I wrote my first novel during the summer I turned thirteen.  It was terrible but not unlike the movie City of Angels (the angel was a woman in my story—yeah, I know, they’re supposed to be sexless creatures, but the movie got it wrong too).  I’m a born story-teller and should have bitten the bullet and become a writer, journalist, or something similar, but I decided to take advantage of the Sputnik panic (read:  $$$$ for studying) and become a scientist.  No regrets there.  It put a lot more PB&J sandwiches on the table for my kids (better said, arepas, empenadas, sobrebarriga, papas criollas, yucca and maduros—we were living in South America for a long stretch of time).

Nope, no regrets.  I kept writing and reading and recording my experiences and now I am, finally, a full-time writer who incorporates that life-time of experiences into his writing (I often wonder about young MFAs who have none).  I’ve been writing full-time long enough that I thought it might be appropriate that I write about some of my experiences with this new digital publishing paradigm shift that has revolutionized the world of publishing.  Since I’m opinionated, this is in my free wheelin’ op-ed blog to allow others to comment (all part of the fun).  Here we go, a summary of what works for me.

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Writers’ Digest publishes its list of recommended websites every year.  Mine is different…and much shorter.  Last week I just added it to “Steve’s Writing” page here on this website.  In this post, I’ll divulge the reasons for my choices—all personal, all subjective.  All sites on “Steve’s Writing” are linked to the corresponding website—just double-click to open up a separate window.

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(Carolyn J. Rose, An Uncertain Refuge, ISBN 9780983735908)

Don’t miss this book!  It’s a thriller, full of action and suspense.  Moreover, the underlying theme, spouse abuse and exploitation of women, points out inconvenient social ills in our society—indeed, in the world.  Ms. Rose’s prose is riveting and her characters sparkle with authenticity.  None of the story seems contrived.  I couldn’t put it down.

First, the story:  Kate Dalton manages an Arkansan domestic violence shelter, a place where abused women go as a last recourse when the prehistoric system of restraining orders fails, as it usually does.  Amanda Blake’s double ex—one ex for angry ex-husband and the other for violent ex-con—shows up at the shelter and tries to kill her.  Kate steps in with a few martial arts skills and ex-hubby dies by his own knife.  The governing board of the shelter, led by a sleazy misogynist lawyer, decides it wants to take advantage of the publicity, but Kate doesn’t, so the board fires Kate.  She heads out of town but is detoured by the recovering Amanda who cons Kate into being her son’s guardian while, like a mother bird leading the cat away from the nestlings, takes the ex-husband’s equally violent brother on a wild goose chase.

Kate seeks and finds comfort in menial labor while running a motel located on the Oregon shore.  She and Amanda’s son (the kid is a hoot) are befriended by two of the motel workers, the chamber maid and the handyman; an older woman running an animal shelter; and a sheriff who prefers fishing in solitude but is ready to help.  She begins a process of bonding with Amanda’s son.  But all along the brother is hot on Kate’s trail.  After killing Amanda in Ohio, he makes it to Oregon.  The confrontation with Kate turns into a confrontation with the handyman, but I won’t spoil the ending for you.

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(William Brown, The Undertaker, ISBN 9781617505119, Kindle eBook)

Do you believe “bargain eBook” means “poor quality”?  Think again.  One of my own readers offered a counter example: in one download session, she bought ten bargain eBooks and enjoyed seven of them.  Not even Derek Jeter has that kind of batting average.  (You can argue that the other three were badly written, but readers’ likes are very subjective—so maybe not.)  The digital revolution is a wonderful boon to readers (maybe not so much for authors), but good books like William Brown’s The Undertaker will make just as much for the author via quantity of sales as any high-priced eBook for an author published by one of the Big Six publishers (I just use this label to group some publishing conglomerates together, not in a pejorative sense).  It’s why some authors (for example, Barry Eisler of thriller fame) are foregoing those Big Six contracts and publishing eBooks on their own.

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Wouldn’t you know it?  I was gifted a copy of Jeffery Deaver’s Carte Blanche, his new 007 thriller.  Put a book in my hands and I start turning pages.  In this case, they were real pages, although I understand that the book is also doing well as an eBook.  I was curious, I’ll admit.  What could Mr. Deaver do with Bond that hasn’t been done before?

