Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff's Blog: #42 Pencil: A Writer's Life, the Universe, and Everything, page 90

Uses of the Undead: Part 3

Inlast week’s postwe looked at the three magical weapons that popular culture has with which to fight monsters, including poop. Thus armed, let’s consider our strategy and thengo look under the bed.

Saturn Devouring His Son (Goya)

With Fava Beans and Chianti for All

Taking arms against a sea of troubles is doomed to failure. Better to boil the sea down to a single monster, the “archetype of the times,” that incarnates as many of those troubles as possible. Godzilla is a wonderful example, right...

The Great American Government Fail

I’m hoping that by the time this post goes up our government will be back on track. If that’s the case ignore the remainder of this.

As I write this, though, partisan politics is still holding sway. There is a bright spot. According to Forbes, “More red states are affected by the government’s relentless shutdown than blue states.” So if the red states are starting to get pissed, I can only imagine a few Republicans may be rethinking their positions.Small businesses are hurting too. They usuall...

In the Beginning: How We Start

By Brenda W. Clough

The pupils at the workshop I was teaching, such dewy-eyed and youthful sprouts! Their tender and innocent question was, how do you begin a story? My first and accurate response was (per Rudyard Kipling) that there are nine and ninety ways of writing tribal lays. True!

But unhelpful, of course. So then I had to tell them how I really do it: I sit down and write the first sentence. No outline, no character list, no plot notes, no creation of setting, magic systems, political o...

Gravity vs. Alien

I stumbled on a review of Gravity the day it opened in Austin and went to see it on the spur of the moment. The visuals were incredible. I enjoyed them even though I didn’t see it in 3-D (not having realized it was a 3-D film until afterwards).

But while I loved the fact that the movie was built around a woman scientist/astronaut, I was a little disappointed in the movie. I had gotten the impression that it was leading to something new and different, but in the end it seemed to me like a typic...

A Glossary of Hazardous Cooties in Science Fiction

This book is known to contain the following varieties of cooties: girl, hard SF, military SF, male protagonist. Read with caution!

It’s dangerous out there, people. There are risks involved in reading the wrong sorts of science fiction, and while advice and counsel is available around the web, the time has come for a concise glossary of the most common debilitating parasitic memes, most frequently referred to as “cooties,” that are known to infect vulnerable readers. Knowledge is power. As a w...

WWW Wednesday 10-16-2013

It’s WWW Wednesday. This meme is from shouldbereading.

• What are you reading now?

John Buchan’s *The Courts of the Morning*.

Seized by an urge to read something new by a long-known author, I was actually pursuing the rarely seen *Sick Heart River*, the last Edward Leithen book, and among the last Buchan wrote. But in the Kindle Store I found one of those compendiums for about $2.99, called *The Essential John Buchan*, but probably including everything a non-researching reader cd. want by him, a...

Writing a hinky sports novel

Writing a hinky sports novel is a bit like Will Farrell making another ESPN-based movie. Nobody expects it to make much sense, but you know you’ll get a couple of laughs, see some boobies, watch some guys do stupid things in their undershorts, maybe experience an unexpectedly touching moment.

I never write anything unless I can find a way to make it ridiculously hard for myself. Then I work especially hard to make it easy to read. For The Hinky Genie Lamp, I did three hard things: I wrote a bo...

War Stories Kickstarter Launch!

War Stories is an upcoming anthology of military science fiction, aimed at exploring how warfare might affect the soldiers and civilians of tomorrow. According to editors Andrew Liptak and Jaym Gates:

War Stories isn’t an anthology of bug hunts and unabashed jingoism. It’s a look at the people ordered into impossible situations, asked to do the unthinkable, and those unable to escape from hell. It’s stories of courage under fire, and about the difficulties in making decisions that we normally...

Looking for Mr. Right (Academically Speaking)

My younger daughter is a high school senior. But she has been looking for colleges since she was a freshman in high school. There have been passionate flirtations, come hither glances from more brochures than you want to imagine (honest to God, we could take over a landfill with the brochures for colleges she’d never heard of, and the colleges she is interested in have spent unbelievable amounts of money and resources on her and her fellow seniors). About a year ago she was pretty sure she’d...

BVC Announces Mad Science Cafe

Mad Science Café

Edited byDeborah J. Ross

From the age of steam and the heirs of Dr. Frankenstein to the asteroid belt to the halls of Miskatonic University, the writers at Book View Café have concocted a beakerful of quaint, dangerous, sexy, clueless, genius, insane scientists, their assistants (sometimes equally if not even more deranged, not to mention bizarre), friends, test subjects, and adversaries.

Download a free story, “The Jacobean Time Machine,” by Chris Dolley:

EPUB MOBI

Table of Conte...