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