Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff's Blog: #42 Pencil: A Writer's Life, the Universe, and Everything, page 82

An Evening with Inspector Clouseau

So I’m living in the inbetween. Most of my stuff’s in storage in a barn belonging to my pal, Liz. She’s graciously allowed me to park at her place while I get my proverbial head together. I keep only the barest necessities with me inside the house as I wait for the head to congeal. I have my laptop and my man cave.

That’s a joke, of course. I call the wide-screen TV with the five speakers for Surroundsound, the man cave. The barn is damp and I was concerned for the man cave’s health, so I brou...

In the Beginning

For me, stories often start with an image. I see something happen in my mind’s eye and start to wonder, “What’s that all about?” And then I sit down and start writing.

In the beginning, in the very beginning when I knew I wanted to write and was still trying to figure out how to do that, there was the image of a woman in a battle being struck by an arrow. She fell, but got right back up; something had blocked the arrow and kept it from doing her any injury.

That was all I knew about the story,...

A Time to Think About Gratitude

[image error]

“The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth” By Jennie A. Brownscombe

Given that the U.S. tradition of Thanksgiving goes back to the Pilgrims — though the official holiday is newer — it is something of a religious holiday. They were Puritans, after all, and I’m sure they gave thanks to God for their survival. Though given the help they got from the Native Americans, I hope they spared a few words of gratitude for them as well.

Since I find it impossible to believe in a being or beings that created the...

WWW Wednesday 11-27-2013

WWW Wednesday. This meme is from shouldbereading.

• What did you recently finish reading?

Anne Bronte,The Tenant of Wildfell Hall–the Victorian50 Shades of Grey! Reading that, it was interesting reflecting that these three vicarage spinsters had within a year or so published books that were regarded as infamous shockers, and that without their gender being known! (see link above for longer review)

I’ve finished, and am in the middle of a haphazard look . . .

. . . at the fascinating evolution of,...

Watching it over and over: The Man Who Knew Too Little

My confession du jour: I watch my favorite movies over…and over…and over. I will watch a movie I know thirty times rather than take a risk a movie that I suspect may disappoint me or give me nightmares. Far too often, my darling husband has been waked in the night by the sound of his wife screaming. I tell myself I’m protecting him from this kind of surprise. I stick to comedy. Even that’s no guarantee. Let’s just say, the rule is, No zombies, and no blood from the mouth.

Bill Murray: We do ha...

Hawt or Not

By now many of you have seen, if not Catching Fire, the second in a planned four movies made from the Hunger Games trilogy (insert your own joke here), then the Onion’s parody-review of the movie. You may go look. There are no spoilers for the movie.

I saw the movie (my company is owned by Scholastic, the trilogy’s publisher–it was a field trip for the office). I enjoyed it. It is not ground-breaking SF, but it is fast-moving, decently acted, and enjoyable, IM, as they say, HO. But it does giv...

The Emotional Charge

By Brenda W. Clough

Thesis: If you want to find the true subject of any story, look at where its emotional charge resides.

I read this in a review of a book that I have already forgotten. But this concept – do we have here another peephole into fiction? As I recall the author said that at the bottom of all romance novels there was the (admittedly risible) doctrine that you could take a worthless, borderline psychopathic man and somehow by the application of True Love turn him into husband mater...

Author Interview: Patricia Burroughs

Patricia Burroughs

Interviewed by Katharine Eliska Kimbriel

Patricia Burroughs—Pooks—began her writing career in romance with five published novels. including Scandalous and La Desperada. She received nominations and recognition from RT Reviews and was a Finalist for the Romance Writers of America’s Rita Award.

Then she got lured over to the dark side…screenwriting. She received a Nicholl Fellowship from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences for an adaptation of her first published novel...

Marvels of Engineering: The Horse Blanket

As our neck of the Great American Southwest emerges from a rather historic weather weekend–the last time it was this wet for this long in November was in 1900–I’ve been singing the praises, early and often, of the engineers who design and execute the horse blanket.

The original concept was simple enough. Heavy blanket large enough to throw over the back of a horse, fastened in some way to keep it more or less in place. It was useful when a horse was overworked and overheated and needed to cool...

TGAN

TGAN

by Ursula K. Le Guin

A question from New Bookends: “Where is the great American novel by a woman?” got an interesting answer from the Pakistani novelist Mohsid Hamed.

Click here for New York Times article

I like a lot of what Mr Hamed says. But there’s something coy and coercive about the question itself that made me want to charge into the bullring, head down and horns forward. I’d answer it with a question: Where is the great American novel by anybody?

And I’d answer that: Who cares?

I thin...