Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff's Blog: #42 Pencil: A Writer's Life, the Universe, and Everything, page 66

Welcoming an Old Dog

Tajji

My husband, fellow Book View Café writer Dave Trowbridge, and I have languished in the condition known as Dog Withdrawal. Our wonderful old German Shepherd Dog, Oka, died last April from leukemia at the august age of 12 ½ (GSDs typically live 9-12 years), and the lively puppy who bounced into our lives later that spring went to find a new home (on a ranch owned by rodeo ropers) when I was out of the state for almost two months, caring for a dying friend. After that, we decided to give ou...

Why Did my Story Get Rejected?

The first sad truth about marketing fiction of any kind is this, and you are just going to have to deal with it:

EDITORS DO NOT BUY STORIES BECAUSE THEY ARE WELL WRITTEN.

Accept it. Memorize it. Put it up over your typewriter. Yes, it’s unfair. And editors have no objection to “well written” stories. Between two salable stories, one well written and one badly written, most editors would rather buy the one that is better written. But if an editor has a well-written story that does not meet her r...

POETS Day: Antisocial Sonnet #4

Female Figurine, Egyptian Predynastic Period, ca 3650-3300 BCE (Brooklyn Museum)

Antisocial Sonnet #4

Obsession

The lady lingers long before the mirror

Distressed by what she sees below her belt:

An image so distorted by her fear

It wrings from her an outcry most heartfelt.

“My butt’s too big!” she cries. “I cannot fight

The fact that everything I eat is thus

Metabolized to dreaded cellulite;

I’ll soon be bigger than a city bus!”

Then bitterly she turns her gaze away

From stark betrayal by her looking gl...

Ursula K. Le Guin at AWP conference, Seattle, WA

Ursula K. Le Guin will sign her collection The Wild Girls at the PM Press booth, South Hall #601, Saturday, March 1st, 2014, 10:00 a.m.-11:00 a.m., AWP Conference, Seattle, WA.

Women, Welcome to the 70 Percent Nebula Award Club

In addition to whatwe here at Book View Cafe believe to be the first self-published novel to achieve a Nebula Award nomination, compl...

Legal Fictions: Equal Opportunity

I’d like to see more imagination in the development of legal and government systems in science fiction. The use of monarchies or feudal societies in far future stories particularly annoys me, because it assumes that human beings won’t ever change in a positive way.

Dictatorships make a good backdrop for a dystopia, but few stories about oppressive rulers show a great deal of imagination.

Another common system is one based to a greater or lesser degree on the current United States. This is most...

WWW Wednesday 2-26-14

Recently Finished . . .

Dog-Nabbed, by Susan J. Kroupa

In this third delightful Doodlebugged mystery, Doodle, the labradoodle trained to sniff out bedbugs, is taken to the Appalachian hills by Molly’s dad (“the boss”) to visit Molly’s grandparents, some maternal relatives, and her old friend Lizzie.

Except that Lizzie isn’t available because her dad, grief-stricken at an accident that killed Lizzie’s older brother, has taken to listening to a “holy man” who denies the family pretty much everythi...

The Name of the Prose, Part 4: A Ghoti by Any Other Name is Still a Fish

JRR Tolkien

As I commented in the previous installment of this series, my first novel was also my first experience trying to create a fantasy world from the ground up. With Tolkien as my only model, I waded hip deep into Scottish history and Auld English linguistics to come up with character, clan, place and object names for my fantasy trilogy, The Mer Cycle.

Here’s what I learned: whatever names I use, it pays to simplify their spelling wherever possible.

Take a name like Foneiel (pronounced Fo...

Linda Nagata, Nebula Finalist!

Every year the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) hosts an award weekend at which they honor the best in SF and fantasy fiction.

This year, Book View Cafe is thrilled to announce that one of our own—Linda Nagata—has a novel on the final ballot:The Red: First Lightfrom Mythic Islands Press.

Please join us in celebrating Linda’s accomplishment. Hurrah! Huzzah! Woot!

The 49thAnnual Nebula Awards Weekend will be held May 15-18th, 2014, in San Jose at the San Jose Marriott. The Aw...

Clear Vision

Recently I’ve been having trouble with my contact lenses. I’ve worn them so long – over 50 years –that most of the time I don’t even think about how different the world looks when my vision isn’t corrected. Like many people, I’m extremely near-sighted, and I also have astigmatism. So what I see before I put my lenses in is not only generally blurred, but consists of overlapping images of different sharpness. My hard contact lenses (Rigid Gas Permeable) deal nicely with these problems. For dec...