Episode 150: Major Milestone Show!

The Pulp Writer Show

In this week's episode, we celebrate reaching the 150th episode of the Pulp Writer Show! I look back at the ten most popular episodes of the show.

We also answer reader questions and discuss reasons for conceding in Magic The Gathering: Arena.

TRANSCRIPT

00:00:00: Introduction and Writing Updates

Hello everyone. Welcome to Episode 150 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is March the 17th, 2023 and today we're going to celebrate this major milestone of a show. We're going to look back at the Top 10 most popular episodes of The Pulp Writer Show and discuss them a little bit.

We also have some updates to my current writing projects, a little bit of discussion about Magic: The Gathering, and we'll answer a few questions from readers. So let's kick off by discussing my current writing projects. I am very nearly done with Dragonskull: Wrath of the Warlock. I'm on the final pass of editing, and this episode will probably go live on March 19th. And if all goes well, Wrath of the Warlock should be available at all ebook stores shortly thereafter. So I just got to push through the final phase of editing and then we're there.

The audiobook of the first book in the series, Dragonskull: Sword of the Squire, is almost finished. That hopefully should be coming out before the end of March as well. I just got to finish proof-listening to a few more chapters and then we should be there. After that, my next major project will be Cloak of Dragonfire. I am 7,000 words into that. I'm also 7,500 words into Silent Order….which one am I on?...Silent Order: Thunder Hand, which is the thirteenth book and after thirteen of those books apparently I can no longer remember which one I'm actually writing. That will come out sometime later this year and I'm also going to start on Sevenfold Sword Online: Leveling, the second book in the series, and that will come out at some point this year, hopefully.

00:01:42: Reader Questions

Let's start off with some questions from readers. Our first question is from Roger, who asks: I have a Kobo ebook reader. I've been buying your books from Rakuten Kobo for years. It seems that they do not distribute your newest ebooks anymore. Do you have a new distributor for the format Kobo ebook? Thanks, Roger. I'm glad you have enjoyed my books. In answer to your question, nearly all my books, as far as I'm currently aware, are available on all the international Kobo stores, including the newest ones, which will be Dragonskull, Cloak Mage, and the Sevenfold Sword Online book. The only exception is the Demonsouled series, which is currently in Kindle Unlimited till mid-April, but other than that (those 15 books), the other 128 or so should all be available on Kobo, and nearly all the short stories. So if there's a specific book you can't get to on Kobo, let me know and I'll double check, but I'm pretty sure you can get my newest books on Kobo, as far as far as I'm aware.

Our next question is from Vincent who asks: Hi, finally read through Ghost in the Sun and loved it. Thanks for writing it. Is The Ghost series finished? Thanks. Thanks, Vincent. I am glad you enjoyed reading the books and in answer your question, I am planning to return to the Caina series at some point in the second half of this year. I just want to finish Dragonskull first and that will have a nice convenient tie in into our next question.

Our next question is from Charles who asks about the Dragonskull series. How many more in this series? Wrath of the Warlock, which I was just talking about earlier, will be the seventh one and there will be a total of nine books in the series, which I am hoping to finish up by the end of summer 2023, but we will see how the rest of this year goes.

Now before we get to our main topic, let's talk a little bit about something fun which I've been playing recently, Magic: The Gathering Arena.

00:03:38 Magic: The Gathering Arena

I've talked about it on the show before and one of the handy features about Magic: The Gathering Arena is the ability to concede the match at any time. You're doing this towards the end or late middle of the game if you realize your cards just aren't going to allow you to win, or if you find yourself in an untenable position and don't see a way forward to victory. It's not all that different from resigning from a game in chess once you realize that checkmate is inevitable.

However, if you've played Magic: The Gathering Arena for any length of time, you will notice that sometimes people concede very abruptly towards the beginning of the match, or even after the first few turns when the outcome of the game is still very much in question, or even sometimes when they’re winning. It seems mysterious on the other end of the experience, though the gold and experience points from a win rather dulls the edge of the mystery.

