Steven M. Moore's Blog, page 124
July 20, 2016
Steve’s Shorts: Your Past Will Find You, Part Three of Three…
Your Past Will Find You
Copyright 2016, Steven M. Moore
Part Three
A knock on the kitchen door jerked Rena awake. The half-filled coffee mug went flying. She grabbed the gun.
“Rena, you in there? I wanted to thank you for sending Gadfly’s papers.”
Will Richardson! Or Richard Wills? She put the gun on the table. “Just a minute.”
She hurriedly collected the shards of the coffee cup, wiped up the spill with a paper towel, and trashed it all. When she opened the door, she realized she was hanging...
July 19, 2016
Irish Stew #55…
International
Saudi duplicity. The Kingdom has an agenda. They try to pretend they’re friends, but they push a 6th century version of Islam just as much as ISIS. Most of the al Qaeda murderers who plotted 9/11 were Saudi, and the Saudi government helped them, not to mention the training in the Saudi’s religious schools that teaches young men to hate the West. They are also trying to radicalize Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo and those in the old Islamic USSR countries. Their agenda is clear: tim...
July 18, 2016
Movie Reviews #32…
The Innocents. Anne Fontaine, dir. This is one of those movies where you see the worst in humanity and also the best. It has violence, but it’s mostly a noir history of women as victims of men inspired by Red Cross doctor Madeleine Pauliac’s war memories.
A young female French intern Mathilde (Lou de Laâge), working with the Red Cross in Poland in December 1945 as World War Two is drawing to a close, is asked to help deliver some babies in a convent. It turns out the Nazis went through there...
Monday words of wisdom…
[Don’t miss the movie review that follows.]
America becomes a greater nation, a stronger nation, when we stand together as one people and in a very loud and clear voice, we say “no” to all forms of racism and bigotry.—Bernie Sanders
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The “Mary Jo Melendez Mysteries” are on sale. Mary Jo is inviting you to celebrate with her for leaving Amazon exclusivity and appearing on Smashwords too. She’s an ex-USN Master-at-Arms who manages to get into a lot of trouble as a civilian; she also manages...
July 15, 2016
News and Notices from the Writing Trenches #127…
“Summertime, and the livin’ is easy….” Less happening too for my newsletter. Gershwin’s classic song is hardly appropriate for modern lifestyles, though. Many people are heading off to vacation. Those can be hectic—the vacations, not the people (although people tend to live hectic lives these days, which is why they need vacations). The best vacation I can imagine? Sitting under a shade tree or under an umbrella on the beach or in a Paris café on the Left Bank reading a good book. Some people...
July 14, 2016
Rethinking traditional publishing…
Authors have many choices these days, but the end result is always the same: if you want readership, you have to (1) let people know you write books and (2) promote individual ones wherever you can. With notable exceptions, you won’t win the lottery, rise to prominence, and receive fantastic marketing like Higgins Clark, Patterson, Grafton, King, and other old mares and stallions in the Big Five’s stables. Big publishers only bet on sure horses as far as PR and marketing money goes. The major...
July 13, 2016
Steve’s shorts: Your Past Will Find You, Part Two of Three…
Your Past Will Find You
Copyright 2016, Steven M. Moore
Part Two
Rena watched Will’s pickup pull away, bothered about two things. First, she had liked his gentle touch, his patience, and his conversation. You’re a lonely woman! Second, Will was a mystery. She wanted to know more about him. He doesn’t seem to belong here either.
She entered her house, glanced at the studio, and decided “Moon Madness” would wait until tomorrow. She found a pint of pistachio ice cream in the freezer and sat down...
July 12, 2016
What right-wing conservatives want you to forget…
I’ve always said true conservatism has its place. In our haste to polarize the country’s political discourse, progressives give conservatives a bad name and vice versa. But putting the brakes on really radical ideas in order to study their consequences, so often lacking in wild-eyed progressives, especially one-issue voters, is a sane course. The law of unintended consequences applies to both conservative and progressive thinkers, of course, because not changing something might have worse con...
July 11, 2016
Monday words of wisdom…
Eighth-graders will be presenting Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the Church basement Friday at 7 p.m. The congregation is invited to attend this tragedy. (Seen in a church bulletin.)
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The “Mary Jo Melendez Mysteries” are on sale. Mary Jo is inviting you to celebrate with her for leaving Amazon exclusivity and appearing on Smashwords too. She’s an ex-USN Master-at-Arms who manages to get into a lot of trouble as a civilian; she also manages to beat the odds and survive, though. Muddlin’ Through (S...
July 8, 2016
Dating your prose…
[For authors mainly, but also for readers who want to understand authors better….]
I bought another one of those megapacks—genre: sci-fi; subgenre: space opera. It’s a collection of short stories, novellas, and novels covering many years of sci-fi writing. You sort of feel like you’re reading some of Chesterton’s Father Brown tales, though. Long sentences and dialogue, but also long narrative, and quite orthogonal to anything you might call minimalist (hard-boiled for mystery lovers). There a...
