Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff's Blog: #42 Pencil: A Writer's Life, the Universe, and Everything, page 25

The Building Blocks of Storytelling: Gossip

When I was a teacher, I took the part of the stern moralist when dealing with gossip—easy to do when kids were being hurtful, but harder to maintain when they weren’t.

The writer part of me found their daily dramas endlessly entertaining, because I saw not just echoes of my own school experience, but human experience.

Gossip is basically storytelling: not literature, but story in simplest—and most complex—form. Because we don’t just repeat the facts (or what we assume are the facts) of what hap...

History to Fantasy

As many of you know, as Patricia Rice, I’ve been published in historical romance since 1984. I’ve written westerns, Americana, Victoriana, Regencies, and paranormal historical romance well before any of those genres became popular. Historical romance has cycled through variations of these sub-genres over the last three decades (three decades—oh my! Obviously, I wrote my first book as a teenager.), and to speak frankly, the lords and ladies required of today’s historical romance need a lot of...

Going to the Movies. Or Maybe Not.

Browsing Netflix the other day, I came across Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. I loved it when it first came out, so I clicked on it and started watching.

I quit halfway through.

Understand that I adored Paul Newman and recall with fondness his movies with Robert Redford, of which this was the first. And tongue-in-cheek westerns with funny dialogue help me deal with my complicated relationship with my Texas heritage. I wanted to enjoy this movie again.

But I was bored.

It’s not just that it fa...

WWW Wednesday – Oct 22, 2014

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 are you currently reading?

As usual, I’m juggling several books in-progress, including advance copies for fellow authors. My husband Thor wonders if my multitasking has finally fried my brain, and he’s probably not far off. But I’m actually reading a novel this time that’...

POV #1—Why Point of View Matters

One of the most significant factors in a reader’s experience of a story is the point of view from which it is told. That is, whose senses readers are going to be asked to experience the story through, whose head they’re going to be in, whose voice will dominate the conversation.

There are four basic points-of-view that, in a real sense, occupy points along a continuum of proximity to the major characters, the events in the story and the reader.

First person (I laughed, I cried, it became a part...

Book View Café Authors On Blogging

Come listen in as we discuss blogging and its role in an author’s career and life.

Patricia Burroughs (Pooks): We’ve discussed blogging and how to make it work. I think the biggest problem with any advice on ‘how to build a platform’ is that it reads like a checklist that you tick off and then wait for people to read you, but as many have pointed out, you really have to find things to do that you actually enjoy doing, or you’re unlikely to be successful.

Sherwood Smith: Being passionate is not...

BVC Announces Center Stage by Mindy Klasky

Center Stage

Diamond Brides Series 8

by Mindy Klasky

Actress Lindsey Ormond has always followed the rules – be nice, keep quiet, and never, ever get involved with a bad boy. But her good behavior has yielded lousy results – she was just left at the altar for the second time in two years.

Raleigh Rockets center fielder Ryan Green keeps life simple – play ball, have fun, and keep an eye on his recently widowed father. When Ryan attends Lindsey’s disaster of a wedding, another sizzling task hits his...

BVC Announces Triple Play II by Mindy Klasky

Triple Play II

Diamond Brides Series

by Mindy Klasky

Three hot contemporary baseball romances by Mindy Klasky, in one sizzling volume:

Second Thoughts: In an unexpected reunion, career-driven second baseman Nick Durban discovers that he is the father of photographer Jamie Martin’s six-year-old daughter, but Jamie can’t trust the ex-fiance who walked out on her years before.

Third Degree: Chef Ashley Harris and third baseman Josh Cantor are competing in a cooking reality show, and the flames in th...

On Naming

by Brenda W. Clough

You write a novel. Naturally it has characters. And those characters need names! Let us set aside for some other day the issue of creating fantasy names, and consider today only naming characters with cognomens that already exist.

Depending upon how you roll, this usually comes very early in the writing process. For me it comes before beginning the writing at all; if I don’t know the character’s name I cannot write. I can get away without looking at my hero for many thousand...

Catching Up, Ha Ha

Catching Up, Ha Ha

by Ursula K. Le Guin

It’s been two months since I blogged. Considering that it’s the eve of my 85th birthday, and that anyone over 75 who isn’t continuously and conspicuously active is liable to be considered dead, I thought I should make some signs of life. Wave from the grave, as it were. Hello, out there! How are things in the Land of Youth? Here in the Land of Age they are rather weird.

The weirdness includes being called a liar by Hugh Woolly, the famous self-publisher of...