But puzzle over it no longer! I've conceded abruptly many, many times, and it's almost always because real life intruded. Here are just a few of the reasons I have conceded:

I was cooking a meal with a long preparation time and thought I could squeeze in a match while waiting for something to boil, settle or bake. This turned out to be incorrect.

There was a weird noise that I had to investigate. When you own a house and you hear a weird noise, the reaction isn't, huh, what a strange noise. Rather, it's…what was that noise and how much is it going to cost to fix? Though to be fair, if you rent, you can report any problems to your landlord or rental company, who will then ignore them and raise your rent.

There was someone at the door.

A package arrived at the door, and since it was raining, sleeting, snowing, or this winter, some combination of all three at once, I need to bring that package off the front step immediately.

An important phone call that I need to take has come in.

A phone call that turns out not to be so important has come in.

If you play the game with the volume cranked up to maximum, it makes a lot of random noises. The goblins growl, the monsters roar, the cards makes swooping noises when you play them, and so forth. Since my tablet is easily portable and has good speakers, I was using the game to rouse a family member from sleep with the volume cranked up to maximum, and we really need to get out the door and into the car. Time to concede!

Someone needs tech support.

Sometimes I play the game and think, you know what, I would just rather play Skyrim or Master of Magic.

So those are just some of the many reasons I have conceded that the Magic: The Gathering Arena match. And when your opponent abruptly concedes on you, perhaps one of those reasons is at play as well.

When I talked about this on Facebook, reader Scott had this to say: I've done it because I just need to play a card or a few to complete the daily. That is a good point. The game offers what's called daily quests where if you play like 20 cards of a specific type or attack with 25 creatures, you get a reward of gold and experience points.

And a couple of times I've played games without conceding, even though I knew I was going to lose just because I wanted to play, you know, like two or three more cards to get me over the limit for the Daily Quest. So it's a very clever little mechanic to incentivize people to keep playing the keep playing the game.

00:06:24: Main Topic: Looking back at the last 150 episodes of The Pulp Writer Show

Now on to our main topic of the week: looking back at the last 150 episodes of The Pulp Writer Show. I started this show in Halloween of 2019. That was when the first episode went live, and in the 3 1/2 years since then, this is the 150th episode and that totals up to about 46 hours of talking into this microphone.

So thanks for listening, everyone and coming along for this very strange ride. To look back at the past 150 episodes and three and half years, I thought I'd look at the top 10 most popular episodes of the show, though I'd be interesting to look back at those and see which episodes are the most popular and to have a few words about each of them.

So of the top ten episodes, the most popular episode of all time is Episode 1, which came out on October 31st 2019. Oh man, that was a while ago. I remember I recorded those first couple episodes on the microphone on my Microsoft Surface because I did not have the microphone I'm currently using now, so that's why the quality on the first couple of episodes was pretty weak.

You know, looking back, it's almost like 2019 in hindsight, seems like the good old days. I mean, at the time it was a very busy, at times challenging year. But you know back then, we had no COVID, my books were selling better than they are now, there was no generative AI, I was in better shape, I have a couple of a couple of problems I have now I didn't have back then. So we have been looking back at 2019 at the good old days, but it's a good sign that enough people are all listening to the first episode and wanting to get further in to the show.

The second most popular episode of all time is Episode 120, Using Dialogue to Create Distinctive Characters, and that was released on May 6th, 2022. So it is gratifying to see that the second most popular episode of all time is one that I've released relatively recently. So hopefully I have marginally improved as a podcaster since then.

The topic of that episode, if I remember right, was how you can use dialogue, not just as a tool of conversation, but as a tool of distinct characterization, that it's one of the ways you can use to distinguish your characters from one another, because if you think about it, people talk very differently. A college professor of philosophy is going to have very different speech patterns than a, say, car mechanic or a bank teller or a teenage girl, and you can use the different ways that people talk in order to help distinguish their characters.

