Stanley C. Moore grew up in a small town in Ohio, the kind of place where wide open spaces and a quiet childhood leave plenty of room to imagine other worlds. He carried that imagination with him for the next forty years, long before he ever set a word of it to paper.
Where It StartedForty Years in the Making
This story didn't start as a novel. It started as RPG game notes and scribbled world rules, decades ago — a hobby, not a plan. Around the same time, a literature teacher who wouldn't let him get away with just doing the assignment made him actually write stories in his class journal. That habit never really left.
Marine Corps service, a survey career, a family, and a lot of life happened in between. But the world kept growing quietly in the background the whole time, until it finally demanded to be written down.
ServiceMarine, Surveyor, Post Commander
Stan served eight years in the United States Marine Corps Reserve, a chapter of his life that shaped his discipline, his sense of duty, and the quiet standards he still holds himself to. He went on to build a career as a land survey chief — a man professionally trained to read the lay of the land in the most literal sense — until a medical retirement closed that chapter and opened a new one.
That commitment to service never ended; it simply changed shape. Today Stan lives in Manassas, Virginia, where he serves as Commander of Robert Vincent McMaugh Memorial Post 10 of the American Legion and as 2nd Vice Commander of the 16th District, Department of Virginia. Among the causes closest to him is the Post's annual charity BBQ fundraiser, which has grown from roughly $6,000 to $10,000 in proceeds, benefiting the American Legion Veterans Children's Foundation.
He was also proud to have been part of the crew that helped build the National World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C. More recently, Stan and Post 10 partnered with VFW Post 7589 to bring long-overdue recognition to Black veterans buried at Rose Hill Cemetery in Manassas — a segregation-era cemetery whose veterans had gone unrecognized in local ceremonies for generations. The effort culminated in a dedicated memorial bench, unveiled on Veterans Day. As Stan put it at the dedication: "You don't leave anybody behind." Read NBC4 Washington's coverage of the dedication →
A Quiet Anchor
Outside the Post and the page, Stan's life is anchored at home in Manassas, Virginia, alongside his wife, Nancy. Their evenings together — quiet, steady, and far from the elemental storms of Tír Litha — are the ballast that makes forty years of world-building possible.
The Greenhouse
When he isn't writing, Stan can usually be found in his homemade greenhouse, coaxing pineapples into growing where pineapples have no business growing — in Virginia. It began as a personal challenge and became something closer to a tribute: a determined, patient way of staying connected to his father, plant by plant, season by season.
The Call of Water is the opening chapter of The Tír Litha Saga, a four-book epic fantasy series rooted in Celtic mythology and grown, like everything else in Stan's life, from patience, discipline, and a stubborn refusal to give up on something worth building.