In this week’s episode, I discuss the origins of my HALF-ELVEN THIEF series, and describe some of the ideas that inspired it. I also talk a little about some of the common scams in self-publishing.
TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 217 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is September the 6th, 2024 and today we are discussing the origins of Half-Elven Thief. Before we get into that, let’s have an update on my current writing projects.
I am editing Shield of Conquest. I’m about 40% of the way through the first round of editing, so hoping to have that out in the middle of September if all goes well, but we’ll see. I am 44,000 words Ghosts in the Tombs, which I am planning to have out in October and 14,000 words into Cloak of….uh…Illusion. That’s how you can tell I’ve written a lot of books. I can’t immediately recall the titles at the drop of a hat anymore.
In audiobook news, the audio for Half-Orc Paladin is done and working its way through processing on various sites. It should be up on Audible, Google Play, Kobo, Chirp and all the other major audiobook stores soon, but you can get it off my Payhip store right now since I was able to post it right away. So if you want to get before anyone else, you can do it there. So that’s where I’m at with my current writing projects (once I remembered all their names correctly, of course).
00:01:16 Question of the Week
And now let’s go to Question of the Week. Question of the Week is designed to inspire interesting discussions of enjoyable topics. This week’s question: what is your favorite fictional villain? The inspiration for this question was that I saw a writer complaining how hard it is to write a book without a villain. It’s not impossible, of course. The conflict of the story might be man versus nature, two people competing in a sporting event, or on equal footing. But it is easier to write a book about a villain and of course really memorable ones often become enduringly popular characters. So as you can imagine, we had quite a range of responses for this one.
Mary says: King Haggard in the last Unicorn. Evil, unfathomable, and dangerous. I can’t believe he adopted a foundling, at that.
Jonathan D. says: If I had to limit it to one, I would go with Megatron. You have to be an iconic villain to still be the main bad guy for 40 years. Honorable mention to Scorpius from Farscape. He was only supposed to be in a few episodes at the end of Season 1 but was so good he became the main villain.
Bret says: Voldemort. I like villains to be simple, the embodiment of evil, evil from the moment they were born, never wavering from evil, and with no chance for redemption. But I prefer the villain to be the system and/or human nature. For example, in your Ghost Exile Book One, there are some bad guys, but since it’s not known that point that there’s a super villain behind the scenes, Caina is fighting the system (like corruption, slavery of Istarinmul) and the bad guys are bad because of human nature in the system, and that’s a great book. One of my favorites.
Michael says: I am a big fan of Marvel comic books and they both have my favorite villains, Doctor Doom and Magneto, because they are both well written personalities and are perfect examples of people with power who will do whatever evil thing it takes to rectify evil conditions in their lives that they have personally survived.
Our next response comes from Becca, who says: I really liked Grand Admiral Thrawn and his use of art. He’s an excellent character. Another Timothy Zahn series villain is the Modhri, a sort of hive mind that ends up with lots of different aspects.
The books she’s talking about are the Quadrail series by Timothy Zahn and they’re pretty good. Check them out if you get a chance. It’s basically a noir-style train mystery but in outer space.
Simone says: Definitely Doctor Evil, because sometimes I also want some “freaking sharks with freaking laser beams attached to their freaking heads.”
I have to say I entirely agree with Simone. Sometimes you want sharks with laser beams.
Andrew says: John Simms playing The Master in Doctor Who.
BV says: Urzo, that villain cracks me up. In fact, the whole crew of villains are characters. Yep, Urzo was something else. Plus he makes me laugh.
Martin says: The Watchmaker from Jeffrey Deaver’s Lincoln Rhyme series. I think the key to an engaging villain is that they have a capacity to win. The watchmaker matches Rhyme’s deductive skills with his own meticulous nature. The question becomes who will make a mistake first and what the consequences will be. You can never be sure who will win. I also enjoy the fact that you only get to read it from the Watchmaker’s point of view without truly understanding him. It’s only at the end that things click into place.
