Steven M. Moore’s interest in printed media (pre-kinder learning to read and write by filling in balloons in his own comic books, and first novel written the summer he turned thirteen) and early reading of mature sci-fi novels, mysteries, and adventures (today the latter would be called thrillers) led him at an early age to declare, “I can write entertaining and intriguing stories too.” Like many, though, he had to postpone his aspirations to support himself and later his family, so he opted for training in scientific fields—math and science seemed easy at the time, and the immediate post-Sputnik era provided the necessary financial aid as his training took him from UC Santa Barbara to UMass Amherst.

After years of academic teaching and research in the US and South America, he had collected so many what-ifs, plot ideas, character sketches, themes, dialogue snippets, and potential settings that his muses (really banshees with Tasers), knowing he’d never suffer from writer’s block, told him to get busy and start publishing. After fifteen years of doing so, and the publication of many novels, he’s still going strong.

His travels around Europe, South America, and the US, for work or pleasure, taught him a lot about the human condition and our wonderful human diversity, a learning process that started during his childhood in California’s San Joaquin Valley. What he learned affects his storytelling, but he also learned to respect and appreciate Kurt Vonnegut’s opinion that writing fiction is an entertainment business (unlike Vonnegut, Moore doesn’t mind semicolons when used properly), reaffirming his desire to entertain with his fiction. The corollary to that is N. Scott Momaday’s confession: “I simply kept my goal in mind and persisted. Perseverance is a large part of writing.” Moore used his old UCSB English professor’s words as a mantra in his own life.

Moore also maintains an active website with weekly new content—some of his blog posts on writing have appeared around the internet, especially “The Eightfold Way”—and he has encouraged and supported other writers with book reviews (his last one was a review of Walter Isaacson’s Leonardo Da Vinci, found on Bookpleasures) and interviews. He’s also been interviewed on several websites, including Feathered Quill. He has a Facebook author page and is active there and on Goodreads. He is now a full-time writer and, whether writing articles, short stories, novellas, or novels, he enjoys every minute of it.

Moore has lived in California, Indiana, Maryland, and Massachusetts, as well as Colombia, where he learned to dream in Spanish and appreciate Gabo’s prose skills and Neruda’s poetry in Castellano. He and his wife now live in Montclair, NJ, just thirteen miles west of the Lincoln Tunnel.