Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff's Blog: #42 Pencil: A Writer's Life, the Universe, and Everything, page 64

WWW Wednesday – March 12, 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?

I’m listening to the second book in Maggie Stievater’s Raven Cycle series, The Dream Thieves. I love the characterizations, the world-building that began in the first book, The Raven Boys. Blue’s family of psychics continues to be funny and fasc...

Characters Hurling Insults For Fun and Profit

How many times has a discussion escalated into an argument, or an argument into violence, with the hurling of insults? It seems we human beings never outgrow the impulse to call people who disagree with us nasty names. There have been enough compilations of creative, gleeful, or historical insults to fill entire libraries. We so much enjoy our own cleverness that we blithely ignore whether calling someone names actually encourages them to change their behavior or whether it firmly cements the...

BVC Announces Mystic Guardian

Mystic Guardian

Mystic Isle Book 1

by Patricia Rice

Aelynn, a tropical island veiled from human sight, magically protects a sacred chalice. When a beautiful maiden washes ashore from the outside world and steals the chalice, she sets in motion dangerous and far-reaching consequences…



Trystan l’Enforcer is Aelynn’s powerful guardian. To guarantee the isle’s safety, he plans to marry into a magically powerful family. His ambition is thwarted when his ship carries a sultry beauty onto the island’s h...

BVC Announces Mystic Isle

Mystic Isle
Mystic Isle Series Prequel
by Patricia Rice

Newly appointed priestess to the Temple of Aelynn, Tasia Olympus is burdened with the greatest task to face any leader — saving her acolytes from a tsunami and finding them a new home. Her ability to communicate with the goddess cannot tell her how to protect three dozen virgins and an equal number of soldiers and sailors as they flee their doomed island.

Experienced captain, Nautilus the Navigator, can tackle storms and sea, but obeying a y...

Tolkien’s Influence on Fantasy

Here’s Tolkien himself, in a letter to Milton Waldman, probably written about 1951 but never sent:

“Do not laugh! But once upon a time (my crest has long since fallen) I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story . . .The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama.” *

He finishes with “Absurd.”

But I don’t believe that is...

Story Inspiration Sunday

I spent the last week in New Orleans. Tuesday was Mardi Gras. It was cold and rainy and I had the most fantastic time.

In the morning, my friend and I went to The Backstreet Cultural Museum, over in Treme. We watched one of the witch doctors bless the museum, watched the skeleton crew dance up, playing with the kids in the street, the music from cowbells and handheld drums.

Later that evening after the parades we ventured back out to Bourbon street. So many people were in costumes! It isn’t qui...

Lambing 2014

Lamb

It’s that time of year again. The incredibly wet, incredibly windy winter has passed into memory and we’ve switched from floods to proto-drought with nothing but full sun forecast for the next fortnight. The weather only does extremes these days.

We have four ewes lambing this year and the first three were all due within days of each other so we brought them up to the lambing pens the moment the rain stopped. The first ewe had triplets last Friday night. The second had twins on Monday…

And...

Backtracking

In the last doggy blog, in the wake of a difficult experience in El Paso, I was getting ready for another tracking test on the 3rd. I muttered about some of the challenges of getting tracking tests–finding the tests, dealing with the luck factor, maintaining the focus, blah blah blah.

So, on the third, we took the test, along with five other teams. This is what we all woke up to:

Ooh. Look. Clouds caught up on the Sandias. Cannot bode well for us.

To be fair, we saw it coming. Several days of...

Life with a Retired Seeing-Eye Dog: First Impressions

We’re nearing the two-week mark with Tajji, the retired seeing-eye dog we’ve adopted. That’s an observational milestone; next week we’ll report to our trainer and decide with her on a course of action for teaching Tajji how to be just a dog. Along the way I’ve found myself constructing “just-so” stories about the difference I see between Tajji, bred specifically for seeing-eye service, and Oka, bred as a sport dog. (His sire was the world champion in Schutzhund, the sport that tests the dog’s...

POETS Day: Vachel Lindsay

To me, Vachel Lindsay has always been the epitome of an American poet. Best known forAbraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight andGeneral William Booth Enters into Heaven,which was set to music by Charles Ives, his work, according to Wikipedia, “lacked elements that encouraged the attention of academic scholarship” and he is mostly forgotten today. This bittersweet little gem illustrates perfectly what I find so appealing in his poetry (besides the fact that he wrote a poem entitledWhy I Voted the So...