The Destroyer of Worlds (23 page)

Authors: Jonathan Moeller

Tags: #Fiction, #Fantasy, #Epic, #Dark Fantasy, #Alternative History

BOOK: The Destroyer of Worlds

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Caina's eyes widened. The Imperial Library was the Emperor's own library, the largest collection of books in the Nighmarian Empire.

The thought of all those books made her hands tremble.

Sebastian laughed. "Would you like to accompany me?"

"Yes," whispered Caina. "Yes, I would."

"Then it is settled," said Sebastian. "If the scroll proves authentic, we shall go to the capital and the Imperial Library. Now get some sleep, daughter. You're still too young to stay up half the night reading."

"You do, father."

"Yes, but I'm old enough that it doesn't matter. Now, off to bed."

Caina smiled, kissed his cheek, and left for her bedroom. Though she doubted she would be able to sleep. The Imperial Library!

She entered the hallway, and stopped.

Laeria stood at the end of the hallway, staring at her.

Caina stopped and stared back, readying herself to fight, if her mother tried to invade her mind.

But Laeria only smirked, and walked away without another word.

You can get the rest of Child of the Ghosts for free here.

Bonus Essay - The Writing of THE TOWER OF ENDLESS WORLDS

It has taken just about ten years to write these books.

In 2002, I took a class on the History of Rome. One part that stuck keenly in my mind was the account of the Roman Civil War. Of course, ancient Rome went through any number of civil wars, but this was THE Roman Civil War, the big one that turned Rome from a decaying Republic to an Empire ruled by the Caesar Augustus, who issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. It is a fascinating and dramatic historical period, and so it is not hard to see why so many works of fiction are set in the period - William Shakespeare's plays about Julius Caesar and Antony & Cleopatra, HBO's graphic ROME series, and innumerable historical novels.

Inspired by that class, I bought a book by Stephen Dando-Collins called CAESAR'S LEGION, about Caesar's elite 10th Legion. I was reading it when I came home to my parents for the summer, and I had gotten to the chapter on the Battle of Pharsalus in 48 BC, specifically the part when Caesar's army almost starved to death due to want of supplies before facing Pompey's legions.

While I had been gone, the local town's Wal-Mart had been upgraded to a Super Wal-Mart, the kind that carries groceries and food in additional to the usual dry goods. I remember, very distinctly, walking into that Super Wal-Mart for the first time and being stunned at the sheer quantity of food available. What would Caesar have done, I wondered, if he had had access to that kind of food? Or to canned food - he needn't have worried about spoilage on the march, and he could have fed all his men.

Then I wandered past the sporting goods section, and wondered half-jokingly what Caesar would have done with a shotgun. Or with fifty shotguns. Or AK-47s. With fifty AK-47s, his men could have mowed down all of Pompey's army.

The idea percolated.

That weekend one of my brothers had a graduation party, and as the festivities wound down, I slipped away to my computer and wrote a story about the idea. In the story, a Chicago politician running for Congress makes a pact with a renegade from another world, a world with a medieval level of technology. The politician will provide guns the renegade can use to take over his world. And what would the politician get in return? Well, I like fantasy novels, so the medieval world had magic, and the renegade was actually an evil wizard. And in exchange for the guns, the wizard taught the politician magic he could use to win his Congressional race, and maybe use to reach even higher office.

So Lord Marugon, last of the Warlocks, and Thomas Wycliffe, Congressman from Illinois, were born.

At the time, I belonged to an online writers' group, and they really liked the story. So I began to write more short stories using the setting and the characters, and by the end of 2002, I had a chain of them coming to about 30,000 words or so.

I decided I would turn those short stories into a novel. I realized it would be a really, really big novel. But that it was okay - it would be a huge epic story, and wouldn't that be easier to sell? I started writing it on January 1st, 2003, confident I would finish by early summer or so.

I typed the final sentence on September 1, 2003, finishing this huge monster book of 339,000 words. Now, of course, writing 70,000 or 80,000 words in a month seems trivial, but back then it was the most I had ever written in so short a time, and it had been such an effort that I didn't write anything new for almost four and a half months after.

I wasn't entirely sure what to do with the thing - most publishers wanted books around the 100,000 word range. After thinking it over, I realized that there was a natural stopping point at about 95,000 words in, after Conmager fakes his death to save Lithon, Ally, Simon, and Katrina from Marugon. I would edit, revise, and proofread that section and submit it as a book. Then I could sell the rest of it as one or more books to the same publisher. And if that first 95,000 words sold well on their own, well, that would make it all the easier to sell the rest, wouldn't it?

Though I didn't know it at the time, this was remarkably naive.

But the first part of the plan went well, and the first 95,000 words, which I had entitled WORLDS TO CONQUER, found a small publisher in August of 2004. Triumph! I sold my novel DEMONSOULED in April of 2004, and it came out in May of 2005, so I figured I could expect roughly the same turnaround with WORLDS TO CONQUER.

