Steven M. Moore's Blog, page 173
March 12, 2014
Review of David Freed’s Voodoo Ridge…
(David Freed, Voodoo Ridge, The Permanent Press, 2014, 978-1-57962-355-5)
This novel is not your classic mystery. The days of Conan Doyle and Christie are long past. The modern reader of mysteries expects more grit, suspense, and thrills mixed in with the classic elements of who-done-its or police procedurals—discovering the perp through possibly multiple crimes and many misdirects. Author Freed has delivered, and it’s a fun read.
Yet the main character, Cordell Logan, an ex-special ops fellow,...
March 11, 2014
Putin is living in the past…
Volodya has a deranged, nostalgic view of past Russian might. He yearns for a return to “the good old days” and seems hell bent on trying to recreate them. While the rest of the world knows Communism with a capital C, aka the Kremlin mafia, failed completely and put the Russian bear on a stringent diet of becoming just another poor Third World oil country, this old KGB psychotic murderer lives in the past. Only there can he flee from his own mortality; only there can he delude himself into th...
March 7, 2014
News and Notices from the Writing Trenches #63…
#354: Aristocrats and Assassins. The release is a wee bit delayed, but it will happen real soon now. Someone said that good things are worth waiting for. As I age, I have more problems with that adage—my patience threshold is worse than before. But I’ve always been impatient. I had my entire undergraduate study planned halfway through high school. The summer I turned thirteen, I wrote my first novel, but I figured even then I would starve as a writer, so I became a scientist, and, PATIENTLY,...
March 6, 2014
The Eightfold Way
[I wrote this quite awhile ago. It made the rounds on other blogs, but I thought it would be a good intro to a series of posts on writing, a sequence that will end with Tom Pope and my Socratic to-and-fro about writing the thriller that’s in prep—see yesterday’s interview with Professor Tom. On Tuesday, I’ll follow this with a new post, “Writing Secrets,” which might repeat some of the same material: give advice often enough and some might sink in. Or not, especially if you disagree! If you d...
March 5, 2014
An interview with Tom Pope…
[Tom Pope is a fellow reviewer for Book Pleasures. He also has an alter ego as a writing teacher. He works with private clients and tutoring services and conducts fiction workshops for nonprofits such as the Langston Hughes Cultural Center. I thought it would be interesting to interview him about his work with aspiring writers. It’s a changing world in writing, and he’s seen it all.]
Steve: Describe your background, Tom, and what you’re doing now. In particular, why are you doing it, and do yo...
March 4, 2014
Irish Stew #26…
Item: The bear is back! It’s not just Putin. The problem is with Russians. They want their dictatorship back and will do anything to achieve it so that they can feel safe, knowing that they’ll be told what to do and how to live out lives by the Kremlin. Russia’s invasion of Crimea (with Putin’s blessing, of course) is the big news at the time I wrote this (last Sunday). Why did he even bother to ask the Parliament? And land-hungry and greedy Russians so invaded the eastern part of the Ukraine...
February 27, 2014
“An Irishman’s heart is nothing but his imagination.”
[Today’s blog post is a four-peat of one about Irish writers—celebrating St. Paddy’s Day, of course! Somehow, I missed this last year. Irish men and women have migrated to the far corners of the Earth. Some have migrated back. Some stayed home. They have suffered the boom and bust of late 20th and early 21st century economics. Their Church scandals involving priests and choirboys, and unwed mothers and evil nuns, have made ours in the U.S. seem minor, yet Ireland is still the most Catholic co...
February 25, 2014
A resurgent Russia…
I’ve heard that phrase from various media pundits. It’s comical. Resurgence is what Godfather Putin would like Sochi to signify, but the only thing resurging in Russia is this narcissist strongman’s egotistical delusion. Russia is spiraling down to insignificance. For nearly a century, it has been ruled by mafiosos whose only interest is to ensure that Russian workers make them rich. In the Soviet era, they hid all this under the cloak of ideology. Now it’s clear that the only ideology is gre...
February 20, 2014
Irish Stew #25…
Item: Presidential hopefuls. My prediction? Benghazi will dog Hillary Clinton and Bridgegate will dog Chris Christie. Neither one will be a candidate in 2016. That makes it an open field. Neither Dems nor GOP have seasoned and electable veterans to step forward and win their parties’ nominations. You’re going to see at least one surprise, maybe two. Of course, party regulars know this and two of them would like to be the surprise candidate. I’m not holding my breath on the competence issue. A...
February 18, 2014
The Cruz agenda…
What is it? Is Ted Cruz a brilliant strategist who studied chaos theory and is now looking to create his own, hoping to emerge the new savior of the Republicans? Or, is he just a hominid with too many Neanderthal genes who is the worst advertisement for an Ivy League education? If you were able to get past all the bad weather the last couple of weeks, you’ll remember what Cruz did to his own party. Instead of keeping his runaway mouth shut and let fifty-one Dems take all the heat for increasi...
