[Have a happy and safe Thanksgiving!]

For me, probably DOA. I have three collections (not counting the one I offer as a PDF free for the asking), and they sell zilch. Two are even priced low in order to serve as an introduction to my writing. It doesn’t matter. They don’t do well. I have a short story in a crime anthology too. But whether crime/mystery/thriller or sci-fi, it just seems readers aren’t interested in short stories or novellas.

That’s hard to understand. In our current hectic lifestyles, I can understand that a reader doesn’t want to start a long novel. I barely got through the last Harry Potter novel (verbosity is always Rawling’s friend), had a terrible time with Eco’s Name of the Rose (I kept losing track of the story line), and never could finish Tolstoy’s War and Peace (maybe we could get rid of Putin if he read it?). But short stories and novellas—maybe one day for the former and two or three for the latter. And, while I never set out to write a story of specific length, I can also write a short story in a couple of days. (When I had a day-job, I’d often write them out on napkins when I went for coffee.)

If you read my review of the movie Arrival, you saw that I made reference to Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life,” the novella the movie is based on. It’s contained in a collection with another five stories (both of my inexpensive collections have six stories too). OK, it’s a twist on the alien invasion theme, but many authors have written twists on that (including me)—how was he noticed? That collection is now on my TBRoR-list (“To Be Read or Reviewed”), but I’ll have to wait awhile because the Kindle version is far too expensive. (The Kindle version is $11.99 for an equivalent 306 print pages. My Pasodobles in a Quantum Stringscape is $2.99 for an equivalent 234 pages. If you do the math, I should be selling mine for $9—but who said ebook pricing is logical?).

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[Encounters with ETs don’t need to happen in space…and they could be a bit racy…For those of you traveling during this busiest travel time of the year, have a safe and easy trip!]

Emma5

Copyright 2016, Steven M. Moore

Chapter One

Mari fought to control starship Odysseus as it bit into the atmosphere. Alarms were sounding. The calm but irritating voice of Jason, their AI, still came through on her com implant, so she killed his alarms.

“Dip and dive!” said Hana. “We have to keep it from breaking up.” That suggestion was vocal, not via the embedded comset.

Gee, thanks, Hana, why didn’t I think of that!

“These damn things were never meant for planet-fall,” said Loku.

Yeah, someone else thinking I don’t know what to do.

“We don’t exactly have time for the escape pods,” said Mari, deciding not to waste time with biting rejoinders.

“Bring her down anywhere. Practically the whole damn planet’s ocean. We’ll worry about finding land later.” Loku checked skin temp. “If you have enough control, we’ll just make a big splash.”

They did. The ten-thousand ton starship created a small tsunami and then sank.

What the hell?

“Jason, why are the cargo hold’s doors opening?” Loku tried to counter the AI’s command.

“Damn AI thinks we want to abandon ship for some reason,” said Mari. “Some embedded protocol. It probably doesn’t understand water. Software glitch!”

“We’re sinking and filling with water,” said Hana, just before the control room’s sliding door buckled and the wave of saltwater hit her.

This is not the time to learn to swim, thought Mari as she fought to keep her head above water. Her next and last conscious thought was that they should all have been in their spacesuits. Three could be found in closets beside an airlock right beneath them. That might have saved them.

***

Mari awoke on a beach and felt something crawling on her face. She screamed and brushed off a small animal with eight legs. She sat upright and squinted at the planet’s sun.  Not a cloud in the sky. She studied the horizon. Where’s the ship? Did we somehow escape and swim ashore?

                She realized she was completely naked. The light clothes she had worn on ship were gone. She sat up, hugged herself, and noticed the curious welts on her torso. Did another sea creature save us? She was surprised at the thought. The planet was supposed to be devoid of any large life forms. Maybe her subconscious was telling her something.