Jenny says: The best villain is when you feel like, yeah, maybe they have a point, but the whole way they’re going about their plan is wrong. Like Thanos- bro had a valid point, but that wasn’t the way to do it.
Scott says: Mine just so happens to be real Star Wars related, Darth Bane from Legends. He made the Rule of Two that we all know of. He wrecked the Sith Academy and the Jedi. He flew a lizard dragon from one planet to another. He went through so much pain, but he maintained his focus on his goal.
The books Scott are referring to as the Darth Bane Trilogy about Darth Bane and his apprentice Darth Zannah and if you get a chance, check them out. They’re actually pretty good.
Barbara says: Just got to be Davros. You can’t get past the Dalek creator, so ultimately evil, really ugly, and the voice is spot on.
Terry says: Sticking with Star Wars, Ventris. Read Dark Disciple and her emotional entanglement with Vos trying to take on Count Dooku.
Jonathan T. says: Another thing that makes Grand Admiral Thrawn great as a villain is that he is terrifying without being truly evil in the way that Darth Vader and the Emperor were. He is harsh and severe, but also wise, brave, and a good leader. He’s even more effective as a morally ambiguous villain because he orchestrates his own removal from the Emperor’s corrupt court (with the Emperor’s help, of course) but it allowed him to be untainted by the evils of the Death Star, Alderaan, and more. Furthermore, it allowed men like Pellaeon to redeem themselves under honorable commanders, such that when the time came to reunite with the Empire some 40 years later, the Imperial Remnant was welcomed with open arms and just a few years later were running the very government they had for so long opposed.
John says: Lazar from Your Highness. Best evil wizard in a movie and, well, the best wizard in a movie, hands down. He had so much magic, he used it for dumb stuff like making a feast of fish sticks and snorting a fairy. He’d trounce Gandalf, “he who has no nose” and laugh at the Sith.
Jay says: Lijah Cuu from the series Gaunt’s Ghost by Dan Abnett. This is a massive series set in Warhammer 40K, mainly from the point of view of regular guards rather than superhuman space Marines. It’s been a decade since I’ve read those books and I swear I just thinking about him makes me want to murder him in increasingly inventive ways. I just hate him so very much.
Alex says: Alan Rickman’s Sheriff of Nottingham’s-superb balance of evil and relatable humanity moments.
Michael says: Darth Vader for me.
Gary says: I like it when a villain can be written so you identify with them. Perhaps you could even wonder if they are really a villain. I have always enjoyed the portrayal of Boo Radley. I’m not sure he would really qualify as a villain, but in fact, that perception plays such a large role in it added a lot to the story.
Cheryl says: Loki.
David says: Doctor Doom.
John says: Murdock from MacGyver.
Barbara says: Roland from Ilona Andrew’s Kate Daniels series.
For myself, I think my favorite fictional villain would be the already mentioned Grand Admiral Thrawn from the Heir to the Empire trilogy, written by Timothy Zahn. He’s an interesting contrast to Darth Vader and the Emperor from the original movies. He’s just as capable of being ruthless as they are, but that’s not his first choice the way it is with someone like Darth Vader. The Emperor and Vader relied on The Force. Thrawn uses logic and deduction.
What he usually does is studies his opponent’s artwork or style of artwork they favor, deduce their psychological blind spots from that study, and then builds attacks around those blind spots that his opponents will not (indeed, cannot see) coming. He takes the remnants of The Empire from the brink of defeat to the verge of total victory during the trilogy. I think it works because while Heir to the Empire is still Star Wars, Thrawn is a completely different kind of villain than Darth Vader and the Emperor while nonetheless being just as formidable. One way to make your characters more sympathetic is to have them go up against a strong, competent villain, which why no doubt is why it’s often harder to write a book without a villain.
