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

BVC Eats: Better corn bread

a smoking-hot cast iron pan greased with deeply browned butter makes a perfect crust

My husband recently entered a bake-off with the cast and crew of Motown: The Musical at the Oriental Theater in Chicago. Bless him, he wanted to enter my corn bread. I said, Hey, it’s just the Better Homes & Gardens cookbook recipe. You know. The book with the red and white checks on the cover? Then he made a trial batch.

Turns out, it’s kind-of not their recipe after all. The differences are mostly fiddly bits...

Maslow and True Love

The other day, a friend was asking me about my Diamond Brides series of hot, contemporary romances, all built around the (imaginary) Raleigh Rockets baseball team. She said, “You used to write speculative fiction, stories where you could really explore themes about civilization and mankind’s place in the universe.” Laughing, I told her I was still doing the same thing — I’m writing stories about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

You remember Maslow. He’s the psychologist that developed the theory t...

Ur Doing It Rite

Throes of Creation, Leonid Pasternak

I am one of those neurotic folks who thinks that everyone else was issued a full set of instructions at birth. For everything–friendship, clothes, housekeeping, parenting, business. Mostly I’ve learned to background that assumption, or even forget it for long periods of time. (Iamalways convinced that people I think are cool must have homes that are tidier and cleaner and better organized than mine. Visiting these people is often eye-opening, and yet I kee...

BVC Announces Third Degree by Mindy Klasky

Third Degree

Diamond Brides Book 5

by Mindy Klasky

If you can’t take the heat…

Chef Ashley Harris wants to own a restaurant – that’s why she attended culinary school, and that’s why she’s working for the world’s most lecherous restaurateur.

Raleigh Rockets third baseman Josh Cantor wants to launch his investment restaurant with the family recipes he loved growing up. Josh has been promised that treasure trove – but only if he can convince his grandmother that he’s dating again, after a traumatic d...

Story Excerpt Sunday: From Deeds of Men by Marie Brennan

Deeds of Men

an Onyx Court novella

by Marie Brennan

Deven was left in a deserted gallery, jaw clenched in frustration. Not the slightest shred of luck, and now he did not know what path to pursue. Henry had other friends, but none half so close as Penshaw. Who else knew him well?

“You are Sir Michael Deven.”

The words brought him up like a curb bit. The voice was so very like…Deven jerked around, half-expecting to see Henry’s ghost staring at him down this Whitehall gallery, translucent in the co...

Books and Cookies

“The digital audience doesn’t want different things; they want good story well told. There is no genre dominance, only well-crafted, well-told story dominance.” To compare books to a popular consumer product, Golden Oreos are profitable not because they are golden but because they are Oreos. As with all the other genres and flavors of Oreos.”Bruce White, a Fortune 500 management and process expert.

I love cookies. I used to make dozens of different sorts of cookies. I write books the same way—...

CLARION 2014–Teaching Week One

I teach the fiction workshop at Swarthmore College. That’s a workshop usually comprising the “smartest kids in the room” as the saying goes. Outside of Swarthmore, that’s not been my experience: Workshop attendees usually span the range from “interesting” to “cannot write for toffee.” Understandable, as most workshops work on the premise that you pay for a slot and you’re in. Well, that’s not Clarion. And that really is not Clarion 2014.

Anybody who has taught at Clarion SD, Clarion West, or C...

The Tajji Diaries – Every Dog Is Different

As Tajji, the retired seeing eye dog that we are rehabilitating for extreme reactivity to other dogs, progresses through her curriculum, one thing stands out over and over again: every dog is different. It’s one of those utterly banal, self-evident statements, and yet how many times do we, even knowledgeable dog owners, take a one-size-fits-all approach to their behavior?

Each of the four dogs in the class (Reactive Rover, taught by Sandi Pensinger of Living With Dogs) is reactive in some way....

Phyllis (Irene) Radford is #1 Skywarrior Books

Book View Cafe’s own Phyllis Radford (aka Irene Radford, P.R. Frost, and C.F. Bentley) is June’s top-selling author at Skywarrior Books, publisher of her collaborations with Bob Brown.

Congrats, Phyl!

Congratulations to Marie Brennan!

Congratulations to BVC member Marie Brennan, whose A Natural History of Dragons has been nominated for the 2014 World Fantasy Award!

The World Fantasy Convention will be held in Washington D.C.