Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff's Blog: #42 Pencil: A Writer's Life, the Universe, and Everything, page 116

Story Inspiration Sunday

As a child, I told long, involved, and very complicated stories involving my animals. (I wasn’t much into dolls, but I did have a collection of different stuffed toys.) The teddy bear–Pooh Bear–was always the prince, and who often needed rescuing. Generally it was the horses who would get him out of whatever situation he was in, or sometimes, Ziggy the clown.

As part of that story telling, we describe things, like where a character lives, or what they see.

One of the things that inspires me,...

Garden Colour

Time for another garden post. Two weeks ago I mentioned the unusually late spring we’ve been having. Well, summer is now officially here – with the help of 20,000 druids camped out at Stonehenge to see in the Summer Solstice – and the garden is blooming.

The picture on the left is our new acacia. I wasn’t expecting it to start flowering this early – it’s only about 3 years old. Note the colour of the flowers. I’ve always thought that the acacia was an ‘almost’ tree. It’s sparse branches and pe...

Stalking the Wild Muse: Writer Rituals & Habits – Tea

A series exploring the props, habits, and drugs that fuel the writer’s productivity. Past, present and future! Look for BVC writers, plus other authors we know and love.

Tea by Pati Nagle

I’ve been a tea drinker all my life, and since I gave up coffee a while back it’s my daily beverage. While many–perhaps most–writers are coffee-fueled, I and a few others fill our morning mugs with Keemun, English Breakfast, Assam, or my personal favorite, Darjeeling.

When I was writing my Far Western Civil War...

BVC Authors in the Clarion and Clarion West Write-a-Thons

Once again several Book View Cafe members are participating in write-a-thons to raise money for the summer workshops held by Clarion and Clarion West. The workshops and write-a-thons begin June 23.

Both Clarion and Clarion West hold six-week writing workshops every summer. They’re usually described as “boot camp” for writers because all the participants do is write, critique each others work, listen to critiques from instructors, and write some more. Sleep is optional.

A number of Book View Caf...

Best of the Blog: Writing Star Trek Novels, or, Why don’t you get a morally acceptable job?

Editor’s note: We’re reprinting some of our favorite blog posts from the last five years. This week: Vonda N. McIntyre on writing Star Trek Novels. This one first appeared in 2009.

By Vonda N. McIntyre

Back in the 1980s, I wrote a bunch of Star Trek novels. I thoroughly enjoyed writing them. Pretty much the only drawback was that some of my colleagues took exception to my polluting my precious bodily fluids with evil tie-in novels. You’d’ve thought they believed they had to save my soul, blathe...

Writers as Thieves

In my ordinary life, I do my best to avoid taking things that don’t belong to me. I only eat grapes when I’m shopping if there’s a display inviting me to taste them and I will point out to waiters that they forgot to charge me for an item.

But as a writer, I steal, obviously and on purpose. For example, the first story in my collection, Conscientious Inconsistencies, owes its existence to The Three Musketeers. And the title — “A Mere Scutcheon” — is from Shakespeare. (Falstaff says it of honor...

All Creatures Real and Otherwise: Cats Eat Homework?

We’ve all heard of the student who tells the teacher, “The dog ate my homework.” But BVC member Amy Sterling Casil, who teaches writing when she’s not doing it herself, had to explain to her students that her cat ate their homework.

This is Oliver, the guilty party in the homework-eating caper. Of course, he doesn’t think he’s guilty. He’s a cat.

Oliver, caught in the act and completely unconcerned.

And here is the evidence. Oliver didn’t bother to enter a plea.

WWW Wednesday 6-19-2013

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

• What did you recently finish reading?

Under the Dome, by Stephen King, is a monster: 1300+ pages. As with most of King’s work it’s big and ambitious and has a nifty core idea. It’s also 300 pages and two subplots too long, for my money. And there are certain tics–cliffhanger ends to chapters–that get overdone to the point where they became annoying. By the time I finished it I was a little exhausted. Ironskin, by Tina Connolly, is an inve...

Community, connection, and solitude

Recently, a couple of things have gotten me thinking about this delicate balance between my need for deep inner[image error] silence/listening-silence, uninterrupted focused writing time, play-with-others, and the nourishment of a larger community. I think that most of us move back and forth along a continuum of how much alone time versus with-others time we need. Of course, some people are temperamentally more social than others; some of us move through our days and lives with more outward energy than ot...

New ebook release: A SPRIG OF BLOSSOMED THORN by Patrice Greenwood

Wisteria Tearoom Mysteries #2

Notorious for failed relationships.

Ellen Rosings knows that’s true of cops. Detective Tony Aragon has even said it about himself, or something like it. Despite her misgivings, she is drawn to him, but can he reach past a cop’s cynicism to trust her?

As summer surrounds her Wisteria Tearoom in the beauty of a lush rose garden, death overshadows the tearoom a second time. Maria Garcia—a venerable member of the Santa Fe Rose Guild—breathes her last in the tearoom’s fr...