most of Facebook's bright ideas, wasted a lot of money and did nothing useful. Generative AI is on a similar course. None of its glorious promises of a better future have actually happened, and all it's really done is a lot of destruction and waste of money. The money is running out, public opinion is turning against it, and eventually LLM technology will dwindle to a sketchy corner of the internet much like crypto. Or to put it both more optimistically and snarkily, the best quote I heard about LMMs was that with strange people heralded the next generation of industrial automation technology as the beginning of the Singularity. It's like thinking that the computer that controls the fuel/airflow mixing your car is suddenly going to overthrow society and replace all human work. The one thing these technologies had in common, other than all being massive frauds, is that many writers worried it would be the end of writing, that crypto was going to replace government money or that all art would become NFTs, or that people would prefer AI slop novels over human written ones. However, none of this actually happened and people who predict the future are usually wrong. Various ancient and medieval societies made attempting to predict the future punishable by death. There's an element of religion to this, but I suspect some hard-headed jurists were less worried about offending the gods through false prophecy and had instead realized that many so- called prophets were just grifters attempting to scam money out of the credulous. This principle holds true today. I'm sure by 2030 there'll be some new technology called "groobelfarts" or whatever. Various grifters will swarm over social media saying "groobelfarts" are the future and if you don't get behind the "groobelfarts" (preferably by buying their course and signing up for their newsletter), then you're going to get left behind by the great and glorious "groobelfarts" revolution. But it will turn out to be 95% of scam and then by 2035, all the grifters will move on to the next tech. So I wouldn't worry about generative AI or whatever the next big technology is, which is probably "groobelfarts". #12 It's a really good idea to have your own website. If you're serious about indie publishing, you're essentially running a small business. These days, a small business really needs its own website. I know some writers rely entirely on their Amazon profile pages or social media profiles. This is a really bad idea, in my opinion, because the ebook stores and the social media platforms are changing things all the time and one of those changes might knock your visibility down to nothing. By contrast, with the website, you control it and you can set the content. It's also very useful to have a central location to direct readers. Ideally, your website will have links to all your books, so you can just send readers there. A lot of writers overthink this, but a standard WordPress or Wix template or something of that nature will work just fine for you. In fact, the fewer bells and whistles on your website, the better. It makes it easier to maintain and is that much harder to hack. #13: It's a really good idea to have your own email list. Related to the previous point, it's also an excellent idea to have your own email list to mail your readers. There are some legal requirements around this involving opt-in permission and physical addresses, and obviously it's best to follow them. But an email list, even after 15 years, is still my most powerful tool for reaching readers. As we mentioned above, the various ebook stores and social media platforms forever tinker with their algorithms and visibility. Having your own website is important, but getting people to visit it can be something of a challenge. That's where the email list comes in. With it, whenever you have a new release, you can email people and let them know. Whenever I publish a new book, the best sales day is always, without fail, the day I send out the newsletter. How do you get people to sign up for the newsletter? I found the best way is to consistently give away things for free. If you sign up for my newsletter (and if you haven't, you should do so right now), you get a bundle of free ebooks. Almost every time I publish a new book, I also give away a free short story. So giving away free stuff via the newsletter is a good way to build it and keep subscribers. #14: Don't cheat or be unethical. Like every other business, there are a million ways you can cheat or be unethical in indie publishing- plagiarism, stealing covers, paying for fake reviews, paying for bad reviews for someone you don't like, buying social media followers, manipulating Kindle Unlimited page reads, cranking out LLM slop books, and so forth. Some of it is technically legal, but unethical, and some of it is outright illegal. It can be very frustrating to see people you know are cheating get ahead. That said, it is always best to walk the straight and narrow road as best you can. There are many religious and ethical arguments for doing so, but if those don't appeal to you, the consequences might. If you cheat and do sketchy stuff, sooner or later it will catch up to you. It might take a long, long time. Bernie Madoff ran his scam for decades before he ended up dying in a prison hospital. Sometimes it catches up to you much more quickly. Sam Bankman-Fried only ran FTX for three years or so during the height of crypto mania before it all blew up in his face. People who work for the devil in the end always end up paying him rather than the other way around. So don't cheat or do unethical stuff. Your life will be happier and easier. And at the very least, you won't have to live with a constant low level fear that the consequences are about to catch up with you. #15: Tomorrow is another day. Perhaps today didn't go well. Maybe you're too busy getting your writing done or you got to your writing time and you're just too tired to concentrate. Maybe it was a bad sales day or you got a bad review or you got some bad family news or one of the other myriad ways that Real Life exacts its tolls arrived. Perhaps today was a bad day, but tomorrow is another day. It will be another shot at the ring. I suppose 15 years of self-publishing means I've been doing this for over 5,400 days. There have been some good days and bad days in the mix, but the thing to remember about bad days is that tomorrow is another day. If you miss your writing goal one day, you can try again tomorrow. And that little bit of daily effort adds up cumulatively over time. Conclusion. So those are 15 lessons I've learned in the last 15 years in indie publishing. As always, I would like to thank everyone who read and enjoyed my books and I hope to keep them coming. Meanwhile, we'll close out with a bonus. As I mentioned earlier in the show, by happy coincidence, my 15th anniversary of indie publishing overlaps the 300th episode of this podcast. So to mark the occasion, I'm giving away a free ebook, Writing Lessons from The Pulp Writers Show, which was written by me, Jonathan Moeller, and A.B. Bachmann (who is the researcher, editor, transcriptionist, and webmaster for this podcast and has been very helpful). You can get this ebook for free at my Payhip store until the end of May. So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show and the past 300 episodes of The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you have found the show useful as we finish up 300 episodes and continue on to hopefully the next 300. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes at https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your view on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.  

As newly deceased, our Wraiths learn that not only does work persist after death, but so do love and hate.

Sam, Rodney, and Dr. Keller fall into a mine shaft in "Trio," and then the Midway Station and the SGC are infiltrated by the Wraith in "Midway." We love a good crossover episode, especially when it includes Teal'c!Find us online:https://twitter.com/wormholewaffleshttps://wormholewaffles.tumblr.com/@wormholewaffles.bsky.socialHive @wormholewaffleshttps://twitter.com/chelseafairlesshttps://chelseafairless.tumblr.com/@chelseafairless.bsky.socialHive @chelseafairlesshttps://twitter.com/arezouaminhttps://arezoudeetoo.tumblr.com/https://www.tiktok.com/@Arezou.Amin@arezouamin.bsky.socialHive @arezoudeetooThreads @arezoudeetooOther Geeky Waffle content:https://thegeekywaffle.com/https://twitter.com/Geeky_Wafflehttps://www.facebook.com/thegeekywaffle/https://www.instagram.com/thegeekywaffle/https://thegeekywaffle.tumblr.com/https://www.tiktok.com/@thegeekywafflehttps://www.youtube.com/c/thegeekywafflehttps://www.patreon.com/thegeekywaffle@thegeekywaffle.bsky.social

In this week's episode, we discuss the recent changes for new accounts at Draft2Digital, and talk about how there is no magic pill for success for writers. This coupon code will get you 25% off the ebooks in the Malison series at my Payhip store: MALISON2026 The coupon code is valid through April 27th, 2026. So if you need a new ebook this spring, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 299 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is April the 17th, 2026 and today we are discussing Draft2Digital account changes and how writers need to embrace the writing grind. Before we start on that, we will have Coupon of the Week and an update on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. First up is Coupon of the Week, and this week's coupon code will get you 25% off the ebooks in the Malison series at my Payhip store. That code is MALISON2026. This coupon code is valid through April the 27th, 2026. So if you need a new ebook for this spring, we have got you covered. And now an update on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. I'm pleased to report that Blade of Wraiths, the fourth book in the Blades of Ruin epic fantasy series, is finally done. You can get Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, bookshop.org, Smashwords, and my own Payhip store. It has been selling strongly, so thank you all for that and I'm glad I was finally able to get it out into the world despite delays. Now that Blade of Wraiths is done, my next main project will be Dragon-Mage, which is the sixth book in the Rivah Half-Elven Thief series, and I'm about 29,000 words into it. I think it will be about 80,000 words, give or take. So I'm hoping to have that out in May, if all goes well. In audiobook news, the fifth book in the Rivah series, Wizard-Assassin, is now out in audiobook. You get it at Audible, Apple, Amazon, Chirp, Google Play, Kobo, and all the other usual audiobook stores. In other audiobook news, Cloak of Illusion is being recorded by Hollis McCarthy right now and Brad Wills will start recording Blade of Wraiths on Monday, if all goes well. So that is where I'm at with my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. Good progress all around. So it's nice to have a good progress update there. 00:02:00 Barnes & Noble/ Draft2Digital Changes Now, before we get to our originally planned main topic, we will pause to address a news item. A few people ask what I thought about recent changes that Barnes & Noble and Draft2Digital made for self-publishers. If you're outside of Indie Author World and haven't heard of any of this, the gist is that Barnes & Noble is putting new restrictions on indie author accounts and Draft2Digital is now charging a one-time $20 fee for anyone opening account and an annual $12 fee on any accounts that make less than $100 a year on the platform and if you make more than $100 a year on the platform, the yearly fee is waived. Now, as you can expect, there was a good deal of consternation about this online, especially among indies with only one or two books who might not make $100 a year from their books. So what is my opinion on this? My opinion is threefold. First, it's unfortunate they had to do this. In a more optimum world, they would not have had to do this, but I suspect they were forced into it due to circumstances. And because of that, number two, it is inevitable that something like this was coming along because number three, the reason this happened was the overwhelming flood of AI generated slop from scammers. The ultimate source of the problem, as is the ultimate source of many recent problems in the world, is generative AI. A small number of scammers are generating enormous quantities of AI generated slop books and uploading them to the publishing platforms. We're talking like tens of thousands of books a month or even a week, and the books are absolutely low effort as well: AI generated gibberish text, AI generated cover, and then thrown on the store. Since I wrote this podcast script, James Blatch of Self Publishing Formula put out a Substack stack article on it, and he mentioned that he was talking to someone from Draft2Digital. He mentioned an example of the kind of low quality slop books they're dealing with. Last year when US political activist Charlie Kirk was murdered, within hours, several nonfiction books on the murder appeared on the stores, and these books were essentially either copy and pasted Wikipedia summaries or AI generated books on the topic that, as you might expect since it was a very recent event, contained no useful information whatsoever. The scammers were just hoping that to take advantage of a contentious current event and make a few bucks along the way. Now imagine this multiplying tens of thousands of times over every single day, and that is the scale of the problem. Now, this has always been a problem with self-publishing, especially with Kindle Unlimited, but AI takes it to an industrial scale. With some basic LLM knowledge, you can automate the entire thing. The figures I've heard are that something like 70 to 75% of new submissions to Draft2Digital in the last year have been AI generated scam books of that nature. Now, obviously this is not viable in the long term and is an existential threat to the platform, so something had to be done. Amazon already took some steps in that direction by limiting accounts to only three uploads a day, so it was inevitable that the other platforms would have to follow suit. Now, the best way to reduce scams is to increase friction. That's why it's sensible to lock your front door and your car. If someone really, really wants to break into your house or car, that's not going to stop them, but a locked door will deter lots of casual thieves or junkies who are strolling around looking for low risk things to steal. In the same way, these changes won't stop the problem of AI generated slop books, but it will help [make] the problem more manageable by increasing friction. So it's unfortunate that these changes have to happen, but I suspect something like this was inevitable, and I also strongly suspect that more of this will be coming. I think eventually we're going to end up with a per book publishing fee, like $10 per title, [which] while unfortunate, would severely reduce the financial viability of these scams, but perhaps we'll be fortunate enough that the era of free and low cost generative AI is going to collapse before that happens. The economic signs are increasingly pointing in that direction with the various AI providers hiking prices in the last few months, and scamming with AI becomes a lot less attractive when you're spending thousands of dollars a week on tokens. Ultimately, in my opinion, the villain here is not Draft2Digital and it's not Barnes & Noble, but the villain is the AI companies who have very recklessly and irresponsibly pushed this highly destructive and often useless technology out of a combination of messianic hubris and old-fashioned greed disguised as self-righteous altruism, much like the crypto and NFT advocates before them. I've said before that I think the primary problem with LLM based AI is that it comes with a whole lot of negative results and virtually no positive ones. The changes of Draft2Digital and Barnes & Noble are yet another example of AI creating negative outcomes and no corresponding benefits. But thankfully, it is not all gloom and doom. It's heartening to see how increasingly unpopular AI is becoming with the general public, with shutting down data center construction projects becoming a hot issue in local US politics. I think the best outcome for the entire mess created by AI technology would be for using it to become as socially unacceptable as, for example, smoking in front of small children or placing bets on a dog fighting ring. 00:07:15 Main Topic of the Week: There is No Magic Pill For Writers Now our other main topic of this week, how there is no magic pill for writers and writers should embrace the writing grind. A while back, I was watching a sports documentary and one of the athletes said that when she was asked for advice from those just starting the sport, she would happily share her routines with these competitors because she knew that most people lacked the work ethic necessary to complete them for any length of time. She lamented that all people wanted was a magic pill and that there was no magic pill for success in her sport. And I think the same thing is true of writing and publishing. People want a magic pill to land on top of the bestseller list right away and make lots of money instantly. The truth is for any kind of lasting success, there isn't that magic pill. Most writers make money by persistence instead of trickery. In this episode, I will give you five of the most important things you need as a writer in order to succeed in publishing your work. I can't give you a magic pill, but like that athlete, I can give you my routine. I've mentioned these tactics before in this podcast, but I wanted to collect them all in one place as a starting point of advice for working hard for that magic secret to success. #1: Work hard. You might hear stories of writers only working an hour or two a day, but the reality is that prolific authors are working far more than that. Only a handful of writers can make a full-time living publishing one book every few years. The rest of us are writing as much as possible and getting out books at least a couple of times a year, if not more. Times have changed. In a saturated entertainment industry, people are quick to forget and move on to the next thing. Website algorithms reward authors who put out new content frequently. So to be able to be a full-time writer, I do work typical workday hours, but I also do some work in the morning before I actually start, and then some in the evening as well, though of course that can be modified based on the needs of the day. I also do some work on weekends. I don't work all day on the weekend, but I do try to get at least a thousand words in and any administrative stuff wrapped up on the weekends. And I try to avoid long vacations, partly because I don't want to miss that much work and partly because I don't really enjoy long vacations. I'm not much of a traveler, I have to admit. This is generally more work than in a typical office setting. Especially around tax time, there's also its own share of a boring administrative paperwork that needs to be done. #2: Don't mistake what working hard is or where you should focus your effort. I've talked a lot about the perils of writing adjacent activities on this podcast, meaning things that feel like productive work but aren't. For example, some authors spend hours a day on social media and feel like they're marketing, but really they're just posting an echo chamber of other authors or getting themselves upset by doom scrolling and calling it keeping up with the news or research. They are as mentally drained as if they did hours of productive work, but unlike productive work, they have nothing to show for it. Writing adjacent activities have to be tightly controlled and managed because the majority of your work time should be spent writing and/or editing. Distractions like these writing adjacent activities can take up an entire day if you let them. I keep to a pretty rigid schedule, planning my breaks throughout the day. #3: When possible, do the publishing yourself. Don't rely on sketchy publishing services or vanity presses asking for thousands of dollars to help publish your book. Despite all the outrage over the Draft2Digital's change, $12 a year is still pretty reasonable compared to some of the outrageous fees that these vanity publishers charge. It's worth taking the time to learn how to format and publish books yourself. There's an abundance of free tutorials or low cost ones from reputable sources that can teach you how. It's better to spend time than money and then you have the skill forever. That is one writing adjacent activity that is absolutely worthwhile. Don't wait for the approval of an agent or spend years chasing one down. You can put your book out yourself. By doing it yourself, you have complete creative control, keep all the profits, and get to decide what you publish next. There's a reason that many authors return to self-publishing after accepting a contract with the Big Five publishers in the US. #4: Manage your expectations. The fact is that some genres sell more than others, especially in ebook form. For example, children's picture books are one of the toughest categories for indie publishers, especially as it fills with AI generated slop replacing illustrators. Children's books, technical books, and very specific nonfiction is simply harder to sell than romance, fantasy, or other kinds of fiction. Most authors don't have a massive success with their first book and find that their sales increase gradually over time. Don't expect to become the next indie success mega success story on your first time out. #5: Be willing to change. The beauty of being an indie author is that you have access to a lot of real time data about your books. If you are seeing a lot of clicks on your ads but few purchases, it's best to try changing your book's cover or blurb before giving up on it entirely. If the search results for your book on Amazon don't match your book at all, it's best to tweak the categories and add in some negative targeting to your ads. There's a saying that the best thing you can do to sell your book is to write the next one in the series, and I have found that to be very true myself. If the book isn't an instant success, it might be better to put out the next one instead of endlessly tweaking the first one. #6: Keep going. Most people can work hard for short bursts of time. The real challenge is to work hard over a sustained period of time, especially if there isn't an immediate reward for it. There is something of the same challenge in exercise and eating healthy too in that you don't usually see immediate results. You have to do it consistently for several weeks or months before you start seeing results. The truth is, most writers are not an overnight success or even a success after a year or two of writing. I wrote for years before my first book got published in 2005. Even after my first book was published and didn't sell well (I think my royalties could have bought me a combo from Burger King). It took years of writing and rejection from publishers before indie publishing became viable, and I was finally able to make money from my unsold novels. If I hadn't kept going, I wouldn't have been able to have those books ready when the opportunity of self-publishing began to lead to actual money. So keep going. Even if your first draft is not your liking, even if your first book you put out doesn't sell, even if you feel frustrated, the best thing you can do is just keep going. In short, ignore the influencers who have advice for becoming an instant bestseller, usually by throwing lots of AI produced slop onto bookselling sites. Taking the easy way out is not a long-term strategy. There is no magic pill that leads to selling over two million books over 15 years like I have done (not to toot my own horn about that, so to speak), but I think that shows the results of effort applied consistently over time for a long period of time. So if you want to be a writer, get to work. So that is it for this week. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. Next week will be our 300th episode. Talk about effort applied over time, right? So be sure to tune in next week for the 300th episode because we're going to have a special giveaway for that. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes of this podcast 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.  

