Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff's Blog: #42 Pencil: A Writer's Life, the Universe, and Everything, page 74

WWW Wednesday 1-15-14

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 re-reading Rudyard Kipling’s KIM. This is a book my mother read to me and my brother when we were babies; she read it every two years for the next six years, until I could read it for myself. At seven, I knew all the vocabulary, but I was un...

Contrary Writing Advice: Don’t Finish This Story!

I love to take conventional wisdom and turn it on its head, following the tradition of rules are made to be broken but first you have to learn them. Beginning writers make mistakes. At least, I did, and I don’t know anyone who’s gone on to a successful writing career who didn’t. At some point, either a teacher or a more skillful writer points out, “Don’t do this” and why it’s a bad idea. Sometimes we figure it out for ourselves. I wonder if in the process of expunging our mistakes we also ign...

BVC Announces Ink Dance by Deborah J. Ross

Ink Dance

Essays on the Writing Life



by Deborah J. Ross

A cup of inspiration, a dash of understanding, and a generous serving of wisdom for writers new and old. From the desk of writer and editor Deborah J. Ross comes a collection of warm, insightful essays on the writing life: including getting started, negotiating with the Idea Fairy and creating memorable characters, writing queries, surviving bad reviews, dealing with life’s interruptions, confronting creative jealousy, and nourishing yours...

Book View Café Eats: Simple Soup

Sometimes it’s a battle to get vegetables into people. In my case, right now I have trouble with raw veggies. My solution is an old macrobiotic secret–cook soup often. But how to simplify what is often an involved process? Sure, you can open a can of soup–but the majority of soups sold in cans or even envelopes contain things you probably don’t want. They have too much salt, sugar, or corn syrup–they have MSG or modified food starch, or contain ingredients your family can’t have, such as whea...

The Custom of the Country*

Recently I watched Ernst Lubitsch’s charming romance, The Shop around the Corner, starring James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan. Made in 1940. In this time of endless remakes, the latest and most successful iteration of which was You’ve Got Mail.

The storyline has had several revisits of less successful nature: a guy and a gal begin corresponding, while, unknown to either, they are encountering each other daily. Their correspondent selves are busy falling in love as they come to dislike each ot...

Experiments in Narrative

I’ve been working on novels for the last few years. None of them have shown up in publication at this point. I have a tendency not to submit them.

That said, I’ve been trying my hand at a different sort of narrative style.

Modern fiction is largely built around the concept of following a particular character or group of characters through a strong prose narrative. It’s the style ofMark TwaininHuckleberry Finn,Rudyard KiplinginKimup to and including most modern writers whether in-genre or out. E...

Over the River and Through the Campus…A-Tracking We We Did Go!

A Blue Hound Beagles Blog AKA when-not-writing

The kitchen, the night before…

When we last saw our heroes (AKA Dart & Connery Beagle), they were preparing to take the imminent Variable Surface Tracking test…not much expecting to pass, given our ongoing family crises, training interruptions, and etc (well, even without those things, because this is hard!).

Well, not if that one is ME…

But. One goes, one does one’s best, and one gets everything possible out of it. And these things did happen, and w...

Publishing, the Cooperative Way (Part 3 of 3)

You’re here, at Book View Café. That means that you love great books, at great prices, written by great authors. But do you really know about Book View Café? Do you understand who we are, how we started, how we get great books to you? This three-part series (originally published in Romance Writers Report, explains publishing, the co-operative way! Part 1 described our history — how we came to be the publisher we are today. Part 2 described our current book production process, explaining how w...

Legal Fictions: Technological Changes and the Law

The readers of this blog are amazing. I had originally planned to do a few introductory posts giving an overview of how legal systems work, but the comments to last week’s post raised so many interesting questions that I’m going to jump into one of those.

Vonda N. McIntyre wrote:

I’m wrestling with what a legal system might look like in a future in which people travel at relativistic speeds, so there’s a lot of time involved, though the people age slowly. Suppose you’re light-years from a place...

WWW Wednesday 1-08-14

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?

Through author/reviewer Paul Weimer‘s end of 2013 “best of” post I discovered a new fantasy trilogy that I am positively inhaling. The first book of Emma Newman’s Split Worlds Trilogy is Any Other Name. This is an amazing bit of world-building,...