Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff's Blog: #42 Pencil: A Writer's Life, the Universe, and Everything, page 127

Where are the women of SF?

Why are people focusing on this question so much lately? Is it some weak tie-in to women’s history month (March)? Does this happen every time spring rolls around? Or has something reached epidemic proportion and now it’s time to Do Something?

I don’t know but there does seem to be a rash of blog posts on the subject. There’s this. And then there’s this. And finally there’s this. Regardless, as Kathi Kimbriel pointed out on Facebook (I would include the link but I’ll be damend if I can figure o...

Training and Instinct

In the last Horseblog I talked about a particular stallion and his spring rituals. I’ve since been able to catch a short video of his space-claiming process, which I’ve posted here. It comes complete with roll-roll-roll and rearandpawtheAIR.

Watching him do this, and watching his mares drive him nutty with their own spring hormones, while also keeping him in training, has put me in mind of what training is. Or rather, what it’s often perceived as, versus how it actually works.

If you run a sear...

La Guantanamera

by Ursula K. Le Guin

After the Boston Marathon bombing people kept talking about Americans standing together, standing tall. I didn’t understand.

Americans grieving together, bowing down in sorrow together — I could understand that. We needed to mourn together for a celebration of joyful bodily health and strength that ended in horror, mutilation, and death. But standing together? Against what?

There is no enemy. This isn’t a replay of 9/11, an attack that did indeed draw us to stand together, b...

Story Inspiration Sunday

I’ve always enjoyed the outdoors. It wasn’t until I bought my house back in 2011 that I discovered that I really like gardening.

I have lots of books on habitation of different areas, like the plants and flowers of the Yucatan (which I used for “The Jaguar and the Wolf”). I have similar books for Japan and China. They’re all research books, which means the purchase was a business expense. I didn’t buy them just because they were pretty. No! Really!

Anyway. Imagine my delight when I found this...

A Sense of History: the thirties

When I look at the romantic comedies of the 30s, it strikes me how many of the American-made films are set and a kind of fantasy Europe. I don’t know if this is because so many of the creative minds in film, particularly in the 20s and 30s, were first and second generation Europeans, harking back to what they remembered of European society. Some of the most brilliant of those filmmakers imbued their films with a kind of continental sophistication that ran orthogonal to strata in American cult...

A Writer’s Life: Deadlines and Film Options

I must be an anomaly because I’ve never had a deadline before. Both the books I sold to Baen had already been written. I was given a delivery date for the second, but it was more of a ‘stop tinkering with the ms’ date than a real, sweat-inducing deadline. So this month has been a new experience for me – a real deadline for a book that hadn’t been written. And I had a month to write it in.

I must qualify that last sentence by saying that it’s a short book, but it still had to be written, illust...

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

I am very sorry to report that my writing habits revolve around chocolate. I am a slave of the dark side. My muse is fueled by dark chocolate and its close ally, sugar: the core brain foods. Pictured here is my current rocket fuel of choice: dark chocolate covered marshmallows from Trader Joe’s. These things ar...

What Makes It Winter?

Steven Popkes’s Sunday post on spring in New England inspired me to look up the temperatures in Austin for this past winter, to see if it was truly as mild as I thought it was. And it was: we had ten days where the low was at freezing or below — the lowest temperature all winter was 27 — and six days where the day’s high was below 50 (the high never got lower than 42). Most of the freezing lows were in December. No snow. No ice storms.

We gets lots of sun in the winter because our rain doesn’t...

WWW Wednesday April 24

WWW Wednesday. This meme is from shouldbereading.

• What are you currently reading?

• What did you recently finish reading?

• What do you think you’ll read next?

Nazis, Zombie Guy Fawkes, eighteenth century actresses, girl guide rescuers . . .

• What are you currently reading?

How the Girl Guides Won the War, by Janie Hampton, is a fact-packed history of Girl Guides in the UK and Europe. The European ones are the most fascinating–I hadn’t known, for example, that the Girl Guides of Poland (known...

Writing, Obsession, and Velveteen Moments

Several of us Book View Café “staffers” were discussing why we write. Specifically, Amy Sterling Casilwondered aloud (as it were) if we wrote because we had that certain type of experience that caused us to sit up and take note, that marked us in some way, that caused us to analyze and ponder and speculate. Or, she asked, did the “condition” of being a writer invite these experiences to us?

I love that image of inviting experiences, but I suspect the reality is somewhere in the middle. Everyon...