This week on FREAKQUELS, Adam Farley picks the gang up in his Turbo Interceptor so they can drag race while discussing the supernatural revenge tale, “THE WRAITH!” The distracting nature of their discussion resulted in many car accidents, but honestly…who cares? 

In this week's episode, I answer questions I receive whenever I mention that STARFIELD is my favorite game of the 2020s. This coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Half-Orc Paladin, Book #3 in the Half-Elven Thief series, (as excellently narrated by Leanne Woodward) at my Payhip store: HECTOR50 The coupon code is valid through April 20th, 2026. TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 298 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is April 10th, 2026. Today I'm doing an FAQ about my experiences with Starfield, which is my favorite game of the 2020s. Before that, we will have Coupon of the Week and a progress update on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. So let's start off with Coupon of the Week. This week's Coupon Code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Half-Orc Paladin, Book #3 in the Half-Elven Thief series (as excellently narrated by Leanne Woodward), at my Payhip store. That coupon code will be HECTOR50. And as always, the coupon code and the link to my Payhip store will be available in the show notes for this episode. And this coupon code will be valid through April 20th, 2026. So if you need a new audiobook for this spring, we have got you covered. Now for an update on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. As of this recording, I am done with the first pass of editing through Blade of Wraiths and then starting on the second. It's taken a bit longer than I've wanted because I've had a lot of Real Life Stuff to do, but if all goes well, I'm hoping to have the book out in the second half of April, so hopefully not too much longer now. I'm also 19,000 words into Dragon-Mage, which will be the sixth book in the Rivah Half-Elven Thief series. Hopefully that will be out in May, if all goes well. No, that might slip to June, but I'm really hoping to get that one out in May. In audiobook news, Hollis McCarthy has started work on Cloak of Illusion, so hopefully if all goes well, we'll have that out to you in May sometime. In fact, I'm hoping that will come out concurrently with Dragon-Mage, because it's always nice when I can stack an ebook and an older audiobook in the series like that together. So that is where we're at with my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. 00:01:46 Main Topic: Starfield Now onto our main topic. This is ostensibly a podcast about writing and the business of writing, but I like video games, so we're going to talk about a video game this week. The reason for that is whenever I post about Starfield or share a screenshot from it, I frequently get a number of questions. I think it's because Starfield was an oddly divisive game when it came out. People have strong opinions about it and then have strong opinions about other people's strong opinions and I do not have these strong opinions myself. While I enjoy the game a great deal, if you don't like it, that's fine. There are lots and lots and lots of legitimate reasons to criticize Microsoft, which is the ultimate owner of Starfield. It's possible for two things to be simultaneously true that Microsoft has done a lot of sketchy things, and that Starfield is a good game that I enjoyed. I suspect it's a bit like enjoying a football game while at the same time knowing that the NFL is an unscrupulous cartel that could benefit from some thorough reforms. Despite that, I have to admit that I don't think it's super healthy to make gaming opinions, whether video games or sports games, a core part of your identity. A game in the end is just a fancy toy for amusement and idle moments. If God descended tomorrow and told me that Starfield would vanish from the face of the earth, I'd be rather disappointed, but my dinner would still taste just as good and my house would be just as warm. That said, I did enjoy the game quite a bit. Everybody needs a hobby and even I can't work every hour of every day. I wrote like a hundred novels in the last 10 years. Everyone has their own stresses in life, of course, but we seem to live in particularly stressful time these days, so a harmless hobby is a nice break from real life. The game's newest expansion came out a couple days ago on April 7th. And so with that in mind, I thought I would answer the most common questions I get whenever I post or talk about Starfield. Question: Did Starfield influence your Silent Order Science fiction series at all? No. But I'm always pleased when I get this question because it's easily answered. The final book of Silent Order came out on September the 4th, 2023, and Starfield came out on September 6th, 2023. I tried Starfield like the day after it came out, but I didn't actually start playing it in earnest until April of 2024, like I didn't actually finish the starter dungeon until April of 2024. So no, Starfield was not an influence on Silent Order. It would be fair to say that Silent Order was more influenced by James Bond, some H.P. Lovecraft, and Wing Commander: Privateer, which is actually our next question. Question: What initially drew your interest to Starfield? Part of the game reminded me a lot of Wing Commander: Privateer from the '90s, which was one of my favorite games back in the day. If you're not familiar with it, Wing Commander: Privateer was what's now called a "space trading sim" set in the Wing Commander universe. In all the previous Wing Commander games, you played as a Starfighter pilot fighting in the humans' war against the cat-like Kilrathi invaders. Your missions were assigned to you along with the specific ship you would fly for that mission. But in Privateer, you played a freelance captain with a rundown freighter. You can carry cargo, go bounty hunting, do mercenary work, trading, and just wander around the map following infinite procedurally generated missions from the Mission Board, the Merchants' Guild, and the Mercenaries' Guild. Eventually, you would have enough cash to upgrade your rundown ship to something better and configure it however you liked. There's a main plot, but you can totally ignore it and do whatever you want. I loved Privateer and I finished both it and the expansion. And of course, spent a lot of time doing the infinite procedurally generated quests. Starfield does the same thing, but with 30 years' worth of advancement of game design and technology improvements. In grand Bethesda game tradition, you don't even have to do any of the main plot lines. You can just wander around doing procedurally generated quests. It's like Privateer, but better and with ground-based quests as well. You can get out of your ship and walk around in a way you couldn't in Privateer. In Starfield, you can land at some random science outpost or industrial outpost and the inhabitants will have a quest for you. I've heard Starfield described as a "cozy game", since quite a few people enjoy just building their outposts and their ships and then decorating them like the science fiction version of Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley. In another sense, I suppose Starfield could be described as "cozy adventure". Granted, that might be a strange thing to say about missions where you machine gun space pirates, blow up their base, and then loot all their stuff, but Starfield is an excellent game for just puttering around. It's fun after a long day to play for an hour, take out some space pirates, upgrade your ship a little, maybe tinker with your outpost. And I do like, I have to admit, the main plot line and the various faction quests. Question: So the procedural generation stuff doesn't bother you? No. Procedural generation has been part of gaming forever and long before the civilizational blight that is modern LLM systems. Certainly there are points where the procedural generation of Starfield could be improved and it has been improved with patches, but I enjoy the randomness of it. Question: If you think Starfield is good, why did it have such mixed reviews? It did have some rough points at launch, like the lack of surface vehicles, the lack of city maps, and some weird choices for inventory management (among some other issues, though those were later patched or upgraded). I honestly think the game is better than the mixed reviews would indicate, and I also think the mixed reviews were a combination of different converging social factors, specifically, people's expectations of what they imagined the game would be versus what it actually was, its Xbox and PC exclusivity, and the unfortunate addiction to outrage culture in social media. As I mentioned before, I think it's obvious that we live in stressful times and for a variety of reasons that are beyond the scope of this episode, I think people are overall angrier and eager to lash out when a target presents itself, especially online. Additionally, I suspect a big part of the mixed reviews is that Microsoft has built up a lot of ill will since the launch of Windows 11 and Copilot, and Starfield is a convenient outlet for that. Like Outlook and Teams are widely hated software tools, probably some of the most hated software tools in the world, but your job forces you to use them and you can't do anything about it. It's more effective to criticize a consumer-facing business like video games than it is Outlook and Teams, since those tend to be sold in blocks of thousands of licenses to large institutional customers that don't particularly care what their employees think about Outlook or Teams. In fact, fun fact, while I was writing this episode, Outlook was causing problems on Artemis II, NASA's first manned mission to the moon in over 50 years. So there is yet another historical milestone for Outlook. Question: You've said repeatedly that you don't like multiverse stuff, yet Starfield's main plot revolves heavily around the multiverse. That's true. I don't really like multiverse stuff in fiction because it's hard to execute well without making the story pointless. If there are a billion parallel universes and somebody dies in one of them, so what? Just hop over one universe and find a new version of the dead guy. Multiverse and parallel universe plot lines are a bit like homemade lasagna or homemade spaghetti carbonara. It needs to be done by someone who really, really knows what they're doing, otherwise the end result is sad and unpleasant, indigestible, or outright disgusting. That said, multiverse as a game mechanic is actually the clever idea. Like we all know that if you really like a game, you're going to play it more than once. How many times have you replayed Skyrim? How many uncounted quintillions of times has the original Super Mario Brothers been replayed? Starfield rather cleverly builds that replaying into the game. You can start over in a new universe and play the game again, but this time your character has in- game foreknowledge of everything that's going to happen and that can affect the gameplay in fun ways. Question: Did you really lose 40 pounds while playing Starfield? Yes. Of course, the main factor was some lifestyle changes in terms of exercise and diet, but I did lose 40 pounds since starting to seriously play Starfield in April of 2024. The game was an excellent distraction instead of late night snacking, so I suppose I sublimated the snacking urge into blowing up space pirates. Question: Aren't you worried Starfield will influence or slow down your writing? Well, writers and other creatives draw inspiration from all sorts of places, but no, I'm not worried about that because Starfield draws so heavily on multiverse tropes and as I've mentioned a few times before, I don't really like multiverse stuff in fiction. In terms of productivity, I published a million new words in 2024 and again in 2025. Though in full disclosure, I will be surprised if I hit a million words in 2026 due to the amount of Real Life Stuff I will have to do this year, but admittedly that is Real Life Stuff unconnected to gaming or recreation and it's only April, so who can say how the rest of the year will play out? Question: Did playing Starfield so much take time away from reading? Probably not. In 2025, I read 69 books and by the end of March in 2026, I have read 15. Lots of people read more than I do, but 69 books in a year is still significantly higher than the American national average. In all honesty, I both read less and play fewer video games now than I did like 20, 25 years ago when I had way fewer responsibilities. Question: The expansion pack Shattered Space got mixed reviews, but you really enjoyed it. Why? I thought the concept was intriguing. "Religious leader builds machine to contact his conception of God and accidentally blows up half his capital city and creates a space time rift" is an interesting concept for both a game and for fiction. I also liked how the expansion pack went in depth into the crazy space cultists' home planet, which was a fun environment to play. Shattered Space is definitely Starfield on hard mode though. The game recommends it for Level 35 characters, but I think 50 might be better, if I'm honest. Question: If Starfield was a commercial failure, why do you play it? Well, "commercial success" and "I enjoyed this" don't necessarily overlap on the Venn Diagram, do they? Just because something is popular doesn't mean it is good and just because something is unpopular doesn't mean it is bad. That said, I don't think it's objectively correct to say Starfield is a commercial failure, regardless of one's opinion of the game. Microsoft is a ruthless corporate empire that has absolutely no qualms about cutting things that are liabilities, especially as more and more of its resources go into Copilot and LLM slop (though there are some indications that its AI focus is starting to loosen as reality begins to impose itself on the grand delusion of the AI powered future). Considering that in the two and a half years since Starfield came out, it's received a lot of patches, a lot of new free content, and two paid expansions, it's clear that the Lidless Eye of Microsoft has not turned towards Starfield in fiery wrath, especially since Microsoft laid off lots of people and shut down a bunch of its game studios during that time. People tend to focus on Steam rankings, but that's only a segment (if a very large segment) of the market. Various Starfield devs in interviews have said that the game is in the top 10 for played hours on Xbox Game Pass. Xbox Game Pass is really important to Microsoft, probably more important than the physical Xbox itself. So I don't think it's objectively true that Starfield is a commercial failure, though it definitely wasn't as successful as Skyrim or Fallout 4. Question: Baldur's Gate 3 (BG3) came out at about the same time as Starfield. Did you like Starfield better than Baldur's Gate 3? Yes. Question: What? Why? Everyone knows Baldur's Gate 3 is the better game. Baldur's Gate 3 is an excellent game. Well written, well designed, excellent voice acting, the works. That said, I also think Starfield is an excellent game and I just enjoyed it more. It's a matter of taste, I think, which is not quantifiable. BG3 is a big Larian/BioWare-style narrative RPG, which is kind of its own genre in the same way that a Bethesda RPG is also its own genre. I mentioned above that I enjoy the puttering around aspect of Starfield a great deal and BG3 doesn't offer as much space for that kind of puttering, some but not nearly as much. I have enjoyed that style of narrative RPG in the past. Dragon Age: Origins and Knights of the Old Republic were both excellent games I played back to back in 2009 or maybe 2008, back when I had more time for that kind of thing and I think they qualify as direct predecessors to Baldur's Gate 3. But these days, I like the freedom of puttering more, even if a game like BG3 offers an excellent interactive narrative. Additionally, I admit I got frustrated a lot with BG3 in a way I didn't with Starfield. In BG3, I kept frequently running into Total Party Kill situations, which is exasperating after you've sunk 20 or 30 minutes into a complicated combat encounter. So I think it's objectively and quantifiably true to say that Baldur's Gate 3 is significantly more popular than Starfield, but on the subjective level, I just enjoy Starfield more. Question: Do you like the soundtrack of Starfield? Oh yeah. It's some of my favorite writing music. For fun, go search on YouTube and watch the London Symphony Orchestra's concert of the Starfield soundtrack. The composer Inon Zur gets to conduct some of it. I'd say my favorite tracks are Into the Starfield, New Atlantis, The Safety of the Citizens, Freestar, The New Old Frontier (I think that plays in the Trackers' Alliance headquarters), Cydonia, Sublevels, Neon, and In Silent Orbit. The battle of music when you fight the Star Born is pretty great as well. I think it's called "Stars and Sacrifice", but I'm not 100% sure. I also quite liked the soundtrack for Baldur's Gate 3 as well, to return to an earlier question. Andrew Wincott totally deserved the BAFTA for "Raphael's Final Act." Question: If a Switch 2 port comes along of Starfield, will you buy it? I would wait for reviews, but honestly, I would be amazed if there was a Switch 2 port of Starfield. The Switch 2 is more powerful than its predecessor, but there's no denying that Starfield is a chunky, chunky game. Then again, I wouldn't have thought it was possible to get Cyberpunk 2077, Witcher 3, or Fallout 4 on the Switch, and apparently those are good ports, so I guess we'll see. Question: Favorite Quest in Starfield? The Mantis, Groundpounder, and the entire thing with the Terrormorphs. Also the whole freaky quest with the Crucible and the clones, that was some great '70s-style science fiction stuff. I enjoy any of the quests with Walter Stroud because he's a fun character, and also voiced by the actor who played Quark in Deep Space Nine in the '90s, back when I was playing Privateer. (Full circle moment!) Also fighting The Hunter for the last time is pretty great since he's such a smug Nietzschean jerk. One of the greatest moments in the game is how The Hunter is just chilling in a Spaceport bar and willing to have amiable conversations with you at the start of the game since he's killed alternate versions of you thousands of times before and isn't expecting trouble, so no reason not to have a civil chat over a drink. I also played through the new Trackers' Alliance plotline. If you get the premium edition of Starfield and its bonus 1,000 Creation Credits, I highly recommend you use them on the Trackers' Alliance expansion. It is a lot of fun. Question: Favorite ship in the game? The Razor Leaf and the Ecliptic Claymore. Also, this is a new addition, but I really like the Orchid you pick up from the fake Mantis Quest in the Trackers' Alliance Quest line. I think my favorite overall ship is the Shieldbreaker that you can buy on New Atlantis, but if you're going to buy a ship instead of stealing it, I think Walter's company Stroud-Ecklund (see above) has the best ships. Honestly, one of my favorite activities in Starfield is stealing ships from space pirates. It's always so much fun. Question: Favorite gun? The Magstorm hands down. Peace through superior firepower. The Magstorm is what I used for the final battle with The Hunter and then again for the final mission of Shattered Space. For stealth, the Hard Target with a suppressor and a scope. I've taken out entire pirate bases with the Hard Target and stealth mode. The one Starborn lady who sells stuff to you in New Universes has a really excellent stealth optimized version of the Hard Target in her inventory. I also really like the Urban Eagle pistol you get early in the Vanguard plotline, since it's usually the best gun in the game I found at that point. Conclusion I hope that explains why I enjoy Starfield and answers some of the questions people always seem to have whenever I mention it. I doubt anyone involved with Starfield will ever listen to this, but I would like to thank everyone who has worked on the game in any capacity: devs, artists, writers, composers, Q&A people, everyone. Thank you for all your hard work, which has given me a lot of enjoyment and mental escape during some very stressful times. So that's it for this week. I promise we will go back to writing related topics next 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 your view on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy, and we'll see you all next week.  

