Chris Dolley at BookViewCafe

Chris Dolley has been having such a good time!  Now, thanks to BookViewCafe, the rest of us can enjoy his sense of humor. For example:

Chris invaded the country next door, created the Free Cornish Army and persuaded the UK media that Cornwall had risen up and declared independence. This was later written up in Punch. As he told journalists at the time, ‘it was only a small country and I did give it back.’

BVC has also delivered Chris “blogging on the topic of romance — sheep style, and posting his spam email story — Nigerian Tuna Spam — which begins:’ I’m Fluffy the favourite kitten of the late president of Nigeria…'”

Not that Chris’s life has been one chuckle after another – it hasn’t. He had to track down the thief who stole his identity and life savings when he moved to France. But like any good writer he will get a book out of it, a true crime memoir he’s describing as “A Year in Provence with Miss Marple and Gerald Durrell.”

Chris has had two SF novels, Resonance and Shift, published by Baen. As part of his BVC debut, Chris is offering the first episode of Resonance, serialized especially for BookViewCafe. Watch for future offerings from him on Saturdays at BVC.

Vonda McIntyre’s Superluminal at BookViewCafe

Hugo and Nebula-award winning author Vonda N. McIntyre has released her novel Superluminal as an ebook at BookViewCafe.com. Read it free as a serial, one chapter per week, or buy the complete novel as a downloadable ebook for $4.99.

Superluminal was originally published in 1983 by Houghton Mifflin.

Other titles from McIntyre available at BookViewCafe.com include the award-winning Dreamsnake and The Moon and the Sun, as well as a number of her short stories.

It’s All in the Elbows

BookViewCafe’s Jennifer Stevenson made the roster of flat-track roller derby’s Haymarket Rioters, farm team of Chicago’s Windy City Rollers. Don’t look for her under her own name, though. Jennifer skates as “Flash Hottie.” Like everyone else in the league, she uses what I might call a nom de roulette.

The BookViewCafe newsletter ran Jennifer’s comments on the way this experience has shaped her writing:

The book I’m working on now is about roller derby, of course. Maybe because I scare the crap out of myself on skates three times a week, I’ve been going for the jugular in this MS more than I used to. The scenes are tighter. The emotion is more intense. My heroine may be more of a drama queen than past heroines, but she’s entitled: her world could end any minute, in every single chapter.    

Update 03/06/2009: You can view BVC’s February newsletter with the complete Stevenson article and a color photo of Flash Hottie if you register free at BookViewCafe.