Steven M. Moore's Blog, page 10

My writing life…

About this time every year, I start thinking about what has gone on in the previous ones, in this case, 2023 and before. With everything going on in the world and the US now—much of it not to my liking, to say the least—I couldn’t help thinking that I started to get serious about publishing my stories not lot long after 9/11. My first novel, Full Medical, was dedicated to someone we lost in that tragic, terrible, terrorist event, although it wasn’t the first that I’d submitted to agents and acqu...

Book piracy redux…

Every so often I write an article about book piracy. It affects the whole industry negatively, of course, but it hurts self-published authors more than other authors and publishers. (Most of my books are self-published, hence my personal interest.) One of my doubts about the still-ongoing Draft2Digital (D2D)-Smashwords merger was that Mark Coker, the Smashwords owner, never saw piracy as a problem. It seems that his attitude has contaminated D2D. Let me explain.

Most of my books are self-publish...

Crime fiction…

I read a lot more crime fiction than I write. In my earlier bows to British-style mysteries, I published a list of novels I’d read and could recommend reading. The number of books in this list has probably at least tripled as I kept my Covid-reading pace going, going, going…. But what’s clear about that list is that it’s better described as one for recommended crime fiction and its authors from all over the world, not just British authors (mostly English-speaking authors, of course, although I’v...

Amazon’s Vella…

You have to give that big Bezos bot and all his little bots credit: They’re very inventive about creating clever and multiple ways to scam readers, writers, and other customers. Are you surprised that Prime keeps going up and up? Are you surprised that they don’t stand by merchandise sold online?

For readers and writers, Vella is the new kid there on the Amazon block ready to fleece you. Maybe some people think they qualify as avid readers if they peruse Vella’s serialized prose, but no true avi...

Are some stories too complex for you?

After writing my review of Jake Tapper’s new novel (last week’s post), I realized I could summarize it by saying it contains complexity but is lacking in plot. Like some of my own stories, it mixes real-world characters (Evel Kneival and Ronald Reagan, for example) and some based on real-world characters (Rupert Murdoch’s family, for example) with fictional characters. (My latest “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” and “Inspector Steve Morgan’ novels do that as well.) But mine are more than comple...

Book reviews: Tapper’s All the Demons are Here…

All the Demons are Here. Jake Tapper, author (2023). It seems that everyone wants to write a novel now. Actually not—most people don’t have the endurance to run that literary marathon—but Mr. Tapper has written three. I read a previous one, The Hellfire Club (I can’t remember if I wrote a review of it because I’m not that motivated to help out Big Five publishing conglomerates), and this one is a mixed bag in comparison.

The historical setting might interest a lot of people of my generation. (As...

Is post-apocalyptic fiction sci-fi?

Post-apocalyptic literature considers a possible if bleak future, so I suppose that one quality might make it sci-fi. It also teaches important lessons and provides warnings about when human beings are currently making mistakes, something it also shares with general sci-fi literature. But it’s often far from space exploration and ETs. The standard trappings of sci-fi, especially those of space opera (like movies from the Star Wars franchise), just aren’t there, though.

It’s hard to write post-ap...

My favorite bookstore…

In my stories, I have several cameos where I become a bookstore owner. Ever since I realized as a tween that I had no future as a major league catcher (my hero was Roy Campanella, by the way, not Yogi Berra), I wanted to become a writer. Barring that, because I was an avid reader, a bookstore owner.

I browsed bookstores as a precocious tween and teen as much as I did our public library, both like an old 49er panning for gold. I’d read books like Brave New World and 1984 long before I had to stud...

Humor in sci-fi…

…is rare but probably more common that a lot of people might believe. I’m not talking about the awful slapstick humor found in space operas (Han’s interactions with Leia, for example, are pathetic) but quality humor dealing with the human (and ET?) condition. Damon Knight’s “To Serve Man” is a short story that created a classic Twilight Zone episode, for example. From C. M. Kornbluth’s “Marching Morons” (no, that famous novella isn’t about the MAGA minions who follow that “f&^%ing moron”—ex-SecS...

I’ve done my part…

Authors’ weapons are their words and their military campaigns their novels. Considering these truths, I’ve done my part to wage battles against autocrats. The Midas Bomb (2009), one of my early novels, painted Venezuela as an autocratic hell—something it became beyond anything I could imagine—and that theme appeared later as well, most notably in Soldiers of God (2008), where yet another Venezuelan dictator launches the first nuclear attack in the Southern Hemisphere against Colombia. The bad gu...