Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff's Blog: #42 Pencil: A Writer's Life, the Universe, and Everything, page 36

Is It Fall Yet?

NASA image

It seems to me that literature always waxes effusive about summer. Everyone is supposed to love summer. Picnics, barbeques, days at the beach. It sounds idyllic.

Me, I hate summer. Give me fall any day: a nip in the air, the trees turning orange and yellow.

Or spring, with brand new green leaves and flowers starting to bring color back into the landscape.

Summer is too damn hot.

OK, so it probably wasn’t all that hot in the places where people originally wrote paeans to summer. It’s ra...

Worldcon Report 6: Visiting Charles

by Brenda W. Clough

Today we visited Charles Darwin’s house in Sussex. It is now actually within the commuter belt, and you can get there by bus and train. I am visiting every residence I can easily find of the right historical period for this novel. Downe House is particularly cool because Darwin had no office or other work space. Everything he did he did at home, surrounded by his family. It helped of course that he was a rich man who could get an army of servants and gardeners to do all the...

WWW Wednesday – Aug 13, 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 have at least 2 books going at once. In the breakfast nook I keep non-fiction. “Finding Merlin” by Adam Ardray. I read his companion book “Finding Arthur” and loved his research and his methodology. A lot of historians will object to...

The “Rules” of Writing

(This article is a “reprint” from our first year of operating Book View Cafe—2008)

Robert Heinlein posited that there were two rules of writing:

1. You must write.

2. You must finish what you write.

That’s easy enough to say, but how does one go about it?

Well, let’s look at Heinlein’s first rule of writing: you must write. I suspect every writer comes to a point in her life when she asks, “Do postcards and letters to mom count? How about shopping lists—do shopping lists count?” In my opinion the...

Worldcon Report 5: Museum Overload

by Brenda W. Clough

Museum overload is easy. You just go to the British Museum. This is where Brits have been stashing loot for centuries. It is the entire Smithsonian in one building. Every time some Iraqi or Greek demands their toys back, the BM taps some local billionaire to add or revamp the exhibits and make them so magnificent no one could envision a change.

So sorry, Greece — I don’t think you’re getting the Parthenon marbles back any time soon. When last I was here they had the panels p...

BVC Announces Sorcerer’s Feud by Katharine Kerr

Sorcerer’s Feud

The Runemaster 2

by Katharine Kerr



Old Secrets Wake

Art student Maya Cantescu has always had secrets to keep — her mysterious disease that has turned her into something like a vampire, her father’s obsession with ritual magic, her own talents for the occult. Now, however, she has a secret far more dangerous than those: in self-defense, she killed a man with magic.

Can her lover, the wealthy, powerful runemaster Tor Thorlaksson, protect her from the consequences? He has dangers of h...

Street Smarts Abroad

Md.Boualam Souk in tetouan (Popular market)” by Md. Boualam- Own work. Licensed under Creative Commons

I am, right now (August 8th), sitting in a farmhouse in Normandy, France, drinking coffee and watching a friend’s daughter stalk flies. My friend Ellen, in celebration of her 60th birthday, rented the farmhouse for a month and has been holding court here for a series of visitors. I’ve been here for a few days, and tomorrow we return the house to its owner and head off to London and the Worldc...

Worldcon Report 4

by Brenda W. Clough

One of the main purposes of this trip is research. I do not come to Britain to drink perry and photograph cats — although I did take a picture of the statue commemorating Dick Whittington’s famous feline!

I come to run miles and cover ground. So I went and toured Charles Dickens’s house, which is, handily, just down the street from my hotel. I went to services at a church in Hampstead, walked over Hampstead Heath with knowledgeable native guides, and got a guided tour of Hig...

Just Get Over It

by Doranna

I know, I know. It’s been a while since I blogged about the doggy current events–even longer since I blogged actively at my place (Wordplay). Even though it’s ostensibly my own blog. Patty keeps regularly chugging forth on the Wordplay Write Horse Friday features, and yet from me…silence.

Usually I’m pretty decent about regular blogging–once a week, sometimes twice. There’s always something new going on with the dogs, always something to chat about with the writing. Because hey! Me...

About Anger part i

About Anger

i. Saeva indignatio

by Ursula K. Le Guin

In the consciousness-raising days of the second wave of feminism, we made a big deal out of anger, the anger of women. We praised it and cultivated it as a virtue. We learned to boast of being angry, to swagger our rage, to play the Fury.

We were right to do so. We were telling women who believed they should patiently endure insults, injuries, and abuse that they had every reason to be angry. We were rousing people to feel and see injustice, th...