00:07:59 Main Topic of the Week: Origins of The Half-Elven Thief series
Now let’s move on to our main topic for the week, the origins of my Half-Elven Thief series. This came about because one of the side effects of having been in self-publishing as long as I have, which is a really long time now, is that my email address has been out there a long time, so I get a lot of scam messages. Sketchy book promo sites are a dime a dozen and they spring up all the time and frequently send out cold call emails to authors. I know some of them are operated by the same guy or guys because in their e-mail database, my e-mail address is mistakenly linked to the name of LitRPG author Darren Holtberg Jr. Whenever the scammer guy or guy starts a new promo site with a name like Book Splurge, I get an e-mail address to “Dear Darren Holtberg Jr.” inviting me to the site. I should mention I’ve never spoken with Mr. Holtberg or read his books and I’m sure he’s a fine author who doesn’t deserve to have scammers emailing him or I get emails from sketchy book marketing sites that say in exchange for $5,000, they’ll make sure your book gets featured in Publisher’s Weekly or something like that.
Lately I’ve been getting a lot of Facebook ads phishing messages claiming that if I don’t click on their fake link and fill out their fake form, my Facebook ad accounts gets deactivated. Lately, they’ve all been coming from Hotmail accounts for some reason, and recently I had a message claiming to be from Facebook Ad Support that actually came from a dress that looks something like Jesus rises@hotmail.com. If Jesus Christ, the son of God, Lord and Savior of Mankind wanted to disable my Facebook ad accounts, I am pretty sure he would express his divine will through a method other than a Hotmail account. And if the rather less than divine organization of Facebook wanted to disable my ad account, they don’t send warnings. They or whatever algorithm is running them that week just does it.
Another recent scam came from a book marketing service inviting me to write a free article for their members about the inspirations behind Half-Elven Thief. It was obviously an automated letter generated by scanning the Amazon sales ranks. I didn’t want to write the free article for some scamming book marketing services but decided instead to write it for my site and make a podcast episode out of it. So therefore, here are the origins and inspirations for my Half-Elven Thief series.
I first started thinking about what would become Half-Elven Thief in early 2023, and a couple of different ideas went into the series. I’ll talk about the business/publishing side of these ideas first and then the creative/artistic ones.
#1: Number one, I wanted to try writing shorter, less complicated books because I felt like my books had been becoming more and more complicated and difficult to write lately. Of course, that’s not entirely true; my books have always been kind of complicated. Soul of Serpents was pretty complex. I wrote that way back in 2011. Soul of Sorcery was very complicated and that was 2012. But that means I’ve been writing complicated books for the last 13 years at a minimum, so I wanted to try something different.
#2: I also wanted to write something completely new and put it in Kindle Unlimited. Like many indie authors, my relationship with the Kindle Unlimited (KU) program has been fraught because of its exclusivity requirement. There is potentially a lot of money to be made in Kindle Unlimited, but at the same time that also prevents a book from selling on any of the other ebook platforms. I had experimented with putting up some of my older series on KU. What usually happens is that I end up making about 90% of what I would make if I had just kept the books wide. KU’s algorithms also have a pretty strong recency bias. The best way to have a book perform well in KU is to write a series of them and then release them fairly close together. They all tend to reinforce each other then, which of course is obviously easy with shorter, less complicated books.
#3: Marvel Lockout Syndrome, which I have talked about on the show before. I also wanted to write something completely unrelated to anything I had written before. By this point, I’ve written almost 50 books set in Andomhaim, over 30 books with Caina as the main character, and over 20 with Nadia is the main character. Readers tend to be completionists who want to read everything in the proper order, but at the same time you also tend to lose readers from installment to installment. Several dozen books and a character backstory can be daunting obstacles to starting a series.
I had been thinking about this for a while and then in 2023 we saw cinematic juggernaut Marvel Studios running into trouble after 15 years of putting out very interconnected movies. Marvel movies used to regularly pull in over a billion dollars, but suddenly they weren’t performing at the box office like they used to. As with everything in pop culture, there’s a billion different theories about that, and a billion terabytes worth of Internet arguments, but I strongly suspect continuity lockout was a big part of it. For example, The Marvels was the sequel to something like 10 different things with a combined watching time of over 50 hours. That’s nearly an entire semester’s worth of stuff to watch, and at that point that feels more like homework instead of entertainment.
