Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff's Blog: #42 Pencil: A Writer's Life, the Universe, and Everything, page 129

Whatever Happened To … Whittling

When I was at Junior School (ages 7-10 years) in the early sixties, every boy and, I suspect, many of the girls would take a knife to school. Not because Bournemouth was a hotbed of knife culture and we needed to defend ourselves, but because knives were an essential part of school life. We needed something to sharpen our pencils with, carve our names in desks, and … to whittle.

No teacher would have dreamed of confiscating our knives. They didn’t like the name carving but – the rest – that wa...

Spellcraft

Listen up: I’m going to tell you how to cast a spell.

Take one apple. (Doesn’t matter what kind.) With a knife, peel the skin off the apple, in one long unbroken strip. (This may take you several tries.) Once you have your strip, throw it over your shoulder, and when it hits the ground it will spell the initials of the person you’re going to marry.

What, that doesn’t sound like a spell to you? That’s because it isn’t one. Well, sort of. What’s a spell, anyway? Incantations, weird ingredients, a...

Why Can’t Men Wear Dresses (Redux)?

Back in September, I did a blog post called “Why Can’t Men Wear Dresses?” It was inspired by how painful it was for my father to put on pants as he was recuperating from hip surgery. He needed a nice loose dress, but there was no way he’d accept one or, for that matter, that the aides in his nursing home would put one on him.

It’s one of the great ironies of the power of gender norms that an elderly man in failing health can wear adult diapers but not dresses.

But the pressure on men to conform...

WWW Wednesday 4-17-13

WWW Wednesday. This meme is from shouldbereading.

Jennifer Stevenson here, reporting for WWW Wednesday.

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

• What are you currently reading?

Uneasy Money by P.G. Wodehouse.This is a paperback Penguin edition that has regrettably been edited down. If I weren’t such a Wodehouse geek I might never notice, because they did a pretty good job, but when you’re a geek, every lost golden phrase hurts. That said, I reread Wodehouse probably too muc...

BVC Announces King Of Hearts by Jennifer Stevenson

King of Hearts: Backstage Boys Book 1

by Jennifer Stevenson

A sexy, funny duel of wills and wits between a small town preacher’s daughter and a blue-collar prince of the blood.

When she witnesses King Dave’s humiliation at the hands of his ex-wife, preacher’s daughter Nadine gains control of King Dave–and becomes his target.

King Dave, son of the president of Chicago’s stagehands, has never been bested. He will stop at nothing to recover his stolen machismo.

A Backstage Boys romantic comedy!

Chapte...

An Alien Mindset

When I first started writing science fiction, my workshop buddies and I talked a lot about aliens and whether it was possible to write from a truly convincing alien mindset. In the years since then I’ve come to the realization that I don’t have to write from the viewpoint of dolphins or martians or vampires in order to create someone who doesn’t think like me.I just have to write someone from a time other than now.

What was the world like when you were a kid? I grew up in the tail end of the 5...

Leah Cutter’s short story now available in Unnatural Worlds anthology

Leah Cutter has a short story in the anthology “Unnatural Worlds”, which was released today and is now available as an ebook from Amazon and other retailers. (It will be available in both paper and audio versions later this month.)

Edited by Kristine Katherine Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith, “Unnatural Worlds” is the first of an anthology series featuring volumes that appear every two month.

“Unnatural Worlds” also features original stories by Devon Monk, Ray Vukcevich, Esther M. Friesner, Dean We...

A Stallion in Spring

(c) Lynne Glazer

Life on a horse farm is always interesting, but when the farm has all genders represented, it’s just a little bit more interesting in the spring.

The English-speaking world has a distinct preference for geldings as riding horses. Entires–mares as well as stallions–suffer from a fair degree of sexism and overall negative bias. Mares are “mareish,” moody, hormonal. Stallions are hormone-crazed monsters. Geldings are, as the adage says, from heaven.

Not that there isn’t a grain of...

Story Inspiration Sunday

People always ask writers, “Where do you get your ideas?”

Honestly, for me, most of the time the answer is, “No frigging clue.”

For example, my latest novel, “The Guardian Hound.” I was toward the very end of writing “The Raven and the Dancing Tiger” and I wrote two sentences, just two, and then I had to put my pen down because the entire novel of “The Guardian Hound” sprang into my mind.

That’s generally how I get my ideas for a novel — the whole thing comes as one package: I see the beginning,...

Possession, Humour and Special Offers

A short post this week as I’m working hard to finish my spoof diet book, How POSSESSION Can Help You LOSE Weight. It may only be a 10k word story but it’s 10k words of humour, and humour is something that can fail abysmally if not done right. Consequently it takes time. It’s also spoof non-fiction, which adds to the complexity as there are far fewer ‘progressing the story’ paragraphs and more ‘make the reader laugh’ paragraphs. If I write 500 words of that a day, I’m pleased.

And it’s fun. The...