Paperbacks are Here!

/ Peter Martuneac / 3 Comments

I finally received my physical copies of Mandate of Heaven over the weekend, and they look great!

I was also struck by the size difference between this book and my other, self-published works. Mandate of Heaven clocks in at about 73,000 words; standard fare for the action/adventure genre.

Now compare it to my longest work, Her Name Was Abby.

Her Name Was Abby ended up being about 160,000 words, well over twice as long as Mandate of Heaven. But that was a different, more niche genre, plus I stand by the size of my self-published works. They’re long stories but I wouldn’t have them be any shorter!

I’m a firm believer that stories should be just as long as they need to be. I won’t chop down or fluff up a work just to meet a certain word count. The story always dictates word count for me, not the other way around.

If you’d like a paperback copy of Mandate of Heaven for yourself, they’re only $17.95 and can be found on Amazon and Barnes & Noble!

Rings of Power: My Season 1 Review

/ Peter Martuneac / 2 Comments

Season 1 of Amazon’s Rings of Power is officially in the books, and what a finish it was! Before I go any further, I must warn you that there will be spoilers ahead. So if you haven’t seen Episode 8 yet and you still want to, don’t read ahead.

Alright, on to the review!

To start, I want to say that the show itself is gorgeous. The sets are wonderful, very evocative of Middle-Earth, and the costumes are great. Some people tried to tell me, before the series aired, that the costumes looked cheap and terrible. I admit that some of the still images I saw showed bits of costumes that weren’t great. But this is a show, not a series of pictures. As I watched, I never noticed anything in what the actors wore that took me out of the story.

I also want to congratulate them on making the best orcs since Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy! Whereas The Hobbit made heavy use of CGI for its orcs and goblins, Rings of Power returns to actual actors in costume and make-up portraying the servants of Sauron. And they are truly terrifying depictions. They may even be better orcs than the original trilogy.

As for casting, I have few complaints. For some reason, some people are really down on Morfydd Clark as Galadriel, but I think she’s been wonderful. Easily my favorite character of the series thus far. Adar, an antagonist not in Tolkien’s works but created for the series, has really stolen the show. Almost every line he utters is quotable. I don’t typically like ‘morally grey’ villains, but I’m a fan of his portrayal and how his story interweaves with Sauron’s.

***MAJOR SPOILER AHEAD***

Speaking of Sauron, I knew it! At the end of episode 8, the identity of Sauron was finally revealed and it was the character I expected it to be shortly into the episode: Halbrand, supposed King of the Southlands.

I spent 7 episodes wondering who Sauron would be, first believing it was a prominent politician in Numenor, Pharazon, until realizing I’d erred in my remembrance of Middle-Earth lore (he was an actual politician in Numenor). I never suspected Halbrand until the end of Episode 6, when Mount Doom was induced to erupt and Mordor thus created; I had suspected Halbrand would be a key character in fighting against Sauron for rule of the Southlands, but once Mordor came into being he suddenly seemed like a wildly superfluous character.

That’s when I had my suspicion. Why give this king-in-exile so much screentime with the major players just to rip away any plotline he might have had? Then, in episode 8, he was transported to Celebrimbor, who just so happened to be in the process of creating rings of power. Then I remembered how Halbrand had suddenly become a master smith in his short stay at Numenor, which reminded me that Sauron was a master smith.

That was when I was fairly certain about Halbrand’s true identity, just as Galadriel began to suspect him as well.

***ANOTHER SPOILER AHEAD***

The Stranger was also revealed to be Gandalf. Or, well, a wizard. But I’m 100% certain it’s Gandalf. This one was easier to deduce and I guessed it in the first episode. He came to Middle-Earth and landed amongst the Harfoots, ancestors of Hobbits whom Gandalf adored, and showed an ability to wield fire, which Gandalf also had.

In episode 8, Gandalf defeats three cultists who believed he was Sauron and were practicing dark magic. Gandalf defeats them by telling them to “go back to the shadows”, which is what he told the Balrog in The Fellowship of the Ring. When he blasted them with light, they faded into nothingness and moths came from their bodies, moths being another creature tied to Gandalf when he used one to summon the Eagles in the trilogy.

Finally, as he and a young Harfoot lass embark on a new journey together, he tells her, “When in doubt, always follow your nose.” Which is almost verbatim what Gandalf told Meriadoc in The Fellowship of the Ring.

If he’s not Gandalf, I’ll admit that I’ll be upset. The clues that he is the grey wizard are so obvious and overt that, if he’s not, I’ll feel tricked and not in a good or clever way.

Anyway, this review has run terribly long. If you’re still here, thank you for reading! My final remarks are that Rings of Power is thus far a resounding success! I already cannot wait to see what’s in store for the next season. I highly recommend watching it!

Book Review: “Eisenhower: Soldier and President” by Stephen E. Ambrose

/ Peter Martuneac / 4 Comments

I’ve had this book sitting on my shelf for a long time, always meaning to read it but always finding a new book to take precedence. This past month I finally decided that I was going to read and learn more about Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Mr. Ambrose personally interviewed Eisenhower at least a few times in preparation for writing this book, how many times depends on who you ask. Ambrose himself insists he had a close friendship with the former president, but a study of Eisenhower’s personal correspondence and records suggests that theirs was a short-term, working relationship.

