Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff's Blog: #42 Pencil: A Writer's Life, the Universe, and Everything, page 121

What Are You Afraid Of?

WisCon is a science fiction convention, but since it’s also a feminist convention, the panels cover more than books and movies. This year the programming committee let me talk about self defense.

Because I’ve done presentations before on the non-fighting ways people can protect themselves — top of the list: paying attention — I focused this talk on fear. Fear is a powerful means of social control; if people are afraid, they will limit their activities on their own.

And people are often afraid o...

WWW Wednesday 5-29-2013

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

• What are you currently reading?

I understand the urge to strike back in order to survive, and I know well the flash of anger that drives the impulse to hurt. But the mental space that permits someone to go into battle, and stay there, is something I’ve been researching off and on for years.

Rick Atkinson, in hisAn Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-3,demonstrates a knack of capturing the complexity of tunnel vision and disconnect...

Blogging Elsewhere: Publishing, Stockholm, and Author Agency

Book View Cafe member Judith Tarr is guest-blogging over at C.E. Murphy’s place. The subject: what publishing was like when she first got into the business, what it’s evolved into–and what authors can do about it.

It starts like this:

So Catie and I have been having this conversation. It started with her post on money, and I finally snapped, after years of keeping politely quiet. I said, “I am horrified at what I see writers of your particular generation having to do in order to pay your bills/...

BVC Announces The Hall of the Mountain King by Judith Tarr

The Hall of the Mountain King

by Judith Tarr

The king’s heir of Ianon is long lost, vanished into the south. Her father refuses to name his son heir in her place, though that son is a mighty warrior. Then one day a young wanderer arrives with news that both breaks and heals the king’s heart: his heir is dead, but before she died, she gave birth to a son. That child, now grown, has come to take her place. But the king’s son will not surrender his hope of kingship to a boy without a father, thoug...

Tic, Tic, Tic

I just finished a great huge doorstop of a book–a thriller, entertaining and complex (though, for my money, about 300 pages longer than it ought to have been for any reason at all) — by a bestselling writer. I had (mostly) a good time reading it, except for the foreshadowing. Every chapter seems to end with a “It would be the last malted she ever drank,” or “three hours later everyone in the hospital would be dead” sort of sentence. I think it’s intended to heighten the urgency and anxiety su...

Writing Nowadays–Shameless!

Now we pause for a moment of shamelessness. And on Memorial Day, yet! My new novel The Havoc Machine has recently arrived in bookstores everywhere. This is the fourth novel in my Clockwork Empire series. If you haven’t read the others in the series, don’t worry–this one stands apart from the other three and you can read it with no knowledge of the other books. Truly!

In a world riddled with the destruction of men and machines alike, Thaddeus Sharpe takes to the streets of St. Petersburg, geare...

Whither Came We?

I apologize for not putting up a post last week. Without getting too deep into the personal space, life intervened.

Anyway: Back to Science!

At least one of my two readers may remember the series I did on Biological Revolutions. You may recall one I did on the transition of proto-life-as-we-know-it to the prokaryotes (See here.) and the rise of the eukaryotes. (See here.) From there I talked about when multicellularity occurred. (See here.) I made a leap then to neurozoans: animals who had diff...

Story Inspiration Sunday

When I moved into my house about three years ago, I had no idea that I was horribly allergic to a plant in the front yard.

I didn’t find out about it until after I’d been there a year. I had spent most of a Sunday puttering in the yard, both in the front and the back. Later that night, my arms itched and hurt. When I finally stopped to look, I found I had welts running across them. It looked as though I’d been whipped.

It wasn’t until I brushed up against the demon plant a second time that I...

Spanish Exorcist Shortage and Killer Donkeys

You’d think in a country with a 25% unemployment rate that filling a job would be easy. Apparently not. Madrid is down to its last exorcist priest and the Catholic archdiocese says it needs more to help cope with the devil.

A spokeswoman for the archdiocese said that they’re considering a plan to train more.

‘The devil exists,’ she said. ‘That’s a fact.’

A leading Catholic website blames the growing secularisation of Spanish society for the increase in people asking for help with their demons. T...

On Casting While You Write, the Realty Division

By Brenda Clough

Laura Anne Gilman has posted about shopping for real people, especially actors, to cast your book. But wait, there’s more. You characters wear stuff, don’t they? Use armaments? Drive pickup trucks? Live in houses? There are limits to what can be done about all this if you are writing a far-future space opera set on a FTL starship orbiting Beta Centauri. But suppose you are not?

Due to the exigencies of time travel plotting, my characters are spending a lot of time in the north...