SENTENCE - The Fictions of Ralph Robert Moore

the official website for the writings of
ralph robert moore

www.ralphrobertmoore.com

My new short story collection, Remove the Eyes, is now available as a trade paperback and ebook. Please go here for more details, and ordering information.

"It is easy to see why Father Figure has become an underground classic over the years. It is a dark, extremely disturbing but completely gripping suspense thriller with a strongly erotic subtext...Moore is an extremely talented writer with a gift for pushing the reader's emotional buttons...certainly liable to become a cult classic, and deservedly so."

--From an editorial review of the novel Father Figure, published by Bookbooters

"For me, the masterpiece of the collection is The Rape by Ralph Robert Moore, a multi-viewpoint – in every sense of the word – examination of an apparent rape (or is it) that sizzles with tension and inventiveness."

--Terry Grimwood, in Whispers of Wickedness, reviewing The Rape, published in Sein und Werden.

"…once again the editors have confirmed their extraordinary literary taste and excellent editorial instinct by selecting twenty stories which, for the most part, are up to the high expectations of 'Darkness Rising' aficionados…In some instances, I suspect, the stories are so good as to surpass even the best from the previous volumes, much to the delight of everyone fond of solid, compelling short fiction...[four of the stories] are really outstanding..."The Woman in the Walls" by Ralph Robert Moore is quite amazing. Despite the tell-tale title (believe it or not, that's the core of the plot!) the story is so original and full of surprising twists it remains absolutely memorable."

--Mario Guslandi, in The Agony Column, reviewing The Woman in the Walls, published in the hardcover anthology, Darkness Rising 2005.

"This is a very strong tale, which will take a hold of you at the beginning and grip until the end. It tells of a farmer and his family and the tragedies which fall upon them, and of the dedicated employee who does anything the farmer asks of him. I found this tale to be very emotional, yet creepy and violent. Moore puts us, the reader, right into the story as if we are driving it, and we are."

--Chris Cartwright, in Whispers of Wickedness, reviewing The Machine of a Religious Man, published in Midnight Street, Spring 2005

"…as it's always the case in any anthology, some stories in "Read By Dawn" are positively awful, some just ordinary, and only a bunch are worth mentioning. The latter group, in my opinion, amounts to a dozen, which is not bad at all in a volume assembling twenty-seven tales …The Little Girl Who Lives in the Woods by Ralph Robert Moore is a very dark, cruel tale about the hidden truths of human existence, blending the reality of spoiled innocence, loneliness, violence and hunger for love."

--Mario Guslandi, in Horror World Review, reviewing The Little Girl Who Lives in the Woods, published in the anthology, Read Before Dawn, 2006.

"Another mind-blowing story is Truth Be Told by Ralph Robert Moore, and it is probably the story that most fits the ‘artifice’ remit. A couple – Franklin and Sarah – are talking. He questions her about her encounter at work with another woman, and his questions gradually lead her on to more and more pornographic descriptions of the encounter. It is obvious from her changing stories that much of what she is saying cannot be true. Is she taking her cues from Franklin’s (leading) questions? Is this some sort of a game that they play regularly? But there is a narrative outside of Sarah’s, and it is moving on and taking the reader somewhere disturbing. A quite remarkable story."

--Jim Steel, in Whispers of Wickedness, reviewing Truth Be Told, published in Sein und Werden, Volume 1, Issue 4, 2007

My novel Father Figure, a bestseller for its publisher in trade paperback, is now available for free in PDF format. Click here to go to a page where you can download the complete text of the novel.

If you're here, it's probably night. You can see a window from where you sit, and the window is dark. Who really knows what's outside?

I write. If you read, we've just made a connection.

SENTENCE is the forest you fall asleep into.

Like most authors, I'm more comfortable between covers, but the truth is that's getting harder and harder to achieve these days. Markets have become increasingly timid in this family values age. Plus the table of contents of most periodicals nowadays is decidedly tipped in favor of the falsehoods of nonfiction over the disturbing truths of fiction. Length is another alarm. Many small-circulation magazines, understandably, want to represent as many writers as possible in an issue, and therefore are less likely to accommodate the girth of a well-fed novella.

Back in the thirties, when fiction magazines were as popular as television is today, young writers could move to the cement and grass of the city and be on newsstands two months later.

We bemoan the loss of those days of opportunity, but the truth is we now have more magazines than ever before, only they're called websites. Thanks to cyberspace, anyone can put out their own magazine. No more backroom arguments with printers, no more getting down on your knees in front of advertisers, no more embarrassment trying to extract your right index fingertip from the white string knotted atop the bundle of the latest issue.