Regardless, this work was eye-opening, and sadly not in a very good way. I used to hold Eisenhower in very high esteem, but now possessed of a greater knowledge about his personal life, I’ve come away greatly soured on him, as a soldier, as a president, as a husband, even as a man.

As a soldier, it would seem that he simply was not a very good commanding officer. His campaigns across North Africa were disastrous, rife with the kind of hesitation and waiting for perfect conditions that plagued so many failed generals in the Union Army during the Civil War. His invasions of Sicily and Italy were ill-timed and generally bungled at all levels. Instead of marching on Berlin, he chose to chase the German army in the field, allowing the Soviet Red Army to reach the city, losing a chance to possibly prevent the Cold War and the split-Germany from ever happening.

Even his crowning achievement, Operation Overlord (aka, the invasion of Normandy), is hardly due to any great skill or strategy from Eisenhower. He was merely the director, the ‘regional manager’ if you will, that oversaw planning and training.

To his credit, he made some good decisions. When he was advised against giving the order for the Normandy invasion, he chose to go forward anyway and achieved smashing success. At the Battle of the Bulge, he was the only flag officer to recognize it as a massive German counterattack and act accordingly. But the fact is that most of the campaigns in which me was the major decision-maker failed or succeeded in ugly conditions, and he spent so much time trying to please each and every subordinate commander that, in the end, no one at all was pleased.

And this continued to plague him as President, when his eagerness to make everyone happy led to no one at all being happy. Rather than confront great problems head on, he preferred to simply wait them out and hope they died on their own. When it came to McCarthyism and ‘Red Panic’, this tactic only just barely worked, but the embarrassing affair dragged on for years before McCarthy devoured himself. But when it came to civil rights, Eisenhower’s dithering directly led to much of the violent clashes that marked that era.

(Sadly, the reason he hesitated to make any decisions when it came to civil rights was likely due to a racist worldview. It was very disappointing to discover the depths of his prejudice.)

As a husband, Eisenhower constantly toed the line between improper relations with other women and full-blown cheating. As a general and as President, he always had one assistant who worked closely with him, spending many hours a day behind closed doors with him, for years, and both times it was a pretty young woman who nearly worshipped him. While Ambrose insists that Eisenhower never had a physical affair with either woman, it’s clear that there was an emotional affair going on. Despite widespread criticism of these two improper relationships and speculation that he was cheating, despite his wife clearly being unhappy with how familiar he was with these women, Eisenhower continued to spend large amounts of his private time with these women.

Simply put, my ideal image of Dwight D. Eisenhower failed to live up to reality. He did some good things, of course. He put down Adolf Hitler and the Nazi empire, he got us out of the Korean War, he refused to escalate the Cold War, but his personal failings leave me unable to admire him any longer.

This was a long book, but it is still an excellent biography! If you wish to learn more about ‘Ike’, go no further than Ambrose’s book!

Mandate of Heaven: Now Available!

/ Peter Martuneac / 3 Comments

Ethan Chase’s past has finally caught up with him, and the entire world’s future now stands on a knife’s edge.

The first book in my new Ethan Chase series is now available! Join Ethan on his exciting hunt for the Heirloom Seal of the Realm, an ancient Chinese artifact that is rumored to grant its bearer godly powers. Joining him are his childhood friend, a Federal agent, and a gorgeous treasure hunter, but they are not the only ones looking for the Seal, and some will cross any line, betray any loyalty, for a shot at ultimate power…

Paperbacks will be available soon! For now, you can download Mandate of Heaven for $4.99 on Kindle, Nook, iBooks, Kobo, and more! See all options here!

September Wrap-Up

/ Peter Martuneac / 3 Comments

As the release day for Mandate of Heaven inches closer, I managed to have an extremely productive month of writing! I set a goal to add 10,000 words to my current work-in-progress (Book 3 of the Ethan Chase series, Gold of the Jaguar) by month’s end, but I ended up adding 20,000 words as of this weekend. That brings the manuscript to just over 50,000 words and near the end. Just this morning I was able to finish a chapter that puts Ethan and company into place for the exciting, climactic scenes.

I also had the pleasure of being interviewed by fellow blogger and author Berthold Gambrel! He will be releasing that interview on October 10th, the same day that Mandate of Heaven drops, and I’ll be sure to share it here and on Twitter, as well.

They say that writers have to be readers, and I’ve been doing my best to live up to that standard this month! I finished reading George W. Bush’s presidential memoirs, as well as a biography on Dwight D. Eisenhower (I’ll review that one later this week), and I’m about a quarter of the way through the audiobook version of Barack Obama’s presidential memoirs. Also, this weekend I picked up a two-book collection of arguments about the US Constitution and the Constitutional Convention that my brother gave me, and that has been fascinating to read!

Well, fascinating to me, anyway. My wife and children roll their eyes when I open that dusty, boring tome.

As always, thank you all for being loyal readers of this blog and my works! It’s officially one week until Mandate of Heaven is released and I’m brimming with excitement about it! It’s one of my best works to date, and I think you all will find it easy to fall in love with these new characters.