Steven M. Moore's Blog, page 44
August 12, 2020
Freebies…
Once upon a time I was in academia and R&D, but about the only thing I do well now is write. I’ve never had any pretensions while doing so. I know anything I write won’t be considered the “great American novel” by critics, but I think I’ve spun some good yarns that have entertained a few people. I’m also an avid reader (okay, I do that well too), so I know what good storytelling is, and I have plenty of books and authors to inspire my own storytelling (strange as it might seem to many people, fe...
August 11, 2020
Don’t tell me what to read…
I have a love-hate relationship with the NY Times Book Review: I’d love to see an author I know and respect be featured in it, and I hate that I don’t! Of course, I don’t need the Times to validate my reading choices either, so I just hate that they try to tell me what to read in their usual biased manner, neglecting to consider about 90% of the books published. Am I to believe the 10% they do consider are better than that 90%? No! My reading experience says otherwise.
Some non-fiction books des...
August 6, 2020
There’s zing in -ing…
I get tired of the writing advice “Show, don’t tell.” After all, what I do is storytelling, not story-showing. Writing classes and guides wind newbie writers around the axle with this advice; older writers too. Authors get so wound up that they write some awful prose as they try to “follow the rules.”
An application of this rule (or, just a dictum people who can’t write blather about) is something like a corollary: Avoid –ing words. Sorry, there can be a lot of zing in –ing: In action scenes, fo...
August 5, 2020
Mini-Reviews of Books #48…
[Note from Steve: Long after the category “Book Reviews” was created, which contains my longer reviews, I started this category on my blog in order to archive shorter reviews (they’re still longer than most you’ll find on Amazon). I can’t believe I’m approaching #50! It’s hard to count all my reviews between Bookpleasures.com, “Book Reviews,” and these mini-reviews, especially since lately I’ve been binge-reading and reviewing entire series. The fact that I would have to do some serious work to ...
August 4, 2020
Op-Ed Pages #11: der Feuerteufel…
The title here is the German’s nickname for Donald J. Trump, “the fire devil” (NY Times editorial page, July 25 edition). I still like my own nicknames, Narcissus le Grand and Il Duce (he of the imperial sneer), but you have to create bad nicknames for the jerk because he does it to everyone else.
In this blog, I’ve often commented on how America nowadays is looking a lot like 1930s Germany, and others are getting on board with that idea. Trump is a fascist and a wannabe dictator, and our whole ...
July 30, 2020
The future of publishing…
While COVID-19 and unrest over policing excesses has certainly affected readership and publishing, the Big Five publishing conglomerates have been struggling for a while. The reason? The digital revolution. In a couple of articles, the NY Times analyzed those struggles (7/16/2020 and 7/17). The first article can be summarized as women beginning to take over higher positions; the second is more about black women’s struggles to enter the Big Five publishing hierarchy. While these articles portray ...
July 29, 2020
Other background notes for A Time-Traveler’s Guide through the Multiverse…
Last week you read some of the physics background for my new sci-fi rom-com. In this article, I consider some other reasons for writing it.
Maybe I’m too serious, but I have trouble writing humor. There’s some in my novels—humor is part of the human experience, after all. And I can be ironic, biting, wry, and cynical, from short stories to novels, but it’s hard for me to sustain a long, humorous story. There are no novels with a comedic flavor, only some short fiction…until now.
They say humor i...
July 28, 2020
‘Droids vs. robots…
I have many complaints about the Star Wars and Star Trek movies. For the first, I’ve mentioned before in this blog that it’s really fantasy, although many fans and critics call it sci-fi. But let’s forget about that glaring disconnect and focus on something that Dr. Asimov would probably have liked cleared up: ‘Droids vs. robots.
“Robot” is the more general term. It wasn’t created by the inimitable Isaac but by Karel Capek in his 1920 play RUR (for Rossum’s Universal Robots, the English subtitle...
July 23, 2020
Quantum mechanics and time travel…
“In the beginning, all the universes in the multiverse were only bubbles in the multiverse’s froth…if there was a beginning. Did God see it all and call it good but play a grand joke on us mortals just for kicks? Maybe the bubbles keep coming? I’ll never know the answer to that question, of course. No mere mortal can know. But there is a multiverse, and it’s filled with universes, quantum states of a unique universe, and mostly filled with stars…and delightful and dangerous weirdness.”
That’s p...
July 22, 2020
Minimalist writing and Twitter…
I haven’t been on Twitter very long. (Frankly I resisted it because of Trump and other bigots, racists, and haters.) As a newbie, I’m still getting used to it. The number of my followers climbed steadily at first but now has tapered off. I can’t remember that number, though (it can’t compare with Trump’s), because I never much cared—I was surprised that it grew. I can remember to whom I tweet, mostly the #readingcommunity and #writingcommunity, but also to my genial authors’ group #WolfPackAurho...
