Steven M. Moore's Blog, page 83
June 26, 2018
Occupations…
I don’t know about you, but I sometimes think about what my life might have been if I chose to follow one of the professions that attracted me as a kid. Beyond the usual fireman, policeman, or doctor, I had a few unusual ones on my childhood list.
I read a lot—comics at first and then short fiction and novels. Many of the latter were sci-fi, so I imagined myself as a space explorer. Dare I say “rocket man”? In other words, a fellow who flew spaceships and went where no one has gone before in...
June 21, 2018
Human characters…
As opposed to ETs? Or a contradiction? As a reader, I peruse a novel as if I’m going to review it, which I often do. Reading that way, you’re bound to notice things. One common observation I have is that some authors’ characters don’t seem human, even if they’re supposed to be.
Sometimes I can see that an author does this intentionally, creating a “larger than life” cartoonish character. This often occurs in humorous stories. When it happens in more serious prose, a reader has to wonder. A ch...
June 20, 2018
Review of James Comey’s A Higher Loyalty…
(James Comey, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership, Flat Iron, 2018, ISBN 978-1-250-19245-5)
I don’t like to read celeb books. Famous people hire a ghostwriter to turn experiences, opinions, reminisces, and disordered notes about them into a book, and many readers will pay top dollar to read it, which often fattens that celeb’s already bloated bank account. The Big Five publishers rush to publish books like that because of those readers. And, as good as the ghostwriter might be (some...
June 19, 2018
Book hype…
Sometimes a reader or interviewer asks me, “Do you have afavorite novel?” While I often write about favorites in posts to my Facebook page on Tuesdays, my general answer is that I have a lot of favorites. I don’t measure them by how much I remember about the story, nor by whether I’m motivated to read them a second time, but by the memory of how much the story entertained me and/or made my life more meaningful. All the book hype in the world can’t tell me if that will happen.
I’ve recently n...
June 14, 2018
ABC Shorts: Homeward Bound…
Homeward Bound
Copyright 2018, A. B. Carolan
[Note from Steve: There will be more than driverless cars in the future.]
Happy decided she was through with beatings. The welts and open wounds on her back were bright red on her black skin. When Master Cheng stopped whipping her in order to catch his breath, she turned and kicked the old man in the groin and ran.
Her parents had come to the Mars colony because of the Chinese government’s promise of good-paying jobs. Just one problem: the Chinese...
June 13, 2018
Review of Alex Gerlis’s Vienna Spies…
(Alex Gerlis, Vienna Spies, Studio 28, 2017, ASIN B06XY644HG)
What a great story! More gripping than Follett’s Eye of the Needle and Deaver’s Garden of Beasts, this spy tale about Vienna at the end of WWII kept me reading. It’s complex, poignant, and gritty. It took me a while to keep the characters straight, even with the character list kindly provided by the author, but that’s stretching it to find something negative. My kind of book!
The book is related to some of the author’s other histor...
June 12, 2018
Less is more…
As I work on one of my projects, the sequel to Rembrandt’s Angel, I’m fighting the content editing. For those not accustomed to writer’s jargon, there are three kinds of editing: content, copy, and proofreading. I do the first as I go, and it’s mostly cut-and-paste, and often just cut. Someone else or I do the second after the manuscript is done, and the third kicks in when we have to make final checks on the product (this used to be done with galley proofs, and still is, in some cases).
Sea...
June 7, 2018
Movie Reviews #61: Solo…
Solo. Ron Howard, dir. I went in with low expectations. Frankly, I’m tired of this light-saber fantasy series, with princesses and Jedi warriors, trying to be sci-fi. But this movie was much better than I expected. I liked it, even though Disney probably doesn’t, as they compare it to the Marvel Avengers movie, a huge money maker that’s a mixed-up mess with little plot. Is the Star Wars enterprise becoming like the Star Trek one with only die-hard fans extolling its virtues?
I don’t see why...
June 6, 2018
Review of Jill Paterson’s The Fourth String…
(Jill Paterson, The Fourth String, J. Henderson, 2017, ASIN B07848BHT2)
When Crispin Fitzgerald, new conductor of the Sydney Symphony, is brutally murdered, DCI Alistair Fitzjohn is called back from leave to take charge of the case. He finds a crowd of persons of interest: all of Fitzgerald’s condo building, quite an artsy group.
We get a peek into book signings and other author woes, the stolen art trade, and apartments used for violin practice, sculpting, and vocal lessons, as the building’...
June 5, 2018
New book prices and sales…
Most of my indie ebooks are $2.99. Considering that the Sunday Times is $6 now, and I spend far more time producing a book than the Times does in writing that newspaper (I’m discounting ad copy, which I ignore), I hereby announce that all new ebooks in the future will either be $3.99 and up, depending on word count. That means they’ll still be a bargain, of course. (There’s almost zero entertaining and meaningful fiction in the Times, so maybe I’m comparing apples to oranges?)
I don’t have c...
