Exploring the First Contact Cafe First Published 11/30/2008 Greetings from the Dragon Lair of Irene Radford aka P.R. Frost, aka C.F. Bentley, aka Julia Verne St. John, aka Rachel Atwood, Phyl to my friends: One of my favorite short stories, “It’s A Con World Afterall”, first appeared in a highly abbreviated form in the program […]
Exploring the “First Contact Cafe” Read More »
A question I get asked fairly often is: Do you just make up the magic you use in your stories? The answer is: I never make it up—at least, not out of whole cloth. Every form of magic I’ve used has been suggested by the real world and further informed by the world the characters
Dabbling in Magic Part 3: You Just Make Stuff Up, Right? Read More »
Occasionally, I read a story in which the writer has lost control of the magic, often by creating unforeseen complications arising out of giving a character so much mojo that the writer finds herself trying to invent clever or at least sneaky and convoluted ways that Our Hero can thwart or be thwarted. This also
Dabbling in Magic Part 2: Keeping It Real and Under Control Read More »
Practical Magic or Tech? Arthur C. Clarke posited long ago that any significantly advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I’d like to turn that aphorism on its head and suggest that any significantly advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology. Simply put, the magic of a world is part of its technology. It’s important to remember
Dabbling in Magic Part 1: What Could Possibly Go Wrong? Read More »
Three lucky BVC authors got invited to send a character to Queen Titania’s Court for a Grand Midsummer Night Ball. It’s a total hoot! Gregory Frost Thomas the Rhymer Thrust into Queen Titania’s Court Invited into Deby Fredericks’ Queen Titania’s Court, my obvious choice of who to send was Thomas, the lead character of my
BVC Authors Send Characters to a Faerie Ball Read More »
I had a gas reading this book. Brenda Clough maintains she writes historical SF, maybe too confining a label? She has set a number of her novels in the past– including this one, set in the late seventies. It’s loosely connected to her Marian Halcombe series, which takes Wilkie Collins’s once-famous heroine farther into a
Interview with Brenda Clough on HIS SELACHIAN MAJESTY REQUESTS Read More »
Sherlock and Modern Communications In 1876 Thomas Watson, a young engineer, was summoned by a peremptory British colleague: “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you.” This was the first telephone call by Alexander Graham Bell. Coincidentally, a few years later, another peremptory Brit summoned another Watson: “Watson: Come at once if convenient. If inconvenient,
More Research-reading Sherlock- Modern Communications– by Alicia Rasley Read More »
This is the first book in Anthony Trollope’s famous Barsetshire series, which inspired spinoffs by Angela Thirkell, and a ton of various filmic versions. Nobody writes about Victorian life like Victorian writers. This is not the best of Anthony Trollope’s Barsetshire novels. It is the first. It is also the shortest, but it tends to
Reading the Classics: The Warden, by Anthony Trollope Read More »
As we are hip deep in politics right about now (Partisan Politics—Just Say No), I thought I’d rerun a few articles on the use of language and how it can distract, influence, alienate, and generate fear, anger and other strong emotions, whether intentionally or carelessly. I love words, sentences, paragraphs, stories. Politics are one of
The Things People Say: Sentence-like Sequences of Words Read More »
When you line up a freelance editor to go over your work, it helps if you have a good grasp of the same things you want them to have a good grasp of so that you can tell when an editor is on the mark with their suggestions for your manuscript. I’ve been blessed (?)
New Writers Ask About Editors: What Does My Editor Need to Know? Read More »
Despite the protests of some legendary authors from back in the day, every writer needs an editor. Here at BookViewCafe, we often edit each others’ work collaboratively, but are also used to having our work gone over by book editors or editors we hire for the purpose of helping to buff up a book before
New Writers Ask About Editors: Why Do I Need One? Read More »
Back when my full time day job was ghostwriting and editing, I’d sometimes get clients who wanted to learn craft and who were intensely concerned about the amount of action in their books. Often they were not readers themselves. They almost universally drew their ideas about writing a novel from movies they’d seen. Movies like
New Writers Ask: What Counts as Action? Read More »
Starting a new series here (Now I’ve Seen Everything) and any of my fellow BVCers who would like, are free to chime in with their own additions to the series. On one of my Book View Café blog posts, I received this informative bit of spam commentary. Normally, I delete these little spamlets without reading,
Now I’ve Seen Everything: Blog Spam Edition Read More »
