Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff's Blog: #42 Pencil: A Writer's Life, the Universe, and Everything, page 51

I Love the End of the World

Some years ago, on my LiveJournal, someone kindly mentioned her enjoyment of my novel The Stone War,and noted that “I love a good post-apocalypse.” My first thought was: gee, so do I. ‘Kay, not certain what, if anything, that says about me personally. But as a writer I can think of several reasons to love the end of the world.

First: you get to have your cake and consume it as well, setting-wise. You can set your story in a real world, trash a couple of well known local landmarks (how often ha...

War on the Water: Red River by P. G. Nagle

Marie Hawkland: A Louisiana belle, mistress of a thousand slaves

Nat Wheat: a Union Navy carpenter who dreams of piloting his own gunboat

Jamie Russell: a Confederate captain, fighting a running battle with the Yankees through swamps and bayous

Their lives collide at Belle View Plantation where the Red River flows into the Mississippi and the Civil War becomes a struggle for control of the country’s largest waterway.

Elderly Colonel Hawkland and his beautiful young wife, Marie, must tread a wary...

Place as Inspiration for Writing a Novel

Since the new ebook edition of my romantic suspense novel Islands was released by Book View Café this month, everyone has been asking if the free-diver on the cover is a photo of me, and I wish I could say yes. If I had pics of my underwater explorations from my time teaching scuba in the Virgin Islands and other Caribbean locations, this could have been me. In those hot, tropic days, I practically lived in the sea, and like my character John in the novel, I wished to be reborn as a dolphin.

T...

Ode to the Round White Ones

Every once in a while a horse person has to just love on “her” breed. We love all horses, of course, and admire every individual for her good points, and generally try to be fair all around.

But we all have our preferences. Even if we try not to. Some horses just suit us better. For many of us, that extends to a breed or type in general. There are sets of traits, looks, ways of going, even colors, that we’re drawn to.

For me, it’s Round White Guys. Specifically, Lipizzans.

It’s not the mythos o...

Story Excerpt Sunday: From Revise the World by Brenda Clough

Revise the World

by Brenda Clough

At Eton, British boys had learnt the classical Greek motto: man is the measure of all things. Not for the first time it occurred to Titus that Protagoras deserved a clout over the earhole. This creature could not be measured or even described in a man’s terms. It lay like a forest across the range of hills to the south, many-hued and textured and extending for miles. In fact it was possible the thing was the range – who knew how thick it was? The downland rippl...

There and Back Again, or “That was a fortuitous fluke” (part 2: Colorado)

when last we left our intrepid road researchers, they were driving along route 50, heading west into Colorado.In case you ever wondered, the easternmost half of Colorado looks a lot like the westernmost half of Kansas. Except fewer feed lots, and the soil’s shading from taupe to reddish-brown.

The second half of the book takes place here, although it’s a vague “here” for reasons of Plot. I’ve been in Colorado before, so it wasn’t entirely new territory, but I was seeing it with Book Eyes, now....

Things

After a recent medium-ish quake, I decided it was time for another shakedown on Things. I stripped out a bunch of clothes I knew I would never wear, and pulled out a couple hundred books I knew I would never read again, and took a pass through kitchen clutter and things in cupboards that I, at least, could get rid of. (The spouse tends to hold onto stuff.)

Sorting through my stuff makes me aware of stuff everywhere. People’s garage sales, thrift stores, neighbors moving—carting load after load...

There and Back Again, or “Why are you HERE?” (part 1: Kansas)

Ah, research. Ah, road trip.

Ah, the joys of getting your research in your road trip!

I’m currently working on the first book of The Devil’s West, which is a divergent history/”weird west” fantasy set in the early 1800′s, in what would have been the Louisiana Purchase. Much of the action in the first book takes place in what-would-have-been west Kansas and eastern Colorado – specifically, the short-grass prairie and high plains. And while Google Earth and second-person notes are incredibly usef...

Story from Bread Loaf: “Joe Biden Is my Homeboy”

I’m just back from this year’s New England Young Writers Conference at the Bread Loaf writing center near Middlebury, Vermont. As usual, it was awesome, challenging, inspiring, and exhausting all at the same time. I made some new friends among the writers in residence, reconnected with some old friends, and spent time with a magnificent group of high school student writers. Their talent, intelligence, and mutually supportive nature just blows me away. They’re awesome writers and awesome peopl...

The Tajji Diaries: Threshold Success

Tajji, our newly-adopted retired seeing eye dog, came to us with strong reactivity to pedestrians and especially to other dogs. She would bark and lunge as soon as she saw any “triggering” stimulus, and her vision is excellent. Sometimes, she would be triggered when the other dog or person was 1/8 mile away. This distance is called the threshold of arousal, meaning that stimuli farther away don’t cause the dog to “go ballistic.” Tajji’s threshold was so long, she basically didn’t have one. If...