Ralph Robert (Rob) Moore

answers the Usual Questions

From his web site: Some people say, but if you put your fiction on the web, it'll be stolen. Let's examine that... 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, Canada, England, Ireland, India 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.

Has your interaction with fans, for example, at conventions, affected your work?

I can't say that it really has. Most of the fan mail I get is positive, and it is encouraging to hear that people like what you're doing, but I'd write what I write regardless of whether others love it or hate it, so the feedback isn't an influence (although I do truly appreciate that people have taken the time to let me know they like my work.)

I think there can be a danger for a writer (or any artist) receiving positive feedback. We all know to ignore letters that were written to simply slam our work, but if you receive a lot of compliments for your humor, for example, there can be a tendency to write more humorous pieces just in reaction to that praise, which can mean you end up writing not for yourself, but for the tastes of a set of fans or a particular editor.

I've never been to a convention, only because it's just never happened, so I have no idea what that experience is like.

Is there any particular incident (a letter, a meeting, a comment that stands out?

Although I receive letters regarding my fiction, I'd have to say the majority of my mail over the years has come from people talking about my online diary entries. I post a new entry each month, and they tend to go into some detail about my regular, day-to-day life. Two types of entries in particular have generated a lot of mail: One a series of entries on my wife Mary's stroke in 2002 (I receive a lot of letters from people who have had strokes and people who are caregivers for stroke patients); and the second a series of entries I've written whenever one of our cats have died. Those emails are the most affecting to me, because they're usually written by someone who has either just lost a pet, or has a beloved pet who is obviously dying. They're hard to read. I try each time to offer whatever consolation I can, and often include Christina Rossetti's poem, "Remember" in my answer, a beautiful, beautiful poem about dealing with the death of a loved one.

The one email in particular in that regard that I remember was from a young couple who had just lost their cat. Searching the web for "death of a cat" they had come across some of my writings, and wrote me about their cat. The email was heart-breaking. I wrote back, a long letter, and later heard from the wife that they had been waiting for my reply, and her husband had decided at one point to take a shower while they waited. Once she received my email, she said she pulled her husband out of the shower so they could read it together. I hope it helped them.

The weirdest email I ever got was from a mother who wasn't too Internet-savvy. This was years ago. I talk about a lot of subjects on my website SENTENCE, one of them being food. The mother wrote me to complain that her daughters had been searching on the term "wok", had found my site where I have a couple of recipes that use woks, and had then wandered to other areas of my site where some of the short stories are rather explicit in terms of sex and violence. She complained that I had "tricked" Google into listing my site for woks as a bait to expose young people to explicit stories. (If only I had that power.)

Do you have a favourite author or book (or writer or film or series) that has influenced you or that you return to?

Well, I love Nabokov, Burroughs, Barthelme, Cortazar, Robbe-Grillet. They had the greatest influence on me, because they showed me what you can do with narrative.

Movie-wise, anything dark and bleak. Night of the Living Dead, To Live and Die in L.A. . . . you get the idea.

In terms of TV series, definitely Six Feet Under. The poignancy of it, and the complexity of the characters.

Who is the person you would most like to be trapped in a lift with? or a spaceship?

An engineer who knows how to get me out of there as quickly as possible.

Who is the person you would most DISlike to be trapped in a lift with? Or a spaceship?

Anyone who is absolutely inflexible in their beliefs, and feels someone who doesn't believe exactly what they do is beneath contempt, regardless of whether that inflexible belief involves fundamentalism or atheism.

What would you pack for space? (Is there a food, beverage, book, teddy bear, etc that you couldn't do without?)

I'd pack my wife Mary, all our cats, cat food so our cats wouldn't overpower us and eat us, food for ourselves, and a storage device with speakers that held as many of our favorite songs as we could fit on it.

What is the most important thing you would like to get/achieve from your work?

Seeing as much of it getting published as possible, and in as many readers' hands as possible. I want as many people as possible flipping my pages for as long as possible.

What is the special satisfaction of your work?

Building a great sentence. Creating a cool metaphor. Finding a character who's effortless to write, because he or she won't stop talking in my head.

submitted by Ralph Robert (Rob) Moore

12 August, 2013

For other answers to The Usual Questions Click here

Just the facts:
Born: I was born in a small hospital in Greenwich, Connecticut, USA. The town tore down the hospital soon after my birth, but I've never held it against them. I was born on November 24. I won't give the year, because, you know, the Internet.
Resides: I reside just outside Dallas, Texas, USA.
Bibliography/Awards: I've been fortunate enough to have my fiction published in America, Canada, England, Ireland, India and Australia in a wide variety of genre and literary magazines and anthologies. The full list is available on my website. My short story The Machine of a Religious Man was included in the nineteenth edition of Ellen Datlow's Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. My story Our Island is one of four stories nominated by the British Fantasy Society for Best Story of 2012. I'll find out in November if I won.

Web site: SENTENCE features the complete texts of about a dozen of my stories, as well as the full text of my novel Father Figure, downloadable for free in PDF format; my diary entries; and tons of essays, interviews, recipes, photographs, videos. http://www.ralphrobertmoore.com

My facebook page at www.facebook.com/ralph.r.moore is me posting entries on different films, music, artwork, weird items, that interest me, and talking occasionally about my life and my fiction, including works in progress.

My Amazon Author Central page at http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B004UNGHBE is an easy way to order most of my books, including my latest novel, As Dead As Me.

For posts about Melbourne events, places, news, reviews, giveaways, see our Facebook Page:

www.festivale.info
ISSN 1328-8008