Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff's Blog: #42 Pencil: A Writer's Life, the Universe, and Everything, page 77

BVC Announces How Like a God, by Brenda W. Clough

How Like a God

by Brenda W. Clough

What would it be like, to get absolute power?

Would you wear a cape and fight crime? Rule the planet? Or perhaps you would be like Rob Lewis, and watch your world collapse around you. Does absolute power corrupt absolutely? Rob is going to find out.

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Author Interview: Nancy Jane Moore

Author Interview: Nancy Jane Moore

Interviewed by Katharine Eliska Kimbriel

Nancy Jane Moore pursued both the law and martial arts with equal vigor, applying their lessons to many areas of her life. She found that questions of justice, fairness, and equality were extremely important to her. This led to her championing low income housing, food co-ops, and working as a legal editor. As she puts it, she didn’t become rich from the law. However, she is a fourth degree black belt in Aikido, both tea...

I Sing of a Maiden

The Horseblog is taking a winter break today. it will be back in the new year, with more horse stories and rants and reflections and odd bits of equine lore.

In the meantime, here is a gift for the season: a story about music, and magic, and living both in and out of time.

I hope you enjoy it.

I Sing of a Maiden

Quiet.

A cold that not quite touched the bone.

Light soft through the fretwork of stone so old and so worn with the touch of hand and body and the moving air that they seemed as fragile as...

Solstice Storm

Just in time for solstice, we had an Unexpected Snowstorm of Great Beauty. Naturally, out came the camera! There’s a gallery after the cut, and there are nice big piccies on the other side of the gallery clicks.

Have a happy solstice time and a great next year!

Nobody Here But Us Mongrels

(Picture from Io9′s sitehere.)

I’ve been interested in Neanderthals for years.

The idea that there was a previous form of human being– not quite like us but close enough to talk to– that used to live essentially next door was irresistible.

My first accepted story involved a Neanderthal/Homo sapiens contact. And it came, as much of my fiction does, in retaliation.

I had just moved to Boston, fresh from the homogeneous midwest, and the amazing diversity stunned me. You could walk down a street in B...

Story Inspiration Sunday

(Subtitled: Novel plotting edition)

My short story assignments haven’t come yet. This is good — it means I’ll finish the current novel before they arrive.

In the meanwhile, I’ve been working on another novel as well. I’ve often said that I have a two-plot novel brain: While I’m writing one novel, I can generally also spend time noodling around and plotting out a second novel. I can’t do more than two at a time, though. I also can’t write on more than one novel at a time, and I envy those who c...

The “Vast” Method

(This post was originally published at the author’s website, Hahvi.net.)

So…I recently finished a very rough draft of The Red: Trials, the follow up to my near-future thriller The Red: First Light. There is A LOT of fixing up, figuring out, and filling in to do — and maybe there will be fatal flaws, I don’t know — but this was a very difficult book for me, so getting to this point is a triumph.

For those of you who are writers, I thought I’d share my experience of how I finally got those last p...

IS Something Burning? Part 2 — Timing is Everything

A Survival Guide for the Hyper Focused

I know more than one writer who has boiled kettles or saucepans dry, burned things in the oven, or cut off a fingernail chopping vegetables. As an expert at trying to injure myself, I am offering up a few suggestions in basic kitchen–and writer–survival. (Readers, I’m talking to you, too!)

Brookstone Mug Warmer with Auto Shut-off!

When I talked last time about electric kettles, I mentioned the value of an auto shut-off. It’s absolutely essential. Well, how...

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug: A Very Short Review

By Brenda W. Clough

The besetting difficulty with the trilogy form is the middle volume. Or, in the case of The Hobbit, it’s the middle film. To inclue the new reader or viewer, yet without boring the returning fan. To be deprived of all the kickoff incidents and developing conflicts, but be denied the conclusions. To be cruelly limited by the need for some kind of unity, in the characters one can introduce, or shove off into oblivion. Pacing is difficult, plot tends to sag — it is hard!

So the...

Describing What I Write

My favorite bio in the Book View Cafe bookstore belongs to Vonda N. McIntyre. It reads (in full):

Vonda N. McIntyre

… writes science fiction.

That’s pithy and to the point. Vonda does indeed write science fiction. Very good science fiction, I might add. I was a serious Vonda fangirl long before we started Book View Cafe.

But much as I admire this bio, I haven’t figured out how to emulate it. Partly that’s because, as I observe on my own author page, I “jump around within the speculative fiction g...