Even in death wraiths have duties, which these four souls learn include the transmutation of other souls into all manner of shapes and objects, to their surprise.

Todd leads AR1 to a Wraith breeding facility where Teyla uses her abilities to take over a queen in "Spoils of War." And then a glitch sets off the automatic quarantine system in Atlantis, forcing odd pairs together in "Quarantine."Find us online:https://twitter.com/wormholewaffleshttps://wormholewaffles.tumblr.com/@wormholewaffles.bsky.socialHive @wormholewaffleshttps://twitter.com/chelseafairlesshttps://chelseafairless.tumblr.com/@chelseafairless.bsky.socialHive @chelseafairlesshttps://twitter.com/arezouaminhttps://arezoudeetoo.tumblr.com/https://www.tiktok.com/@Arezou.Amin@arezouamin.bsky.socialHive @arezoudeetooThreads @arezoudeetooOther Geeky Waffle content:https://thegeekywaffle.com/https://twitter.com/Geeky_Wafflehttps://www.facebook.com/thegeekywaffle/https://www.instagram.com/thegeekywaffle/https://thegeekywaffle.tumblr.com/https://www.tiktok.com/@thegeekywafflehttps://www.youtube.com/c/thegeekywafflehttps://www.patreon.com/thegeekywaffle@thegeekywaffle.bsky.social

Harry tries Wraiths on Wings at a 4 game tournament... Are they as bad as people say they are!? Support the Podcast: Patreon.com/Entmoot Email: entmootpodcast@gmail.com Buy your toys: 7thcitycollectables.com/entmoot

In this week's episode, we take a look at eight common ebook formatting errors and how to correct them. This coupon code will get you 25% off the ebook of Ghost Exile: Omnibus One at my Payhip store: EXILE25 The coupon code is valid through April 6, 2026. So if you need a new ebook this winter, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 296 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is March 27th, 2026 and today we are looking at eight ebook formatting problems that readers hate and how to fix them. Before we get into our main topic, we'll have Coupon of the Week and a progress update on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. So let's start off with Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 25% off the ebook of Ghost Exile: Omnibus One at my Payhip store. That coupon code is EXILE25. And as always, you can get the coupon code and the links to my Payhip store in the show notes. This coupon code will be valid through April 6th, 2026. So if you need a new ebook as we leave winter and head into spring, we have got you covered. Now for an update on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. As of this recording, I am currently 97,000 words into Blade of Wraiths, and I'm hoping to get to the 100,000 word mark by the end of today. You will note that if you read the first three books in the series, this will make it longer than the first three by good bit, which is part of the reason why it's taking so long. I was hoping to have it published by now, to be honest, but between the length and the variety of things I've had to do in real life before I can get to writing have slowed me down a bit. I have made progress and I am hoping to finish the rough draft before the 31st, if all goes well. Then it will be time to write a tie-in short story that newsletter subscribers will get for free when Blade of Wraiths is published, and then on to editing. So I'm hoping to have the book out in the second half of April, if all goes well and the creek doesn't rise, so to speak. I'm also 12,000 words into Dragon Mage, which will be the sixth book in the Rivah Half-Elven Thief series. I'm hoping that will be out in May because that will become the main project once Blade of Wraiths is finished. In audiobook news, as I mentioned before, recording of Blade of Storms (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) is complete. I think as of right now, you can get it at my Payhip store, Google Play, and Kobo. Audible, Amazon, Apple, and a few of the other major stores should hopefully be coming along before too much longer. Recording is done on Wizard Assassin, which you may recall is the fifth book in the Rivah series, and that is narrated by Leanne Woodward. We just have to proof that, and then it'll be time to submit it for processing at the stores. So hopefully you'll be able to get your hands on that before too much longer. I believe next week, Hollis McCarthy will start recording on Cloak of Illusion, the 12th book in the Cloak Mage series. Since a few people have asked about this, I thought I'd mentioned here there will be a Cloak Mage: Omnibus Four in audio that will combine Cloak of Embers, Cloak of Titans, and Cloak of Illusion. I will probably start working on that one month after Cloak of Illusion comes out in audio. So that will probably be along sometime this summer, if all goes well. So that's where I'm at on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. We've got good things coming up for you soon. 00:03:18 Main Topic: ebook Formatting That Readers Hate Now let's move on to our main topic this week, and it's something I have quite a bit of experience with, I have to say, is ebook formatting that readers hate. Today, we're going to talk about issues with ebook formatting, a topic that people have very strong opinions about. I am going to talk about eight issues in particular and then discuss how we can fix or prevent or best of all, avoid them. First of all, what do we mean by ebook formatting? Formatting is the term to describe the layout, text, and images of the book. Back in the print book days, this was a complicated but fairly fixed thing. In the very old days, you would have to lay it out the books manually. A few decades ago, they had programs like QuarkXPress and Adobe InDesign where you could use these software applications to prepare finished files for sending to the printer to be printed as books. But nowadays, in an age where books are electronic files read on dozens of possible devices and apps, it's much more difficult to predict every possible thing that can go wrong with formatting. For example, with a print book in the old days, you would set the layout, and that is the way the layout would look. Every single book (ideally) printed would look the same. But in the modern age, if you have an ebook, it could be read on a Kindle, a Kindle Color, the Kindle app on the phone, a Barnes and Noble Nook, a Google tablet, on Apple iBooks on an iPod, on Apple iBooks on an iPhone, on the Kindle app on an iPhone. There are literally dozens of different potential combinations where an ebook file could be read and therefore dozens of different potential complications that can arise for ebook formatting. If there are formatting problems, readers will not be able to understand or even physically be able to read the text at worst, and more likely will be deeply annoyed by the issues that feel like road bumps such as extra line breaks and will express their displeasure in reviews. There are also an abundance of ebooks out there that are hastily converted from PDF or Word docs that make for an extremely difficult reading experience. Many of the problems we're going to talk about today arise from when that happens, including the first several. So with that in mind, here are eight ebook formatting errors to avoid and how to deal with them. #1: Illustrations, charts, and maps. Some of the most common issues are that these aren't legible in grayscale (like an e-ink reader, like the Kindle or the various Kobo devices) or have too small fonts or a poor quality or low resolution. This is a very common problem, and it's kind of a problem across all ebooks. Like for example, think of the map of Middle Earth from J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. It's a very complicated map with a lot of different names on it. Now imagine trying to read that map on a six inch black and white Kindle screen. You probably aren't going to be able to do it very well. People using dark mode are most likely going to have problems with seeing images in the same way. So if you have an image heavy book, it's a good idea to test that. So how to fix this? What I've done myself, because I write a lot of fantasy novels and fantasy novels traditionally need maps, is I will put the full color maps on my website and then in the author's note at the beginning, say a map of Owyllain or a map of Andomhaim is available at the author's website on this link. I had a few people ask if I could put the maps in the books and the nearest thing I've done is including the maps with some of the direct sales of my Payhip store. I think the system works very well because those map pages are consistently some of the most visited pages on my website. And to be honest, it would be a lot easier to look at the map on, for example, your tablet or your computer instead of on your phone when you're trying to use the e-reader application. And even if you are looking at the map on my website on your phone, you can pinch zoom in the browser in the way you probably can't in the ebook reader. So that is the quick and easy solution for it. For more image intensive books like textbooks, for example, you just have to take great care and make sure they use large, high resolution images that aren't going to get pixelated. It may be a good idea to set up a website that has these images that the readers can refer to. This would be a bit of extra expense and work, obviously, but it would go a long way to making your readers happy, like I have done with the maps on my website. #2: Paragraphs that aren't indented or unneeded spaces between indented paragraphs. This is one of the biggest pet peeves that people have when reading ebooks. Indented paragraphs are important and if they're properly indented, then space isn't needed between the paragraphs and this will look odd to readers. This was in fact a problem I did have the first couple of years of my ebook publishing career because I used Sigil for my primary ebook formatting and that is the default way Sigil renders ebooks. In time, I started to switch to using Vellum for ebook formatting and that solved the problem. So what I did at that point was I just went through all my entire library, reformatted the ebooks in Vellum, and then re-uploaded them to the various ebook store platforms and that took care of the problem. And that's what I've been doing ever since. I've been using Vellum for ebook formatting since at least 2018 at this point, I think. So how to fix? The easiest way to fix this is to spend a little money on a tool like a Vellum or Atticus or a similar program that does ebook formatting for you because that will make sure your paragraphs are indented properly and then you can spot check as well to make sure that the table of contents is working and the chapters are working and that the paragraphs are being indented properly. #3: Our third issue is hard to read fonts. Some people enjoy fonts that are very stylized, but let's be honest, most readers don't. It's also an accessibility issue if the serifs or the flourishes are too elaborate. How to fix? Honestly, the easiest way is to not use custom fonts for your book unless you have a really, really, really and I emphasize really good reason to do so because part of the appeal of ebooks and ereaders is that you can adjust the font size to whatever you want, which is also particularly important as people get older and it becomes harder to read small print. So if you have a font that is inherently difficult to read in your book, that is going to be a serious, serious speed bump to readers enjoying the book. So my advice for custom fonts is avoid if possible, and even if not possible, still try to avoid. #4: Our fourth issue is basically the same as the third issue, except worse. Font sizes that can't be changed/hard coded text size. A bad font choice is made much worse if the ebook is hard coded to a certain font. This can happen if you use certain exporting tools to export your print book layout into an ebook layout, and sometimes the font size carries over with that. People have strong feelings about fonts and some are more accessible than others, so it's very important not to do this. So how to fix this problem? Don't do it to begin with. It's bad and people will be mad at you. Do not hard set the font size in your ebook, and if you do it by accident, fix it if at all possible. That is my advice in this situation. #5: A fifth potential ebook formatting issue is random hyphens in the middle of words that shouldn't be there. Random hyphens in the middle of words can happen if you convert a book from a PDF file to an EPUB file, and this means it's a very preventable formatting issue. The best way to avoid this is not to upload a PDF file or a Word file to Kindle Direct Publishing and the other ebook platforms, because while they do have automated tools for converting a PDF and a Word document to an EPUB, there's often weird formatting glitches that pop up like the random hyphenations. The best way to avoid this is to use a proper tool to format your ebook like Vellum, Atticus, maybe Scrivener, maybe Kindle Create. So that is the best way to do that by preparing your own EPUB file and uploading that directly. #6: A sixth issue is footnotes or bibliography or endnotes that don't link back to the original page. This also really annoys people. Footnotes and other links within books either need to be popups or linked back to the original page otherwise, readers will be deeply annoyed trying to return to their place each time and even fewer people will read them. And the best way to fix this is to make sure you have set up the footnotes, bibliography, or endnotes properly in a formatting program so that the links work. If you try to do this using a PDF or Word document you upload to the ebook platforms, it's probably not going to work. So it's best to, again, to create your own EPUB and upload it directly. #7: A seventh thing that annoys readers is books without chapters or books without numbered chapters. Books without chapters or unnumbered chapters is a very annoying thing for readers, but most formatting software will help to create and number chapters. Now, how to fix? The technical explanation of this is an EPUB file is essentially a zipped version of several XHTML files and each XHTML file in the sort of zipped package should be its own chapter. The way an EPUB generates table of content files is that every chapter heading should have a H1 HTML key, and that it lets the EPUB know which heading should be chapters. Now you can hand code all this in a program like Sigil, but again, it's much easier to use a program like a Vellum, Atticus, or Kindle Create that will automatically create a proper table of contents for you rather than you having to go through with a XHML or EPUB editor like Sigil and then hand code the H1 tag. It's much easier to automate this and there are applications that will do this for you. #8: The eighth formatting problem that annoy readers is quotation marks the wrong way. What do we mean by that? Quotation marks come in two styles, straight and curly. Curly ones look like flipped commas, while straight quotation marks look more like two lines. Most word processing programs like Word will default the curly quotation marks and convert straight ones. Although curly quotations can sometimes create garbled formatting, they're considered to be the standard. How to fix? Honestly, the easiest way to fix this is to, if it's a problem for you, is to do a find and replace or a find and search. Just if you find that usually what happens is that if you hold down the shift key for too long while you're thinking and then you hit the quotation marks. Sometimes in certain operating systems, it'll convert it to straight quotation marks instead of curly ones. So if you are worried about a few of the wrong type of quotation marks showing up in your document, the easiest way to fix it is just a quick search through the document for straight quotation marks and then remove any ones that you see. We've talked a lot about formatting ebooks and tools for formatting ebooks. So I thought I would suggest the three most popular applications for formatting ebooks, and those would be Vellum, Atticus, and Kindle Create. Vellum is most expensive, but I think it has most features, whereas Kindle Create is pretty simple, but it's free. Vellum is Mac only. As I've mentioned before on the show, I started using it for print layout and then liked it enough that I switched over to using it for all my ebook formatting and that's been true for like the last eight years now. It's very easy to learn. It has excellent features and excellent support. I've never had any technical problems with it whatsoever. I'd say the biggest liabilities for it are that it's the most expensive of the options and it's Mac only. So if you don't have access to a Mac, you would need to choose another option. The next option would be Atticus, which the advantage for Atticus is that it's cross platform. It will work on Windows, Mac, and Linux because it is foundationally a web application. It's also very collaborative in that you can invite other users to use it. The creator of the program, the guy who runs Kindlepreneur named Dave Chesson, has said he wants to create an all- in-one ebook creation, writing, and formatting tool with Atticus, and I think he's taken a pretty good stab at it. I'd say the biggest weakness for Atticus is that it does have a bit of a learning curve because there are so many different functions packed into it. The free option would be Kindle Create, which is a program put out by Amazon. Kindle Create is pretty basic, but it does have everything you need and you can use it to create both files optimized for the Kindle platform and generic EPUBs that you can use on other platforms. I'd say its biggest weakness is that it's fairly simple and that it's produced by Amazon, which some people have strong feelings about, but it is free, which is hard to beat. In Episode 251 (about a year ago), I talked about ebook formatting software and offered pros and cons for each. There isn't one perfect option, so it's good to look over the details for each one of them and watch one of the many available reviews or overviews available online to get a feel for how each one works differently. And now the three strategies for finding formatting issues before your readers do. #1: Test your ebook in each file format (PDF/EPUB) and on multiple devices. It's impossible and prohibitively expensive to test on every possible device, but try some of the most common devices and apps. It's important to test on a Kindle, an actual Kindle and not just on the app, for example. #2: Check the page and chapter breaks in particular. These are the spots where odd formatting tends to cluster. Check all of them to make sure there's nothing weird that you need to fix. #3: Check for legacy things from the print version like page numbers, the table of contents, and so forth. And I find that the easiest way to do all three of these at once is in my final phase of editing a book, I will have my computer read it aloud to me with text to speech and I find that's a good way to find any remaining typos. It's also a very good way of spotting formatting issues since you'll be looking over the entire book one more time and if there's like a weird gap or a line break or something of that nature, you're probably going to have a good chance of spotting it. So in conclusion, ebooks can be a bit difficult to format, but there is dedicated software and a slew of tutorials and guides to help you do it. Learning a little bit of HTML and CSS can help, but it's not a requirement at this point. If you're self-publishing, having a well formatted book is important because readers either won't enjoy or won't even start a poorly formatted ebook. I hope these tips help you with knowing where to start with improving your ebook formatting. So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to the Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your view on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and we'll see you all next week.  

