Steven M. Moore's Blog, page 20
July 8, 2022
A. B. Carolan’s confession…
Towards the end of Intolerance (a complete “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” novel available as a free PDF download—see my “Free Stuff & Contests” web page), A. B. Carolan meets with his old friend, the Irish copper Michael O’Hara, for drinks at a Donegal pub. There A. B. confesses to having a bit of writer’s block. Michael gives him some advice to cure it.
That advice is basically to remember all the tools a novelist possesses for writing a good story. That list of tools is as old as storytelli...
July 6, 2022
Bridge novel?
In a sense, I’ve discovered a way to keep a series going without writing another novel for the series: Write one that connects one series to another. I call it a “bridge novel.” Maybe Grafton wouldn’t have bored me so soon if she’d done that with her “alphabet series”—“B is for Bridge” could have been the title. Baldacci, Child, Patterson, and other formulaic old horses in the Big Five’s stables could have used that trick too.
This isn’t a new concept in my case. The Golden Years of Virginia Mor...
July 1, 2022
Fascism in my prose…
“The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.”—Tom Clancy.
Said in another way, a novel should hold up a mirror to the real world, showing its negatives as well as its positives. Fascism is still part of our reality, maybe more so now than ever before. Shouldn’t it be considered in our fiction?
I know many readers, especially those who read mystery and thriller novels, don’t like to see politics or political violence in fiction beyond the good-vs.-bad trivial plots. The...
June 29, 2022
Books in print…
There are hard-bounds, often lacking art because they have flyers, which are also often lacking art; trade paperbacks; and those small airport paperbacks—the latter two often with tasteless covers as well. Many older readers prefer them; younger generations (and book pirates?) prefer ebooks or audiobooks (are they pirated?), if younger generations read at all (they’re distracted by social media, computer games, and streaming video). Besides the negatives already hinted at, and being objective, t...
June 24, 2022
The future of British royalty…
[Note from Steve: The reader may consider this part two of the article “Brits don’t like me…”.]
While the British royals are far from being main characters in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series, the mere fact that the series is partially set in the UK implies that mentioning them from time to time is hard to avoid. And while I’ll repeat here that I wish old Queen Elizabeth well on her Platinum Jubilee (she’s now the longest reigning British monarch), but even the most ardent fan of Bri...
June 22, 2022
Behind the times…
I see more and more online retailers correctly sort novels into their respective series. B&N, for example, correctly grouped together all published versions of the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” novels. (Two are free PDFs—see my “Free Stuff & Contests” web page—so no one could blame them for their omission.) Kudos to B&N!
I’ve observed that B&N is on the march. Under new management maybe? Their book barns are aging well, and people still flock to them as well as other mom & pop bookstores, as...
June 17, 2022
Brits don’t like me…
It all started with a British review of Rembrandt’s Angel that torched that novel: I thought the British reviewer’s critique could be summed up by the following: How dare I, a Yankee author, write a crime story set in the UK? I took that as sour grapes—the novel had good reviews here in the States, so that critique certainly wasn’t about quality. The reviewer just hated the idea that someone could write about a British character mucking around in a British setting (Esther Brookstone travels a lo...
June 15, 2022
Fame…
Who needs it? Yearning for it is narcissism, of course, or even worse (Facebook is full of people who yearn for it). I suppose some people wanted (or even still want?) to be Johnny Depp. I’ll admit I would but only because he owns a nice island in the Bahamas. (Oprah does too, so there’s no gender bias on my part like maybe what might have occurred at the Heard-Depp trial—now those are two narcissists, but aren’t all Hollywood actors?) But having so much money that I can buy my own private islan...
June 10, 2022
Retirement…
Not mine but Esther Brookstone and Bastiann van Coevorden’s! Celtic Chronicles, #9 in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series, will be the last novel in that series.
In the beginning (somewhere in 2015, if not earlier), I began to write Rembrandt’s Angel on a whim without any intentions of giving Esther a series. I had this niggling idea for many years after reading Agatha Christie’s novels as a kid, really a question: Why didn’t she ever put Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot together to solve...
June 8, 2022
Reset?
After publishing a new novel (or maybe in this case two, The Klimt Connection and Celtic Chronicles, #8 and #9, respectively, in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series), I often pause, take a breather for a few days (in this case, it’s like running two marathons!), and think about future plans. Is it time for a reset? I always ask myself. Sometimes the answer is “yes,” and that’s when I write something I believe is entirely different, even experimental, like The Secret Lab or A Time Travel...