She felt a rawness in her genitals, as if the Union’s portodocs had just given her a flight-check physical. She put that out of her mind, writing it off to the traumatic experience of somehow getting out of the ship and saving herself.
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Now that Trump has won, the GOP-controlled Congress will probably receive a new nominee for the court to replace Obama’s. When it looked like HRC would win in a landslide in the Electoral College (what a difference a day makes!), there were major threats from Congress to the effect that they wouldn’t approve any nominee during her presidency. That would have been yet another blow to an important but sick democratic institution and would have continued its crippled state we saw in many important decisions during the last months with the constant threat that lower courts’ rulings are left standing when there’s a tie 4-4 vote. Now, with the tables turned, it’s possible that the Dems will do the same thing to Trump unless he nominates someone the Dems can live with (the rejection of Bork offers a precedent of what the Dems can do).

With hindsight, Trump would want to guarantee his nominee would ensure a conservative agenda, probably a Scalia-clone (isn’t Thomas enough?). Ensuring any agenda from your nominee is hard to do, though. Earl Warren was the conservatives’ worst traitor and the progressives’ delight—that justice nominated by Eisenhower shed his wolf clothing and became a liberal lamb, presiding over many important decisions that upset conservative apple carts. The situation was exacerbated for Ike and the GOP because Warren was even Chief Justice! CJ Roberts has shown a wee bit of that irascibility and independence too, earning the wrath of conservatives in many cases. Kennedy and Souter also have offered many surprises. No one knows whether the conservative side of the court will be emboldened by Trump’s win and Sessions nomination to the AG post (that will probably be filibustered by the Dems in the Senate unless it eliminates the filibustering tradition—I can see some sleepless days and nights in old Dems’ futures).

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You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.—Winston Churchill

***

Trouble on the border? It’s not Mr. Trump’s construction trucks rolling in but Detectives Chen and Castilblanco trying to stop a few bad guys. Assigned to a national task force, they stand in the way of a diabolical plan that involves a drug cartel, al Qaeda, and a right-wing militia. Angels Need Not Apply is a thriller you don’t want to miss! Available on Amazon and Smashwords and its associated retailers (Apple, B&N, Kobo, etc) and lenders.

In libris libertas!

Arrival. Denis Villeneuve, dir. The ETs are called Heptapods, but they look like elongated octopi standing on their tippytoes. I’ve always been fascinated by the challenge of ET/human communication (see Sing a Samba Galactica—also available in other ebook formats—or the PDF free for the asking, “Portal in the Pines”), so you’d think this movie would be like a full glass of Jameson for me. 90% of it was. I’ll have to go read Ted Chiang’s novella “Story of Your Life” now to answer some questions. Yeah, OK, the ETs form of communication was via circles with fuzz, squirted out from those feet like octopis’ ink emissions. But why circles? And the fuzz looked very fractal, so can there really be information content there (there are data compression schemes that are fractal-based).

Amy Adams, who plays Dr. Louise Banks, a linguist, is a wee bit too fragile but does a pretty good job as main character, but not Oscar caliber as some critics claim. Jeremy Brenner plays Dr. Ian Donnelly, a theoretical physicist. It seems like Hollywood needs a romantic complement to a protagonist even when the sexes are reversed. I guess Ian’s needed to give the hugs the fragile Louise desperately needs? The rest of the cast is just so-so. At least they didn’t make the black guy (Forrest Whittaker) the villain—that job was handled by paranoid government leaders all around the world.

I’m still thinking about this one. The best two sci-fi movies of all time, Alien and Blade Runner, were also notable for their quiet, mysterious, and scary intensity. That’s all Arrival has going for it basically, but it’s well done (the score helps). The violence, unlike those two famous movies, is minimal. In that sense, it’s more like The Martian, although not nearly so scientific (and thankfully the Heptapods don’t grow potatoes).  I’ll have to say that the intensity makes the time fly, and you’ll want to eat some popcorn instead of your nails. The movie certainly offers an important lesson: people will get creeped out when confronting something radically different. Some viewers said it “blew their mind.” (That is done with very few glitzy special effects, by the way, making me wonder why all the visual effects crews listed in the credits were necessary. Maybe I didn’t register their subtlety.)

Chiang’s novella was originally offered as a PDF like The Martian. I’ve started doing that too, mainly because I can’t afford to publish everything I write. It’s comforting that someone in Hollywood still reads original sci-fi literature. (Watched an old Star Trek episode I’d missed last Saturday—so much better than ones from the other series because it was written by a REAL sci-fi writer, not a wannabe screenwriter). I just wish some titles were changed: Arrival is even lamer than “Story of Your Life.” Titles are important, but writers seem to be hooked on lame ones recently.