Our souls have washed ashore together and the Shadowlands await. There is but one road to Morgantown and beyond that Oblivion's embrace. Guest Starring: Darius McCaskey as The Shadowguide

A man with psychic visions and Todd both come to Atlantis in "The Seer," and then Rodney and his sister Jeannie are abducted in "Miller's Crossing." Miller's Crossing also marks the first time a Wraith has gone to Earth!Find us online:https://twitter.com/wormholewaffleshttps://wormholewaffles.tumblr.com/@wormholewaffles.bsky.socialHive @wormholewaffleshttps://twitter.com/chelseafairlesshttps://chelseafairless.tumblr.com/@chelseafairless.bsky.socialHive @chelseafairlesshttps://twitter.com/arezouaminhttps://arezoudeetoo.tumblr.com/https://www.tiktok.com/@Arezou.Amin@arezouamin.bsky.socialHive @arezoudeetooThreads @arezoudeetooOther Geeky Waffle content:https://thegeekywaffle.com/https://twitter.com/Geeky_Wafflehttps://www.facebook.com/thegeekywaffle/https://www.instagram.com/thegeekywaffle/https://thegeekywaffle.tumblr.com/https://www.tiktok.com/@thegeekywafflehttps://www.youtube.com/c/thegeekywafflehttps://www.patreon.com/thegeekywaffle@thegeekywaffle.bsky.social

In this week's episode, I share five tips for getting the most out of Bookbub Ads. This coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Wizard-Thief, Book #2 in the Half-Elven series, (as excellently narrated by Leanne Woodward) at my Payhip store: THIEF50 The coupon code is valid through March 30, 2026. TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 295 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is March 19th, 2026, and today we're looking at five tips for setting up BookBub ads for indie authors. We will also take a look at my current writing projects and do Coupon 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 Wizard-Thief, Book Two in the Half-Elven Thief series (as excellently narrated by Leanne Woodward) at my Payhip store. That code is THIEF50. As always, you'll be able to see the coupon code and link to the Payhip store in my show notes. This coupon code will be valid until March 30th, 2026 so if you need a new audiobook this winter, we have got you covered. Now let's have an update on current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. Progress has not been as fast on Blade of Wraiths as I would have liked just because I've had so much stuff in real life that has taken priority lately. I'm still at 73,000 words, which puts me on Chapter 12 of 21 in my outline, so I'm over halfway through the rough draft. As has often been the case recently, the final draft will have more chapters than the rough draft because I tend to write longer chapters but the readers prefer shorter chapters, so I will split the longer chapters into shorter chapters. The final draft will probably have around 30, maybe 35 chapters, depending on how I split things up. But based on my outline, I am over the halfway point, so that is a good feeling. I am also 8,000 words into Dragon-Mage, which will be the sixth book of the Half-Elven Thief series with Rivah. I'm hoping I can get, despite delays, I'm hoping I can get Blade of Wraiths out in April and Dragon-Mage out in May, but we will see how the rest of this month goes. In audiobook news, Blade of Storms has finished recording (by Brad Wills), and it's a great audiobook. I'm looking forward to sharing it with you all. Currently, as of this recording, it is on Payhip, Google Play, and Kobo, but it should be showing up on the other audiobook stores before too much longer. Since Coupon of the Week was for Wizard-Thief, it's a good time to mention that Leanne Woodward is currently recording the fifth book in the series as an audiobook, Wizard-Assassin. We hope to have that out sometime in April, if all goes well. So that's where I'm at with my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. 00:02:33 Main Topic of the Week: BookBub Ads For Indie Authors Now let's move on to our main topic this week, five tips for setting up BookBub ads for indie authors. Lately, I have been doing a lot more with BookBub ads than I have in the past because as I've mentioned before on the show, Facebook ads have declined in effectiveness and quality a great deal because there's so much AI slop on the platform and because Meta insists on putting the AI slop into the targeting of the ads, which makes them much, much less effective. Despite all the testing I've done since I stopped using Facebook ads in October, I have not gotten good results. I stopped using Facebook ads most of the time in October. I still occasionally do boosted posts for things like book announcements and maybe audiobook announcements, but the traditional targeted ad campaigns have become so much less effective with the Advantage Plus targeting that Meta uses. The idea behind that is that it bases the targeting off the ad off the text you put in the ad as opposed to letting you manually select targets. In theory, this sounds good. In practice, the targeting is just not good and doesn't work. So I've mostly stopped using Facebook ads and have switched more efforts to BookBub ads and Amazon ads, which is why we are talking about this now. So to start off, what are BookBub ads? BookBub is a book newsletter service that people sign up to receive in their email inbox. They can pick which categories they receive in the newsletter, such as romance, fantasy, science fiction, nonfiction, and so forth. The newsletter itself focuses on book deals or new releases and the bottom of each one has a small ad space that people can make a bid to be featured on. Unlike Facebook ads, for example, you're directly reaching an audience that wants ads about discounted books and are eager to learn about new releases and good deals, but let's be honest, mostly good deals. BookBub ads are a separate entity from BookBub Featured Deals. Anyone can make regular BookBub ads without being accepted like you have to for a Featured Deal. I'm not going to talk about the process of getting a Featured Deal in this episode, although I have been able to get them several times. Many people feel like BookBub ads aren't as effective as they once were, but I found that a good creative, the right targeting, and the right price can really make a big difference in how well an ad campaign does. For example, January when I set up this episode was the last month I had complete data for and for January, my four BookBub campaigns averaged a 2.89% click-through rate (with the highest one actually having a 4.2% click-through rate). For reference, BookBub has said that they consider 1.5 to 2% to be a good click-through rates on their platform. So with that in mind, here are a few things I've learned from my time doing BookBub ads. #1: Try Amazon ads first. I would recommend getting familiar with Amazon ads first before starting to use BookBub ads. Amazon ads are more forgiving. It's harder to overspend on them, and sometimes it feels like it's hard to get Amazon ads to spend at all. Amazon ads will give you important data on similar books and authors (often called comps) that you can use to build your BookBub ad campaigns when you do start them. It's also easier to get clicks on Amazon ads than BookBub ads. I recommend using both your Amazon ad and "Also Bought" data to make a list of at least 10 authors to use to target your BookBub ads, although you will probably not use all 10 in the same ad campaign. When you're choosing authors to target in your BookBub ads, you should also limit by genre as well, since many of your comp authors will write in multiple genres. Using myself as an example, I write fantasy, science fiction, and nonfiction books. Limiting by genre alone for your ads is too broad of a target, but the combination of similar authors and the right genre should narrow it down enough. BookBub currently provides a little too broad or too narrow feature on the page to help you find the right balance. #2: Get your pricing right. It must be a good deal. Your book needs to be on sale. The BookBub audience are first and foremost deal seekers. The most successful campaigns will feature either free or $0.99 books, but anything under $2.99 is the right price range. Do not advertise regular price books through BookBub ads, especially if the price is something like $9.99 or even above, even if the price at $9.99 is actually a good discount, like it's a cookbook or a technical manual, which tend to be more expensive. BookBub readers aren't very likely to be excited about that. This audience may even be annoyed to see books at those higher prices, even if it is a new release or a discount over the normal price. If your book is regular price but it is available in Kindle Unlimited, it's probably best to leave out the price information in your ad and focus exclusively on putting the Kindle Unlimited logo or language prominently in the creative. Obviously you want to limit your ads for this exclusively to Amazon. Many BookBub subscribers have Kindle Unlimited subscriptions so for those readers, that is even more of a draw to them as a discount would be since they can read the book at no additional cost to them since they already paid for their Kindle Unlimited subscription that month. #3: Try one ebook site for each campaign. Run your first campaign focusing on just one ebook site instead of running all of them at once in a campaign. For most people, that means picking Amazon or their home country's biggest ebook site. Limiting each campaign to just one ebook site will show you what platforms are the most effective for your ads and let you focus on how the clicks impact actual sales. #4: Don't go crazy on your bids. It doesn't make sense to make aggressive bids until you feel like you have your comps dialed in. Ignore the suggested amounts that BookBub provides and start small. Again, limiting to just one ebook site for each campaign is also a way to limit how much of the campaign budget gets spent, although it may still spend the full amount, especially if you've chosen Amazon. #5: Keep your campaigns short. People get tired of seeing the same ads, so it doesn't make sense to run a campaign for months on end. Limit each campaign to a bit less than a week. For myself, it's usually about four days that I'll run a BookBub ad and you'll generally see the best results on the first two days, usually the best results on the second day, and then diminishing returns but still decent on days three and four, and after that, it kind of flatlines. So I've found that generally, at least for my books, four days is about the best. Now we're going to talk about a slightly different topic, creating the creative for the image, which is the biggest part of the BookBub ad. First up, what do we mean by a creative? BookBub uses the term creative to describe the image that the readers will see as the ad. It's 300 by 250 pixels, so space is at a premium. Why is this important? In fact, it is very important because the creative is all that people see in the newsletter for your ad. It's a very small ad and it's important to get the images and information optimized so it looks nice and clear and the call to action (what the person should do to buy or read it) is very clear. So with that in mind, we'll give you five pieces of advice for setting up your creative. #1: The default is boring. BookBub does provide a default template for creating BookBub ads and it's serviceable and it works. It will also keep you from making any big mistakes like pixelated text. However, the default unfortunately is boring. It doesn't catch the eye, especially for longtime BookBub subscribers who have seen dozens, if not hundreds of ads in that style and format. Try using templates on sites like Book Brush or Canva to make your own creative instead. #2: Get the image right. Be sure to test that everything is legible and the image and the text both look sharp in the actual 300 by 250 pixel size of the creative. You should be using the highest resolution image that you can. The image should immediately signify what the genre is as well. Colors help a lot for this. For example, a gritty thriller can use darker colors or a cozy fantasy romance should use gentler colors like sage or lilac. It's not especially interesting to use just the book cover and the shape of a book cover, especially since that takes up at least half of the available space in the creative, if not more. Also, in a space that small, the text on the cover and any details in the image will probably be hard to see. Try experimenting with using other images besides the cover. As long as the creative conveys the genre and price, you can experiment a bit with the images you use. #3: The text matters. Don't waste space with reader reviews as the ads text. They take up too much space and they're not especially persuasive in an ad. Less is more. You have, at most, a very short sentence to describe the book's genre and the plot hook. It might be best to try out a few variations to see what works the best. #4: Clear call to action. As with any other ad, there needs to be a clear call to action. A "Free" or "Read on Kindle Unlimited" button gives people both the price and clear entry point for how to get the book. If the price is a limited time deal, that's a good thing to note in the ad with the word "sale" or "limited time deal". That gives people a reason to click right away instead of telling themselves they'll click on it later, which to be honest, they will probably forget to do. #5: Change it up. It doesn't make sense to keep running the same creative over and over again. People will get bored of seeing the same thing, just like with any other ad. You can rotate between a set of creatives, but it doesn't work well to run the same one multiple times in a row for a long period of time. Just as a quick rule of thumb, I would say give yourself about three to four months before reusing a creative in an ad since that's usually enough time for people to have forgotten they've seen it before. Just like on YouTube, it might make sense to do A/B testing of images and text on an otherwise identical campaign to figure out if a different approach to the creative makes a difference. For example, you could try the same overall creative with different text or a different call to action. Likewise, if the campaign isn't doing well or is burning through money faster than you would like, you can always pause the campaign in your BookBub dashboard. It's okay to change your plan and to end your campaign early if it isn't working. So now let's talk a little bit what I actually do on BookBub. I advertise my Amazon Books on Amazon, and I use BookBub to advertise things on Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Google Play, and Apple Books, because the competition for clicks for the other stores is much less fierce on BookBub than it is for Amazon. The cost of getting Amazon clicks on BookBub can be prohibitively expensive. The specific books I advertise are usually my permafree first in series ones like Frostborn: The Gray Knight, Child of the Ghosts, Sevenfold Sword: Champion, Cloak of Dragons and so forth, because it is very easy to advertise free books on BookBub because as we mentioned earlier, it is a discount ebook newsletter. What I usually do for the creative is I use Photoshop and Daz Studio to create a genre appropriate image. For example, for the Cloak Mage series, which is urban fantasy, it's usually Nadia wearing a leather jacket and casting a fireball in a dark alley at night. For the Frostborn series, it's usually an armored warrior or wizard casting a spell. Then the text at the bottom says something like "free epic fantasy", "free urban fantasy" or so forth. I typically work on these images in Photoshop at 3,000 by 2,500 pixels, so they're easier to see. Then once the image is done or I want to see how it looks, I dial it down to 300 by 250 to see how it looks in the appropriate size and make sure that it works. That approach works pretty well for me, as we mentioned earlier in the show. To sum it up, BookBub can still work for you as part of your overall advertising and marketing strategy, and to learn more about what ebook stores you might want to promote more based on their click-through rates of your ads. If you approach it cautiously and use the data from your ads to make changes on the go, you can still do pretty well on BookBub ads. So that is it for this week, and I hope you know a little bit more about BookBub ads now. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy, and we'll see you all next week.  

