Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff's Blog: #42 Pencil: A Writer's Life, the Universe, and Everything, page 101

Story Inspiration Sunday

It isn’t just pictures or poetry or the critters who share my yard that inspire me.

It’s also music.

Like many writers, I can’t listen to music with words while I’m writing. I need pure sound, that inspires me to write faster, or draws me in with its mood. While I sometimes write in silence, just listening to the wind in the trees, or the rain pattering the roof, or the birds in the backyard, sometimes I listen to man-made noise.

So — some links!

I listen to a lot of soundtracks while I’m writing...

The Darcy Chronicles 8: Hormone Avalanche and Second Thoughts

In his 14th week of life, Darcy began his transition to adolescence. By contrast with a human toddler, everything will happen at once. The next two months may be quite interesting; the next week may be determinative: he’s wearing us out.

Darcy’s a great dog with not a mean bone in his body, but he just keeps getting more and more energetic. Sometimes, after a good training session, we think we have his puppy-raising nailed; the next moment, Deborah and I are looking at each other thinking the...

My First Computer – Vic 20

My First Computer: Vic 20 by Commodore

by Phyllis Irene Radford

More years ago than I like to think about, my son was in 3rd grade and his school just received a grant to buy 3 computers for the entire school.Who would ever need more?

Um… Hubby and I decided that maybe our little baby boy needed a computer of his own so he could keep up.We went looking and found an entry level machine that we could almost afford.The Commodore Vic 20.No hard drive.We could buy rudimentary games on a plug in like...

This is Why I Love Vonnegut

From Bluebeard:

“A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but world’s champions.”

According to my Kindle version of Kurt Vonnegut’s Bluebeard, that little bit above has been highlighted 94 times.

Amazon’s public highlighting function is their way of bringing back that fun little extra you got when you bought a used...

Book View Café Signs Deal with Audible

Yup. BVC is moving into a whole new dimension, flying at a brand new altitude. We’re going audio. A lot of our titles will now be heard in addition to being read. Here’s the announcement we sent out yesterday:

Book View Café Signs Deal with Audible

Audible acquires audio rights to more than 100 works by award-winning and nominated authors in multiple genres

August 21, 2013 — Book View Café (BVC), the author-run publishing company, today announced an agreement with Audible, Inc., the world’s larg...

Camping in the Middle of Somewhere

San Francisco Bay is dotted with islands. One of them, Angel Island, is a state park with camping facilities. The only way to reach Angel Island is by ferry and the campsites are a mile or more hike from the ferry landing, making it a backpacking adventure. The campsites are basic — there’s water, an outhouse, a picnic table, and a bear safe (for raccoons, since there are no bears on the island) — but no cabins or indoor plumbing.

It’s like a lot of backpacking camping locations across the cou...

WWW Wednesday 8-21-2013

It’s WWW Wednesday. This meme is from shouldbereading.

• What did you recently finish reading?

I’m not the only one around who’s been rereading their way through my old mate Iain Banks’ oeuvre. Sudden death has a way of doing that, drawing you back into the work as some kind of act of memory, a rite of passage and a letting-go. I’m thinking of it as a slow farewell. As an act of sheer self-indulgence, I started with all the science fiction; inevitably, I am now suffering withdrawal, seriously s...

High summer outside Chicago

wild grapes

There’s plenty more summer on the calendar, but this is probably the peak of high summer outside Chicago. Rich and I walked in Wright Woods and saw some classic local and invasive plants that remind me of a childhood spent bombing around the woods with the family dogs while Mom and her parents made a fire and talked in the picnic area.

cardinal flower

My mom made wild grape jelly out of these sour little guys. It takes gallons to make any jelly to speak of, because they’re 65% seed i...

BVC Welcomes New Member John Cramer

Please join Book View Café in welcoming John Cramer.

We’re pleased to announce our newest member, physicist and SF writer John Cramer, and to present his SF novels, Twistor and Einstein’s Bridge.

John Cramer divides his time among writing science fiction and science fact, experimenting with quantum optics, teaching physics, consulting with NASA, and zooming off to CERN for another terabyte of data. In their spare time, he and his wife Pauline compete in AKC agility trials with their two Shetlan...

BVC Announces Twistor by John Cramer

Twistor

A Novel of Hard Science Fiction

by John Cramer

A condensed-matter physics experiment in a university physics laboratory produces an unexpected breakthrough, when the apparatus begins swapping normal matter with “shadow matter.” Industrial espionage goes awry and young physicist David Harrison and two small children find themselves inside a giant tree in an alternate Earth populated by strange, wonderful, and dangerous six-legged wildlife. David and the children must find a way back, whi...