In libris libertas!

[Aren’t you lucky! Double feature today…]

Holly Berry Arts and Crafts Show success. I want to thank everyone who stopped by my booth. If you also purchased a book or books, all the more thanks—I hope you enjoy the stories and come back for more. That show was a great success for the Upper Montclair Woman’s Club in general—all for a very the good cause of supporting their community actions—and for me in particular. It was a very different experience compared to a book fair. You can see a pic of me at the show on my Facebook author’s page (“Liking” the photo and/or the author page in general would be greatly appreciated).

Book clubs. While I signed all the books I sold at the Holly Berry Show (there were many!), my participation there seemed less like a book signing or book fair and more like the experience I have with book clubs—lots of discussions with people about the writing life, books and authors, genres, and so forth. In spite of being a bit of an old-fashioned, introverted, and reclusive author, I enjoy that kind of interaction. I’ve always been a people-watcher and enjoy talking with people (although I probably listen more than talk). If you belong to a book club in the Montclair, NJ area, query me to discuss details about an appearance. Depending on the size of your club, I can provide complimentary ebooks or print books (if available) for the club members.

Email newsletter. At the Holly Berry Show people signed up for an email newsletter, so I decided to offer it in general (new policy!). This will be a shortened and more sporadic version of this newsletter about newsy items in my writing life you, the reader, might be interested in—new books, freebies, other events like the Holly Berry show, and news and info about the world of publishing in general that might affect you as a reader. I will NOT bombard you with zero-content newsletters or ads. And I will never divulge your email to third parties—I don’t like spam, and I imagine you don’t either.

Amazon is annoying. I was writing an article for next week on whether short story collections are doomed to extinction (please, no comments until you’ve read the article) and happened to look up details about Fire Upon the Deep, a Vinge sci-fi novel. In their defense, Amazon’s computer algorithms have no way of knowing what I intended to do with that information, but I was immediately blitzed on Facebook with an ad for that novel.

First, why blitz me with an ad? Presumably, if I were interested in buying the book, I would have bought it when I was on Amazon! Second, there is the stupid assumption that I was interested in the book, which is not true–I hate it as an example of a case where a sci-fi writer goes against KNOWN science. Vinge postulates that the speed of light changes as one moves away from galaxy center.

You can extrapolate known science in sci-fi; negating known science is a sin. That’s why I’m not into zombies, vampires, werewolves, ghosts, and so forth, but you could call that fantasy. Vinge received the 1991 Hugo for his book, a prize generally reserved for true sci-fi, and that’s how his book was marketed. In such cases, I can’t get beyond the pseudo-scientific crap to enjoy the story–sorry Vernor!

New PDF free for the asking. I just finished the novella “The Whistleblower” last week, a story set in the future about two presidential candidates and their backers. It’s a pessimistic portrayal about how American democracy might evolve, so we’ll say it’s post-apocalyptic considering the current election results. It’s completely bipartisan, though, because I don’t say which party each candidate belongs too, and they’re both sleazy. This has joined the list of other PDFs free for the asking—see the “Free Stuff & Contests” page. Query me via the contact page.

More info for readers. In addition to the online and email newsletters, I write book and movie reviews and author interviews.  Bookpleasures.com is where I do my “official reviewing” of books, but I’ll often post reviews of books I read for R&R here. Also, any reader with comments, questions, or concerns about one of my books can use my contact page—I’ll respond as soon as possible. (Those email threads can be a lot of fun.)

Info for writers. About half my posts in recent months have been about writing and the writing business, 309 in total over the lifetime of this blog—yeah, I’ve been writing for a long time! Here are some recent titles of posts you can find in the “Writing” archive that might interest you: Crime, Mystery, and Thriller Stories; NaNoWriMo and Writing Distractions; Action Scenes; The Cart and the Horse; “Cultural Appropriation” in Writing; Dystopian and Post-Apocalyptic Fiction; Short Story, Novella, or Novel?; Books by Celebrities; and Are Traditional Crime Stories Passé? Maybe it’s time to add to my little course on fiction writing? (That’s in the archive too, but it’s also compiled into a PDF, free for the asking.)