In this week's episode, I look back at the movies and streaming shows I watched over winter 2025/2026 Instead of Coupon of the Week, you can get SILENT ORDER: OMNIBUS ONE for free at my Payhip store at this link until March 31st: https://payhip.com/b/lhCyU TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 294 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is March the 13th, 2026 and today we are looking at my movie and streaming TV show reviews for Winter 2025 and 2026. We'll also have Coupon of the Week and an update on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. Before we get into all that, let's start off with Coupon of the Week. Actually, we are not going to have Coupon of the Week this week because originally I scheduled a Coupon of the Week for Silent Order: Omnibus One to get you 25% off it. However, I was able to get a BookBub Featured Deal to give away Silent Order: Omnibus One for free on the 17th. So instead, the episode description will just have a link to where you can get Silent Order Omnibus One for free at my Payhip store. Next week, regular Coupon of the Week will return. Now for an update on my current writing, publishing and audiobook projects. As of this recording, I am about 51,000 words into Blade of Wraiths. I had hoped to be a little further at the end of this week, but there was quite a bit of real life stuff to do this week that took up a lot of time. I didn't make quite as much progress as I had hoped, but I did make some progress, so that's good. I'm still hoping to have the book out in April if all goes well, but we will see. I'm also 5,000 words into Dragon-Mage, which will be the sixth book in the Rivah Half-Elven Thief series (six of nine planned). That hopefully will be out in May if all goes well. In audiobook news, the main recording on Blade of Storms (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) is finished. Just have some proofing to do yet and then get through processing. Then hopefully the audiobook should be available on all platforms by next month. Recording is also underway for Wizard-Assassin, the fifth book in the Rivah Half-Elven Thief series. So that is where I'm at with my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. 00:02:00 Main Topic: Movie/TV Show Review Roundup Now let's move on to our main topic this week, my movie roundup. Spring is near, so it's time for my Winter 2025/ 2026 Movie Review Roundup. I admit this is a bit shorter than my usual movie roundups because for a couple of months I didn't see anything I really felt like writing about. Not in a bad way or depressed sort of way, but I just didn't see anything I felt interested enough to write about, whether good or bad. The new year brought new movies to watch and now we have enough for a Movie Review Roundup. As always, the movies and shows are in order from my least favorite to my most favorite. The reviews are based on nothing objective, but only my own thoughts and opinions. First up is Operation Fortune, which came out in 2023. This is a Guy Richie action comedy with Jason Statham in the lead, which probably describes all you need to know about it. Like if you say the phrase "Guy Richie Action Comedy with Jason Statham in the Lead", this would be the movie that popped into your head. Statham plays Orson Fortune, an elite special forces operative. When a mysterious device is stolen by terrorists, the UK government sends Fortune to retrieve it. Fortune teams up with a group of specialists and then sets out to punch bad guys and save the day. Some good action sequences, some funny bits, and Hugh Grant was hilarious as the evil arms broker billionaire, but definitely a paint by number action movie. Enjoyable to watch, but nothing deep. Overall Grade: C Next up is Legend, which came out in 1985. This is a very weird movie told as sort of an '80s style dark fairy tale. The premise is that the Lord of Darkness wants to destroy all light (as lords of darkness are wont to do). But to do that, he needs to kill a pair of unicorns. He sends his goblin minions to do the deed. Meanwhile, Princess Lili is in love with Jack, a forest child who lives in harmony with various elves and dwarves and other natural creatures. When the goblins kill one of the unicorns and take the other back to Darkness's subterranean fortress, Jack and Lili have to team up to rescue the last unicorn and defeat Darkness. The creature work and all the puppets and suchlike look amazing. Poor Tim Curry delivered an excellent performance under that mountain of prosthetics he had to wear as Darkness. That said, I don't think Tom Cruise had quite learned how to act yet, and I'm afraid he kind of stood around with a blank expression most of the time. So I'd say Legend is an interesting fantasy classic, but definitely very niche. Overall Grade: B- Next up is Anaconda, which came out in 2025. This is a very meta, bonkers, and yet nonetheless entertaining comedy movie. It kind of went off the rails while shouting "WHEEEEEE" the entire time. College friends Doug, Griff, Claire, and Kenny are entering middle age and are all dissatisfied with how their lives have turned out. Doug wanted to be a director, but instead makes wedding videos. Griff is a struggling actor. Claire is a divorced lawyer and Kenny is a "Buffalo drunk (he only drinks beer and wine and just some, but not all of the hard liquors). When Griff acquires the rights to make the next movie in the Anaconda series, the four friends jump at the chance to make it as an indie film. Scraping together their savings, they set off for the Amazon to film their snake movie. However, they find themselves caught in the middle of a fight between illegal gold miners and the Brazilian government and there is an actual giant anaconda that is hunting both the gold miners and idealistic American filmmakers. This was very meta since the characters were making a movie in the Anaconda series…in a movie in the Anaconda series. Despite that, it was very funny and I enjoyed it, though it might be a bit too tongue in cheek for some viewers. Comedy, alas, is ever subjective. Overall Grade: B- Next up is Fackham Hall, which came out in 2025. Sometimes a movie is funny but dumb. Sometimes a movie is dumb but still funny, and sometimes a movie is just plain dumb. However, I'm pleased to report that Fackham Hall is the best of the three: funny, but dumb. It's a goofy but affectionate parody of Downton Abbey and the kind of movie that isn't afraid to make jokes simply for the sake of jokes. Interestingly, halfway through the movie takes the right hand turn and becomes a parody of an Agatha Christie novel. It was pretty funny in the vein of the Naked Gun or Airplane movies, though a few of the jokes might be too raunchy for some viewers. Overall Grade: B- Next up is Wrecking Crew, which came out in 2026. I would say this was one part buddy cop comedy, one part noir mystery, and one part John Wick style violence. When private investigator Walter Hale is killed by a hit and run in Hawaii, both his sons (by different mothers) conclude that it was murder. Straight laced James (played by Dave Bautista) is a Navy SEAL with a stable family life, while Maverick cop Johnny (played by Jason Momoa) is frequently drunk and on the outs and on the outs with his girlfriend. Nevertheless, both half-brothers independently realize that shady corporate interests killed their father and set out to find his killers. They must also deal with their complicated feelings with their father and overcome their deep seated resentment of each other. This was a pretty fun action movie, though the violence level is definitely John Wick level and might put off some viewers. Honestly, it made me wonder if there's a "Hawaiian Noir" mystery genre, the way that "Nordic Noir" novels were popular for a while. Overall Grade: B Next up is The Running Man, which came out in 2025. This is both very dark and very funny, and I think it was actually better than the original movie from the 1980s. It explores the same concept. Future America is a dystopia ruled by the Network megacorp and Glen Powell's character needs to get medicine for his daughter, but he can't afford it, so he tries out for the Network's cruel reality shows and lands a spot on the biggest one of all, The Running Man, where contestants have to stay alive and hidden for 30 days while they're hunted by mercenaries and the general public gets rewarded for informing on them. This definitely had strong Idiocracy vibes as well and the satire of contemporary American culture was very cutting and probably quite accurate. I do think this movie deserved better than to flop at the box office like it did, but perhaps it will have a long life on streaming. Overall Grade: B Next up is A Few Good Men, which came out in 1992. This is a high quality legal thriller carried by Tom Cruise's and Jack Nicholson's performances. Today, Tom Cruise is largely famous for extreme stunts like driving a motorcycle cycle off a cliff (it did make for a good movie) and various personal eccentricities, but both he and Nicholson really can act and their scenes together are great. Sometime between this and Legend (which we talked about earlier), Cruise really figured out how to act on screen. Anyway, when a Marine is killed during a hazing ritual, Lieutenant Kaffee (played by Tom Cruise), is called in to investigate, aided by Lieutenant Commander Galloway (played by Demi Moore). Colonel Jessup (who was played by Nicholson), the commander of the Marines in question, wants to cover up what really happened, and Kaffee and Galloway set out to prove that the Marines charged with murder were in fact following orders when the hazing ritual went wrong. Of course, the movie hinges around Kaffee's and Jessup's final confrontation in the courtroom. I have a theory that all genres are in fact variants of fantasy. Like romance is the fantasy of true love, thrillers are the fantasy of violence and so forth. This movie would be the fantasy of the legal thriller, where the bad guy cracks on the stand. In real life, of course, when generals screw up, the privates, the NCOs, and the junior officers get thrown under the bus while the generals go on to cushy gigs at the Rand Corporation or Lockheed Martin. The strength of the performances makes the fantasy and therefore the movie work. Overall Grade: A Next up is The Paper, which came out in 2025. I ended up with a month of the Peacock streaming service, so I decided to give The Paper a try. It is a spinoff of the classic The Office [US] sitcom from the 2000 to 2010s. The premise is that failing paper company Dunder Mifflin from The Office has been purchased by a large conglomerate called Enervate. Enervate 's core business is toilet paper and other paper bathroom products, but they also own the Toledo Truth Teller (we'll refer to that as TTT) newspaper, and they use paper pulp that isn't good enough for toilet paper to print the paper. TTT is a regrettably normal local American newspaper in that it's mostly AP Wire articles and ads, with one reporter who covers local sporting events. Things start to change when Ned Sampson takes over as the new editor of TTT. Ned was formally Enervate's best toilet paper salesman, but he has a romantic view of journalism and wants to be a reporter. As a favor to him, the CEO lets him take over TTT. There he meets Mare Pritti, an Army vet in charge of the paper's layout who also wants to be a real journalist, and the two of them hit it off despite their immediate attraction. Ned has to navigate his coworkers (who range from useless to insane and useless to even more insane), corporate politics, rival bloggers, and his growing attraction to Mare. It was a pretty funny first season and I enjoyed it. There's allegedly going to be a second season, so if that happens, I will definitely watch. Overall Grade: A Next up is Conan the Barbarian, which came out in 1982. I actually saw this before like 15 years ago, but I saw it again at the end of February, so it's time to write about it. This is a very specific movie that deserves its status as a cult classic, and I do think it is better than Legend. It wasn't particularly faithful to any of the Conan stories, but it somehow did a good job of capturing the essence of the character. This was one of Arnold Schwarzenegger's first movies. It might have even been his first one, though I'm not sure. He didn't quite have the whole acting thing down yet, so he played Conan as strong, stoic, and mostly silent, which worked quite well for the character. James Earl Jones was excellent as Thulsa Doom, the evil wizard and cult leader who is Conan's nemesis. I guess in the 1980s, if you wanted your fantasy or science fiction film to be successful, you needed your villain to be an armored figure either played by or voiced by James Earl Jones. The Riddle of Steel scene where Conan throws all Doom's atrocities into his face and Doom goes, "ah" in the sense that, "yeah, I get why you want to kill me," was great. The fight scenes and stunts are all the more impressive in hindsight because obviously they're all practical effects and efforts since CGI didn't exist yet, especially given the large number of horses in the movie, since no horses are notoriously very difficult to work with in film. I once heard an experienced rider say managing a horse is like managing a two year old, albeit a two year old that weighs a thousand pounds and is much stronger than you are. The soundtrack by Basil Poledouris is a classic and deservedly so. Like, modern day oligarchs come across less as dark lords and more like malevolent dorks because they travel by private jets and electric car and yachts and so forth. By contrast, Thulsa Doom thunders across the countryside with his Riders of Doom, accompanied by Basil Poledouris's score with trumpets, drums, and choral parts. If you really want to be an intimidating bad guy, your entourage needs to be armored cavalry riders and you need a Basil Poledouris light motif. Conan the character sometimes gets stereotyped or dismissed as a masculine power fantasy (erroneously in my opinion), but the female characters in the movie are pretty good. Conan's mother faces off against the Riders of Doom by herself and Thulsa Doom himself has to use his mental magic to kill her. Prince's Yasmina is kind of the McGuffin of the movie, but she has a character arc as well where she turns against Doom and helps Conan to fight him. Compared to many '70s and '80s film heroines, Valeria was very good. For example, Lois Lane in the 1978 and 1980 Superman movies screams a lot and basically causes Superman to make a lot of bad decisions while being dead weight. By contrast, Valeria kills a bunch of bad guys with her sword, fists fights some evil spirits to save Conan, and then literally comes back from the dead as a Valkyrie to help Conan in the final battle with Thulsa Doom's goons. So this is definitely worth watching as a cult classic of the fantasy genre, though it does have a lot of nudity even by the standards of '80s movies. Overall Grade: A Now for my favorite thing I saw in Winter 2025/ 2026, which was Wonder Man, which came out in 2026. I was surprised by how much I liked this. The main character is Simon Williams, who is a struggling actor in LA. He's a good actor, but he's also an enormous theater nerd with an encyclopedic knowledge of both film and theater, which means he tends to overthink his performances, to the exasperation of the director and crew, which gets him fired a lot. One day he meets Trevor Slattery, the highly eccentric British actor who unknowingly was recruited to play the fake Mandarin back in Iron Man 3. Trevor has since kicked drugs and alcohol and returned to his one true love, acting. He ends up taking Simon under his wing and together they set out to get auditions for Wonder Man, a remake of Simon's favorite superhero movie from when he was a kid. However, both Simon and Trevor have secrets. Simon is concealing actual superpowers since superpowered individuals are not allowed in major film and television productions for safety and legal reasons due to a hilarious side story involving Josh Gad. Trevor was actually recruited under the threat of returning to prison by the Department of Damage Control to spy on Simon since they suspect he has superpowers but can't prove it and they want to find enough evidence to arrest him. The tension of all these plot threads keeps ratcheting up until the final episode. Anyway, this was an excellent self-contained "ground level" Marvel story without a lot of callbacks or cameos or getting lost in the increasingly complex MCU continuity. The friendship between Simon and Trevor, two extremely eccentric actors, was both touching and hilarious. Overall Grade: A+ So those are the movies and streaming shows I watched in Winter 2025 and 2026. So that's it for this week. Thank you for watching The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show enjoyable and interesting. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes with transcripts at https://thepulpwritershow.com. Stay safe, stay healthy, and see you all next week.

Human lives are a collection of memories. Some of these memories lift us up while some tear us down. Even after death some souls are tied to memories which are unresolved. Wraith is a story which explores this within the World of Darkness. CW: Death, Law Enforcement, Immigration, Alcohol abuse, and traumatic situations

