Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff's Blog: #42 Pencil: A Writer's Life, the Universe, and Everything, page 27

Wonder

Someone recently said that wonder dies with the young.

My first reaction was resistance, but I could not articulate why, other than that I don’t wanna think of the world as something that can no longer afford wonder.

It’s certainly easier to evoke wonder from children, because so much of the world is new to them. Who doesn’t look back with longing on the intense coolness of a discovery that fires the imagination, both in real life and in books?

But it can happen to the older reader, too. I don’t...

Guest Post: Stephanie Osborn: SPEARED

Photo courtesy NASA.

You’ve seen the tee shirt “Why, yes, I am a rocket scientist”? Today Book View Café is happy to welcome writer and retired rocket scientist Stephanie Osborn, collector of graduate and undergraduate degrees in four sciences: astronomy, physics, chemistry, and mathematics, as well as “fluent” in several more, including geology and anatomy.

Stephanie would like to introduce a topic dear to her heart—safety for astronauts.

Did you know? All three of the major catastrophes in our...

A Sense of Place

Moving has made me think about the multiple places I consider home.

Texas, of course. The whole state, not just Austin (where I went to college and where I live now), Houston (where I was born), or Friendswood (where I spent most of my childhood), but the entire place.

I’m a native Texan. My roots go back for five generations on both sides of my family –which is a long time for Anglos – and are spread all over the state. And Texas has an outsize mythology. A lot of it is nonsense, but it has an...

WWW Wednesday – October 8, 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?

Ever since I heard about Sherwood Smith’s new romance Rondo Allegro, I’ve looked forward to reading it. I’m now nearly finished with the book and it hasn’t disappointed. Set in the Napoleonic era, the novel is a lush and sometimes sobering depic...

What’s in a Word: Shared Worlds/Shared Words

In my last article on word-smithery, I made the the observation that “There are two parties to [the author-reader relationship], of course, the writer has to know how to use the words, but the reader has to know how to read them. This requires a shared knowledge base or shared experience or, at minimum, a shared definition and/or connotation for the words.”

I was playing a video game the other day that brought this home in an intriguing way. The game is one of Big Fish Games Nancy Drew Mysteri...

Convolution: What makes a good con from an author’s point of view?

For the last few years, I have rarely attended a convention where I couldn’t commute from home, and they are few, so I was delighted to invited to attend Convolution, a fairly new convention, held at the Hyatt Regency near the San Francisco airport. It was a bit of a drive, but Dave Trowbridge, my lovely spouse, was invited to be a guest, too, and that meant help for the long, late trudge home over twisty mountain roads. For both of us, the convention was an enjoyable, stimulating, and worthw...

BVC Announces Panglor by Jeffrey A. Carver

Panglor

A Novel of the Star Rigger Universe

by Jeffrey A. Carver

Wrongly discredited as a space pilot, Panglor Balef is doomed to die in space, if sheer luck doesn’t bring him through. But luck has never been in Panglor’s cards. Bad enough to be coerced into a mission of murder and suicide, he must also contend with Alo—a young woman, stowaway, and impossible companion. Neither of them, nor his empathic ou-ralot, could possibly anticipate the journey through space-time they are about to embark o...

Breaking Good

The broken brain. It is Teh Stoopit. It looks at things it’s known how to do forEVER and it says, “I got nuthin’.”

When it comes to the dogs, I can often see it coming…if not always. “Nope, can’t teach this new skill right now, because it will break something that I need in the immediate future.”

When I was teaching agility and rally, I saw broken dog brains all the time. Dogs learning how to back up would forget how to sit. Dogs learning to stand from sit would forget how to finish to heel. D...

Story Excerpt Sunday: from Poisoned Pearls by Leah Cutter

Poisoned Pearls

by Leah Cutter

Kyle still smelled of baby oil and cigarette smoke, though I figured he’d been dead for at least two hours, based on the light dusting of snow that covered his artistically torn jeans and preppy red-and-white-striped button-down. The snow around his body was all smudged with footprints, probably from the cops. He sat propped up against the wall in the alley, dark red bricks supporting him, while some stupid tagger’s name spiked over his head, painted in black, lik...

Rambles in England, Part 2

St. Paul’s Cathedral and John Donne’s Memorial:

I was eager to visit this magnificent cathedral not only for the architecture, but to see the memorial statue of John Donne, who famously penned the words, “No man is an island.” An Elizabethan poet known for his metaphysical style and erotic sonnets, he was dubbed “The Rake.” Later in life he turned to religion and started writing his passionate sonnets to God instead of mistresses. He was ordered by King James I to become an Anglican priest, an...