Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff's Blog: #42 Pencil: A Writer's Life, the Universe, and Everything, page 86

Technologies Old and New

The large pod pictured above can walk across the ground when operated by someone inside. It reminded me a lot of the walking machines in the early Star Wars movies, which is appropriate since I saw it at the East Bay Mini Maker Faire and people in Oakland, California, think that George Lucas got his ideas for some of those walkers from the huge cranes at the Port of Oakland.

The pod was exciting, but what made the Faire such a thrill was the range of technology from impossibly ancient to thing...

BVC Welcomes the Marion Zimmer Bradley Trust

MZB photo courtesy Modern Arts Studio, Oakland, California.

Marion Zimmer Bradley is probably best known for her Darkover novels and her best-selling Arthurian novel The Mists of Avalon. In addition to her novels, Bradley edited many magazines, amateur and professional, including Marion Zimmer Bradley’s FANTASY Magazine, which she started in 1988, and an annual anthology, Sword and Sorceress.

Her literary estate is managed by the Marion Zimmer Bradley Literary Works Trust.

Please visit her Book...

Little strangers

Please don’t try to imagine how cluttered my office is.

When our cats passed on last winter, I swore I’d try to wait at least ten months before considering kittens. They’d been very old and very sick, and it wasn’t a comfortable passing. I just couldn’t face it.

But round about St Marculf’s Day I began dreaming about adopting cats. One night I’d dream I was adopting my old cats, only they were young again. The next night, I dreamed about a kitten I’d never seen before. Next night it was an old...

Meeting Marion

To celebrate tomorrow’s Book View Cafe debut of the Marion Zimmer Bradley Literary Works Trust, here is the story of how she and I met.

I frequently am asked how I came to work with Marion Zimmer Bradley and to continue her Darkover series after her death. Senior author-junior author dual-bylines are not unusual these days, but each partnership has its own story. In this case, the answer centers around our long-established professional relationship. That in itself would be insufficient to prod...

BVC Announces Across the Spectrum, ed. Pati Nagle and Deborah J. Ross

Across the Spectrum

Book View Cafe’s 5th Anniversary Celebration

Edited by Pati Nagle and Deborah J. Ross

Book View Café celebrates its fifth anniversary with an anthology of our favorite stories. From the fantasy and science fiction of our roots to steampunk, romance, historical and mainstream; from humor to life’s hardest challenges, across the spectrum from light to dark. Stories by Ursula K. Le Guin, Vonda N. McIntyre, Marion Zimmer Bradley, and many more.

Table of Contents

Shapeshifter Finals...

BVC Announces The Complete Lythande

The Complete Lythande

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

Elisabeth Waters, Editor

It’s a long wait until the Final Battle between Law and Chaos, when all Adepts of the Blue Star are pledged to fight on the side of Law. So what does one do in the intervening centuries? Lythande has to earn a living, after all. Music and magic are saleable skills–sometimes both together. There’s a magic lute….

The allure of a mermaid’s song…a temperamental music-loving dragon…magical artifacts that will allow no one to turn...

BVC Announces Wolverine’s Daughter by Doranna Durgin

Wolverine’s Daughter

by Doranna Durgin

Kelyn of Ketura.

Daughter of a legendary warrior who left the mountains before she was born. Brave. Strong. Tempered by her struggle to survive in the hostile, craggy Keturan mountains. And plagued by moments of enormous and puzzling clumsiness.

“Find your father,” the local wisewoman tells her. “To find your true self, find the Wolverine.”

Angered by his abandonment, Kelyn doesn’t care about her father–but the lure of adventure in the Out Lands calls to her,...

Impact of Imagination on Society Award to Ursula K. Le Guin

Impact of Imagination on Society Award from the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation, to BVC founding member Ursula K. Le Guin

Author Interview: Pati Nagle

Pati Nagle

Interviewed by Phyllis Irene Radford

Tomorrow is the 5th birthday of Book View Café and we are starting off the celebration with an interview of our current Chief Cat Herder, Pati Nagle.

Pati Nagle currently leads the Book View Café as Managing Director and President of the corporation, succeeding Sarah Zettel about two years ago. She writes in multiple genres with a variety of pen names. P.G. Nagle writes historical novels about the U.S. Civil War in the west. As Patrice Greenwood sh...

Characters Without Flaw

Writing is not for the faint of heart… or the lazy.

I realize the public thinks of authors as desk jockeys who stare out their windows all day until a burst of genius has them rattling their keyboards. All right, so yeah, that happens. But that’s the easy part.

Maybe some authors rattle their keyboards and produce perfect prose and indelible characters and a page-turning pace setter. I’m not one of them. Actually, my bursts of genius are so slow that I tend to sit in the sun like a cat and scri...