Whilst cycling to work in the early hours of the morning, a young man found himself confronted by a chilling apparition near the dark waters of Trench Pool. What began as a single terrifying encounter soon escalated into something far more disturbing, as the figure continued to stalk him for weeks afterwards; a haunting presence he would come to know as The Wraith of Trench Pool. MUSIC  Tracks used by kind permission of Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 Tracks used by kind permission of CO.AG Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this week we look at the advantages and disadvantages of writing interconnected series. This coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Dragonskull: Blade of the Elves, Book #3 in the Dragonskull series, (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store: ELVES50 The coupon code is valid through March 16, 2026. So if you need a new audiobook this winter, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 293 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is March 6th, 2026. Today we are looking at interconnected series/whether they're a good idea or a bad idea for a writer to pursue. We also have Coupon of the Week and a progress update on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. So let's start off with Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Dragonskull: Blade of the Elves, Book #3 in the Dragonskull series (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store. That coupon code is ELVES50. And as always, the coupon code and the link to my Payhip store will be available in the show notes. The coupon code is valid through March the 16th, 2026. So if you need a new audiobook as we head into spring, we have got you covered. Now for an update on my current writing and publishing and audiobook projects. Cloak of Summoning is done and it is out. You can get it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, Bookshop.org, Smashwords, and my own Payhip store. It has done quite well and actually got to number one in its category on Amazon US as of this recording, which is all the more impressive because on March 5th, the day my newsletter went out, Amazon US was down for a significant chunk of the afternoon. Despite that, that doesn't seem to have slowed down Cloak of Summoning any, and it is still going strong. So thank you all very much for that. And as I said, you can now get the book at all the ebook stores. Now that Cloak of Summoning is out and published, my main project is Blade of Wraiths, the fourth book in my Blades of Ruin epic fantasy series. I'm currently 28,000 words into it. So I'm hoping if all goes well and nothing comes up, I can have that out sometime in April. My secondary project is Dragon-Mage, which will be the sixth book in the Half-Elven Thief series and I am 1,000 words into that. That will take over as my main project once Blade of Wraiths is done, and hopefully that will be out in May, if all goes well and nothing crazy happens. In audiobook news, Cloak of Titans, as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy, is now available at almost all the audiobook stores, including Audible, Apple, Amazon, Google Play, Kobo, and the other major ones. So you can get that and listen to it at your audiobook store of choice. Brad Wills is currently recording Blade of Storms, which was the third book in the Blades of Ruin epic fantasy series, and he is about halfway through recording that. So hopefully we should have that out in April sometime, if all goes well. So that is where I'm at on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. With that, let's move on to our main topic. 00:02:51 Main Topic of the Week: Interconnected Series Our main topic is today we're going to talk about whether interconnected series are a good thing or a bad thing. First of all, what are interconnected series? Interconnected series have different standalone stories, but share at least some characters and locations from previous series. Many of the ideas and themes carry over as well, but not always. Romance writers use interconnected series. A couple or couples featured in previous series make an appearance in a new place or with a new group of people. Author Abby Jimenez has characters in her romances occupy the same social orbit in Minnesota across multiple series (and of course, they all share a love of the author's real life Minnesota bakery, Nadia Cakes). There's something of a joke among romance writers that your series can be as long as you want it to be, just make sure that the heroine has a large number of single/unattached sisters so that after the heroine has their happily ever after, you can go one by one down through the sisters and make sure they find their love interests and that they too can have their happily ever afters and extend the series for as long as you want. One example of a non-romance interconnected series from books I've written would be Sevenfold Sword, which is a direct follow up to Frostborn. The new series involves Ridmark, Calliande, and the other characters from the Frostborn series, but they are in a new location with new allies, new adventures, and new adversaries. A reader could (and has) read the Sevenfold series without having read Frostborn, but Frostborn fans get more time with characters they like and there are nods to the previous series. I fully intended Sevenfold Sword to be a standalone series, but what I found is that people tend to start Sevenfold Sword and then go back and start Frostborn and read all of Frostborn and then proceed on to Sevenfold Sword. So in that sense, the interconnected series was successful because that led to sales of Frostborn that might not have happened otherwise. So with all that in mind and that introduction, here are four reasons interconnected series can help you as a writer. #1: Readers are already invested. Readers have already spent a substantial amount of time with these characters and places. They have formed a bond with them across the entire previous series and are excited to spend more time with them and find out more about them. Even a brief appearance from returning characters feels exciting to readers. A very recent example of this from pop culture is how the TV show The Paper used a character from the US version of The Office. Because audiences are familiar with the character of Oscar in Accounting (who is the only returning character thus far), they are interested in seeing what he's doing and why he's in Toledo instead of Scranton. Also, his reaction to seeing a documentary crew at work again is exactly what you expect that it would be and is a great moment of humor that perfectly fits the character's personality. The show does mention some small things from the previous series, like a quote from Michael Scott, but it's certainly not a classic spinoff and is very much its own creation, reflecting how both office culture and humor have changed a great deal in the over 20 years since the US Office first began airing. #2: You already are invested as the writer, if you are the one writing the interconnected series. Writers as well as readers can get invested in a set of characters in the world building in a certain series and they're excited to continue. This is especially true if you haven't yet concluded the character's external and internal conflict arcs, because I have found after 171 books that it is generally easier to write a character that has an ongoing conflict instead of one that has all of his or her conflicts resolved. It's also a bit easier to write in a series over the long term because in a certain sense it's less work because you don't have to create everything from scratch. Cloak of Summoning was the 14th Cloak Mage book, but counting Cloak Games, it is the 26th overall book with Nadia as the main protagonist. By now, I'm very familiar with how Nadia thinks and acts and what she would do in any given situation and the rules of her world and setting are very well established. And so in some sense that makes it easier to write because I don't have to create everything from scratch again in terms of the worldbuilding. It's also in some ways easier to generate the sort of enthusiastic energy to write the book because people are very frequently asking when the next Nadia book is going to come out. So that is heartening for morale, so to speak, as one is writing the book, the knowledge that people are actively waiting to read it once it is finally published. #3: You can use ideas you weren't able to in the previous series or expand on existing characters. It's often said that there are more ideas than time for a writer. Interconnected series lets you use some of the ideas that didn't make sense to use in a previous series and lets you build on the world you have already created. It's exciting to watch characters grow and see how familiar places evolve as time has passed. For example, my Blades of Ruin series returns to the world of Sevenfold Sword in the Kingdom of Owyllain, but a century has passed and the humans from the previous series have died of old age. How did the culture of Owyllain evolve and change in that length of time? How did changes in the monarchy create new problems and enable new enemies and how else did the world change? For example, Sevenfold Sword did not have goblins when I wrote it, but in the century since, the goblins that appeared in the Dragontiarna series have migrated to Owyllain and set up their own new kingdom on the borders. This also is something I explicitly did in Cloak of Summoning. In one of the previous books, I mentioned that $34 million was stolen from one of the organizations aligned with the protagonist, so that is the major plot hook for this book, trying to figure out who stole that money and why. In addition, I'm able to expand on several ideas from the previous books, such as the Forerunner, Grayhold, and some of the other characters and expand on them and use them in the book in a way I wasn't really able to in previous books. So being able to do that as a writer is very enjoyable. #4: A series is often easier to market. New series are famously much harder to market than a continuation or interconnected series. It's easier to hook people when there is some amount of familiarity involved. After all, after 171 books, I've started a few new series from scratch and it is definitely harder to get those off the ground than it is to do say, book seven in an ongoing series. Returning to the previous example of the show The Paper, there's a reason that Oscar was featured heavily in the trailers and the promotional materials for the news series, despite being really a secondary character in the show instead of a lead character. Featuring Oscar in the promotions for the new show was a great shorthand for what type and style of show The Paper was going to be, and it made people more interested in the new series than they might have been otherwise. Given that The Paper was apparently renewed for a second season and did well enough to merit a second season, I think that strategy paid off. However, having an interconnected series may be a disadvantage and it may cause you problems. So here are five potential pitfalls and problems to be managed. #1: Managing reader expectations. One thing that can make interconnected series difficult is when your new series diverges from the expectations that readers have based on the previous series. They might feel frustrated when a character has changed significantly and acts differently than they might have before, or if there was a conflict that does not meet the way that something might have happened in a previous series. This can be potentially tricky because for the series to work, for the stories to be interesting, the characters have to evolve and change and grow and experience setbacks, but at the same time, you don't want to drift too far from what drew readers to the series in the first place. I've had a couple of times in my own series when people were not happy about specific plot points in Frostborn or Sevenfold Sword or Silent Order or The Ghosts or Cloak Mage. I think there are two ways to look at that. The first way is what you don't want to do, and this would be an example of what you should avoid. There's a story I read about a Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master who had been running a campaign with his players for two years and it all had the same characters and all the characters had leveled up together, but one of the players was moving away to a new part of the country. So at the last session, the player character in question decided to murder all the other players as he left (their characters rather, not real life murder, of course). Just because he could, just because he felt like being a jerk. That would be the very extreme end of what you do not want to do. It's best to never act out of spite. The better version of that is if you are writing a long series and you have a clear artistic vision about what you want to happen with it, in terms of character development or major plot events or even major characters who get killed, it's best to stick to that and not waffle. Yes, you are going to tick off some people. That is essentially inevitable. If you are going to write something, no matter what you write, it's going to annoy somebody, but it's best to have a clear artistic vision and stick to it. And if you do have dramatic plot developments, it's best to establish them well in advance and then to deal with the consequences as well, because you want to avoid as much "handwavium" as possible. So I think the key to managing reader expectations is to be as transparent as possible. I've had people asking me for the next Cloak Mage book already, even though the new one's only been out for like two days and I've said repeatedly that I'll probably start working on it in May once Dragon-Mage becomes my main project and to also be as reasonable as possible in the writing in terms of making sure everything makes sense as you write it. #2: A second disadvantage is that you may need to help the reader in terms of glossaries, summaries, character lists, et cetera. If a series continues characters, plots, and locations from a previous series, it can be helpful to provide glossaries, plot summaries, or character lists to help refresh their memories or to explain something to a reader who has not read the previous series. Although an interconnected series should largely stand on its own as much as possible, people still feel slighted if there's a reference to something they don't remember or know. In my own books, I have often included a footnote if a reference contains a plot point from a previous book. I've done this in Ghost Armor, Shield War, and Cloak Mage a couple of times, though I haven't done it in Blades of Ruin because it's set a century after the other books. People have responded favorably to those, though I have to admit Cloak of Summoning doesn't have any just because I simply forgot to do them. So I may need to remind myself to do that once we get to Cloak of Frost. But people have responded well to that. I've also done glossaries of characters and glossaries of locations at the end of, let's see, Frostborn, Sevenfold Sword, Dragontiarna, The Shield War, and Ghost Armor and people found those helpful. I may do that for other series if they get long enough to require it. I have seen some authors include summaries of previous books at the start of their new books. I've even seen some traditionally published books that do that as well. I've never done that. I'm not sure if that's a good idea or not. I'm not saying it's a bad idea. I feel like the book should stand as much on its own as possible. If you need to include the summary at the beginning, there might be something wrong, but on the other hand, some people do like those and do find them helpful. So I think that may come to a "your mileage may vary" experience. #3: The potential disadvantage number three would be adding new characters and evolving old ones. The danger of an interconnected series with a new cast of characters is that readers may not like the new ones as much or they feel cheated that their favorite characters are not there. Having at least one character return gives the reader an audience and anchor while they meet the new characters. It's important to evolve returning characters, but it's also a fine balance to make sure they don't change in a way that's forced or artificial. The famously bad examples of this are the legacy characters in the Star Wars sequel trilogy where the filmmakers made Luke and Han into Sad Old Losers just to make the new characters look better by comparison and that did not work out so well in terms of the movie's reception. The personality needs to reflect what is happening in the new series without sacrificing what readers like best about them from the previous series, which seems to be what happened in the Star Wars sequels. Returning again to The Paper, if Oscar had suddenly become a cheery and high energy middle manager instead of remaining true to his original personality of a slightly prickly and judgmental accountant, it wouldn't have felt true to viewers of The Office who spent nearly a decade with that character. Instead, he remains pretty close to what viewers remember, cautious based on his previous experience with the documentary film crew at work and as the first season goes on, philosophical about the passage of time and his relationship with the documentary crew who have been part of his life for so long, which is a good example of character evolution. I actually think the recent Ghostbusters movies are also a good example of that where the focus is on the new characters, but the legacy characters from the original Ghostbusters movies return and they act as sort of a mentors and sort of guiding authority figures for the new characters. #4: A fourth potential difficulty is gaining new readers with an interconnected series. Many readers have been burned by interconnected series that claim to be standalone, but as they are reading it, they feel lost in allusions to prior events or feel like they're missing information. It's important that even interconnected series stands on its own for readers and that references to the past book actively serve the plot of the current one. Many readers are also completionists and will want to start interconnected series from the first possible starting point. And I've already talked about that with Frostborn and Sevenfold Sword, which makes them less likely to start an interconnected series since they're possibly committing to a huge multiple series at once. #5: And that leads to the fifth and possibly the most serious disadvantage of a long interconnected series like that, what I've called before Marvel Continuity Lockout Syndrome. I've done a previous podcast episode on what I call Marvel Continuity Lockout Syndrome, which refers to the MCU movies. Essentially, a series of interconnected series can go on for so long and reference so many things that it feels daunting for someone to start. The idea of having to catch up or doing homework on dozens of items in order to watch or read something is unbearable for a lot of busy people and most people's memories can't sustain a few decades of content like the Marvel Cinematic Universe now has. This is one reason, in fact, it's probably the main reason that I started the Half Elven Thief series because of Marvel Continuity Lockout Syndrome. I had written Frostborn, Sevenfold Sword, Dragontiarna, Dragonskull and The Shield War. This is this long interconnected series, but I was worried that Marvel Continuity Lockout was affecting its ability to draw in new readers. So I started Half-Elven Thief, which is completely separate and new, and it's done quite well, and I think partly because it doesn't have the sheer daunting scale of someone looking at over 50 connected books set in Andomhaim and Owyllain. To mitigate this as much as possible, I think it's best to make absolutely sure that references to the past series are only necessary for driving the plot of the current one, and that they don't make the story unnecessarily complicated. You can avoid this by following the good rules of story structure. Make sure the protagonist of the book has an interesting conflict that they have to struggle to overcome, and that the central point of the conflict isn't references to past books. So to sum up, interconnected series are a great way to build loyal readers and create more complex characters in worlds. It's becoming more popular in the publishing world in works like Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere, which proves that readers are willing to read long and sometimes only loosely interconnected series to keep experiencing a world they enjoy. Just be aware of the potential pitfalls and guard against them as best you can, which fortunately can be done with a proper story structure and a little foresight. 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 your review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

