Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff's Blog: #42 Pencil: A Writer's Life, the Universe, and Everything, page 84

Author Interview: Laura Anne Gilman

Laura Anne Gilman

Interviewed by Katharine Eliska Kimbriel

Laura Anne Gilman. Writer. Editor. Tired Person.

This has been Laura Anne Gilman’s tag line forever, and with good reason. She does enough work for three people—she’s worked for major New York publishing houses and start-ups, including running the successful ROC Line; she has a flourishing editing business, and writes under both her own name (fantasy, SF, urban fantasy, YA) and L.A. Kornesky (mysteries). A Nebula nominee for Flesh and Fi...

Writing: Code vs. Cipher

I don’t have many favorite works. Things that percolate up to favored status are usually too different to be easily compared. For graphic novels, would I preferKingdom ComeorV for Vendetta. How to compareThe Stars My DestinationorThe Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch?

But I do have a favorite poem:Ars PoeticabyArchibald MacLeish.

I’ve read a lot of MacLeish andArs Poeticais not his strongest piece– for my money, that would beJ. B., his verse play about Job. But the poem speaks to me about somet...

Story Inspiration Sunday

I create song lists for every novel I do. I had a great one for Siren’s Call–full of bright jazz, with some Asian pieces thrown in, and a couple of country western numbers to boot.

The Raven and the Dancing Tiger’s song list was full of songs about dancing, as well as great swing dance tunes.

When I do collections of short stories, I also do song lists. I end up choosing one song per short story, that I find I’m listening to while I’m writing the short story, or that I find when the story is fi...

Casting your Book’s Magical Spells — Part 1

One of the things that makes a fantasy story fantasy is the presence of magic. I’m often asked how I “created” the magical system in the Deverry books. At times writers just turning to fantasy have asked me how to go about this arcane process. The truth: I didn’t create anything. I adapted one of the many systems of “real” magic, that is, the beliefs that real people have held about magic in various cultures and in various historical periods, including our own. Unfortunately, I’ve only studie...

Kickstarter Followup Report

A month ago I posted about a Kickstarter campaign to fund War Stories, an anthology of modern military science fiction. I’m pleased to report that War Stories successfully funded on November 12, two days before the deadline! This means the anthology, edited by Jaym Gates and Andrew Liptak, will move forward, and see publication in 2014.

Thank you to everyone who supported the project and who helped to spread the word!

Authors contributing to War Stories include Joe Haldeman, Keith Brooke, Maur...

In the beginning: Organic Writing

By Patricia Rice

Back in typewriter days, I started a book knowing nothing more than the characters and an inciting situation. I built on those, sentence by sentence—until I reached the middle, which would inevitably fall flatter than a cold soufflé for lack of structure.

Once I had deadlines to meet, it became obvious that I didn’t have time to muddle with the middle, I needed to learn plotting. But I’m an organic writer and my muse requires words on the page to create inspiration.

Thus became...

Reviewing Yelp

15 Reviews for Yelp

Yelp is the best reviewing site out there. Thank god for Yelp. Without it I wouldn’t know where to eat, what car to buy, or what school to send my kids to. Thank you Yelp!

Don’t wast ur time if u follow yelp advis u will fall into abis and never get ot.

I hate yelp.

I love yelp.

The food was excellent, but the service was slow and the waitress snaped.

TripAdvisor is better.

Most of the advis is gud, but they cud use

I used to use Yelp. When they first started the reviews wer...

What’s In a Name?

What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.

When I began writing fiction, I decided to use my full name as my byline. There was a very practical reason for this: Nancy is the 12th most common female name in the U.S., while Moore currently ranks as the 16th most common surname. (It was 9th when I made the decision, but it’s dropping fast as the U.S. gets more people with Hispanic backgrounds.)

Not that Jane isn’t also fairly common among people who trace th...

Great Covers: Loving Frank

This series will appear at random as I find covers that make me say, “Wow!”

Here’s the first one: Loving Frank by Nancy Horan. I was not surprised to learn that this novel was a NYT bestseller. The cover is really wonderful.

Why? It communicates a wealth of information without words.

This cover says “Frank Lloyd Wright” at a glance to anyone familiar with Wright’s work. Then the title, Loving Frank, informs me that this is a personal story about someone who loved Wright (and indeed it is, about...

WWW Wednesday 11-13-2013

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 in NaNoWriMo mode, so I am plowing my way through first editing one manuscript and finishing another. But I find I need distraction after a writing day, and sometimes a book is the perfect distraction. I’ve been picking up a lot of comfort r...