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