Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff's Blog: #42 Pencil: A Writer's Life, the Universe, and Everything, page 26

Consideration of Works Past: The Fittest

(Picture from here.)

I’d pretty much given up on this one. It was one of those stories where you remember bits and pieces but can’t recall the title or author. I’d put up phrases I remembered and got nothing.

Then I was reading an article on “cozy catastrophes” (see here. for the article and here for the wiki.) The phrase is attributed to Brian Aldiss. It means different things to different people. To some, it’s a catastrophe that ends with a whimper rather than a bang. The result may or may no...

Story Excerpt Sunday: from Fool’s Paradise by Jennifer Stevenson

Fools Paradise

Backstage Boys Book 2

by Jennifer Stevenson

The fat lady was about to sing. Up in the followspot booth, sixty feet over the audience, Bobbyjay Morton aimed his darkened Supertrouper spotlight at her. The music swelled. He heard the stage manager on his headset.

“Warning. Number two spot in color six to pick up Brunnhilde.”

In the same moment, his cell phone vibrated on his hip.

“Spot two go.”

Cursing silently, he powered up the Supertrouper. Bang, he nailed the fat lady with a beam of...

Rambles in England, Part 3

Oxford, Harry Potter Hall, and Tolkien’s Grave

Oxford teems with literary connections, and as a lifelong reader of British lit, I couldn’t wait to wander the lanes connecting Town and Gown in this concretion of shops, inns, and venerable walled colleges.

Having survived our first left-hand driving terrors (“Drifting! Drifting!”), Thor and I located our charming B&B, then followed a public footpath through a cow field and along a brook featuring picturesque swans.

We emerged near The Turf, the “o...

Evita: A Very Short Review

by Brenda W. Clough

This warhorse of the musical theater was revived in 2012 on Broadway and is now on tour. I caught it at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC. I have seen the movie, which is a different and IMO a lesser work, but for some reason have never seen the stage musical until now.

And wow, what a perfect musical this is! As Hal Prince famously said of it, how can you go wrong with a work that begins with a funeral? And biographical material has a natural through line that is very con...

Crisis Mode

One of my talents – perhaps my best one – is that I respond well to crises. Faced with an emergency situation, I know instinctively what things must be done and which ones can be postponed or jettisoned.

I do the same thing with deadlines. I rarely finish something early, but I also rarely blow a deadline. If something is due by 5 pm, it will be filed on time. Other things will be put aside because they can be done at another time.

Under pressure, I know what is important and what isn’t. And I...

BVC Eats: Jerked pork roast

Mom wasn’t good with big chunks of meat.

I didn’t learn to cook large chunks of meat in my childhood. My mother could make a whole chicken, and she could make a pretty good stuffed turkey, but her roast beef and roast pork always came out dry and tough.

I got rather fond of that last slice, the charred-black salty heel of the roast. But back in the sixties, we didn’t marinate stuff. We thought we were pretty fancy if we had olives with pimento in the middles.

Since then I’ve discovered that a ma...

WWW Wednesday — 10-15-2014

It’s WWW Wednesday. This meme is from shouldbereading.

by Brenda W. Clough

• What did you recently finish reading?

I am still deep in the throes of reading for research. To this end I have plowed through the two Dover volumes of Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan, (1841) by John L. Stephens with illustrations by Frederick Catherwood. Stephens was actually the American ambassador to Central America, but although he was conscientious in trying to present his diplomatic cre...

Raising Feminists, the Film Edition

I was going to write about my current obsessivehobby of beading, but thenSeven Brides for Seven Brothers was on TV. And I was appalled all over that I let my impressionable daughters watch it when they were small, and impressed that it didn’t seem to do them any lasting harm.

My family watches a lot of movies, and many of them are old musicalsfrom the 40s and 50s. Seven Brides for Seven Brothers is a1954MGM musical based on a short story by Stephen Vincent Benet called “The Sobbin’ Women.”Out...

Starting Over (and Over and Over)

There’s a reason why the idiom “changing horses in midstream” has a negative connotation. Every horse is different, and every time a rider or handler meets one for the first time, a whole new set of parameters comes into play.

Of course there are common factors and ranges of approach that work for various horses, and the more experienced a trainer or handler is, the wider the range of options becomes. But it’s never as simple as just walking up to the new guy, giving him a once-over, and apply...

Story Excerpt Sunday: from ‘Incandescent’ in Female Science Fiction Writer by Amy Sterling Casil

Incandescent

from the collection

Female Science Fiction Writer

by Amy Sterling Casil

Paperwhite was a vogue girl, born to love. For three straight days.

Perhaps the gengineers thought that the human urge to crush a lovely flower might be put to good use on a flower that was born to be crushed. Perhaps they realized that girls who did what vogue girls did— were not meant for long life. They were like paper clothing, to be worn once, then discarded.

Such a fragile flower to end an alien plague. The g...