Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff's Blog: #42 Pencil: A Writer's Life, the Universe, and Everything, page 37

Consideration of Works Past: The Door into Summer/Double Star

(Pictures fromhereandhere.)

My two favoriteHeinleinnovels have always beenThe Door into Summer(1957) andDouble Star(1956).

The reasons for this have changed over the ears. TDIS was not one of his most popular novels– one critic suggested that this was a novel where the commentary by the narrator was the best part. DS, on the other hand, has been roundly praised over the year and won Heinlein’s first Hugo.

TDIS is about Dan Davis, an inventor and engineer who is bilked of his company, his livelih...

Story Excerpt Sunday: From Speak to Our Desires by Brenda Clough

Speak to Our Desires

by Brenda Clough

Suddenly the Dodge gave a clank and a jerk. The engine seemed to sigh with relief, and then relax. The car began to slow down. Ruby pushed the gas pedal and shifted the gears without result. A car behind them beeped impatiently, then roared past.“Mom, pull over!” Ellie cried. “There’s smoke coming out the back!”

Actually it was steam. But the car evidently could go no further. Ruby eased it over to the curb and pounded the steering wheel with her plump pale...

Not only refilling the well, but digging a new one entirely… GISHWHES 2014

“I regret nothing…except the things I didn’t get to do.” — post-GISHWHES motto.

And another GISHWHES (Greatest Internet Scavenger Hunt The World Has Ever Seen)staggered to a close after a week of intense play, with many thousands of members world-wide compiling their items (nearly 200 possible by the end!) and uploading them to the submissions portal by the deadline late last night (very late, if you were the UK or Europe). If there was someone who was not staggering, slightly delirious and i...

Worldcon Report 3: The Center of the World

by Brenda W. Clough

My husband has never been to England. He routed through Heathrow once, on his way to more distant parts. So clearly we had to come early and Do All The Tourist Things. A significant fraction of the planetary population is doing the same thing this week; London is something like Disneyland only with crime. All the trains are full, every restaurant and pub is crowded, all the sights are thronged, and the bobbies look harried and tired. However! This does not slow us down at a...

Inventing a Publisher . . . the Bookstore

You’ve got a bunch of writers busy learning how to digitalize their work, and venture into the weird world of Cover Art. The next step is getting the work to the reader.

Sarah Zettel, a popular and successful writer across several genres, with stories in The Shadow Conspiracy I & II, was there at the very beginning.

She says:

Book View Cafe is an example of getting caught up in the early turmoil of a tech revolution. When we started talking about the idea of an author co-op, the prevailing wisdo...

Worldcon Report 2: Russell Square

The only problem with flying in and out of Iceland is that the planes arrive and depart at Godawful times. We had to get up at 4 am to make our flight, and at that hour of the morning the check-in kiosks are not our friends. The Reykjavik systems are particularly gnomic, too. Luckily there is a sad fellowship of travelling sufferers, and a profane Icelandic girl was ahead of me in line. I was able to helpfully point out the Continue button, and she gave me useful tips about how to scan in my...

The Tajji Diaries: Dogs In Love?

Tajji on the field

Our new-to-us retired seeing eye dog, Tajji, has been making good progress with her reactivity to other dogs and sometimes to people. A great deal of this progress has occurred in the “Reactive Rover” class taught by Sandi Pensinger of Living With Dogs in Soquel, CA. This does not necessarily mean Tajji can and will take what she’s learned (“good things happen when I look calmly at another dog”) and apply them to other places and other dogs. Dogs do not generalize. To them,...

Worldcon Report 1: Book View Geyser

by Brenda W. Clough

The last time I went to London was 13 years ago and, I had planned to go with a friend, Amy Sheldon. We selected a mutually agreeable date, booked our flights, and were all set to go. On the morning of the departure I got into the car and turned on my radio. It was September 11, 2001. When I pick ‘em, I really pick ‘em.

So, once more into the breach! I no longer can handle time zones well. So this time we are making a side trip: one day in Reykjavik in Iceland. I am writing...

Ursula K. Le Guin and Michael Cunningham Talk About Writing

BVC’s own Ursula K. Le Guin and Michael Cunningham talk about what’s going on with fiction in this dialogue at Electric Lit.

Here are a couple of quotes to whet your appetite:

Cunningham:

I feel like the most prominent aspect of this period is what I suppose I’ll call “broadening.”

Broadening in the sense of a much larger collective conviction about who’s entitled to tell stories, what stories are worth telling, and who among the storytellers gets taken seriously.

Le Guin:

There are very real diff...

The Battlefield as Heroin

When you think of all the things people might get addicted to, war isn’t the first thing that springs to mind. But as one of my Vietnam War vet classmates back in the mid-1970s put it: There it is.

Consider the reality of being in that particular war zone. Most of the time in most of South Vietnam, the enemy was not the NVA or the Viet Cong. It was boredom. There you were, stuck halfway across the planet from your normal joys and diversions, enduring the slow tick of the second hand, counting...