Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff's Blog: #42 Pencil: A Writer's Life, the Universe, and Everything, page 55

Report from Versailles: The adventure begins

I’m keeping this forever.

By Vonda N. McIntyre

My adventure began when I arrived at Versailles. Wait, no, it began at the airport when the production company sent a car for me. (I could get used to this.) Or maybe it began when the driver had to chase off another driver who tried to poach me. (I think that’s what happened. My French is rudimentary. I stumble through a couple of phrases of bad high-school French and the person says “Would you like it if we spoke English?” and I say “Thank you th...

Tuesday Morning Truth

Hadn’t known about The Library House in Long Beach until a few women from my Jane Austen book discussion group met there for coffee a month back. It’s such a cool place I’ve gone back a couple of times.

This last visit, I was there with a few people from a couple of intersecting circles, the center being a friend celebrating her birthday. The conversation got around to books and reading. X looked around and pointed out that everyone there was over thirty, so cumulatively we represented an impr...

Dog training with Master Zhuang

Tajji and Dave training in the “The Meadow” next door

“Rulers should always avoid giving commands…for commands, being direct and verbal, always bring to the subject’s mind the possibility of doing the opposite. But since rituals are non-verbal, they have no contraries. They can therefore be used to produce harmony of wills and actions without provoking recalcitrance; if a man finds himself playing his appointed part in li [ritual] and thus already — as it were de facto — in harmony with others...

HURRAH! Mindy Klasky Throws the Perfect Pitch

Mindy Klasky’s Book View Cafe publication Perfect Pitch was recommended on USA Today’sHappy Ever After romance genre blog.

Included in the enthusiastic review: “Why you should read it: This introduction to Mindy Klasky’s Diamond Brides series is a heartfelt, conflict-ridden story as irresistible as its characters. It’s also a whole lot of sexy, savvy fun.”

A word from Mindy:

What Mindy Klasky has to say:

“Write what you know.” That’s standard advice for new authors. …I wrote what I knew for the f...

Legal Fictions: The More Things Change, the More Law Doesn’t

I’ve said more than once in this series that law is inherently conservative. It relies heavily on precedent; in fact, U.S. law is built on European law – primarily English common law, but also French and Spanish systems – and occasionally harks back to decisions made hundreds of years ago.

It usually takes a long time to make significant changes in law, especially in the U.S., where we have 50 states, several territories, and the District of Columbia as well as the federal government. Those go...

Superstition: pleading with thunderstorms

Light a cigarette. Maybe it’ll make the bus come.

Terry Pratchett mentions “pleading with thunderstorms” in The Truth, in which the younger son of an aristocratic family declines to enter the clergy because he regards prayer in this light.

Whatever your views on the efficacy of putting the hands together and hoping (another Pratchett quote, this one from Going Postal), it is a well-known factoid that certain behaviors bring on disaster, while others avert it.

Be prepared for Snowpocalypse and it...

WWW Wednesday 4-30-2014

WWW Wednesday. This meme is from shouldbereading.

• What are you currently reading?

As usual, I have several books going. (They tend to take up stations–an upstairs book, a downstairs book, a carry book, a research book, sometimes a late-at-night book, etc.)

A Call to Arms, by P.B. Nagle. I like how the author gets into the head of a woman of the mid-nineteenth century. I’ve hit the chapters when the blithe, easy-triumph expecting militia soldiers experience the shock of real warfare. Grim! And...

Education =/= Panic

This is apparently true: a Long Islandelementary school cancelled the annual-year end kindergarten show because it would distract the kindergarteners from preparing for college.

I’m not as surprised by this as I might have been twenty years ago or so. At that time, when I was living in New York City and my husband and I were looking for a preschool for our older daughter, we were told–with a straight face–by the head of a Montessori school that my kid couldn’t hope to get into Harvard without...

BVC Announces Lady of Horses by Judith Tarr

Lady of Horses

Book 2 of The Epona Sequence

by Judith Tarr

In the grandfathers’ time, when few yet living had been born, the People worshipped the horse, and served him, and took the gifts that he gave them: his meat, his hide, the milk of his mares. But he had not yet granted to men the greatest gift of all: the gift of riding on his back, and racing the wind.

Sparrow is a shaman’s daughter in a tribe that forbids women to be kings, to be shamans, to be anything but silent and tractable servants...

Morning Manure Meditations

Well, walking meditations in general, but isn’t that a catchier title? Also, more alliterative?

Some people do their thinking best when sitting still. Or lying down. Or being in some way immobile. I get a lot of good story ideas and plot breakthroughs in the shower, but I’m not necessarily standing still, and the water is in constant motion.

With a horse farm, I have motion forced upon me every day, several times a day: feeding, cleaning, caring for, and interacting with horses (and dogs and ca...