Pre-existing biases and genre prejudices shouldn’t count in the reviewer’s world even though, in my case, I’m also a writer with my own way of doing things (which continuously evolves, but that’s another story)—the title of Jane Friedman’s well known blog, There Are No Rules, is really a corollary to the writer’s commandment “Know what the rules are.”  Yet a writer’s style goes beyond rules and is as personal as his fingerprints.  I generally like Deaver’s, but, as I mentioned in a post a few weeks ago, I didn’t want to have anything to do with James Bond.

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Some news about three of my favorite duplicitous countries:  (1) The Pakistani spy agency has been implicated in the murder of journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad.  Yes, these are the same guys that arrested the people who helped us send OBL to hell where he belongs.  They’re also the same guys who knew where he was all the time.  (2)  It turns out the Afghan police (army?  it’s hard to tell in a Third World country) were incapable of putting down the attackers at that hotel in Kabul.  They needed the help of NATO attack helicopters.  (3) The Saudis have purchased some special tanks from German companies.  These tanks are equipped with special crowd-control features.  Is Angela Merkel and her government embarrassed?

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Last Sunday Pradnya Joshi wrote an alarming article titled “We Knew They Got Raises.  But This?”  It was in the Business section of the N.Y. Times.  I say “alarming” because, not only were American CEOs not particularly hurt by a recession that has hammered the U.S. middle class, they managed to eke out on average a measly 23% raise over their pay in 2009.  The median pay for top executives at 200 companies last year was reported in this article to be $10.8 million.

Why is this obscene?  Let’s assume that the hypothetical median executive really works his butt off 24/7, 365 days per year.  That’s 8760 hours.  So, $10.8 million translates to about $1200 per hour.  That’s about 165 times the federal minimum wage.  Of course, no CEO works 24/7 365 days per year, not even if his alias is Iron Man.  He enjoys his yacht, his summer home, his time on the golf course, a mistress or two perhaps—all of which take time from his job.  He puts his pants on the same as me—and, unlike me, takes them off for the mistresses while the trophy wife is in the country club (the membership is often paid as a company benefit).  Are you getting the idea?

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By now I suspect that many Jeffery Deaver fans know he has gone over to “the dark side.”  Either he’s an Ian Fleming wannabe, is tired of Lincoln Rhyme, has run out of ideas to write about, or was enticed by a multi-million dollar contract, but his new 007 adventure Carte Blanche has been released.  Too bad.  Even Jeffery Deaver can’t haul me kicking and screaming back to 007.

Now, don’t get me wrong—writers pick up famous series and do marvelous things with the settings and characters that are already established.  The continuation of Ludlum’s Bourne series comes to mind and even some of the Star Trek books aren’t bad as space operas, although they’re more fantasy than sci-fi, of course.  The difference is that the writers of those series’ continuations aren’t as well known as Jeffery Deaver.  C’mon, Jeff, what gives?

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A second edition of the FBI’s “Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide” is currently under revision and will be out on October 1.  Is this a new and improved version?  Hardly.  While emotional rants from organizations like the ACLU are expected in this and all similar cases, a saner review tells you that it’s just more of the same—and that’s the problem.  What are reasonable limits on our privacy?  How much of our privacy are we willing to lose in order to protect ourselves from criminal elements and terrorism?

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This was available for some time for next-to-nothing on Amazon Shorts.  Alas, the latter has been sacrificed to the marketing gods–Amazon’s loss, your gain, especially if you have read my sci-fi thriller Full Medical. An old friend was upset that I killed off his favorite character in that book, so I resurrected him, in a sense.  Enjoy.

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Character Assassination

Steven M. Moore

Copyright, 2007

“Your holiness, sir, I really want to lodge a complaint.”

St. Peter twirled the keys to the gates to heaven with his left hand, his right perched jauntily on his corresponding hip.  He was assuming a defiant pose as this was the first case where a fictional character had wandered up to the heavenly gates.  He didn’t know quite what to do with him.  In the meantime, he was twirling the keys to the kingdom with his left hand so that Old Bob would know that the saints were ambidextrous, not favoring either the left or the right, but the old drunk apparently was not impressed.  So the bearded saint decided to demand an explanation.

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