Steven M. Moore's Blog, page 25
January 21, 2022
“Friday Fiction” Series: What’s in a Game? Chapter One…
[Note from Steve: A bit shorter than the other novellas, but still a British-style mystery. Enjoy.]
What’s in a Game?
Copyright, Steven M. Moore
Chapter One
DI Matthew Lawrence stood with DS Ellie Jones, looking into the loft. He called it that because he could imagine that some artist might have leased the space, although it did have some furniture: A large table was surrounded by seven chairs. Three bodies slumped in three of the chairs. The other four looked like they were pushed back in a hu...
January 19, 2022
New woes caused by Amazon…
The evil Bezos’s bots have struck again! Because my older books are “evergreen,” meaning that they’re as current, relevant, and hopefully entertaining as the day I wrote them, I decided recently to check to see if there were any new reviews written by recent readers. (I now only read and use reviews to extract material for marketing purposes, but readers should keep writing them to help other readers.) Not only were there no new reviews, but the bots had removed the old ones!
If you peruse the r...
January 14, 2022
I told you so…
I certainly wasn’t the first sci-fi writer to portray a viral pandemic, but my More than Human: The Mensa Contagion follows the progression of a contagion in human populations that was a preview of what we’re experiencing with Covid: Deadly at first and not so transmissible but then mutating to a more benign version that has “learned” not to kill so efficiently so the virus can survive.
Of course, this is no accident. Before I started that novel, I studied many aspects of viral pandemics, basica...
January 12, 2022
Two previews…
Consider this article a follow-up to the one titled “My Lost Novels.” While #6 in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series is a free PDF download and #7 will be, I’ll preview both books here. The previews follow the summaries for each novel.
Defanging the Red Dragon. Esther Brookstone, ex-MI6 spy and ex-Scotland Yard Inspector in the Art and Antiques Division, and her husband, Bastiann van Coevorden, ex-Interpol agent, along with NYPD homicide detective Rolando Castilblanco and his wife, TV ...
January 7, 2022
My lost novels…
I’ve written a few novels you might not know exist, so I’m calling them the “lost novels.” How did they get lost? The primary reason was Covid. I’m always writing new fiction, more so during the pandemic—short stories, novellas, and novels—and the manuscripts of the novels started piling up, forming a log jam I had to undo. Consequently, they’re all self-published (the most efficient way to publish!), so I’d like to remind all readers of this blog that they exist.
First, there is The Last Humans...
January 5, 2022
Twitter…
Twitter now is under new management. While I expect some changes as a result, compared to other social media sites, authors will find Twitter the easiest one to use. Unlike my political blog at pubprogressive.com (I post my more political articles there now), Twitter is a mixed message board for me: I mix political tweets with ones about reading, writing, and publishing.
First, let me say that it’s the best way for authors to learn to write blurbs and construct “elevator pitches.” They can learn...
December 31, 2021
“Friday Fiction” Series: Living on the Third Rail, Chapters Nine through Eleven…
[Note from Steve: Wow! I just squeezed this in so that I didn’t have to add 2022 to the copyright statement! Happy New Year! Because this is yet another British-style mystery story, the metaphor of the title here refers to London’s Underground aka the Tube. Trains there, unlike NYC’s, actually have four rails with two live ones. The positive third rail is still outside the rails the car wheels ride on and has the higher voltage, which is twice the fourth with negative voltage, nestled between th...
December 29, 2021
NY Times reviewers…
Once again I can celebrate: I didn’t read one book on the NY Times’s list of top books for 2021! I sometimes by chance have read a few non-fiction books on that list, but not this year. And fiction books? Very rarely. Why is this?
It’s simple: I filter out all books from the Big Five publishing conglomerates the NY Times reviewers focus on because I’ve learned that I’m rarely interested in any book published by the Big Five…or reviewed by the NY Times, which rarely supports small presses or self...
December 24, 2021
“Friday Fiction” Series: Living on the Third Rail, Chapters Six through Eight…
[Note from Steve: Because this is yet another British-style mystery story, the metaphor of the title here refers to London’s Underground aka the Tube. Trains there, unlike NYC’s, actually have four rails with two live ones. The positive third rail is still outside the rails the car wheels ride on and has the higher voltage, which is twice the fourth with negative voltage, nestled between the two regular train ones. Now there’s a factoid that might stump any Jeopardy contestant!]
Living on the Th...
December 22, 2021
Amazon vs. authors and publishers…
As much as I find the NY Times “Book Review” worthless to me as both reader and author, the Times published an interesting editorial about Amazon on Sunday, December 5. (It wasn’t in the “Book Review,” of course. Heaven forbid they say anything against Amazon there!) While more verbose than necessary—the Times’s reporters and contributors tend to bloviate in general—that opinion piece laid out the case against Amazon and pointed out how Bezos’s retail behemoth is destroying American publishing, ...
