Steven M. Moore's Blog, page 39
January 20, 2021
Writing what I love to read…
The NY Times article (1/1/2021) about Robert Jones Jr.’s debut novel The Prophets described this self-motivation for the author’s writing. I’ve been doing just that for years! I’ve always shared that mantra for my own writing even before I published my first novel, Full Medical (2006). I’m an avid reader, but I’d found a lot of the fiction I was reading lacking in its treatment of important themes and universal truths about the human condition—the good, bad, and ugly of human existence, if you ...
January 15, 2021
“Friday Fiction” Series: Mr. Gualchmai, Chapter One…
[Note from Steve: In the collection Sleuthing, British-Style, I introduce DI Clarke and DS Blake in three short stories as a homage to British-style mysteries. While the following didn’t make it to novel status (as the British coppers might have wanted, and I suggested might eventually happen one day), or the self-imposed editorial deadline for that collection (as a test case for Draft2Digital), you might find the following short story equally entertaining.]
Mr. Gualchmai
Copyright 2021, Steven ...
January 13, 2021
John McCain…
[Note from Steve: Readers of this blog have already read about some of the publishing history of The Last Humans: A New Dawn. I continue the discussion of that ebook here, focusing more on the content in this post.]
My readers know that I often separate sections of a novel with a quote: Rembrandt’s Angel uses George Bernard Shaw quotes, Son of Thunder has quotes from St. John the Divine, and so forth (the third book in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” Series, Death on the Danube, is partit...
January 8, 2021
“Friday Fiction” Series: War Ruins…
[Note from Steve: From time to time, I’ll post free short fiction here—short stories or novellas from A. B. Carolan or me. You can download more—see the list on my “Free Stuff & Contests” web page. This one from A. B. might be a fitting albeit humorous epitaph for 2020, or at least for the four-year aberration that was Donald J. Trump. If you don’t like that, you’re part of the problem…so please do not read this story.]
War Ruins
Copyright 2021, A. B. Carolan
“There was a conventional warfare fo...
January 6, 2021
The cursed tale…
I finished The Last Humans: A New Dawn in the summer of 2019. Since then this sequel to The Last Humans has seems to have a curse on it. Let me list why.
First, I signed a contract for it in December 2019 with Black Opal Books. Version 1.0 of that small press provided an acceptable home for the first book, so, even with a buyout and reorg of the publisher, I incorrectly assumed Black Opal version 2.0 would be delighted to keep the series in house. Wrong! I should have been forewarned by the del...
December 30, 2020
Another experiment in publishing…
In a previous article I posted to this blog, I wrote about my experiment with a new (for me) ebook aggregator, Draft2Digital (D2D), that allows an author to “go wide.” It’s now time to write about an even earlier experiment.
The D2D experiment involved The Last Humans: A New Dawn, my most recent novel and sequel to The Last Humans. This second and earlier experiment involves Death on the Danube, #3 in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” Series. I published that book with my reliable Carrick P...
December 23, 2020
Pandemic novels…
[Note from Steve: The content below might seem unusual for the holidays, but I end this article with hope, as I usually do with all my novels. So Happy Holidays everyone…and my wishes for all of you to have a safe and prosperous 2021.]
From Crichton’s Andromeda Strain to my own More than Human: The Mensa Contagion and “The Last Humans” series (The Last Humans and The Last Humans: A New Dawn), apocalyptic pandemics have been part of sci-fi. Before COVID, real pandemics seemed to be things in the...
December 16, 2020
Going wide: Draft2Digital vs. Smashwords…
Both Draft2Digital and Smashwords offer authors the opportunity of “going wide,” i.e. distributing their ebooks to many online retailers in the US and worldwide, and even library and lending services. Why use them? It’s simple: the more retail places an ebook appears, the more chances there are that a reader will purchase it! When you consider B&N has a network of brick-and-mortar stores and Kobo in turn distributes ebooks via its deal with Walmart, there are multiplier effects going on too. Als...
December 9, 2020
Orphans…
I still believe that small presses are a good choice for authors who want to publish their books traditionallythey at least offer some TLC none of the Big Five can provide (or is it the Big Four now with Simon & Schuster merging with Penguin Random House?). But many of them have become little more than POD outfits, due to economic hardships, so that old advantage of getting books in bookstores has all but disappeared (bookstores require books to be returnable, and POD books are not). Even the...
December 2, 2020
Short fiction and ‘zines…
I’ve always loved short fiction. I read many collections and anthologies as a kid and still do as an adult, and I subscribed to some well known periodicals or picked them off the racks when I could. When I became a full-time writer, and even before, it was natural that I’d think of publishing in ‘zines and anthologies and making my own short fiction collections.
First problem: It’s not worth my time to submit a story to a ‘zine. Remember the Cancer Stick man from the X-Files? That’s most authors...
