Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff's Blog: #42 Pencil: A Writer's Life, the Universe, and Everything, page 126

The Body in the Flowerbed

When your first publicity stunt pushes the General Election result off the front page, what do you do for an encore? This was a question I was asking myself in 1975 when Plymouth Rag Week came around again. After all, this was my last chance. My finals were eight weeks away and if I didn’t organise something, I’d have to revise.

I spent days thinking. The previous year I’d liberated the country next door. Was France up for another revolution? How easy was it to build a guillotine?

Then it came...

Stalking the Wild Muse: Writer Rituals & Habits

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.

By Brenda Clough

Some writers swear by nudity. It helps them to write. Benjamin Franklin was famous for his air baths which he indulged in every morning. He also brought the first bathtub to America, from France, and would write in it.

It is only fair to say that summer in Philadelphia is horrifically hot and humid, and in July...

Superstition

Have you ever crossed your fingers for something you really, really wanted?

Most of us probably have. The gesture is said to have originated with early Christianity, as a secret signal between believers. You don’t have to see it as religious, though, to do it when you’re hoping for good luck. You don’t even — and here’s the interesting part — have to believe it that it works.

I mean, really. What good does it do to have your middle finger hooked over your index finger? That won’t affect the out...

How Great Is The Great Gatsby?

Recently the radio program Studio 360 devoted its entire hour to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby as part of its American Icons series. Various writers and scholars, including Azar Nafisi, author of the delightful Reading Lolita in Tehran, and the novelist Jonathan Franzen, waxed poetic about the book, which the Studio 360 website describes as “the great American story of our age.”

At some point in the program, one of the speakers — I think it was Franzen, but there’s not a transcript av...

WWW Wednesday 5-1-2013

WWW Wednesday. This meme is from shouldbereading.

To play along, just answer the following three (3) questions…

• What are you currently reading?

• What did you recently finish reading?

• What do you think you’ll read next?

• What did you recently finish reading?

Tooth and Claw, by Jo Walton. Oh heavens, what a wonderful book! If the author of Beowulf were in a polyamorous relationship with the late Anne McCaffrey and Jane Austen, with Charles Dickens dropping by every afternoon, this would be the...

Writing Sex: I like it if you like it

Now and then I teach an erotica writing class at a sex toy store. I love that gig—they hand me a nice check, and I turn around and spend it all before I leave.

Something else I like about that gig is that I get to hear so much amazing erotic writing. And yet, nine tenths of the people who show up have never written anything before, let alone something sexy.

Part of what makes it work is my workshop structure—the way I set it up, it’s impossible to screw up. Everybody can dare to write badly, an...

BVC Announces Dark Magicks by Katharine Kerr

Two stories from the time of King Arthur, when magic was real and dangerous.

Dark Magicks at Book View Café Ebookstore.

How Feminism Killed Cooking

I read an article on Salon yesterday: “Is Michael Pollan a Sexist Pig?”by a writer named Emily Matchar. The title is, of course, very tongue in cheek; the article is about the omnivore/ locavore/femivore movements, and about the myths we make up about the past. In this case, the past in question is the good ol’ days of cookery from the writers’ childhoods, and how much better everything was in the days before feminism led us to processed food.

Now, all things being equal I like to make my food...

Writing the Near Future

Certain activities strike me as unwise risks—big wave surfing for example, or scaling a sheer cliff without ropes, or writing near-future fiction.

All stories age. Even those set in the author’s present, that accurately reflect the time and place in which they were written, can come to seem quaint, offensive, or just plain wrong as societal values change. Setting a story in the far future or the undocumented past can’t save an author either, as the plot, the attitudes of the characters, and th...

A Toast to How Beer Saved the World

Here’s a book that takes issue with the popular image of beer as the drink of sports-watching couch potatoes: How Beer Saved the World, an anthology of quirky short stories celebrating beer. Edited by Book View Cafe’s Phyllis Irene Radford, and including stories by BVC members Brenda Clough and Nancy Jane Moore, this is a collection of 14 different takes on positive outcomes brought on by beer.

Beer goes back to the early days of the human race. As it says in the introduction, “Fermented grain...