Steven M. Moore's Blog

“Write what you know” is stereotypical advice writing coaches serve up. It’s complete bullshit, of course! In the collection Howling at the Moon where my short story “Gamin” appears, I write about a copper and urchin fighting crime on the moon. Obviously I’ve never been to the moon, so I can’t know what it’s like. That story sprung from my imagination!

I’ve never been to China either (and until that country becomes a democracy, I refuse to go!). But in Aristocrats and Assassins, NYPD Detective D...

…for authors and book promoters (and interested readers): I get offers all the time from book promoters asking me to use their promotion services, almost as many suggesting I jazz up this website. I realize the latter is getting a bit long in the tooth, but any jazzing up will be done by the same company of website gurus that I initially used to create it, Monkey C Media. The former are a bit more complex to automatically ignore, so allow me to explain. (Penny Sansevieri et al, take note.)

The m...

Last week I wrote about my first mystery/thriller novel, The Midas Bomb. That was my third book, so it definitely qualifies as “evergreen,” i.e., an oldie that is as current and fresh as the day I finished it (my opinion, of course—critics’ opinions might differ), but I try to make sure all my stories remain relevant for many years.

My second novel, Soldiers of God, is an “evergreen book” as well, but this sci-fi thriller turned out to be a bridge book between the “Clones and Mutants Trilogy” an...

After a quick review of my oeuvre recently (I often do this to avoid repetition, for example), I had to wonder, “Did I really write that?” Some readers might think that’s just an old scientist being nostalgic about his research papers written long ago during an effectively previous lifetime. But I bet if you’re reading this blog post, you’re thinking about the later version of Steven M. Moore, this crazy author of mystery, thriller, and sci-fi stories.

One of my favorite novels in that fictional...

Long ago, mostly for personal reasons, not tourism, I visited the South American countries Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay. We started in Buenos Aires. I’m not sure what the Peronistas and the future Pope Francis were doing there at the time, but, as has often been the case, our dollars went a long way because of the high inflation. We met a crazy taxi driver there  (his idea of parallel parking was to get halfway into a space and then ram the rear car back out of the way), a nice ...

Romantasy? Definition: An extremely awful and illiterate creation of a genre that’s a combination of “romance” and “fantasy” to describe the trash that authors and publishers are now dumping on the reading public. God help us! Neither genre will ever recover from this abuse.

Sappy romances have long been “bestsellers,” especially those that are replete with passionate wrestling matches that are a lazy substitute for real plots and themes. It’s mind-numbing fiction with their only claim to fame b...

After all the stories I’ve written—shorts, novellas, and novels—I’ve arrived at the point where I know I’m missing the “mot juste.” I even edit things I hear on TV now, automatically, looking for editing mistakes in word usage and better ways of saying things. Here’s a silly example: A TV reporter said, “Police investigations into what happened continue and are needed to determine what happened.” I thought when I heard that, “That first ‘happened’ is okay. It might be referring to an extended ac...

In my books and other offerings, especially the novels, I often include the section titled “Notes, Disclaimers, and Acknowledgements.” I might include other material as well, but that one might seem unusual to some readers. What is the logic for including this section?

Notes. These might include answers to anticipated questions readers might have as they’re reading or afterwards. Where’d I get the idea for the story (or stories)? Why did I write them? What’s their background? How did I come up w...

The adage says not to do this. While it’s certainly true that bad books can have good covers and bad covers can camouflage bad books—the Big Five publishing conglomerates are guilty of both sins—a better adage might be “a better cover makes any book look more attractive to read.

The “need” for a cover comes from print versions, of course. A traditional book without a good cover doesn’t look more than a manuscript, some legal document, or battle plan (“Project 2025”); in other words, it looks lik...

While I empathize with the main point that NY Times’s editorial columnist Maureen Dowd makes in her article “Attention, Men: Books are Sexy!” summarized in her column’s title (I certainly read a lot more than I write, so I’m not guilty as charged), I disagree with her implication that men should be reading irrelevant and obscure classics (especially not Jane Austen’s novels, the best cure for insomnia that I know of). I’ll also point out that on the whole neither women nor men read much anymore—...