BVC Members on Curious Fictions

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Eleven members of Book View Cafe are now publishing short story reprints and other features on Curious Fictions. All stories at Curious Fictions can be read for free and you can follow any authors you choose.

However, Curious Fictions also gives readers two options to pay for authors’ work. You can “tip” an author for an individual story or you can subscribe to the author’s stories. Subscriptions and tips help authors boost their income and are greatly appreciated.

The BVC authors on Curious Fictions are:

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New Worlds: In the Beginning

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(This post is part of my Patreon-supported New Worlds series.)

Some worldbuilding topics are so large, it’s hard for me to figure out which approach is best for tackling them. In more than two years of this Patreon, I have yet to say anything directly about government . . . but since that was one of the three topics tied for first place in this month’s patron poll, I decided to bite the bullet.

But before we can really talk about government, we should talk about what existed before it.

Continue reading →

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The Author’s Note is a Spoiler (kind of)

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After I finished writing GABRIEL’S ROAD, which Book View Cafe published this week, I wrote the Author’s Note wherein I explained why the book was coming out later than anticipated, and also poked into why the story went where it did, and how I realized — after the fact — what I was writing about.

And why the book was so very hard for me to get on the page, even though I’d known for over a year what happened.

It’s all Gabriel’s fault.  Or maybe it’s Old Woman Who Never Dies.  It’s definitely Graciendo’s fault for giving Gabriel terrible advice, however well-meant (if you’ve read “The Devil’s Hope” in WEST WINDS’ FOOL, you know that Graciendo is not the best role model to follow).

And maybe it’s my fault, too, for letting a character get too real. Continue reading →

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Cheating at the Top

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I have never understood the praised heaped on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short novel, The Great Gatsby. I wrote about this here some years back.

If there is only one “Great American Novel” – a nonsensical idea invented, I suspect, by Fitzgerald’s contemporaries who wanted to see the writing of fiction as a “manly” endeavor like war or boxing – it is, of course, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, which nails one of the two core corruptions that underlie our supposedly perfect country.

But life in these United States and in our world as a whole is complex and multifaceted. No one book can do everything. Nor should it.

I’ve always thought Gatsby was a beautifully written book about corrupt and uninteresting people. I might like it better if I didn’t always have the feeling that both the author and the narrator admired Gatsby, who is Trump without the advantage of rich parents, though with better manners.

However, the recent college admissions scandal has changed my mind about one aspect of the book. Continue reading →

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The Name of the Prose, Part 4: A Ghoti by Any Other Name is Still a Fish
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JRR Tolkien

As I commented previously, my first novel was also my first experience trying to create a fantasy world from the ground up. With Tolkien as my only model, I waded hip deep into Scottish history and Auld English linguistics to come up with character, clan, place and object names for my fantasy trilogy, The Mer Cycle. (Of course, it’s available from Book View Cafe, IBooks, Amazon, and Barnes&Noble).

Here’s what I learned: whatever names I use, it pays to simplify their spelling wherever possible.

Take a name like Foneiel (pronounced Fo-nee-el). Why, I asked the writer who came up with the name, couldn’t it just be Foniel, which has the virtue of allowing the reader to pronounce it just as it’s spelled. His answer was that he liked what it looked like and thought it seemed to fit in a fantasy novel. Another name in the same manuscript was Taruu, which could just as easily have been Taru. 

Why simplify? Because it will allow a reader to actually “pronounce” the character’s name in her head. I wish I’d simplified my heroine’s name in The Meri (Mer Cycle, Book One). I had a lot of readers who said, “I didn’t know how to pronounce ‘Mereddyd,’ so I just thought of her as ‘Mary.’” Mereddyd was the Gaelic spelling of the common name “Meredith”, but my readers didn’t know that. (Did you know that Merlin is from the Gaelic Myrddin?) Continue reading →

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Auntie Deborah’s Advice Column for Aspiring Writers

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Dear Auntie Deborah: How can I find a real publisher for my YA novel, instead of one of the many vanity or scam presses? — Tearful Wannabee

Dear Tearful: Do your research about publishers. Find out which accept unagented submissions. Check them out on Writer Beware or Predators & Editors!!

Get an agent. Again, do your research on which agents are legitimate and represent your genre. (See above resources.) A decent agent will do the submissions for you, using their professional contacts, plus access to publishers that require an agent (which, today, is most of them).

Hang out online with other YA authors and pick their brains, see who publishes them, so you can hear about newer publishers and agents who might be open to your type of material.

Get support. Hobnob with other writers, particularly those at or a little beyond your career stage. Writing is such a lonely business at best, and we need to glomp together — even seasoned pros with decades of sales — for mutual encouragement. And gossip.

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BVC Announces Gabriel’s Road by Laura Anne Gilman

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Gabriel's Road by Laura Anne GilmanGabriel’s Road
The Devil’s West
by Laura Anne Gilman

Following the events of RED WATERS RISING, Gabriel Kasun is once again on his own, haunted and hunted by bandits, ghosts, and his own personal demons . . .

A stand-alone novella of The Devil’s West.

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Show Your Gray

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So I learned in a certain magazine aimed at people of a certain age, that there is a highly popular Instagram account known as Grombre. I used to think that because I didn’t subscribe to Instagram, if that’s the appropriate verb for such an action, Facebook wouldn’t learn even more stuff about me. Which is probably moot because they, and Google, already know everything about me.

Giving up on what is by now a fruitless effort to protect my privacy, I logged into Instagram using my Facebook password. FB, you have become a part of my DNA. And I used said Google to find out more about Martha Truslow Smith, who started the account.

First I found out the derivation of “Grombre”. There is—maybe was or still is, as it’s never easy to know whether the craze that started a few years ago is still a thing—a hair-dying style called ombré, French for “shading”. It still appears to be popular because lots of women blend of colored strands of hair. So you get it now: “gray” coupled with ombré becomes Grombre. Kinda hip, right?

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The Rambling Writer Explores More Greek Islands, Part 20: Kos Town

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Join Thor and me as we wander the charming harbor town of Kos, where history and natural beauty flourish.

NOTE: Since our recent trip to Greece to research more settings for my novel-in-progress, THE ARIADNE DISCONNECT, Thor and I knew we had to return to this magical region. My first entry in this new blog series posted here on Saturday, 10/20/2018. It gives an overview of our rambles from Athens to seven islands in the Dodecanese and Cyclades groups, ending our ferry-hopping pilgrimage on the anciently sacred island of Delos.

The only “big city” on Kos island was first inhabited in the Early Bronze Age (2300-2000 BC), and became an important trading port during the Minoan and Mycenaean periods (2nd millenium BC), and then later during Archaic and Classical times (7th-5th century BC). The fertile island was rich enough to send 30 ships to the Trojan War. Today it is still famous as the birthplace of Hippocrates (460-377 BC), the “father of modern medicine,” and Thor was eager to visit the Plane Tree of Hippocrates in Kos Town.

As we parked on the outskirts of the town center and started wandering the pleasant, tree-shaded lanes, we realized that the modern town curves around and embraces remnants of all these ancient periods, in addition to early Byzantine, Medieval Knights, Ottoman Turks, and Italian occupations. Continue reading →

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