Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff's Blog: #42 Pencil: A Writer's Life, the Universe, and Everything, page 63

#Watched100times: The Valet

supermodel Alice Taglioni and valet Gad Elmaleh

So I have a new filmmaker I love, Francis Veber, the French maker of comedies The Valet, The Closet, La Cage Aux Folles (1978 original and the 1996 US remake The Birdcage), The Tall Blond Man With One Black Shoe, and The Dinner Game. I’ve seen the first three…now I want to see the other two.

The Closet is about a mild-mannered executive who learns he’s about to be downsized at about the same time he is mistaken for being gay. This not only saves h...

If You Want to Send a Message, Call Western Union*

By Rebecca Kennison (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0

There is a story I read when I was a younger person (in, of all things, a compendium of fiction and articles from the first 100 years of theLadies Home Journal) set in the 19th century, and about a young English woman working in a huge Russian household as a governess, who is trying to navigate the politics of this large group of people**. Because she is not exactly a servant, but not exactly a member of...

BVC Announces Mystic Rider by Patricia Rice

Mystic Rider

A Mystic Isle novel

by Patricia Rice

The disappearance of the sacred chalice has brought disastrous weather and volcanic eruptions to the island of Aelynn. Ian Olympus, Aelynn’s powerful leader, must venture outside the only home he’s known to find the cup and save his people.

Chantal Deveau has used her gift of music to write impassioned anthems for the Revolution and lullabies for her niece. But as the mobs grow more violent, the sensual timbre of a handsome stranger in a monk’s ro...

The Unbearable Dailiness of Being

I was driving along not long ago, spinning around inside my head the way one does, pondering bills and responsibilities and necessities and obligations. This errand run, that errand still to do, animals to feed at a certain time which was my essential deadline for the expedition.

Peripherally I was aware that it was a beautiful day in a beautiful setting, with mountains and desert and sky. But mostly I was caught up in the grimly mundane.

Then I glanced at a horse pasture as I was going past, a...

Who Gets to Escape?

I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories . . . Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it. In using Escape in this way the critics have chosen the wrong word, and, what is more, they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape o...

Puppy’s First Shoes

Talk about awesome reinforcement timing! This past month, in some weird universal coincidence, big lots of people (okay, a couple) asked me exactly this–when did I start training? How? And now here we are, officially chatting about it for the Blog Event!

So here’s my easy answer: I start my puppies the moment they come home.

Now, anyone who’s gasping, “She puts her puppies over jumps/on the a-frame/dogwalk/WHUTEVER” should just slap their own heads. Just pause right now and take care of that l...

It’s Pi Day!

by Brenda W. Clough

How can I resist reviving this charming pastry? A veal and ham pie AND an advertisement for our fine organization. Nourishment for both body and mind!

The ebook version of my novel How Like a God is now available from Book View Cafe.

My newest novel Speak to Our Desires is out from Book View Café.

Negotiating With Cats

One of my favorite lines from Ghost Busters is a description of Armageddon, the End of Times – “dogs and cats, living together!” The stereotype is that that dogs and cats are fundamentally incompatible, born enemies. But dogs and cats can form communities – families – based on learned communication, play, and safety. To do this, especially with adult animals, requires a little help from their resident monkeys.

Tajji, our “new-to-us” retired seeing eye dog, lived most of her adult life in a hou...

POETS Day: Still Life with Epiphany

My first home in Boulder Creek

The scent of blackberry sage tea

Like a whisper unheard

Steals through the house

Borne on cool spring invading through opened windows:

Plum blossoms, mold and forest, the fresh tea-like woodiness of redwoods.

In a moment

The space these walls enclose, shaping my restlessness, the air I breath,

Reshapes itself

Expectant.

Now even silence is different,

As though I do not hear you

Not because you’re absent

But because you did not choose to speak.

Then a corner slides away reveal...

Legal Fictions: D-I-V-O-R-C-E

Last week in the comments to the WWW Wednesday post, Brenda Clough and Sherwood Smith got into a discussion on divorce in earlier times. Sherwood observed:

Divorce is all tied up with women’s rights.

Indeed it is, because while divorce means that a woman can legally leave a bad marriage, the changes in women’s rights and economic status were necessary to make leaving a practical alternative for more people. The two things go hand in hand.

In fact, one of the reasons behind the Women’s Temperance...