Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff's Blog: #42 Pencil: A Writer's Life, the Universe, and Everything, page 47

SF Gate Reviews Vonda McIntyre’s Dreamsnake

Online genre magazineSFGATE ran a very nice write-up of Vonda McIntyre’swork.

The review, written by Kevin McVeigh, is entitledFromthe Attic VII: Vonda N. McIntyre.

Vonda fans can read it here.

I’d say this rates a big, zesty HURRAH!

WWW Wednesday 6-18-2014

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 did you recently finish reading?

I broke my wrist three weeks ago (ProTip: If you get up in the middle of the nightin a hotel room, turn on the light). Between the initial fracture reduction, the flight home (which mademy splinted arm swell up like crazy) and the subseque...

Can it be done? A sex scene in ten pages or less

only 99c at Amazon

I wrote this story for an RWA critique session. My chapter does “hot nights.” The authors bring sex scenes to read. I was feeling pretty cocky, because whatever I decided to read, people always loved my sex scenes, right? Then I noticed that the fine print said, “Bring ten pages.” Turned out that all my sex scenes run fourteen to forty pages. Oops.

So I wrote Dezyrah’s Talk Dirty To Me.

I did it in all-dialogue for two reasons: one, I’d read some Terry Bisson short stories in...

BVC Announces Finding the Eye

Finding the Eye

by Jill Zeller

writing as Hunter Morrison

Using a peculiar camera she found, Maxine Nutbeam photographs her cousin’s life-sized horse sculpture and it comes to life. Coming from a long line of Nutbeams possessing erratic, careless magical abilities, Maxine encounters the camera’s owner Dante, whose supernatural skills as a Time Mage surpass even Maxine’s vivid imaginings. Rushed headlong into sorcery, danger and chaos, Maxine uncovers her mother’s secret and the mystery of her ow...

Edge of Tomorrow: A Very Short Review

by Brenda W. Clough

Oh, the pleasures of a summer action movie! There is nothing like checking your brain at the door and just letting it rip. Edge of Tomorrow touches all the necessary bases for success. Bloodless violence! Combat armor! Alien invasion! Enough of an intellectually challenging premise to keep the high foreheads distracted, while all the explosions and blazing guns distract the children! Time travel is a classic hardy perennial device for this, and Edge of Tomorrow stands in ex...

Don’t Want that Bad Good-bye

(I wrote this post a week ago. The coping continues.)

People have lately been asking me about Rena Beagle. How she is, why I’ve not said much about her.

I’ve been bound to leave you, we’ve known that for awhile…

I’ve told them that she’s on hiatus from agility (where we finished her Open and Excellent titles last year) and she’s been playing rally when she feels well enough. In fact she earned her Rally Advanced a month ago and even got her first Excellent leg, very close to the year-anniversary...

Story Excerpt Sunday: From Fires of Nuala by Cat Kimbriel

Fires of Nuala

Book One of the Chronicles of Nuala

by Cat Kimbriel

Never draw unwarranted attention to entrances or departures, Darame reminded herself as she slipped into her own room. Peeling off the black dress and shoes she hastily donned a loose-fitting evening robe and slippers. Now, to find out what Avis was “up to”…. If it was possible for innocent Avis to involve herself in any secrets. Guileless as clear water, Avis had quickly shown Darame that skulduggery was not her game.

Will Stephe...

The Turing Test

Well, last time I spoke about how the Fermi Paradox irritated me. I’m on a curmudgeonly roll. Since it’s in the news, let’s go gunning for the Turing Test.

The Turing Test was invented, not surprisingly, by Alan Turing. It came from a paper entitled Computing Machinery and Intelligence and appeared in Mind in 1950. It was an attempt to determine whether machines could think without defining a “machine” or “think”, since these were potentially ambiguous concepts. He wanted something that could...

TRAINS: From Vientiane to Bangkok

By Brenda W. Clough

Nowadays this is fairly easy. Go here to see the schedules and get tips. I did this in 1969, in my early teens and it was… different. There were at the time no dentists in Laos, at least none that my parents trusted, and so we went to Bangkok to get our teeth looked at. For some reason I had to go — but I can’t remember any toothache. And for some reason we didn’t fly, a trip that would then take perhaps an hour or two.

Instead we began by going from our house in Vientiane t...

Kick(start)ing myself into Scrivener

I mentioned last month that I was launching a Kickstarter project for Chains and Memory, the sequel to my 2012 novel Lies and Prophecy.

We’re on the home leg now, with just four days to go; the campaign ends on Tuesday the 17th. I’m delighted to say it’s been a smashing success: initial goal in less than 48 hours, one stretch goal achieved and another one within reach. Of course, the real work has only just begun. With the initial funding secured, I’ve started drafting the novel, and that’s go...