So that was just sort of a crystallization of what I’ve been thinking about with the problems with really long interconnected series, so I wanted to write a short or self-contained series that would be a good entry point and introduction to my writing for people and yet wouldn’t be connected to any of the other very large series that I have written. Those were the business/publishing reasons for Half-Elven Thief. Now let’s talk about some of the creative ideas that went into it.
#4: I love basic/generic fantasy tropes. My absolute favorite kind of fantasy is what people call generic or traditional fantasy. I want to see a knight, a dwarf, an elf, and a wizard going into a dungeon and fight some orcs…maybe an evil wizard and steal their loot or go on a quest where they have to visit several successive dungeons and fight different monsters. Or a Conan style barbarian wandering around having adventures in decadent city-states and occasionally beheading an evil wizard. That’s my favorite kind of fantasy story.
Of course, in the bad old days before self-publishing, you couldn’t sell a book like that because the publishers didn’t want traditional fantasy. That’s why the original books in the Ghost didn’t have orcs or dwarves or anything like that, since I wrote them long enough ago that I was still trying to sell them to traditional publishers. So when it came to Half-Elven Thief, I decided to write a book around some of those traditional fantasy tropes, like a thieves guild, half elves, sinister wizards, and so forth. In that vein, let’s move to our next reason.
#5: Half-elves. So why is Rivah the main character of Half-Elven Thief, a half elf? The reason came from a semi ridiculous controversy in 2023. Apparently, Hasbro, the owners of Dungeons and Dragons, had decided to remove the terms half elf and half orc from the game since they might be potentially offensive. The usual Internet furor ensued, though the truth was that the game had been modified so you could have characters who were any combination of fantasy races like a character was half elven and half gnome or something. I suppose the larger issue is that Hasbro really wants to turn Dungeons and Dragons into a subscription service like Xbox Game Pass, but that’s a different topic anyway. The idea caught in my head, and so I decided that Rivah would be a half elf.
#6: Now we go to the sixth and probably biggest creative influence on Half-Elven Thief: failures of leadership. Of course you can tell a story with traditional fantasy tropes, but all stories, regardless of genre, have themes to them. An author’s opinions of his own work is often erroneous, but I think one of the chief themes of Half-Elven Thief is failures of leadership. I thought about that a great deal in 2023 because in 2023 I knew a lot of people who quit the traditional helping professions like the medical field, teaching, law enforcement, and so on. They didn’t quit because they disliked the work and not even because the money was bad but because the leadership at their institutions was so inept and even malignant that it turned the workplace into a toxic environment, so they left to seek more lucrative employment elsewhere, which overall is a net loss for civilization, isn’t it? We need people to be nurses and teachers and cops, but if they leave not because the work is challenging, but because their managers are grotesquely incompetent narcissists, that is a bad thing.
To return to this week’s question of the week about villains, one of the reasons Grand Admiral Thrawn on is an effective villain is because he’s an effective leader. His soldiers are glad to follow him because he’s not egotistical. He’s not capricious or unfair, and he cares mostly about results. Unfortunately, in real life, leaders like Thrawn are in fact rare. We have far more leaders like Admiral Ozzel from the Empire Strikes Back, a petty, insecure, incompetent man who Darth Vader finally force chokes to death in exasperation. We’ve all experienced working under someone like Admiral Ozzel, and even if you’re not in one of the helping fields, no doubt we all have had an incompetent or malicious supervisor before and it’s remarkable how often incompetent managers turn out to be malicious ones as well. So I was thinking a lot about that, about how incredibly destructive bad leadership can be in the right circumstances. That reflected quite a bit into Half-Elven Thief.
So those were the business and creative inspirations that went into the Half-Elven Thief series. Finally, I would like to close with gratitude for how well Half-Elven Thief has been since released. I’ve tried three new things in the last three years and Half-Elven Thief by far, has gone the best. I’m grateful that so many people have enjoyed Rivah’s adventures.
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 in https://thepulpwritershow.com, often with transcripts (note: transcripts are available for Episodes 140 onward). 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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