Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff's Blog: #42 Pencil: A Writer's Life, the Universe, and Everything, page 39

Breaking the comfort zone, and GISHWHES

by Laura Anne Gilman

Last year, in a fit of what I thought was temporary insanity, I decided to join GISHWHES, also known as the Greatest Internet Scavenger Hunt the World Has Ever Seen, an event founded by actor Misha Collins. It’s a seven-day-long group event that asks you to abandon shame, modesty, and common sense in the frantic goal to complete a list of increasingly insane tasks, some simple, some immensely complicated, all of them asking you to be ridiculously creative and utterly fearl...

Story Excerpt Sunday: From Northlight by Deborah J. Ross

Northlight

by Deborah J. Ross

The mare kept pitching and throwing her body from side to side, but she couldn’t get her hind legs under her. Her breath came in labored grunts.

I grabbed her mane as if we were on the trail together. “Up! Come on, that’s the way! Get up, damn you!”

Then my eyes focused on her taut, rounded belly, the way her muscles wouldn’t work right, and the green-flecked slime dripping from her jaws. The trefoil leaves of ropeweed.

I fell to my knees at her side. Her body was hot...

Truth in Fiction: Novelized Autobiography

I wonder why I did not commence authorship before! How true it is that a man never knows what he can do until he tries. The fact is, I never thought that I could make a novel, and I was thirty years old before I stumbled on the fact. What a pity!

Back in the late nineties, I discovered Patrick O’Brian’s tall-ship adventure stories. I’d always liked shipboard adventures, ever since I first read C.S. Forester as a kid. I was so taken by O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series (which I think far superio...

Sherwood Smith’s novella in August LIGHTSPEED

Sherwood Smith has a novella, “The Rule of Engagement,” in this month’s Lightspeed,with a mini-interview.

Inventing a Publisher . . . Part One

A few years ago, I was talking to some people at a local convention and mentioned that I was joining a publishing co-op run by writers. Most said polite versions of “Oh, that sounds interesting,” but one laughed.

I said, “Why are you laughing?”

“Publishing? Run by writers? That’s like trying to put cats on a hamster wheel.”

I mentioned it on an email list, and got a private note from someone saying basically, “Run as fast as you can! I give it a year, and then some bullying alpha will try a take...

Guest Post: Nicola Griffith: Who Owns SF?

Book View Cafe is delighted to present a guest post from Nicola Griffith, who is on a blog tour in honor (honour?) of the UK release of her book Hild .

by Nicola Griffith

[This first went up on Charlie Stross's blog a few days ago. It's an essay in the old sense of the word. I'm not here to pick fights or bludgeon anyone with my point of view on SF1. I want to explore, to wander a little. I've used footnotes not as a scholarly buttress but in an attempt to keep this exploration from becoming a h...

WWW Wednesday – July 30, 2014

WWW Wednesday. This meme is from shouldbereading.

• What did you recently finish reading?

Middlemarch, by George Eliot. A somewhat longish review here.

Prisoner, by Lia Silver.

This is the first volume in what will be a longer series, but doesn’t drop you off a cliff.It takes its time setting up the characters and situation. All characters are complicated, especially the main two. Both have serious emotional damage as a cost of becoming supremely badass. We begin in Afghanistan with DJ Torres hav...

BVC Eats: Welsh cakes a la Venusienne

This recipe comes all the way from Venus.

This recipe was given to me by our landlords in New Haven. They were odd folk. Mark was a pagan, once the Pursuivant of Arms for the New London Barony of the Society for Creative Anachronism, and Becca was into EST and the Hunger Project. My husband and I called them the Venusians. We pretended that their pickup truck, which was red and named Fafnir, was really a spaceship, and that when they disappeared for the weekend it was because they were phoning...

Aliens in Hell

As a writer of science fiction, I found creationist Ken Ham’s commentary on alien life and the space program absurd and thought provoking.

For those of you who missed it, in response to NASA’s expectation of finding alien life in the not too distant future, he wrote on his Sunday blog: “You see, the Bible makes it clear that Adam’s sin affected the whole universe. This means that any aliens would also be affected by Adam’s sin, but because they are not Adam’s descendants, they can’t have salva...

Avast, Ye Lubbers

A ripple ran through the otherwise serene waters of the Book View Café last week when a pirate site–or rather, a directory site with links to all sorts of pirated material, including vast quantities of members’ fiction, some of it very likely published here at BVC–came to our collective attention. There was a flurry of activity as we all contacted our publishers, or started writing Takedown Letters, or reported the site to the FBI. It is, at very least, time sink and an annoyance.

And then I g...