By this I don't mean don't use phonetic accents in prose. I hate it when people do phonetic accents in prose where every word is misspelled in order to convey the idea of a regional or local accent. HP Lovecraft used to do that, and he was terrible at it. Great horror writer, very bad at accents. But there are subtler and more distinct ways you can use to distinguish characters using dialogue. It's a very interesting topic and given that it's the second most popular topic in the time I’ve been doing the show, it’s clearly one that other writers have an interest in as well.

The third most popular episode of all time was Episode 38, Reader Questions and Answers, and that was the first time I did something that would become a regular topic on the show, where I read a bunch of questions from readers and or listeners, and then discuss the answers on the show. I can see why many podcasters do that because it is a great and easy way to generate content. So if you have a question you want answered, leave a comment on my website or Facebook page and who knows, it might be the topic we discuss on the show.

The fourth most popular episode of all time was Episode 2: NaNoWriMo, and that was the very first time I talked about NaNoWriMo, which is the short way of saying National Novel Writing Month, which takes place every November, and that is when you're supposed to write 50,000 words or complete your novel, whichever you can do. And it is often a launchpad, so to speak, for beginning writers to find the energy to finally finish a novel for the first time, or to finish writing a book for the first time.

Myself, I don't do NaNoWriMo too often, because for me, every month is National Novel Writing Month. I mean, I talk about all the different books I was working on at the start of the show. And so I have enough writing to fill many months to come, but I am not one of those people who bashes NaNoWriMo. I think it's a good exercise for both beginning and more advanced writers, if you want to try it and get into writing a novel for the first time.

The most popular episode of all time is Episode 91, Introducing the Dragonskull Series, which went live on October the 11th, 2021, and that is where I was discussing in the Dragonskull series, which I was about to publish for the first time and the thought process that went into it. At that point I had written Frostborn and Sevenfold Sword and Dragontiarna, which was 37 books with Ridmark as the main character, so I wanted to take some thought and think about what I was going to do next and what kind of story I wanted to write. And so I ended up writing a story about Ridmark’s eldest son.

But that has been the bestselling series of mine for the last two years since it came out and so clearly that was a good choice and I'm very much looking forward to publishing Dragonskull: Wrath of the Warlock next week.

Let's see…the 6th most popular episode is Episode 31, Six Tips to Outline your Novel, which came out on June 5th, 2020, and in that I talked about obviously how to write an outline for your novel. In writing novels, there tends to be two groups of writers: those who are called the plotters, who plot everything out in advance, and then what's commonly called the pantsers, which is short for riding by the seat of your pants. Given that is a somewhat undignified term, especially in the UK, they often prefer the term discovery writers or people who are writing into the dark.

Myself, I am definitely a plotter. Before I write any book or any short story for that matter, I write an outline first, which I usually do by writing a synopsis and then chopping it up into different chapters, expanding on the chapters, and going from there.

That said, Dragonskull: Wrath of the Warlock will be my 139th novel, so I've been doing this a lot and I feel confident in myself enough now that sometimes I'll veer off the outline when I get far enough into the book and think something will work better. It's no different from driving across the country from Los Angeles to New York. You could follow the map, and you probably should, the first time you do that. But after you've done it 138 times, you probably know some of the shortcuts and think of a better way to do things when you get to a specific on ramp or a specific exit and it's no different from that.

Let's see. I just had to pause to pause recording to take a phone call and I forgot where I was. I think we're up to seven. That that's probably a good indicator of the general level of quality of the podcast for the last 150 episodes. I'm doing a top ten list and I can't remember where I am, but I think we're at 7 and the 7th most popular episode would be Episode 110, Three Techniques for Starting your Novel, and I published that on February 25th, 2022.

Every part of a novel has its own challenges. Everyone wants a satisfying ending. The middle can be something of a slog, but starting is sometimes a challenge for people. You don't want to do anything cliche like “it was a dark and stormy night.” You definitely don't want to start off by describing the weather. Never do that. And you want the start to be interesting, to hold the reader's attention. So in that episode we talked about three techniques for how do you start your novel, capture the reader's attention, and then seamlessly transition into the bulk of the novel.