Some people say, but if you put your fiction on the web, it'll be stolen. Let's examine that. What could be stolen is either the story itself, or its ideas. A story can be stolen printed or posted, but it should be fairly easy to establish, in either case, the author. If you want, include in your text an anagram that, when held up to light, identifies you like a watermark as the author. Ideas can be stolen-- a simile, a description, a joke-- but that will happen regardless of the medium in which your baggage is left alone on the airport floor. The truth is, fear of plagiarism is fear of readership.

We have an enormous range of talent out beyond the electricity. Talent that can share on the Internet. There are dangers, but to be plagiarized is never fatal. What is more important is to be read. Because if it's in a box, and no one but you knows about the storms raging through the paragraphs, the footsteps plodding soggily down the sentences, water dripping off the rims of words, that's the biggest shame of all. A fizzle. Because the real achievement of writing is not the writing. The real achievement of writing is someone else reading the writing.

I've been published in America, England, Ireland, and Australia, and translated into Lithuanian. My fiction has been called "graphically morbid". My writings are not for everyone. Are they for you? Find out.

You can either go to one of the links in the upper left of this page to read the complete texts of many of my short stories and other writings, published and unpublished, as well as lengthy excerpts from my novels, or you can go to Words Walking Nude, a collection of about fifty short excerpts from my work, to see if you like my style, and what I have to say.

Art is an invitation to go inside someone else's mind. To see our world as they see it. SENTENCE is my mind.

I'm glad you came. I just lit a cigarette. I just poured Merlot. I hope you enjoy your exploration.

For a complete chronology of site updates, please see HISTORY.

Established January 1, 1998.

SENTENCE Publishing

"All was chaos, that is, earth, air, water, and fire were mixed together; and out of that bulk a mass formed-- just as cheese is made out of milk-- and worms appeared in it, and these were the angels."

-- Domenico Scandella, 1599 (Two years before being burned at the stake).

remove the eyes

june 1, 2009

I've decided to publish a collection of my short stories.

It's an option I've been tempted by for a while.

Before the Internet, writers had no control over the publishing of their work. If editors didn't accept your story, that story only existed in a manila folder in your files. Stories want to be read, just like food wants to be eaten. If you prepare a Spaghetti Carbonara but no one eats it, is that Carbonara truly a meal, or just a stove activity? If you write a story but no one reads it, is that manuscript truly a story, or just a keyboard activity?

The Internet changed all that.

I remember, back in the mid-nineties, when I first started looking around the Net and came across author sites. Some of these writers had posted their own stories online. Anyone could read them. No editor or publisher needed. It occurred to me, I can do that.

I bought a book on HTML code.

It's hard to convey how empowering that was. I could get my work out to readers directly.

So I posted some of my stories online.

It's the same thing with short story collections.

I've been approached by a number of editors over the years asking if they could publish a collection of my stories. In each case, the project ultimately fell through, for one frustrating reason or another.

But that process did start me thinking.

Much like the Internet freed writers to post their own work online, several vendors on the Internet now allow writers to publish their own work as printed books.

Again, this is truly empowering.

I get to decide what stories to include. What order they'll be in. Their final text. I have complete control.

I looked around at the different self-publishing services, and decided on Lulu.

In many ways, this was an easy decision.

Lulu is the largest Print on Demand (POD) publisher on the Internet.

(In traditional publishing, the publisher orders a print run of, let's say, 500 copies. That's a huge up-front cost. If those copies don't sell, the publisher loses money. With POD, the printer (Lulu in this case) doesn't do a print run. The print-ready file for the collection is stored digitally. Each time a customer orders a book, one copy of that book is printed and shipped. No overhead costs.)

Lulu charges nothing for making your book available. They provide you with the tools to format your book, both text and cover. You're in charge of putting the book together. Once the book is the way you want it, Lulu takes a commission of 20% over the printing cost on each copy sold, and you get the remaining 80%. Pretty nice.

I decided to publish my collection in the standard U.S. trade paperback format (nine inches by six inches). I downloaded a Lulu MS Word file that was pre-set to the page dimensions I'd need (margins and page length), then copied my short stories to that file.

It was a lot of fun editing the collection.

I got to choose the font I wanted (I went with Garamond, which I've always liked. To me, it's the most easily-readable font.) Got to choose the font size (I chose Garamond 11. I like a font size that, again, is easily readable, but just ever so subtly smaller than a regular font size. That very slightly reduced font size makes the reading experience, I feel, more intimate.)

