Steven M. Moore's Blog, page 193
November 21, 2012
News and Notices from the Writing Trenches #37…
#210: Show your appreciation with a review…. I just received a glowing review of Survivors of the Chaos from David W. Menefee, Pulitzer-nominated author and reviewer for BookPleasures.com. Indie authors know what I’m talking about when I say how much I appreciate this review. Thanks, Dave!
Readers of indie authors, you can show your appreciation for your indie author’s hard work and dedication to entertaining you by not only buying his or her books, but by writing a small review for Amazon or...
November 20, 2012
Obama’s “socialist agenda”…
The GOP’s sour-grapes set has started to develop theories on why it lost the election, theories that still use all the code words and hidden innuendoes that made the 2012 election one of the most polarized ones in U.S. history. Mr. Romney has been focusing on “all the gifts” that Mr. Obama made to his constituency of Blacks, Hispanics, immigrants, women, and young people. Mr. Ryan has said that the election was won in urban America.
Fox News pundits are busy spinning the results, trying to pin...
November 15, 2012
Violence in fiction and real life…
Just before hurricane Sandy came roaring into NJ like a banshee on the loose, we went to see Ben Affleck’s Argo. As usual, we arrived early to get good seats. Another early arrival commented that a friend (or was it a relative?) refused to see the movie—she never watched violent movies, he said. That started me thinking.
To paraphrase Tom Clancy, the problem with fiction is it has to seem real. He’s talking about military thrillers, of course, but that statement is true about many fiction genr...
November 14, 2012
Revive a language, revive a novel: lick your dialogue with a foreign tongue…
[Another guest post from thriller author Gina Fava. Writers should especially pay attention. I think she brings up some very important points on this one. Thanks, Gina.]
Does that little voice inside your head ever use a language other than the one you speak everyday? Ever consider dabbling in a foreign language to enhance the novel you’re writing, as in Diane Johnson’s Le Divorce?Or creating a sense of mood with dialect, like Mark Twain did inAdventures of Huckleberry Finn,or just as Dennis L...
November 13, 2012
Winners and losers…
As a post mortem to the 2012 election (RIP, I say), I offer my personal list of winners and losers. Feel free to suggest additions in your comments—a great opportunity to vent.
The big winner? The 99%. Yeah, I know some of you voted for Romney (otherwise the popular vote would be 99% Obama, 1% Romney), but you will still benefit. Count your blessings. The oligarchy lost—sort of. They’ll have to be more clever about how they exploit the middle class now, but they’ll probably manage just fine. T...
November 8, 2012
When two parallel lines intersect…
[Note: Continuing this week of respite from the elections, I wrote this light-hearted but serious piece on writing techniques. Enjoy.]
I shook the mathematical beliefs of my thirteen-year-old niece the other afternoon. An elementary problem in algebra required knowing that the measures of the interior angles in a triangle sum to 180 degrees. That’s in Euclidean geometry. I commented that there are other non-Euclidean geometries where that “rule” is not true. In one of these geometries, paralle...
November 7, 2012
Adding a Few Sips of Wine to My Editor’s Italian Itinerary
[As a toast to all those who were able to vote yesterday, I offer some good travel advice from guest blogger and thriller author Gina Fava to her editor. Thank you, Gina. My apologies again for not including your lovely pictures—I don’t include them to speed up loading on slower systems and browsers. Readers can see them in Gina’s original post.]
Amanda’s Italian Itinerary While sharing a bottle of Castello Banfi’s Rosso di Montalcino2006, with my editor and friend, Amanda—more on her professi...
November 6, 2012
No post today…
Today is Election Day. Everyone who can, please vote. It’s your right. Hopefully, all of us who are affected by Sandy’s aftermath can find an alternate polling place and also vote.
Tomorrow my blog will continue with a light-hearted guest post written by thriller author Gina Fava.
November 2, 2012
Apocalypse NJ…
…and NY and Connecticut and…the list goes on. The pictures of the banshee storm Sandy from space said it all: don’t mess with Mother Nature. One scientist with nothing better to do estimated that the storm contained the equivalent of 10,000 of the a-bombs dropped on Japan at the end of WWII. That impersonal and frightening number can’t begin to match the scenes of damage and destruction so tragically affecting people on a very personal level.
The headline of this post was borrowed from the hea...
November 1, 2012
How the American public loses elections…
Maybe I’m just a pessimistic old curmudgeon, but it seems to me that the real losers in an election, federal, state, or local, are the voters, the American public. Here are some scenarios and some reasons.
Elections are generally close, unless a candidate is running unopposed (alas, that often happens in states of one color or the other, or in “safe districts” the politicos have gerrymandered in such a way that an opposition candidate has no chance). By close, I’m talking about winning margins...