The eighth most popular episode would be Episode 26, Six Tips for the High Fantasy Writer and that was published on May the 4th, 2020. There's differing debates about what the terms mean, like for a while Cloak Games on Amazon UK and then Cloak Mage was turning up in the Low Fantasy category and I wasn't entirely sure what Low Fantasy was until I found out that Low Fantasy is considered to be our world where fantastical elements intrude in which is why Nadia’s world is a lot like our world but there are magic and elves and so forth, whereas High Fantasy takes place entirely in a constructed world like a Tolkien and Shannara, and other settings like that. So in that episode, since I've written a lot of what could be called High Fantasy with Frostborn, Sevenfold Sword, Dragontiarna, and Demonsouled and the Caina books as well would technically be High Fantasy if you use that definition. In that episode, I put out six tips for the High Fantasy writer, and hopefully people have found them useful.

Let's see…our ninth most popular episode was Episode 3: Kindle Unlimited For Indie Authors, and I published that all the way back on November 18th, 2019. That is a perennial topic that indie authors talk about, whether their books should be exclusive in Kindle Unlimited, or whether they should be wide and available at all retailers. 4 years, well 3 1/2 years after recording that episode, I'm definitely leaning more on the side of publishing wide and staying away from Kindle Unlimited simply because the macroeconomic environment overall in 2023 is much more unstable and fluid than it was in 2019. Now I forgot what year was, but it's 2023. We've had the war in Ukraine going on for a year. The economy is much worse than it was in 2019. We've had bank failures and, you know, other economic problems like that, a bunch of layoffs in the tech sector. Overall, putting all your eggs in one basket, even a basket as powerful as Amazon, is just not a good idea nowadays. I mentioned earlier in the show that the Demonsouled series was in Kindle Unlimited right now so I can experiment with it, but it's going out in April and I think it's going to stay out of in April.

And then I'm probably gonna be done with Kindle Unlimited for a while, just because the economy is so unstable and seems like a great idea to have the books spread around to as many different stores as possible. I don't think Amazon will go out of business, but I bet a lot of Silicon Valley Bank customers thought their bank wasn't gonna go out of business either. So if for that reason alone, I am less likely to experiment with Kindle Unlimited than I would have been in 2019.

And finally the 10th most popular episode from the podcast was Episode 123, Technology and Genre in Cloak Mage and Cloak Games, and that was published on July 8th, 2022. In that I talked about how Cloak Games and Cloak Mage, which has become sort of an unintentionally mixed genre series, like it's primarily urban fantasy and it the covers are designed to look like urban fantasy books and they’re advertised as urban fantasy books, which works, but there was a very strong and growing science fiction element to the stories because it takes place 300 years or so in the future and there's more advanced technology available for the characters than there is on our contemporary Earth.

And I think the lesson here is that if you're writing a multi genre book like Cloak Games, you really need to pick one genre to be the dominant one and have the other genres be more influence or elements that play into it and then focus all your advertising around the dominant genre of the book. That certainly has been what I've learned advertising in Cloak Games, and hopefully that advice will be helpful to you in your own efforts. So that was the 10 most popular episodes of the podcast.

If I forgot one because I got interrupted by the phone call, I'm sorry about that, but I think those were all ten.

What do I want to do with the podcast in the future, now that we are 150 episodes in? I would like to provide more helpful advice to various writers who might be listening to this. I would continue to talk about things that interest me on the side that related vaguely to writing like, you know, various computer games or board games that capture my interest. I would definitely continue answering reader questions that I get and talking about them on the podcast.

And I would, if the opportunity arises, like to do more interviews. You might remember that I interviewed Troy Lambert from Plotter back in December 2022. I believe that was a good time and a good interview. I think it was informative and that people found it useful and I would like to do more of that in the future, if I can find the time to do it because as I mentioned at the start of the show, there is quite a lot of books I need to write and this is sort of a side project. So, 150 episodes in, maybe we'll be still here at 300. Hopefully we'll soon be here at 200 and I'd like to finally close off the show by thanking everyone who's listened for the past 150 episodes and all 46 hours.

So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful and if you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting platform of choice. It really does help. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.