I was able to determine how I wanted each page to appear. For example, I decided against putting the story's title, and my name, at the top of each page. I like it, reading a collection, when there's no distracting verbiage at the top of each page. It allows you to get more deeply immersed in each story, as if you're lost in the woods.

There were practical editing chores as well, to conform my manuscripts to conventional book format. I had to go through each story and use the Word function Search and Replace to change the spacing after each period from two spaces to one space (in traditional manuscript submissions, you include two spaces after each period. In print-ready texts, you only use one space, because two spaces will produce a "snake" pattern down the page.) I had to make sure each ellipsis was exactly three dots, and had to change each double-hyphen to an em dash.

I also meticulously went through each story, line by line, word by word, to produce the definitive version of that story.

Again, a lot of fun.

So what stories did I include?

I wanted a mix of stories that had already been published, as well as stories that had never before appeared in print.

Above all, I wanted stories that flowed together, thematically. And I wanted each story to be a strong story. I didn't want any filler.

I had over seventy published and unpublished stories of mine from which to choose.

Here are the nine stories I selected:

AFTER HERE. 2,300 words. Never before published. Tom is eating his lunch in a crowded pubic square in Portland, Maine when a pretty young woman comes up to him and asks if he'd like to play a game.

THE WOMAN IN THE WALLS. 7,000 words. Originally published in the anthology, Darkness Rising 2005. A girl Jack meets in a San Francisco bar invites him to come home with her, but warns him there's an incredibly obese woman who lives in the walls of her apartment.

THE MACHINE OF A RELIGIOUS MAN. 8,000 words. Originally published in Midnight Street. Anthologized in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, edited by Ellen Datlow. Nominated as Best Short Story of the Year in the 2006 British Fantasy Society Awards. Bonay races in a car through the desert highways of New Mexico, trying to help his friend Gordon, who's crying in the back seat.

STRANGERS WEAR MASKS OF YOUR FACE. 15,400 words. Originally published in Theaker's Quarterly. Philip pretends to still be asleep in the middle of the night in his northern Wisconsin apartment, as strangers with knives gather around his bed.

MY FIRST KISS. 10,000 words. Never before published. A boy and girl who like to break into other people's houses for fun find themselves faced-down by an old woman with a shot gun when they break into a castle that's been transported stone-by-stone to Connecticut.

STEAKS IN THE CITY. 7,000 words. Never before published. Warren sucks up huge amounts of booze and drugs, then goes driving into Dallas to find his lost love.

THIS MOMENT OF BRILLIANCE. 9,500 words. Originally published in Lullaby Hearse. Ed, a wet work specialist, goes a little bit crazy in the Maine to Florida corridor while he's searching for a man with a secret.

LIKE AN ANIMAL IN A HOLE. 10,600 words. Never before published. David and Nell visit the Seattle town home of Nell's dead brother, trying to figure out how he died.

ROCKETSHIP APARTMENT. 7,700 words. Originally published in Midnight Street. Kevin meets Carla at a Los Angeles laundromat, and gets drawn into her plan to travel to the next galaxy.

So, five stories published before, four stories making their first appearance.

I'm really excited by this project. It allows me to get my fiction out there, in printed form, with me as my own editor/publisher.

Lulu lets you set your own price for your book. I ultimately decided on $18.00 for the trade paperback; $6.25 for the ebook download.

Given that the collection is over 70,000 words, over 200 pages, I think it's a fair price.

There are different ways you can order the collection.

You can go directly to my storefront on Lulu, here, and order the book. Ordering directly through Lulu helps me the most, because I get the highest royalty that way.

In about two months, you should be able to buy the book through different online bookstores, including Amazon U.S., Amazon Canada, Amazon U.K., Barnes and Noble, etc.

Also in about two months, you should be able to go into any "bricks and mortar" bookstore, whether it's a chain or independent seller, and order the book from the Ingram catalog.

I'm really curious to see how this experiment turns out. I'd love to publish additional short story collections, plus some of my novels.

The Internet is turning into a farmer's market. The middleman (publishing house/supermarket) is no longer needed. You buy your produce directly from the person growing those tomatos and jalapenos, dirt under their fingernails.

If you enjoy my writings, please help support this project by going hereto order a copy of my collection.

Lulu accepts all major credit cards, plus PayPal, and ships to most countries.

Updated information on the availability of Remove the Eyes at different venues (Amazon, Barnes and Noble, etc.) can be found by going to Buy My Books.

A new Lately is published the first of each month. To print this Lately, please go here. To read previous Lately entries, please go here.