Time passed. From time to time I emailed the publisher, wondering when I should plan to do edits.

Soon, they said.

More time passed. I wrote a sequel to DEMONSOULED, called SOUL OF TYRANTS, and abjectly failed to sell it. Eventually I quit graduate school, moved to a different state, and got a different job. I kept writing novels, but none of them sold. Eventually I realized I could make more money blogging about computers than by writing fiction, so I started to do that.

Then, out of the blue in May of 2008, a galley proof arrived for WORLDS TO CONQUER. Sweet! I dutifully filled out the proofs and sent them in, and the book appeared for sale on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in August of 2008. I did my best to promote it. I gave away review copies and babbled about it incessantly on my blog for weeks.

And it sold...well, let's just say it sold well enough that I could afford a Whopper and fries. Specifically, one Whopper. With cheese.

It was delicious.

And after I ate it, that was that. That was all the money I saw from WORLDS TO CONQUER. The book faded away, and I moved on.

More time passed. I wrote other books, and did other things. I sold short stories every year to Marion Zimmer Bradley's SWORD & SORCERESS anthology, occasional short stories to small presses, and had some success tech blogging, but that was it. I never again sold a novel or got another book contract. Bit by bit, I began to reconsider writing books. If I couldn't sell them to publishers, was I wasting my time? Had I been wasting time, all those years, trying to write and sell novels? Maybe it was time to let go, to move on to other things.

Then in November of 2010, I got a third-generation Kindle ereader.

"There has
got
to be a way to make money using this thing," I thought to myself.

Accurately, as it turned out.

I didn't realize it at the time, but 2010 was the year that ebooks started to make their way into the mainstream, and I was in the right place at the right time with
all
these unpublished novels I could turn into ebooks. In April of 2011, I came across a post by thriller writer Lee Goldberg, describing his experiences self-publishing one of his books as an ebook. What caught my attention was that his book (THE WALK) had originally be published by Five Star, which had published DEMONSOULED back in 2005. Following Mr. Goldberg's advice, I got the rights to DEMONSOULED back and turned it into an ebook in April of 2011.

Just as an experiment.

To see what would happen.

Fast forward to April of 2012, and I had sold just under 23,000 copies of 19 different ebook titles. I realized that a whole new paradigm for writing and reading had been created. No longer was it necessary to find a publisher to sell a printed book. Now, with ebooks, I could write as many books as I wanted. The readers, not the publishers, would be the final judge of quality.

I pulled out my old contract (now 8 years old) for WORLDS TO CONQUER from my file cabinet, and saw that as of May 2011, I could claim the rights back to the book, allowing me to self-publish it as an ebook.

And in 2012, I got the rights to WORLDS TO CONQUER back from the publisher.

So I buckled down to doing massive edits and revisions on the book, both of the 95,000 words that had been published, and the remaining 250,000 or so that had never been seen by anyone else. It was a strange experience to return to those familiar characters after so long - Simon and his fears and doubts, Thomas Wycliffe and his imperial ambitions, Liam Mastere's desperate effort to save King Lithon, and Arran Belphon's long quest to reach the Tower of Endless Worlds, crossing a continent (twice) in order to reach it. (Needless to say, after ten years of trying to find a home for this book, I rather emphasized with Arran's quest!)

In the end, I divided the book into four full-length novels: THE TOWER OF ENDLESS WORLDS, A KNIGHT OF THE SACRED BLADE, A WIZARD OF THE WHITE COUNCIL, and THE DESTROYER OF WORLDS. Together they total about 315,000 words, and I put them up for sale in the first week of June 2012.

It is very strange to think that the books are now available using technologies that did not exist when I began writing what would become the first chapter of THE TOWER OF ENDLESS WORLDS in May of 2002.

So it has been a long journey, but the destination has been reached at last, and I hope you have enjoyed these books.

-Jonathan Moeller

About the author

Standing over six feet tall, Jonathan Moeller has the piercing blue eyes of a Conan of Cimmeria, the bronze-colored hair a Visigothic warrior-king, and the stern visage of a captain of men, none of which are useful in his career as a computer repairman, alas.

He has written the DEMONSOULED series of sword-and-sorcery novels, and continues to write THE GHOSTS sequence about assassin and spy Caina Amalas, the COMPUTER BEGINNER'S GUIDE series of computer books, and numerous other works.

Visit his website at:

http://www.jonathanmoeller.com

Visit his technology blog at:

http://www.jonathanmoeller.com/screed

Contact him at:

[email protected]

You can
sign up for his email newsletter here.

Other books by the author

The Frostborn Series

Frostborn: The Gray Knight

The Orc's Tale (Tales of the Frostborn short story)

The Third Soul Series