***

Action on the southern border! No, it’s not Trump beginning the construction of The Wall. It’s Chen and Castilblanco fighting terrorists, a cartel, and neo-Nazi militias. In Angels Need Not Apply, the deadly duo from the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series” go undercover to fight crime as part of a national task force. This novel is available in all ebook formats.

In libris libertas!

Some people consider these three words to be genres, but now they’re just keywords that help readers figure out what the plot is about or what is emphasized, and, in many cases, a short story, novella, or novel can be described by all three.  Crime stories (often called police procedurals when involving cops) focus on the crime solvers and their techniques. Mysteries are often more cerebral and focus on who committed the crime and why, and the mystery solvers are more likely to be ordinary people, not pros—the reader doesn’t know who committed the crime and the author often includes misdirects to confuse her or him so s/he can’t guess who did it. In a thriller, the reader is likely to know who committed the crime, or who is planning to commit one, and the protagonist(s) are more concerned with stopping it.

Consider a story about a serial killer. That’s one case where all those keywords can apply, and the most appropriate keyword just indicates an emphasis. For the crime writer, a cop will match wits with the serial killer, try to find out who s/he is (most serial killers are males, though, so a female could be a twist), and then apprehend the perp. The mystery writer might also have a protagonist match wits with the killer and try to find out who s/he is, but there might be many misdirects and even events from the protagonist’s past that connect her or him to the killer. The thriller writer would tend to alternate between the serial killer and those chasing him, letting the reader get into the minds of both, and action scenes might be featured more (see a previous writing post).  Clearly all these stories can have elements of crime, mystery, and thrills.

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[This one is just for fun: this bawdy of evidence suggests that time-travel is impossible. But who knows what happens in a parallel universe?]

The Apprentice

Copyright 2016, Steven M. Moore

            “You’re late.  I’ll buzz you in.”

Late?  I know that!

Jeff Langley’s car had broken down…again!  He’d had to call a cab, a trip that had cost him nearly all his cash.  He also expected the cops to tow the car—that charge would bankrupt him.  He wasn’t happy with the prospect of asking dear old Dad for money.  The I-told-you-you-needed-an-advanced-degree sermons were becoming tiresome.

The voice on the intercom had been garbled and hard to understand, but the buzzer sounded.  He walked into the old lab building, one of the oldest on campus.  Why the security?  He pulled out the slip of paper.  It had gone through one wash of his jeans. “Technical assistant wanted.  Must have experience writing code to connect and control different electronic equipment installations.  Inquire with Prof. G. Hoff, Brook’s Lab, Room 5H.”  He found stairs at the end of a dark corridor and began to climb.  Guess elevators didn’t exist when they made this building!

He knocked at 5H.

“Wait a moment!”  The voice was muffled.  There was a pause.  “Come on in. Take a seat. Not literally, of course.”

He looked around, but saw no one.  Rows of workbenches were covered with equipment and parts, tools, and takeout cartons.  “Professor Hoff?”

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What made Mexico so evil back in the 1840s, well before our Civil War, is that slavery is illegal there. Remember the Alamo? With that war we were making California our own, and a lot of other people and properties, and doing it as though butchering Mexican soldiers who were only defending their homeland against invaders wasn’t murder.—Kurt Vonnegut

***

Action on the southern border! No, it’s not Trump beginning the construction of The Wall. It’s Chen and Castilblanco fighting terrorists, a cartel, and neo-Nazi militias. In Angels Need Not Apply, the deadly duo from the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series” go undercover to fight crime as part of a national task force. This novel is available in all ebook formats (Amazon, Smashwords and its retailers).

In libris libertas!

If you are not prepared to take care of the men and women who put their lives on the line to defend this country—who come back wounded in body and spirit—if you’re not prepared to help those people, then don’t send them to war in the first place.—Bernie Sanders

Celebrate and support our veterans and their families and remember the fallen today.

In libris libertas!