Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff's Blog: #42 Pencil: A Writer's Life, the Universe, and Everything, page 88

Tools

When I sold my first book, the on-pub payment went to the purchase of a state-of-the-art machine: an IBM Correcting Selectric III, brand new, light brown. I named it Toast. (I am not the sort of person who commonly names her stuff. Or rather, I might name my stuff, but then I forget that I’ve done so, and the name withers and dies.) And I wrote four more books on it. And did various other things. When I joined the computer revolution in the mid-80s, I kept Toast around for filling out triplic...

BVC Announces Miles to Go by Laura Anne Gilman

Miles to Go

A Sylvan Invesigations Novella

by Laura Anne Gilman

The person you pass on the street…may not be human.

They are known as the fatae, the various non-human species that make up the Cosa Nostradamus, the magic-using community. And they could be your neighbors, your teachers, your fellow commuters. Your local PI.

Meet Danny Hendrickson: Human mother, faun father, 100% attitude.

For the most part, Danny’s made his own way, straddling the line between human and supernatural in his job the wa...

BVC Announces Promises to Keep by Laura Anne Gilman

Promises to Keep

A Sylvan Investigations Novella

by Laura Anne Gilman

The person you pass on the street…may not be human.

They are known as the fatae, the various non-human species that make up the Cosa Nostradamus, the magic-using community. And they could be your neighbors, your teachers, your fellow commuters. Your local PI.

Meet Danny Hendrickson: Mother, human. Father…not.

For the most part, Danny’s made his own way, straddling the line between human and supernatural in his job the way he does...

Author Interview: Sarah Zettel

Author Interview: Sarah Zettel

Interviewed by Phyllis Irene Radford

Founding member of Book View Café, Sarah Zettel, writes in multiple genres with multiple pen names; everything from hard SF as C.L. Anderson, fantasy and paranormal mystery as Sarah Zettel, sensuous Regency Romance as Marissa Day, Steampunk and YA. She served as Managing Director of BVC during our birth pains and first expansion into cooperative publishing.

1.) We’ve all heard the story of Book View Café’s origins when twenty or...

Cross-Training

This longtime horse trainer (including raising foals) and cat herder is now an accidental dog trainer, by grace of the gods and a puppy that materialized in the desert one blazingly hot summer afternoon. He arrived as if from nowhere, with no collar or tags, no training of any kind, nothing except a sincere love for people. (Other dogs, not so much. Not so much at all. Though he adores the resident retired showgirl. And the foster mom’s two big Shepherds.)

So now we are learning how to cope wi...

Zen and the Art of… Disappointment

by Laura Anne Gilman

I often refer to “Zen and the art of writer maintenance,” and I’m only slightly tongue-in-cheek. But achieving even a hint of Zen-inspired serenity is difficult, especially when you have a brain that’s trained to look at a scenario and spin off potential threads. “Shutting down our brains” isn’t something that happens easily, if at all.

One of the many ways we screw ourselves up is that faint thought in our heads that says “when I hit X, everything will work. Everything wil...

Ways to Trash Your Writing Career: An Intermittent Series

It is unfortunately true that it is impossible to publish a partial work. A publisher cannot put half a novel up on the shelves at your local indie bookstore. The first duty of a writer is to finish writing the thing.

A fellow BVC denizen tells me of a writer she knows who was unable to meet deadlines. Even after signing the contract to deliver the novel on a given date! Publishing houses have schedules to meet. They have booked space/time at printers, and when the time comes, there has to be...

Uses of the Undead: Part 4

Last week we looked at an exemplary monster of our times, Hannibal Lecter, who combines in one person both vampire and zombie, both predatory capitalism and coercive collectivism. After a recapitulation of the discourse so far, we’ll move on to the importance of story (narrative) in opposing oppression.

The Idol of the Market

The Story So Far

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that those who feel helpless, must be in want of a monster. Monster-making is an ancient response to helplessness,...

Nancy Jane Moore Has a Story in the New Issue of Postscripts

The latest edition of PS Publishing’s serial anthology Postscripts includes “The Revelation of Jo Givens” by BVC’s Nancy Jane Moore.

This volume — no. 30/31 — is called Memoryville Blues (taken from John Grant’s story by that name) and includes 25 stories by a diverse group of authors including Lavie Tidhar, Mike Resnick, Scott Edelman and Anna Tambour. It was edited by Peter Crowther and Nick Gevers.

Moore’s story was inspired by the Biblical Book of Revelation, but it’s not the usual version...

Subtle and Outrageous: Nick Mamatas’ Love is the Law

Subtle and outrageous? Sure. Why not? If you’re balls-to-the-wall intelligent, no problem. Love is the Law is and it is. I’m glad I bought an ebook so I could look up the big words as I went along. I’m still trying to digest “perseverate” and the concept of “antinomium praxis.”

But a smart novel doesn’t live on big words alone. There’s got to be depth and feeling and maybe even a little bloodshed. There is some bloodshed here, but not much, considering it’s a horror story. It’s much more subtl...