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In this week's episode, I take a historical digression to look at the four major Thomases of the English Reformation - Thomas Wolsey, Thomas More, Thomas Cromwell, and Thomas Cranmer. This coupon code will get you 25% off the ebooks in the Dragonskull series at my Payhip store: QUEST25 The coupon code is valid through March 9 2026. So if you need a new ebook this winter, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 292 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is February 27th, 2026. Today we are taking a digression into history by looking at the four Thomases of the English Reformation (with one bonus Thomas). We'll also have Coupon of the Week and a progress update on my current writing and publishing projects. First up, let's do Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 25% off the ebooks in the Dragonskull series at my Payhip store. That coupon code is QUEST25 and as always, the links to the store and the coupon code will be available in the show notes of this episode. This coupon code is valid through March 9th, 2026. So if you need a new ebook this winter, we have got you covered. Now for an update on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. I am very nearly done with Cloak of Summoning. As of this recording, I am 35% of the way through the final editing pass. This episode should be coming out on, let's see, March the 2nd. I'm hoping Cloak of Summoning will be available a few days (hopefully like one or two days) after this episode goes live, but we'll see how things go. In any event, it should be out in very early March, which is not far away at this point. I'm also 14,000 words into Blade of Wraiths, the fourth book in my Blades of Ruin epic fantasy series. Hopefully that will be out in April, if all goes well. That's my secondary project right now, but once it gets promoted to primary project once Cloak of Summoning is available, my new secondary project will be Dragon Mage, which will be the sixth book in the Rivah Half-Elven Thief series. I'm looking forward to that since it is going to bring to an end a lot of ongoing plot threads. So it should be quite a fun book to write and hopefully to read. That should hopefully be out in May or possibly June, depending on how things go. In audiobook news, Cloak of Titans, the audiobook narrated by Hollis McCarthy, should be available in more audiobook stores than it was this time last week, though it's still not on Amazon, Audible, or Apple. Brad Wills is working on recording Blade of Storms and I think the first six chapters are done. Hopefully we should have those audiobooks available to you before too much longer. So that is where I'm at with my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. 00:02:18 Main Topic: The Four Thomases of the English Reformation Now without further ado, let's get to our main topic and it's time for another of my favorite topics overall, a digression into obscure points of history. I've mentioned before that Wolf Hall (both the TV show and the book) is a lot easier to understand if you are at least passingly familiar with the key figures of the English Reformation, which happened during the reign of King Henry VIII. But who were these key figures? I had a history professor who said that to understand the English Reformation, you need to know about the four Thomases of the English Reformation: Thomas Wolsey, Thomas More, Thomas Cromwell, and Thomas Cranmer, since each one of them altered events in a major way. Fun fact: only one of the four died from natural causes and right before he was about to go on trial for treason, which would have likely ended with his execution. The English Reformation was a tumultuous time and the Tudor court was not a place for the faint of heart or the morally scrupulous. So let's talk about the four Thomases and one bonus Thomas today. But first to understand them, we should look at three background trends that converged and boiled over during their lifetimes. #1: Henry VIII needs an heir. King Henry VIII was quite famously married six times and executed two of his wives in his quest for a male heir. To the modern era, this sounds odd and chauvinistic, but one of the errors of studying history is assuming that the residents of the past had any interest in 21st century standards of behavior. By the standards of Henry's time, having a male heir to assume the kingdom after his death was absolutely vital. In fact, an argument could be made that Henry was attempting to act responsibly by going to such lengths to father a male heir, though naturally he went about it in a spectacularly destructive and self-absorbed way. Remember, Henry's father, Henry VII, came to the throne after a 30-year civil war, and there were noble families that thought they had a better claim to the throne than Tudors and would be happy to exercise it. A good comparison is that the lack of a male heir for Henry VIII was as serious a crisis as a disputed presidential election in 21st century America would be. You can see evidence for this in Henry's famous jousting accident in 1536. For a few hours, people were certain that he was dead or was about to die, and this incident caused a brief constitutional crisis. If Henry died, who would rule? His daughter, Mary, who he had just declared a bastard? His young daughter Elizabeth from Anne Boleyn? His bastard son, Henry FitzRoy? A regent? One of the old families who thought they had a claim to the throne? Now, these are the sort of questions that tend to get decided by civil wars, which nobody wanted. So Henry needed a male heir and it weighed on him as a personal failure that he had been unable to produce one, which was undoubtedly one of the reasons he concluded that several of his marriages had been cursed by God and needed to be annulled. Though, of course, one of Henry's defining traits was that his self-absorption was such that nothing was ever his fault, but a failing of those around him. #2: The Reformation is here. At the same time Henry was beginning to have his difficulties, the Protestant Reformation exploded across Europe. The reasons for the Reformation were manifold. There was a growing feeling across all levels of society that the church was corrupt and more concerned about money than tending to Christ's flock, a feeling not helped by the fact that several of the 15th and 16th century popes were essentially Renaissance princelings more interested in luxury, money, and expanding the power of the papal states than in anything spiritual. Many bishops, archbishops, abbots, and other high prelates acted the same way. The situation the early 16th century church found itself in was similar to American higher education today. Many modern professors and administrators go about their jobs quietly, competently, and diligently, but if you want to find examples of corruption, folly, and egregious waste in American higher education, you don't have to try very hard. Reformers could easily find manifold examples of clerical and papal corruption to reinforce their arguments. Additionally, nationalism was beginning to develop as a concept, as was the idea of the nation state. People in England, Scotland, Germany, and other countries began to wonder why they were paying tithes to the church that went to build beautiful buildings in Rome and support the lavish lifestyle of the papal court when that money might be better spent at home. For that matter, the anti-clericalism of the Reformation was not new and had time to mature. At the end of the 14th century, Lollardy was a proto-Protestant movement in England that challenged clerical power. In the early 15th century, the Hussite wars in Bohemia following the teachings of Jan Hus were a preview of the greater Reformation to come. Papal authority had been severely damaged by the Great Schism at the end of the 14th and the start of the 15th century when two competing popes (later expanded to three) all tried to excommunicate each other and claim control of the church. In the aftermath, Renaissance Humanists had begun suggesting that only the Bible was the proper source and guide for Christianity, and that papal authority and many of the church's practices were merely human traditions that had been added later and were not ordained by God. A lot of the arguments of the Reformation had their earliest form from the writers of the 15th century. Essentially, the central argument of the Reformation was that the believer's personal relationship with God is the important part of Christianity and doesn't need to be mediated through ordained priests in the official sacraments of the church, though such things were still important. Of course, all the various reformers disagreed with each other about just how important and what the nature of that relationship was, how many sacraments there should be, and what the precise relationship between the individual, the church, and the state should be (and that argument got entangled with many other issues like nationalism), but that was a central crux of the Reformation. So all these competing pressures have been building up, and when Martin Luther posted his statements for debate on church reform in October of 1517, it was the equivalent of lighting a match in a barn that had been stuffed full of sawdust and was suffering from a natural gas leak. #3: The printing press. So why did Luther's action kick off the Reformation as we know it and not the other proto-Protestant movements we mentioned? I think the big part of that is the printing pass, perhaps the biggest part. The printing press did not exist during the early proto-Protestant movements, which meant it was a lot harder for the ideas of reform to spread quickly. The Lollards in particular wanted to translate the Bible into English instead of Latin, but the Bible is a big book and that is a lot of copying to do by hand. In 1539, after a lot of encouragement from Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII decreed that an English Bible should be placed at every church in England. In 1339, that would have been an impossible amount of copying by scribes. In 1539, thanks to the printing press, it was essentially on the scale of the government embarking on a mid-sized industrial project, perhaps a bit of a logistical and organizational challenge and you have to deal with contractors, but by no means impossible. The printing press made it possible for the various arguments and pamphlets of the Reformers to spread quickly throughout Europe. Luther published tracts on a variety of religious and political topics for the rest of his life, and those tracks were copied, printed, and sold throughout Europe. In fact, he had something of a flame war with Thomas More over Henry VIII's "Defense of the Seven Sacraments". Kings and governments frequently tried to suppress printers they didn't like, but the cat was out of the bag and the printing press helped drive the Reformation by spreading its ideas faster than had previously been possible. AI bros occasionally compare modern large language model AIs to the printing press as an irreversible technological advancement, but one should note that the printing press of the 16th century did not require an entire US state's worth of electricity and an unlimited supply of water. So those were some of the undercurrents and trends leading up to the English Reformation. With that in mind, let's take a look at our four Thomases. #1: Thomas Wolsey. Cardinal Thomas Wolsey was Henry's right hand man during the first 20 years of his reign and essentially the practical ruler of England during that time. He started his career in Henry's reign as the almoner, essentially in charge of charity, and it ended up becoming the Lord Chancellor of England. Since Henry was not super interested in actually doing the hard work of government, Wolsey ended up essentially running the country while Henry turned his full enthusiasm towards the more ceremonial aspects of kingship. Wolsey was an example of the kind of early 16th Century church prelate we mentioned above, more of a Renaissance princeling than a priest. However, as Renaissance princelings went, you could do worse than to have been ruled by someone like Wolsey. And if you were a king, you would be blessed to have a lieutenant as diligent in his work as the Cardinal. Granted, Wolsey did amass a large fortune for himself, but he frequently patronized the arts, education and the poor, pursued some governmental reforms, and deftly maintained England's position in the turbulent diplomacy of the time. He was also much more forgiving in questions of religious dissent than someone like Thomas More. Wolsey was the most powerful man in England at his apex, and the nobility hated it for him because his origins were common. So long as he had Henry's favor, Wolsey was untouchable and the nobility couldn't move against him. But the royal favor came to an end as Henry's marriage to Catherine of Aragon was unable to produce a son. Since Catherine had previously (and briefly) been married to his older brother Arthur before Arthur's death, Henry became convinced (or succeeded in convincing himself) that his marriage was cursed by God for violating the prohibition against sleeping with your brother's wife in the book of Leviticus. His eye had already fallen on Anne Boleyn and Henry wanted an annulment and not a divorce in his marriage with Catherine. In the eyes of God, he would never have been married at all, and then he could marry Anne Boleyn with a clear conscience. Here, Wolsey's gift for diplomacy failed him, but perhaps it was an impossible task. Catherine of Aragon was the aunt of Emperor Charles V, who at the time was the most powerful man in Christendom. All of Wolseley's efforts to persuade the pope to annul the marriage failed, partly because the pope had already given Henry VIII dispensation to marry his brother's widow. Wolsey's failure eroded his support with the king. Anne Boleyn likewise hated Wolsey partly because she believed he was hindering the annulment, and partly because he had blocked her from marrying the Earl of Northumberland years before she had her eyes set upon Henry. Finally, Henry stripped Wolsey of his office of Lord Chancellor, and Wolsey retired to York to take up his role as archbishop there. Wolsey's popularity threatened Henry and Anne, so Henry summoned him back to London to face treason charges. Perhaps fortunately for Wolsey, he died of natural causes on the journey back to London. His replacement as Lord Chancellor was Thomas More, the next of our major for Thomases. #2: Thomas More. More was an interesting contrast-a Renaissance Humanist who remained a staunch Catholic, even though Renaissance Humanists in general tended towards proto-Protestantism or actual Protestantism. He was also in some ways oddly progressive for his time. He insisted on educating his daughters at a time was considered pointless to educate women about anything other than the practical business of household management. Anyway, More's training as a lawyer and a scholar led him to a career in government. He held a variety of posts under Henry VIII, finally rising to become the Lord Chancellor after Wolsey. In the first decades of his brain, Henry was staunchly Catholic and despised Protestantism, in particular, Lutheranism in general and Martin Luther in particular. In 1521, Henry published "Defense of the Seven Sacraments" against Luther, and More helped him write it to an unknown degree. In their dislike for all forms of Protestantism, More and Henry were in harmony at this point. More was involved in hunting down heretics (i.e. Protestants) and trying to convince them to recant. During his time as the Lord Chancellor, More ended up sending six people to be burned at the stake for heresy, along with the arrest and interrogations of numerous others. This rather clashes with his "humanist man of letters" aspect, but More was undoubtedly convinced he was doing the right thing. And while he might have believed in education, he most definitely did not believe in freedom of conscience in several areas. To be fair to More, in the view of many at the time, Protestants, especially Anabaptists, were dangerous radicals. Likely More viewed hunting heretics in the same way as some modern politicians view hunting down covert terrorist cells or surveilling potential domestic terrorists. Harsh measures true, but harsh measures allegedly necessary for the greater good of the nation. However, the concord between More and Henry would not last. Henry wanted to set aside Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn, which More staunchly opposed. More especially opposed Henry breaking away from Rome and becoming head of an independent English Church. At first, More was able to save himself by maintaining his silence, but eventually Henry required all of his subjects take an oath affirming his status as head of the church. Thomas Cromwell famously led a deputation to try and change More's mind, but he failed. More refused, he was tried on specious treason charges, and beheaded in 1535. Later, the Catholic church declared him the patron saint of politicians. This might seem odd given that he oversaw executions and essentially did thought police stuff against Protestants, but let's be honest-it's rare to see a politician even mildly inconvenience himself over a point of principle, let alone maintain it until death when he was given every possible chance to change his mind. Probably the most famous fictional portrayals of More are A Man For All Seasons and Wolf Hall. I would say that A Man For All Seasons was far too generous to More, but Wolf Hall was too harsh. #3: Now for the third of our four Thomases, Thomas Cromwell. After Wolsey's fall and More's refusal to support Henry's desire to either annul his marriage to Catherine or to make himself head with the church so he couldn't annul the marriage, Thomas Cromwell rose become Henry's new chief lieutenant. Cromwell is both a fascinating but divisive figure. For a long time, he was cast as the villain in Thomas More's saga, but Hillary Mantel's Wolf Hall really triggered a popular reevaluation of him. Like A Man For All Seasons was too generous to More, I would say Wolf Hall was too generous to Cromwell. Nonetheless, I suspect Cromwell was and remained so divisive because he was so effective. He got things done on a scale that the other three Thomases of the English Reformation never quite managed. Cromwell's origins are a bit obscure. It seems he was either of non-noble birth or very low gentry birth and his father Walter Cromwell was a local prosperous tradesman in a jack of all trades with a reputation for litigiousness. For reasons that are unclear, Cromwell fled his birthplace and spent some time in continental Europe, possibly as a mercenary soldier. He eventually made his way to Italy and started working for the merchant families there, gaining knowledge of trade in the law, and then traveled to the Low Countries. When he returned to England, he became Cardinal Wolsey's right hand man. After Wolsey's fall, Cromwell went into Parliament and defended his master whenever possible. This loyalty combined with his significant talent for law and administration caught the eye of Henry and he swiftly became Henry's right-hand man. Amusingly, Cromwell never became Lord Chancellor like More or Wolsey, but instead accumulated many lesser offices that essentially allowed him to carry out Henry's directives as he saw a fit. Unlike More and Wolsey, Cromwell had strong Protestant leanings and he encouraged the king to break away from the Catholic Church and take control of the English Church as its supreme head. Henry did so. His marriage to Catherine of Aragon was nulled. The rest of Europe never accepted this until Catherine died of illness and it became a moot point. In 1533, he married Anne Boleyn. Like Cromwell, Anne had a strong Protestant bent and began encouraging reformers to take various offices and began pushing Henley to make more reforms than he was really comfortable doing. For example, Cromwell was one of the chief drivers behind the English Bible of 1539. This, combined with Anne's inability to give Henry a son, contributed to Anne's downfall. Unlike Catherine, she was willing to argue with Henry to his face and was unwilling to look the other way when he wanted a mistress, and this eventually got on Henry's nerves. Events are a bit murky, but it seems that Henry ordered Cromwell to find a way he could set aside Anne and Cromwell complied. Various men, including her own brother, were coerced and confessing to adultery with Anne on charges that were most likely fabricated and Anne's "lovers" and Anne herself were executed for treason in 1536. Cromwell had successfully used a technique that many modern secret police organizations and dictatorships employ- if you want to get rid of someone for whatever reason, accuse them of a serious crime, coerce them to a confession, and then have them executed. Joseph Stalin did basically the same thing when he purged the Old Bolsheviks after Lenin's death. Henry married Jane Seymour shortly after Anne's execution, and she finally gave Henry his long-waited son, though she died soon afterwards of postpartum complications. Cromwell also oversaw the dissolution of the English monasteries in the 1530s. Monasticism had become quite unpopular even before the Reformation, especially among humanist writers. The concentration of property in the hands of monasteries made for a ripe target. Using Parliament and with Henry's approval, the monasteries of England were dissolved, the monks and nuns pensioned off, and the various rich properties held by the monasteries were given to the king and his friends. Cromwell himself profited handsomely. This was essentially legalized theft, but there was nothing the monasteries could do about it. Cromwell pushed for more religious reforms, but that combined with the dissolution of the monasteries caused "The Pilgrimage of Grace" in 1537, a rebellion that Henry was able to put down through a combination of lies, stalling, outright bribery, and brutal repression under the Duke of Norfolk (more about him later). Cromwell was at the zenith of his power and influence, but his reformist bent and made him a lot of enemies. For that matter, Henry was increasingly uncomfortable with further religious changes. He wanted to be head of his own church, but essentially his own Catholic Church, not his own Reformed or Lutheran one. Cromwell's alignment with the reform cause gave his more traditionalist enemies a tool to use against him. Cromwell's foes had their chance in 1540 when Henry married his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves. Cromwell had heavily pushed for the match, hoping to make an alliance with the Protestant princes of Germany against the Catholic Holy Roman Emperor. For whatever reason, Henry took an immediate dislike to Anne and never consummated the marriage, which was swiftly annulled and Anne pensioned off. Henry blamed Cromwell for the failed marriage and Cromwell's enemies, particularly Duke of Norfolk and Bishop Gardiner of Winchester, were able to convince Henry to move against him. Cromwell was arrested, stripped of all the titles and property he had amassed, and executed in July of 1540. The sort of legal railroading process he had born against Anne Boleyn's alleged lovers and numerous other enemies of Henry's was used against him. This was one of the very few executions Henry ever regretted. Within a year, the French ambassador reported that Henry was raging that his counselors had misled him into putting to death the most faithful servant he had ever had. Once again, nothing was ever Henry's fault in his own mind. The fact that Henry allowed Cromwell's son Gregory to become a baron and inherit some of his father's land shows that he likely changed his mind about the execution. For once in his life, Henry was dead on accurate when he called Cromwell his "most faithful servant". He never again found a lieutenant with Cromwell's loyalty and skill. The remaining seven years of Henry's reign blundered from setback to setback and all the money Henry obtained from the dissolution of the monasteries was squandered in indecisive wars with France and Scotland. I think it's fair to say that the English Reformation would not have taken the course it did, if not for Cromwell. As ruthless and as unscrupulous as he could be, he nonetheless did seem to really believe in the principles of religious reform and push such policies whenever he could do so without drawing Henry's ire. #4: Now the fourth of our four major Thomases, Thomas Cranmer. If Thomas Cromwell did a lot of the political work of the English Reformation, then Thomas Cranmer wrote a lot of its theory. Cranmer was a scholar and something of a gentle-minded man, but not a very skillful politician. He seemed happy to leave the politicking to Cromwell. I think Cranmer would have been a lot happier as a Lutheran pastor in say, 1950s rural Nebraska. He could have married a farmer's daughter, had a bunch of kids, and presided at weddings, funerals, and baptisms where he could talk earnestly about Jesus and Christian virtues, and he probably would have written a few books on obscure theological points. But instead, Cranmer was destined to play a significant part in the English Reformation. He started as a priest and a scholar who got in trouble for marrying, but when his wife died in childbirth, he went back to the priesthood. Later, he became part of the team of scholars and priests working to get Henry's marriage to Catherine of Aragon annulled. While he was at university and later in the priesthood, he became fascinated by Lutheran ideas and became a proponent of reform. As with Cromwell, Henry's desire to marry Anne Boleyn gave Cranmer his great opportunity. Anne's family were also in favor of reform, and they arranged for Cranmer to become the new Archbishop of Canterbury. The new archbishop and the like- minded clerics and scholars laid the legal and theological groundwork for Henry to break with Rome and become head of the English church with Cranmer and the rest of the reform faction wanted to be used to push for additional church reforms. He survived the tumults of Henry's reign by total loyalty to the king – he mourned Anne Boleyn, but didn't oppose her execution (though he was one of the few who mourned for her publicly), did much the same when Cromwell was executed, and personally sent news of Catherine Howard's adultery to the king. Because of that, Cranmer had a great chance to pursue the cause of reform when Henry died and his 12-year-old son Edward VI became King. Edward's uncle Edward Seymour acted as the head of the King's regency council, and Seymour and his allies were in favor of reform. Cranmer was at last able to steer the English church in the direction of serious reform, and he was directly responsible for writing the Book of Common Prayer and several other key documents of the early Anglican church. But Cranmer's of luck ran out in 1553 when Edward VI died. Cranmer was part of the group that tried to put the Protestant Lady Jane Grey on the throne, but Henry's daughter Mary instead took the crown. Mary had never really wavered from her Catholicism despite immense pressure to do so, and she had last had a chance to do something about it. She immediately brought England back to Rome and started prosecuting prominent reform leaders, Cranmer among them. Cranmer was tried for treason and heresy and sentenced to be burned, but that was to be commuted if he recanted his views in public during a sermon, which he did. However, at the last minute, he thunderously denounced his previous recantation, asserted his reformist faith, and vowed that he would thrust the hand that signed the recantation into the flames first. Cranmer was immediately taken to be burned at the stake, and just as he promised, he thrust his hand into the flames, and his last word is that he saw heaven opening and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. Cranmer had spent much of his life trying to appease Henry while pushing as much reform as possible, but in his final moments, he had finally found his defiance. When Mary died and Elizabeth took the throne, she returned England to Protestantism. Elizabeth was much more pragmatic than her half siblings and her father ever were, so she chose the most expedient choice of simply rolling the English church back to as it was during Edward VI's time. Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer and religious articles, lightly edited for Elizabeth's sensibilities, became the foundational documents of the Anglican church. So these four Thomases, Thomas Wolsey, Thomas More, Thomas Cromwell, and Thomas Cranmer were central to the events of the English Reformation. However, we have one bonus Thomas yet. Bonus Thomas: Thomas Howard, the Duke of Norfolk. Thomas Howard was a powerful nobleman during the reign of Henry, and the Duke of Norfolk was frequently Henry's lieutenant in waging various wars and putting down rebellions. He was also the uncle of Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, Henry's second and fifth queens. He was also involved in nearly every major event of Henry's reign. So with all that, why isn't Norfolk as remembered as well as the other four Thomases of the English Reformation? Sometimes a man would be considered virtuous by the standards of the medieval or early modern age, yet reprehensible in ours. For example, for much of the Middle Ages, crusading was considered an inherently virtuous act for a knight, whereas in the modern age, it would be condemned as war mongering with a religious veneer. However, by both modern standards and Tudor standards, Thomas Howard was a fairly odious character. For all their flaws and the morally questionable things they did, Wolsey, More, Cromwell, and Cranmer were all men of conviction in their own ways. More and Cranmer explicitly died with their faith. Cromwell's devotion to the Protestant cause got him killed since he insisted on the Anne of Cleves match. Even Wolsey, for all that he enriched himself, was a devoted servant of Henry after his downfall never betrayed the king. By contrast, Norfolk was out for Norfolk. This wasn't unusual for Tudor nobleman, but Norfolk took it to a new level of grasping venality. He made sure that his daughter was married to Henry's bastard son, Henry FitzRoy, just in case FitzRoy ended up becoming king. He used both his nieces, Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard, to gain power and lands for himself, and then immediately turned against him once he became politically expedient. In fact, he presided over the trial where Anne Boleyn was sentenced to death. After the failure of the Anne of Cleve's marriage, Norfolk made sure to bring his young niece Catherine Howard to court to catch Henry's eye, and to use the Anne of Cleve's annulment as a lever to get rid of Thomas Cromwell. Both stratagems worked, and he attempted to leverage being the new Queen's uncle to bring himself to new power and riches, as he had with Anne Boleyn. Once Henry turned on Catherine Howard, Norfolk characteristically and swiftly threw his niece under the bus. However, as Henry aged, he grew increasingly paranoid and vindictive, and he had Norfolk arrested and sentenced to death on suspicion of treason. Before the execution could be carried out, Henry died, and Norfolk spent the six years of Edward VI's reign as a prisoner in the Tower of London. When Edward died and Mary took the throne, she released Norfolk since she was Catholic and Norfolk had always been a religious traditionalist suspicious of reform. He spent the remaining year of his life as one of Mary's chief advisors before finally dying of old age. As I often say, history can be a rich source of inspiration for fantasy writers, and the English Reformation is full of such inspiration. Wolsey, More, Cromwell, and Cranmer can all make excellent inspirations for morally ambiguous characters. For that matter, you can see why the reign of Henry VIII has inspired so many movies, TV shows, and historical novels. The real life events are so dramatic as to scarcely require embellishment. So that's it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show and thank you for listening as I went on one of my little historical digressions. I hope you found the show enjoyable. 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 we'll see you all next week.

