Steven M. Moore's Blog, page 14
March 22, 2023
Portraying the minority experience…
As a fiction writer, I consider the whole human experience. As an old white guy, some readers might think that I can’t really portray the experience that minorities have in worldwide societies, the good, the bad, and the ugly, but I’ve been around a while and observed human behavior quite a lot (authors should always be observers). My observations have provided me with evidence that minority groups often have a harder time than majorities in any human society.
Because of the events and choices I...
March 15, 2023
George Langston interviews Esther Brookstone and Steve Morgan…
Early St. Paddy’s Day wishes for all my readers. On this day, everyone can be Irish! You don’t need to be of Irish descent to celebrate. (St. Paddy himself was a Briton.) Visit your local pub and toss down some Irish ale, stout, or whiskey and enjoy some lamb, bangers and mash, or a plate of corn beef and cabbage (that’s more an Irish-American invention, but it’s the spirit of celebration that counts), finishing everything off with an Irish coffee. If you’re vegetarian or vegan, have some potato...
March 8, 2023
Prelude to “Evil”…
Inspector Steve Morgan writes:
I’ve always had a healthy respect for water. I’d been without water in Afghanistan; and I had too much of it in a London canal when a wanker tossed me in one, thinking I was dead. England has two coasts. Once I’d settled in Bristol, I thought about buying a small boat to sail on the Irish Sea; I thought it might be fun in the future to sail a bit with Kanzi and our kids, after all. But that dip in the North Sea waters off Newcastle-on-Tyne where most of her folks l...
March 1, 2023
My favorite characters…
I have many characters sprinkled through my stories, of course. Most of my favs are found in my seven series. That’s no surprise: One reason authors create series is that they want to develop the characters present in the series’ novels a bit more. That’s probably why readers follow a series as well, but their main reason might just be their increasing familiarity with those characters.
I’ve created so many characters since I started publishing in 2006 (Full Medical) that it’s hard to signal out...
February 22, 2023
The best retailers and lenders of ebooks…
I’m sometimes (albeit rarely now) asked what are the best retailers and lenders of ebooks. Readers (and authors!) all too often just assume it’s Amazon. It’s not…and there are many. Amazon has its hands in too many cookie jars now (the jars are full of money, not cookies, of course), going far beyond being a simple online retailer of ebooks (or being a lender in several programs that scam authors and publishers), so it dominates the world of retail sales so much that you have to wonder if the re...
February 15, 2023
Ending a trilogy…
I’d always intended to finish “The Last Humans” trilogy. Unfortunately, circumstances beyond my control affected the second novel and delayed my writing of the third. To describe what occurred, I’ll just quote from the “Notes” section that will appear at the end of the recently published third novel, Menace from Moscow:
“…the trilogy has endured a troubled publishing past. It almost seemed that it was jinxed. The ups and downs I experienced in publishing it were largely beyond my control. You se...
February 8, 2023
Review of Elie Honig’s Hatchet Man…
Hatchet Man. Elie Honig, author (2021, 2022). While one could argue that this is more a book for addicts of legal thrillers, it’s unfortunately non-fiction. It paints a disturbing picture of the man who never tried a case in his life yet became US Attorney General twice, William Barr. The focus here is on the second time, his two years as Jeff Sessions’s replacement in the Trump administration. In those two years, he preached the gospel of Trump’s “absolute immunity”; selectively released only a...
February 1, 2023
Advice from the elven king…
In last week’s article, I reviewed J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Now, inspired by reading that prelude to The Lord of the Rings trilogy (I’d read the trilogy as a kid, but not its prelude), I’ve continued to read on into Frodo’s odyssey. This article isn’t about that, though.
Instead, I want to tell you about some advice to authors Tolkien offers in his Forward to the Ring trilogy. Okay, he doesn’t present it as advice, but I’ll interpret it in that way as a complement to my little course “Writ...
January 25, 2023
Book review: The Hobbit…
The Hobbit. J. R. R. Tolkien, author (1957). “What?” you say. “I come here to read reviews about new books, not old ones. I can just see the damn movie!” A fair complaint, I suppose, but any reader of this blog who might say such a thing doesn’t write the articles for this blog! And while I greatly enjoyed the three Lord of the Rings movies, I read the corresponding books as a kid. (Much better reads than that Harry Potter crap, of course.) But I didn’t read The Hobbit, which is like Asimov’s Pr...
January 18, 2023
A two-part motto…
Readers of this blog know that at the end of an article I usually sign off by writing, “Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!” Although it might be obvious, let me parse this motto’s meaning, which has two parts.
The first might be considered a genre statement, but it’s more a statement about my stories’ settings. (I’m no fan of genres or anyone who tries to categorize my fiction besides me.) Those settings can cover anywhere on planet Earth or go far beyond Earth into the cosmo...
