Steven M. Moore's Blog, page 19

Want a traveling vacation as part of your reading?

The settings in my novels are a bit more varied than those of my life, but they often reflect my wanderlust, some travels done for work (around the US, South America, and Europe), others as a tourist. About half the novels in the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco” series start in New York City near where I now live (the pair are NYPD homicide detectives) but go elsewhere. The books in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series often take place in the main character’s England but also in other ...

Famous authors and their forgotten books…

Famous fiction authors often gain their fame from their series. (I have a few myself, although they haven’t made me famous.) But often their out-of-series books, those that stand alone, are so much better. Unfortunately, they’re often forgotten by the reading public. (As are most of my novels, whether in a series or not!) The novels I consider in this novel are also “evergreen books,” ones as current and entertaining today as when the authors finished their manuscripts. (Many of my books are eve...

Is traditional publishing for you?

There are so many options for self-publishing a book nowadays, going from 100% DIY to paid aggregators like Draft2Digital to Smashwords (I purposely omit Amazon—I avoid the Bezos bots as much as possible), that the question in the title hardly makes any sense anymore. To put it more bluntly: Why in the hell would any author bother with traditional publishing?

I have to confess that I’ve succumbed to temptation myself and experimented with traditional publishing: Penmore Press published Rembrandt...

Movie Reviews #86…

Thor: Love and Thunder. (Taika Watiti, director.) I finally went to see a movie at a local AMC. The theater had aged badly during the Covid-19 pandemic (no surprise—no ticket sales implying no upkeep), but the seats were still comfy and the projector and sound system seemed to be as I remembered it. However, because this is what’s first in my list that I took home about my experience, you’ll understand why in hindsight I wished that I’d waited for a better movie.

The last really good movie I saw...

A. B. Carolan responds…

As my American collaborator Steve Moore indicated in a recent blog article, I received some good advice from that old ex-Gardia Michael O’Hara. My difficulties with continuing “The Denisovan Trilogy” are a bit more complicated than described by Steve in that post or in his novel Intolerance, though (the latter is available as a free PDF download—see the “Free Stuff & Contests” web page).

First, my protagonist Kayla Jones, known as “The One” by the descendants of Denisovans known as “The People,”...

Windows 11…

Are you thinking about upgrading from Windows 10 to Windows 11? Did you purchase a new computer, and you’re now forced to use Windows 11? In either case, you could have problems!

I put myself in the latter situation recently. I’ve stuck with Windows, version after version, because I hate Apple’s egotistical attitude of not making it easy to play with devices from other equipment providers—Apple likes to pretend that its products are the only ones in the technological universe! But now the almost...

POV and person…

While I’ve written about this topic before, I still see a lot of confusion out there. Let’s go over the basic ideas again.

Most fiction is written in a main character’s point of view (POV): The fictional world of a novel is seen from the eyes, ears, and other senses of one or several protagonists, or even a villain’s. But that POV can change from chapter to chapter or even section to section, either because there isn’t just one main character. Authors (even famous ones) mangle POV, their “head-h...

The “art detective” is out and the “plod” is in…

Mystery and thriller authors sometimes kill off main characters. I did that in the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco” series (the Mossad agent in Angels Need Not Apply), but I couldn’t do it with Castilblanco and Chen (both have appeared in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series as well, most notably in Defanging the Red Dragon).

Main characters can also be villains, of course, and my arch-villain, Vladimir Kalinin, appears in many of my novels, most recently enjoying roles in the latest “...

What’s with owls?

Did these birds become so popular because of those Harry Potter stories? Are these rapacious carnivores so cute and cuddly that everyone loves them? Or have we always loved them because they say “Who”? And did advertisers just discover them now?

As a writer, I have to be an observer, mostly of human nature and not owls! So, I’ve discovered that suddenly something weird is going on: Owls might be replacing cats and dogs as human beings’ favorite literary animals. Why? What’s changed?

Take commerc...

Word usage…

I’m frustrated when I know there’s the perfect word in a given situation and can’t quite remember it. That’s when I remember that my verbal memory has a lot of junk in it: sports terms, even for sports I never played; trivia facts, ones I could easily look up now with Google; technical terms I once used a lot but don’t use at all in my writing; random words from French, German, Russian, and Spanish—a lot from the latter—that often fight with English; and so forth. The hard disk in my head probab...