In this week's episode, we take a look at hysteria over AI, and compare it to past religious movements like William Miller's Great Disappointment. This 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: RIVAH50 The coupon code is valid through March 2, 2026. So if you need a new audiobook this winter, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 291 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is February 28th, 2026, and today we're looking at AI hysteria and whether or not AI gives any actual benefits to people. We also have Coupon of the Week, progress updates on my current writing projects, and also Question the Week, where we talk to people about AI. But first, 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 (as excellently narrated by Leanne Woodward) at my Payhip store. That coupon code is RIVAH50. This coupon code will be valid through March 2, 2026. So if you need a new audiobook as we exit winter and come into spring, we have got you covered. Now let's have an update on my current writing and publishing and audiobook projects. I'm pleased to report that the rough draft of Cloak of Summoning is done. It turned out to be just about as long as Cloak of Worlds, maybe a thousand words shorter. I am about 20% through the first round of editing, and I am hopeful that that book will be out sometime in March, probably the first week of March if all go as well. I've also written a short story called Dragon Claw that newsletter subscribers will get for free in ebook format when Cloak of Summoning comes out, which as I said will hopefully be in early March. I'm also 11,000 words into Blade of Wraiths, the fourth book in my Blades of Ruin epic fantasy series, and that will be my main project once Cloak of Summoning is published. In audiobook news, the audiobook of Blade of Shadows (as narrated by Brad Wills) is now out at almost all the stores, so you can get it at Audible, Apple, Google Play, Kobo, and the other main stores. Cloak of Titans (as narrated by Hollis McCarthy) is done and is currently rolling out to the stores. I think as of right now, you can get it at Google Play, Kobo, and my own Payhip store, but it should be showing up on Audible and the other main stores before too much longer. So that is where I'm at with my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. 00:01:56 Question of the Week Now let's move on to Question of the Week. For the first Question of the Week of 2026 and this week's question: have you personally derived any benefits or experienced any negatives from the rise of generative AI? And this question was inspired by the topic of this week's post, obviously enough since we're talking about AI. I should note that this is a contentious topic with divergent opinions, and so I asked people to remain civil in the comments and they definitely were, so thank you for everyone for that. Now let's have some opinions on AI before I tell you how AI has positively and mostly negatively affected my life. Joachim says: I have not used AI for private purposes. My Con: My Chromebook might be obsolete rather sooner than later. In my company, we use an AI, which is helpful. It has all the knowledge articles, so you can ask, how do I do this or that? The company's Con: laptop prices are going up. Eddie says: My Cons are much the same as yours. My Pros are using it to create images for tabletop games to help players visualize monsters and NPCs. I have found it effective in turning voice to text meeting notes into meeting minutes and actions. Jesse says: Software engineer here. I have found it helpful when I'm working on something in a language I'm not as familiar with the syntax. As a "how I might do this" learning tool, it's not bad. As a "do this for me/vibe code" thing, no thanks…too much trust. John says: Yes and no. I was in an AI startup that stopped paying me and my team for two months then let us go. We're currently suing them for back pay, but the tech worked and is still working. I also work in ad tech. Devs are trying to get more productive using AI tools. It's hit and miss as far as I can tell, but using traditional machine learning and data science to optimize marketing has worked for decades and still works, but that's not what people consider to be AI nowadays. Also drove across the country last August and used ChatGPT to plan my trip, and that works splendidly. I think John might win here for largest negative in his comment though, to be fair, that's more for business reasons than for AI itself, though I, for his sake, I'm pleased he was able to use ChatGPT to plan his drive across the country and ChatGPT didn't send him driving off a cliff someplace. Jenny says: I'm so over everyone trying to push this "solution" on me. It's like protein enhanced foods. Stop trying to put protein and AI into everything. Just put it where it makes sense or let me choose it. My negative experiences far outweigh anything helpful. Jimmy says: I have quit using Google search. It never tried to find the answer that I asked for. It just returned what it felt like. Its answers usually matched the paid ads it led the list with. Rob says: Okay for meeting notes and rough drafting for job applications, et cetera. Other than that, seems to have limited use for me personally and is a nuisance on my phone, internet browser, et cetera. And finally, Randy says: my biggest Con is that the AI answers that pop up when I'm trying to search range between inaccurate and dangerously wrong. I suspect many people don't realize they aren't reading actual data when they see them. So thank you to everyone who shared their thoughts on that. For myself, I've mostly experienced negative things with AI and a few positive things though to be honest, both the positive and negative things were relatively minor in the greater scheme of things. So I shall list off the Pros and Cons of my experiences with generative AI. I should mention that none of my books, short stories, for sale audiobooks, or book covers contain any AI elements. If it says Jonathan Moeller on the cover and it's not on YouTube, then it is 100% human made. Now, the Pros and Cons. The Pros: Power Director 365, the video editing program I use for YouTube, has an "animated by AI" feature so I've used it to animate some of my book covers for use of Facebook ads with middling results at best. I used Google's Voice AI stuff to create AI voice versions of the Silent Order books and then put them on YouTube because I wanted to understand the technology. I'm not planning to ever do actual audiobook versions of Silent Order since they wouldn't make back any money, so I wasn't screwing a narrator out of work and the voices involved were licensed by Google, so there was no copyright infringement the way there is with companies like Anthropic. That said, I suspect this is less generative AI and simply a more advanced text to speech technology, which has been around forever. I mean, you could do text to speech back on the earliest versions of the Macintosh. I mean, ideally, I would like text to speech to just be a button in your ereader app of choice for accessibility reasons, and then you can purchase the audiobook if the text to speech was too bland. Overall, a lot of people listen to the AI versions on YouTube, but the listeners mostly complained about the synthetic voice and would've preferred a real narrator, unsurprisingly. Now onto the Cons. Facebook ads went from very effective to middling at best on a good day, thanks to their Advantage Plus AI. I am constantly bombarded by AI generated scam emails of several different varieties. I deleted twelve before I recorded this. The price of Microsoft Office went up, the price for RAM and GPUs went up due to data center hoarding them all. The price for electricity has gone up. Windows 11 and Microsoft Office's performance has gone down quite a bit due to forced AI integration. In fact, I got so annoyed at Windows 11, I switched to writing on a Mac Mini, which I suppose was a positive because I like the Mac Mini, but still. Google Search and all Google products in general are much less useful because of AI and the quality of information on the internet (already low) has gone down quite a bit due to the prevalence of AI slop. Admittedly, neither these Pros or Cons are majorly serious to me personally (with the possible exception of electricity prices going up), but the Cons definitely outweigh the Pros. I can confidently say I have derived no real benefit from generative AI, and I suspect a lot of other people could say the same, if they're honest. 00:07:27 Main Topic of the Week: William Miller, The Great Disappointment, and AI Now onto our related main topic this week, AI hysteria, William Miller, and The Great Disappointment. This past week there were numerous articles from and interviews with various AI bros saying that within 12 to 18 months, AI will replace white collar work and humanity must simply adjust. When I read these articles, I wasn't reminded of the Singularity, of AI, of Skynet and the Terminator, or anything technological. Instead, I thought of a preacher named William Miller who died about 190 years ago. William Miller came out of the Second Great Awakening, which was one of the waves of religious vitality and furor that grip America every so often. Miller almost died in combat as an officer in the War of 1812, and saw one of his men killed in front of him, which understandably left a lasting impression. His experiences led him to an examination of mortality that resulted in a fervent Baptist conversion. He also became convinced that he could calculate the date of Christ's return from the Bible and decided that Jesus Christ would return on October 22nd, 1844. By then, he had a substantial following, and on the day his followers gathered in their churches to await the End of Days and the judging of the living and the dead, many of them having already given away their possessions, but nothing happened. Miller's movement collapsed and most of his followers abandoned their beliefs, though some splinter groups eventually involved into the Adventist branch of American Protestantism, of which the Seventh Day Adventists are the most prominent. Nowadays, when Miller is discussed online, the usual tone is to laugh at the religious rubes from the benighted past, so unlike us enlightened and savvy moderns. But I think the truth is that Miller succumbed to a universal human impulse. Every generation thinks that it is going to be the last generation or the generation that will see the culmination of history, whether they're viewing that through a religious lens or a secular lens. For example, when I was in my early twenties, I knew a very religious woman my own age, who was convinced that the world had become so wicked that it would end by the time she was 30. A few years later, I met another woman who thought global warming would ensure the collapse of the ecosystem and the end of the food chain by the time we were 30. However, I have not been 30 for a rather long span of time now, and for better or for worse, the world grinds on. Nor is this an impulse limited to my own generation. People who came of age during the Cold War thought the world would end in nuclear fire during their lifetimes and a little after that from global cooling. Lesser examples could be seen in the Y2K scare in 2000. Throughout the Middle Ages and the early modern period, it was common for peasant revolts to be led by charismatic preachers who predicted that soon all thrones would be overthrown and Christ would return to judge the living and the dead. Because of all these examples, I'm certain there is a universal human impulse to believe that the world will end in our lifetimes. I think this comes partly from a combination of fear and hope, fear of the future and the end of the world and hope that one's life will be lifted out of the mundane in the final fulfillment of history. You don't have to get up and go to school or work tomorrow if the world ends, but the truth is that the world is most likely not going to end, and you and I are probably going to have to get up and go to work tomorrow. I think the hyperbole about AI comes from that same sort of apocalyptic impulse, this idea that one is living to see and participating in the apotheosis of history when what one is in fact doing is using a money losing chatbot that frequently gets things wrong. To be clear, AI isn't going to wipe out white collar work, and it isn't going to cause the collapse of society, though like cryptocurrency, it will cause a lot of harm without very much benefit. AI simply isn't good enough and doesn't do what does boosters say that it can do. There are numerous people who, in my opinion, are accurately explaining and pointing out the many flaws in AI and in the economic bubble it has created, just as there were people who predicted the fall of the Soviet Union, the dot-com bubble, the housing bubble, the criminal activities of FTX and the flaws of cryptocurrency, and were frequently derided as cranks until subsequent events prove them right. So why all the hyperbole around AI? I think part of it is the end of days impulse we discussed above. The rest of it, I'm afraid, is simple crass desire for money and power. Why are all these tech companies burning unfathomable sums of money on AI when it's obvious, painfully obvious, that the bubble is heading for a crash? After the dot-com crash of the early 2000s, the Internet companies that survived eventually evolved into the tech titans of our day (Amazon and Google come to mind). All these different AI companies and boosters are hoping that their company is the one that survives and becomes the next titan conglomerate of the 2030s. Admittedly, I think this is unlikely. I think that while the most probable outcome for the current model of AI, LLMs, and generative AI is that it ends up like cryptocurrency. For a while, crypto advocates thought that it would overthrow central banking and lead to unprecedented freedom and prosperity. However, while there are many valid criticisms to be made of central banking and fiat currency, one of their advantages is that that they do a good job of shutting down the kind of scams that crypto easily facilitates. For all the glowing promises of its boosters, the primary use case for cryptocurrency has been to cause economic disruptions and to facilitate crimes and scams. I suspect AI will probably degenerate down to a similar state once the bubble pops. The technology won't go away, but it can't do all the miraculous things its backers promise. The money is going to run out eventually and it will inflict a lot of economic damage on its way out. And like crypto, AI will mostly have negative uses. Likely its most common use cases will be to help students cheat on exams, make stupid political memes where someone's least favorite politician (whoever that is) is shaking hands with Emperor Palpatine or Thanos or whoever, engage in mass copyright infringement, and to scam seniors out of their savings. So if you are disturbed by the rhetoric around AI, take heart. When you read an article from someone announcing the glories of AI and discussing how all of civilization will have to rework itself around AI, remember that the person in question is most likely seeking money or power, or are like William Miller's followers the day before October 22nd, 1844. 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 we'll see you all next week.  

For Black History Month, this week's Dark Nation Radio showcases black musical artists of the dark music scene. Among those in the mix are Black Rose Burning, Urban Heat, O.Children, The Light Asylum, The Shadow Matjlis, The Veldt, Algiers, The Mystic Underground, Cemetery Sex, Jordan Fiction, Scary Black, Kali Dreamer, Tunde Adebimpe, The Ire, Val Cain, Fearing, Shadow Age, Bastet, Jah PHNX, Psychic Graveyard, Ganser, In Retrograde, Sisters of Shaddowwe, Sailem, Madame St. Beatrice, The Wraith, and Genesis Owusu. It's a very good show—I hope you'll give it a spin. Thank you for your support! DJ cypher's Dark Nation Radio Playlist 22 February 2026 Black History Month Broadcast Black Rose Burning, “Under Twin Suns (acoustic)” O.Children, “Ruins” Urban Heat, “Seven Safe Spaces” The Light Asylum w/ Heavy Halo, “Die Cast Down” The Shadow Matjlis, “Love in Flames (Adoration Destroyed mix)” Cemetery Sex, “Pain” Scary Black, “The Fallacy of Worth” Ganser, “Black Sand” The Veldt, “The Everlasting Gobstopper” Jordan Fiction, “Killing Time (Exhumed)” In Retrograde, “Samsara” Jah PHNX, “Antichrist” Shadow Age, “Hooky” Kali Dreamer, “Bathory Bomb” Madame St. Beatrice, “Lost in Confusion” Algiers, “Death March” Genesis Owusu, “Leaving the Light” Psychic Graveyard, “Haunted by Your Bloodline” Bastet, “Nightmare” Tunde Adebimpe, “Magnetic” The Mystic Underground, “Darkness Hides at Dawn” Tom Morello & the Bloody Beet Roots, “Keep Going” The Ire, “Bacchic Dance” Sisters of Shaddowwe, “Aranya” Sailem, “STFU” My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult, “Days of Swine & Roses” Val Cain, “Blood” The Wraith, “Only Shadows Remain” Fearing, “Destroyer” THOT Squad, “Pound Cake” Serpenteens, “The Superhuman Monster Show” DJ CYPHER'S DARK NATION RADIO—25 years strong! **Live Sundays @ 9 PM Eastern US on Spirit of Resistance Radio sorradio.org **Recorded @ http://www.mixcloud.com/cypheractive **Downloadable @ http://www.hearthis.at/cypheractive **Questions and material for airplay consideration to darknationradio[at] gmail[dot]com **Facebook @ http://www.facebook.com/groups/darknationradio

As a kid, Teresa could see dead people. Family members, friends. Until one day, she met a stranger who had come back from the other side with a message for her.Teresa Moorleghen is the founder of Coastline Pilates in Santa Cruz. She still sees dead people.Produced by Eliza Smith and Anna Sussman, original score by Leon Morimoto, artwork by Sanaa Khan. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.