Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff's Blog: #42 Pencil: A Writer's Life, the Universe, and Everything, page 62

BVC Announces Mystic Warrior

Mystic Warrior

A Mystic Isle novel

by Patricia Rice

The mystic Isle of Aelynn slowly gravitates toward the same disastrous fate as revolutionary Europe–its survival depends on returning an elusive treasure…

With her home torn by the loss of their spiritual leader, Lissandra Olympus, the heir apparent, seeks the help of the one man who might save them– renegade warrior Murdoch LeDroit. But Murdoch has turned his back on those who feared his extraordinary psychic powers and rejected him. Besides, r...

Indie Discoveries— Andrea K. Höst

Indies

I’d like to commence a series of posts on independent writers. Independent, or “indie,” sidesteps the baggage of “self-published.”

For a bit of perspective: since records have been kept, it appears that artists, musicians, and writers were pretty much in charge of marketing their own work. There were no publishing conglomerates. The market was mostly confined to kings, church leaders, and universities until the Enlightenment printing boom, which was, I suspect, roughly the equivalent to...

Cats, Claws, Panic

Cats, Claws, Panic

(Annals of Pard, X)

by Ursula K. Le Guin

Do cats bite their nails? I mean, do cats other than Pard bite their nails?

After breakfast, Pard washes his face. Sometimes the soft swipe across the jowl with the spit-dampened front paw turns into something else: he holds that paw pad-first to to his mouth, gets a claw between his teeth, and tugs it. He tugs repeatedly, and hard enough to make a not wholly agreeable tooth-on-claw noise.

In the afternoon, when he is doing All-over Spitb...

Story Inspiration Sunday

This week I finished off the latest novel, When the Moon Over Kualina Mountain Comes, incorporating all the first reader comments I received. The novel grew about 6000 words from the draft that the first readers read to the draft I turned into my copyeditor. From the end of the first draft to the version I turned into my copyeditor, the novel grew more than 10,000 words. This is why I always say I’m a “putter-inner” – my first drafts are sparse compared to later drafts.

Last night, I started...

Making Good Characters Rationally Self Destructive

(Picture fromhere.)

Aboutyears ago, back when I was in college and dinosaurs ruled the earth, I ran acrossGarret Hardin’slovely book,The Tragedy of the Commons. If you want to go out there and read it quickly, go ahead. It’s not long. I’ll wait.

The metaphor was the British Commons, where the townsfolk would share grazing land for their cattle. However, there was an incentive for an individual to sneak in and graze more than the others if he could get away with it. His cattle would get a little...

What Kind of Cookie Do You Write?

“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.

This statement came up in a discussion of marketing recently here at Book View Café. What follow...

Where’s the On-Off Switch on This Dog?

We’ve now had Tajji for almost three weeks and have a pretty solid sense of the challenges we’ll be facing while re-socializing her. As I noted in my first blog post about her, she’s “hyper-vigilant:” aware of and alert to anything new around her, and convinced that it is her responsibility just as it was with her blind person. This attitude is certainly a necessity for a seeing-eye dog in her service harness, but it’s a serious liability in a companion animal at the end of a leash. It manife...

Borrowing a Voice 2

One of the questions of the young writer is, how do I make my characters sound, well, characteristic? How do I make them all sound different?

This is a common problem, and shades over into the issue of authorial voice. All Heinlein heroes do sound alike, because they were written by Robert Heinlein. But consider Dickens. There is a specific Dickensian voice; you can recognize a passage written by the great man easily, whether fiction or nonfiction. But all of Charles Dickens’ characters do sou...

Legal Fictions: Asimov’s Laws of Robotics Are Not Enough

Science fiction writers have been following – or deliberately rejecting – Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics since he first wrote about them in the 1940s. But now that we live in a world where robots are vacuuming our floors – not to mention operating on our bodies – lawyers are getting into the act

Law Professor Ryan Calo is working on a major paper (still in draft stage) arguing that — as with the cyberlaw that has accompanied the explosion of the Internet — robotics is going to require n...

WWW Wednesday – 3-19-2014

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 are you currently reading?

Technically I’m still halfway through my thorough reread of the Chalet School books by Elinor M Brent-Dyer: sixty books written over thirty-five years, a classic of the English girls’ boarding-school genre (despite being set largely in foreign l...