Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff's Blog: #42 Pencil: A Writer's Life, the Universe, and Everything, page 30

The Lego Movie: A Very Short Review

by Brenda W. Clough

This is not a movie that I intended to see. I do not do Legos, I do novels, which are very similar only you have to make the pieces. But my son, who is oppressed by his un-cool parents, told me that I had to see it. And still I dragged my heels, until I was trapped in an airplane seat on a transatlantic flight, and had cranked out over ten thousand words of fiction in three days. Suddenly my brain was slush and I had to gafiate. And there was this movie!

The Lego Movie has e...

Find Your Passion

I was thrilled by this year’s MacArthur grant list. So many fascinating people doing so much meaningful work.

Poets. Musicians. Scientists. Lawyers. An artist using Houston’s Third Ward and the people who live there as his canvas. Alison Bechdel!

I was particularly impressed by Pamela O. Long, an independent historian of science and technology. Partly that’s because she’s 71 and still working; it always makes me happy when people recognize that folks don’t turn into pumpkins at some pre-determ...

WWW Wednesday 9-17-2014

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

• What did you recently finish reading?

I just finished Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East by Scott Anderson. David Lean’s classic movie has been iconic for me since before I knew what “iconic” meant (my father used to take me to the cinema sometimes, in that way of divorced parents everywhere, and I sometimes think my taste for epic fictions was born even before I read The Lord of the R...

Old Yanks in the New Forest: ponies

find the pony in the forest…he has the right of way

So my husband and I went to London for the World Science Fiction Convention, and afterward visited the New Forest, which is situated in the southwest corner of England, right up against Wales. I’d been wanting to see the New Forest for a long time. My fascination with big trees had me picturing all sorts of wilderness things. Some British form of Sasquatch. At least some wild horses.

It did look as though there would be wild horses. Websites d...

10% Above the Waterline

In the days when I was reading slush (unsolicited manuscripts to the fortunately uninitiated) we had a rule of thumb: the more “supporting materials” came with a fantasy manuscript, the more likely the MS was to be rotten. This wasn’t a hard and fast rule: some manuscripts that came with this stuff were okay; few were top-notch. A beginner mistake is to assume that, as finished books have these things, it’s necessary for the aspiring writer to provide them.

Really: no it’s not.

First of all: it...

BVC Announces Spiral Path by Katharine Eliska Kimbriel

Spiral Path

Night Calls 3

by Katharine Eliska Kimbriel

“The world is woven of secrets.”

Ritual magic mixes dangerously with wild magic. Yet Alfreda Sorensson’s talent has grown until she becomes a target for worldly and unworldly powers. Now, to save her soul, she must leave her pioneer home in the Michigan Territory to take refuge at an elite New York school, where her wild magic places her in direct conflict with the ritual taught to young Americans and Europeans.

Alfreda suspects that half the...

Our World and Its Aliens

Whenever we try to imagine science-fictional aliens, many times we find ourselves looking at life forms on our own planet. They’re so numerous and so varied and so very different from us, especially as we get away from mammals and the general run of large or largeish land critters and into the kinds of life that exist in environments we can’t ourselves survive in: depths of the ocean, volcanic calderas, drops of water or tiny cracks in rocks or…

But many times we circle back to the more compre...

Story Excerpt Sunday: From Razzmatazz by Patricia Burroughs

Razzmatazz

A Romantic Comedy

by Patricia Burroughs

“WHAT THE HELL?” Alex shot upright and rubbed his unshaven face. He surveyed the messy bed and did a double take when he saw his friend beside him.

Chris rolled over more slowly, more agonizingly, and groaned. “Lord, I must have really tied one on last night—”

“You! You!”

Alex stared past the foot of the bed at Kennie. He blinked a few times, then remembered. Oh, damn. Did he remember.

Chris’s gaze followed his, and he jerked upright, “What’s she do...

Beauty is the Beast

I was reshelving some books the other day, and there was Rosmund Hodge’s debut YA fantasy, Cruel Beauty. I’d read it when it first came out, remembered enjoying it, and sat down to reread it.

There seem to have been a number of variations on Beauty and the Beast coming out lately, especially in YA. Though the ‘beast’ can be a demon or death personified, he is seldom an ugly monster. He can be cursed, but in a way that doesn’t mar his dangerous beauty. Because the ‘Beauty’ of the tale seems to...

Her: A Very Short Review

by Brenda W. Clough

Her, by Spike Jonze, is an Oscar-winning movie came out in 2013. I haven’t gotten around to seeing it until now, and it is, I am delighted to report, the purest SF you ever saw. You want near future tech? The impact of a new invention upon society? Here we go! And this is deliciously up-to-the-minute, with pocket computers, sexting, and online relationships. And, finally, we make that Asimov/Clarke jump into bigger questions that leave mere humans lamenting.

Joaquin Phoenix...