Steven M. Moore's Blog, page 145
September 11, 2015
Time for remembrance…
Remembering 9/11 shouldn’t be a NYC event, or events at the sites where the four planes crashed. It should be a national and world event. Nearly 3,000 innocents died that day at the hands of Muslim jihadists, most of them Saudi Arabians who graduated from that country’s religious schools. Bin Laden, the planner and cheerleader for the terrorist dogs, was also Saudi.
But we can’t blame one nation or a respected worldwide religion for this attack. We must blame a terrorist ideology that exploit...
September 10, 2015
The Goldilocks Principle…
You’ve probably heard me speak of it. Like that famous intruder into the three bears’ lives, this principle describes “getting it just right.” In writing, it means looking for balance in your prose. Zen is looking for a metaphysical balance, but many things in our lives need balance. In particular, even if readers don’t actually look for it, they’ll sense that something’s amiss if it’s not there.
Of course, that perception of unbalance in a novel is subjective for both reader and writer. One...
September 9, 2015
Steve’s Shorts: Mayhem, Murder, and Music’s Zamba Argentina…Part Two of Two
[Note from Steve: This is the continuation of a series of short stories inspired by my favorite songs. Some you might know, like the Billy Joel classic, “The Piano Man,” motivation for the first story; others, like this one, homage to “Zamba de Mi Esperanza,” sung by the Chachaleros, are a wee bit obscure (and possibly no longer available). They’re freebies for readers of this blog…until they appear in a short story collection, that is. The Argentine zamba, sometimes written samba (technicall...
September 8, 2015
Trump and the immigration debate…
If you check my blog category “Immigration,” you’ll see that I’ve written a wee bit about this subject. Trump’s politically incorrect tirades against illegal immigrants aside, you’ll have to give him credit for creating awareness of this issue. Trump’s throwing Univision chief correspondent Jorge Ramos out of a press conference aside, he’s shown that there’s a lot of hatred and resentment in the land to tap into. But let’s examine the issue a bit more calmly.
You can’t change the Constitution...
September 4, 2015
News and Notices from the Writing Trenches #102…
Item. Taxes. First the EU with its VAT, now Japan with an 8% Consumption Tax. It’s becoming more and more difficult to market ebooks in other countries (all bad-news bulletins from Amazon affecting KDP Select authors). I can’t say I make many sales there (dribs and drabs, but that can describe all my sales), but here’s the thing: many of my stories are international in scope and I think overseas readers would enjoy them as much or more than U.S. readers. I have an international outlook, not a...
September 3, 2015
Thank you, Stephen King…
Occasionally the NY Times finds interesting news it deems fit to print. Any time Stephen King writes something about the writing business, I read it. I don’t like the guy’s stuff much, but I think his book On Writing should be read by every writer, new or established—it’s his most important opus. The Times article by King, “Can a Novelist be too Prolific?” appearing in the Sunday Review section (8/30/15), is an important addendum. Note the Times didn’t put it into their Book Review section or...
September 2, 2015
Steve’s Shorts: Mayhem, Murder, and Music’s Zamba Argentina…Part One of Two
[Note from Steve: This is the continuation of a series of short stories inspired by my favorite songs. Some you might know, like the Billy Joel classic, “The Piano Man,” motivation for the first story; others, like this one, homage to “Zamba de Mi Esperanza,” sung by the Chachaleros, are a wee bit obscure (and possibly no longer available). They’re freebies for readers of this blog…until they appear in a short story collection, that is. The Argentine zamba, sometimes written samba (technicall...
September 1, 2015
A war against the dark lords…
With two recent incidents adding to a long list of atrocities, ISIS has shown that they’re the Devil’s minions. The dark load who has declared himself the leader of that sixth century-style caliphate from the Dark Ages (that’s not a nation, by the way) repeatedly raped an American foreign aid worker and then murdered her. I suppose her body will never be found. Was she beheaded like the eighty-three-year-old antiquities protector? Probably worse. These beasts have no respect for women and onl...
August 28, 2015
News and Notices from the Writing Trenches #101…
[The celebration of issue #100 is now history, so some chest-thumping is back. Well, that’s newsy too, and I don’t spam readers with email newsletters like many authors, so you won’t find most of my personal news anywhere else. News about the publishing business is more op-ed like—comment on those items if you approve or disapprove.]
Item. Feedback is important. Lurkers abound on the internet. This isn’t a negative term for the most part, by the way. I’m a lurker myself. I read a lot of opini...
Movie Reviews #18…
[Note from Steve: I guess we’re in the summer doldrums, dog days of summer, or whatever you call it. There have been a few weekends where there’s nothing worth seeing on the silver screen. But this review is a little longer than most, so that’s compensation for you.]
Man from U.N.C.L.E. Guy Ritchie, dir. OK, forget that the Soviet Union never cooperated with anyone after World War Two. (I’m reading a bio of Churchill—they didn’t cooperate much during the War either, but, in their defense, Pap...
