Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff's Blog: #42 Pencil: A Writer's Life, the Universe, and Everything, page 28

Girl Genius Radio Theater: A Very Short Review

by Brenda W. Clough

This show was actually a script, read aloud by voice actors, which was staged at the World Science Fiction Convention in London in August. As you can see, it really is a reading — a couple of sound effects is all you got.

And boy, was it fun! You surely have heard of Girl Genius, the online graphic novel. It’s been in publication for years and years, and has won so many Hugo Awards that it’s becoming a habit. You can read all the issues on the web site from the beginning, bu...

More Transitions

Judith Tarr’s Monday blogpost on transitions made me realize that transition is the right word for my life right now, too.

I’m moving, for the third time in less than seven years, this time from Austin, Texas, to Oakland, California. Prior to that period I lived in the same house for 17 years and the same city (Washington, DC) for 28 years, so I’m experiencing a certain amount of emotional upheaval.

In the years since I outgrew the college habit of moving almost every year (I can give a great t...

BVC Eats: Autumn apple and sweet potato casserole

When choosing sweet potatoes, choose the redder ones!

This is one of those rich, buttery, sweet, cold-weather recipes we forgive ourselves for eating because it’s cold. And the holidays. And it’s vegetables, right?

Autumn Apple and Sweet Potato Casserole

Preheat oven to 350.

Peel and slice equal amounts Granny Smith apples and sweet potatoes. Microwave the sweet potatoes on high until they’re half-cooked, about a minute per sweet potato used. This prevents the casserole from taking hours to bake...

words words words

I love my Compact* Oxford English Dictionary. Yes, it weighs a young ton, and requires a magnifying glass to read, but it’s a gorgeous reference, and one of my favorite world-building tools. ÂEspecially when there’s a word I want to use and am not sure it works in period. ÂYou don’t want your 13th century German serf saying “okay,” or your 19th century English maiden talking about “actualizing her personhood.”** ÂBecause that’s wrong, and it will yank the smart reader right out of the story.

B...

BVC Announces Giving Him Hell by Jamie Quaid

Giving Him Hell

Saturn’s Daughter 3

by Jamie Quaid

Tina Clancy is looking forward to a nice, quiet Christmas, but life has other plans for the newly-minted lawyer. As a Daughter of Saturn, Tina expects a healthy dose of crazy in the Zone, Baltimore’s roughest docklands. Sparkling holiday lights that spontaneously combust — check. Garden gnomes swimming in sauna-like snow melt — check. But when a blue blob crawls out of the red-hot sewer — that’s a bridge too far.

Soon, Tina is trying to exorcise...

Ursula LeGuin is a Literary Lioness!

Our own Ursula was interviewed by theÂNew York TimesÂas part of their piece entitledÂLiterary Lions Unite in Protest Over Amazon’s E-Book Tactics.

Ursula and other lions and lionesses were interviewed for their participation in Authors United, a group of authors who have taken on Amazon over its treatment of Hachette Books.

Ursula is quoted in the article as saying, “We’re talking about censorship: deliberately making a book hard or impossible to get, ‘disappearing’ an author.”

You c...

Transitions

Transitions are a big deal in horse parlance. Technically they’re the sequence of strides that move the horse from one gait to another, or into or out of a halt. They should be timed correctly, balanced precisely, and executed smoothly.

That canter depart to the left, that’s more of a rocket launch with tail thrusters. Definite Needs Improvement. It’s a reminder to keep the checklist clearly in mind (not so easy when you’re sitting on top of a set of warp thrusters), and also to remember to re...

The Bones of the Matter

(Picture from here.)

I’ve been getting over an injury I got doing judo about a month ago. So, of course, I started thinking about bones.

The skeleton is one of our most obvious anatomical features. I know we can see and feel skin and eyes and hair. But the skeleton is one of our clearest examples of an anatomical system. The bones articulate. They move together. Muscles attach to them.

Where did they come from?

Well, we’re vertebrates. That meas we have a dorsal notochord. There’s an erroneous co...

Story Excerpt Sunday: from Risk of Love and Magic by Patricia Rice

Risk of Love and Magic

by Patricia Rice

Nadine Malcolm finished inputting the data sheets she’d been assigned, then shoved her cheap black-framed glasses up her nose. With a surreptitious sideways glance, she verified that the guard was busy poisoning his health with sugar and coffee. Swiftly, she hit a series of keys.

The guard turned around before she could do more. The repetitive message she’d stored would automatically go out to the phone numbers she’d recorded. She didn’t hold out m...

World is Doomed! Teens Read Trash, News at 11.

This summer, Salon featured an articleÂwherein an adult reader takes to task other adults who like books written for young readers. This caused a spinoff furor that included the time-honored cane thumping about the garbage teens are reading, and how Civilization Is Doomed because of the young generation’s taste for trash.

That sort of condemnation is sometimes aimed at this or that popular series (Hunger Games, Divergent), and sometimes a blanket condemnation. I usually skip such fulmination...