Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff's Blog: #42 Pencil: A Writer's Life, the Universe, and Everything, page 124

Some Things Never Grow Old

As I write this, I’m visiting my aunt. She has a respectable number of books, many of them paperbacks dating from the 1940s – 60s. I opened one up to look at it this morning and got a flush of memory. The smell of that book–the old, yellowing, not-acid-free, paper, took me back to my childhood, when I’d peek into my parents’ paperbacks (with the stunningly garish 1950s covers, or the designy-moderne 1960s covers) and that smell would rise up. It’s a smell I respond to pretty primally: it’s bo...

On “casting” while you write. Or not.

by Laura Anne Gilman

When I first started out in this biz, I heard a lot of writers talking about “casting” their books, and researching for visuals (typically actors, but not always) as part of their research prep.

And this struck me as strange (then again, I don’t create playlists for projects, either. So I may be an outlier.)

Y’see, I don’t ‘cast’ my books before/while I’m writing them – or even after, honestly*. It’s not because it wouldn’t be fun, or because I don’t think about what my char...

The Joy of Editing

When writing I usually have a moment in each novel when something snaps, and suddenly the addition of one complication or deletion of one beloved scene gives the entire story new coherence. Whatever had been fermenting in my hind brain takes over and all the disparate pieces of the book fall together into a unified whole.

I have learned to trust my hind brain. At least on first draft.

As an editor, it is my job to find those glitches and point them out to the author and then let them fix it. I...

Story Inspiration Sunday

A while ago, I took an online class about designing covers. (Full disclosure: I’ve created all but two of my covers, and am in the process of redoing all of them.) As part of the class, we were assigned a cover to create. Everyone had the same title and author. We had to go find the right artwork.

The title of the book was, “Knight on a Roof.” The author’s name was, “Major Fantasy Author.”

The artwork I found inspired me, as things are wont to do.

Here’s the original artwork:

Here’s the cover I c...

The Dog, the Mother, and the Dead Whale

You may have read this story before, butit’s a good one and worth a second outing.

Rank smells – the ranker the better – would drive our dog, Zaphod, nuts. He was drawn to them. He’d roll in them, grinding noxious substances into his fur by repeated dives, rolls and shoulder slides. No amount of calling could drag him off. And a bath would have to follow – with much scrubbing, rubber gloves, and Hasmat clothing.

One incident stands out above all others. The incident with the dead whale. We’d ta...

Writing in the Digital Age: You Guess — Nook, Micronook, Nooksoft, or MSNook?

Endangered species?

Nook and Microsoft,
sitting in a tree,
K * I * S * S * I * N * G

First comes books, then comes hardware,

Then comes software with nightmare support.

It is still just a rumor, but with some strong evidence by sleuths at TechCrunch: Microsoft is looking to pay $1 billion for the assets of Nook Media, LLC. The assets, not the hardware, mind you. A few of those assets are the 11 novels and 3 short stories I’ve put up on Nook myself.

I don’t know how I feel about this. Nook has been g...

You Really Have No Idea

Any writer in the creative arts can share a version of this story. It is invariably something that has directly happened to them: They’re at a party, making small talk, meeting people. They are asked, “What do you do?”

“I’m a writer.”

“Really? What do you write?”

“Novels. Screenplays. That sort of thing.”

“You know, I had an idea once. It goes like this…”

And to the misery of the writer, they are regaled for the next twenty minutes (barring an escape to the bathroom and out the window) by their ne...

Stalking the Wild Muse: Writer Habits & Rituals: The Altar of Coffee

A series exploring the props, habits, and drugs that fuel the writer’s productivity. Past, present and future! This week, we discuss why coffee is the Food of the Gods, closely followed in this exulted position by chocolate and green tea.

by Cat Kimbriel

So do you mean habits or rituals?

When I was a child, my mother would open the magical can of Juan Valdez’s finest, pure Colombian coffee. I would insist on sniffing the scoop of fresh grounds before she made the pot. I knew nothing about coffee...

Repeating Myself, But Not Being Redundant

It’s time once again for a flurry of reminders that women writers don’t get no respect.

There were the clueless editors on Wikipedia who had the bright idea of trimming the list of American novelists by carving out a separate list of American women novelists. That nonsense stopped after an American (woman) novelist complained in The New York Times and social media raised an uproar. However, some trolls then screwed with her Wikipedia page.

This isn’t the first time there have been complaints ab...

It’s the Little Things: A Trip to the Dump

I had an old couch and a futon that had been in storage in the barn for a couple of years. These things had been with me for years but not really part of my life. A barn allows for the storage of too many things that are hard to throw out even if they feature unfortunate polyester upholstery in a mustard plaid pattern not even my mother would love. Out in the barn these pieces had accumulated an impressive coating of swallow droppings. The stuffing had rotted to a wonderful mushiness, perfect...