Up, about and already late…

I’ll leave you with further linkage to Apex Book of World SF contributors, proving just exactly how indefatigable Charles Tan can be: Han Song from China, Anil Menon from India, Tunku Halim from Malaysia, and Dean Francis Alfar from the Philipines.

Taking the neo with me to improve wordcount on Harbinger of the Storm (24600 words, two murders, one major antagonist, and counting)

Been a while since I last updated this:

• Winter Song by Colin Harvey. The planet of Isheimur was terraformed centuries ago, at the height of humanity’s resources and ambitions. But everything was lost in the subsequent intergalactic war, and Isheimur has been slowly sinking into decay, recycling every year the bases of its survival–knowing that each piece of technology that breaks down can never be replaced. Into this dying world stumbles Karl, a human marooned after the destruction of his ship. Karl is desperate to get home; but the atrophied subsistence society of Isheimur might not be ready for the radical shock of his presence…
  A very cool read. There are no earth-shattering ideas, but the characters are very well-drawn, believable and sympathetic without being sappy. The slowly dying society is terrifically depicted, and while I know some people might disagree, I absolutely loved the ending. I love that there are no compromises or shying away from brutal truths.
• Blindsight, Peter Watts. I picked this one up mainly on the recommendation of the BF, who heard Peter Watts speak in Montreal and was apparently very impressed by what he had to say. Earth becomes aware of an alien presence when thousands of miniature objects survey the planet. A mission is hastily put together to see what the aliens could possibly want: headed by a genetically engineered vampire, Theseus aims to achieve first contact. Its other members are a pacifist soldier, a heavily-robotised biologist, a linguist with multiple personalities, and the narrator, a ex-epileptic with half his brain removed, and who acts as a detached observer to report back to Earth. But his detachment may be the one thing that ends up dooming him…
  Wow. This was full of terrific ideas about cognition, consciousness and sentience. As a bonus, it was also an awesome first contact story, with none of the plausibility problems I usually have with those stories. There are a fair amount of explanations about biology, but always done in a fascinating fashion; and it’s got the Chinese Room experiment playing a huge part (yes, I’m a geek) . It played a lot like a tremendously intelligent horror story in space, for all the SF trappings (the vampire is a huge clue, but not the only motif that’s been taken from horror).
  Word of warning: it’s also very, very dense. My report to the BF was basically that he had to read it, but that French would probably be easier on him than English…

It would seem I share a birthday with Neil Gaiman and Sesame Street. (and Martin Luther, incidentally).

One step closer to fame and fortune 🙂

Happy birthday to Mike Munsil, Liberty Hall founder. Hope it’s a good one!

In other non-related news, here’s some linkage: the other interviews on SF Signal of the contributors of the Apex Book of World SF include French dark fantasy author Mélanie Fazi, horror writer and AR author Kaaron Warren, and Croatian Aleksandar Ziljak (whose story “An Evening in The City Coffeehouse, with Lydia on my mind” is up in the November issue of Apex Magazine).

My con report for Utopiales is up on the World SF news blog (I was not going to produce one, but Lavie nagged me). You can read it here.
Lots of text, but sadly no illustrations–given that the BF and I had managed to forget the camera in the somewhat precipitous departure from Paris. Next time, we’ll do better…

Doug Cohen has posted the TOC for the February 2010 issue of Realms of Fantasy, which will contain my story “Melanie” and associated artwork by Frank Wu (you can see the cover here, which is also the interior illustration for Ann Leckie’s “The Unknown God”). I would seem sharing a TOC with Harlan Ellison.

And, over at the Asimov’s website, the next issue announces “The Wind-Blown Man” as “a debut […] sure to turn heads” (along with a story by Codexian Caroline M. Yoachim).

Finally, Rich Horton mentions me, albeit very briefly, in his year-end summary of Interzone (for “Ys”).

Er, wow. I feel spoiled.

(via Marc Gascoigne and Jennifer Jackson)

I couldn’t stop laughing yesterday. “When the stars are right” indeed…

The indefatiguable Charles Tan interviews Jetse de Vries as part of a series on World SF. More interviews to come, all week long.

And friend Marshall Payne interviews Angela Slatter (frequent Shimmer contributor, awesome reteller of fairytales) over at the Super-Sekrit Clubhouse–interviews, funny cartoons and more.

Doing nanowrimo again this year–like last year and the year before last, I’m mostly using it as a springboard to kickstart a novel-in-progress: this time is Harbinger of the Storm. Truth is, Nanowrimo is slightly above what I deem a comfortable writing speed: I’m more a 1,000-words-a-day kind of person than a 1,666-words-a-day madwoman. But the key point is peer pressure: seeing how everyone else is doing forces me to hammer away at the keyboard every day, or to make up for lost time.

Last year, it didn’t work out so well: I wrote perhaps 1/3 of Foreign Ghosts before real life intervened and I had to reschedule. However, in 2007, I got 50,000 words of Servant of the Underworld done over November (and, because I’m just that kind of madwoman, I got the other 50,000 words done over December. The BF’s comment on the whole process was something like “never again”, because he scarcely saw me for two months). This time, I’m allowing myself a longer period to write the draft (though winning nano would still be kind of cool).

Like 2007 and 2008, I have my roadmap: a more-or-less complete synopsis: 25 chapters, 4,000 words per chapter, knowing that the average length of a scene is around 2,000 words (1,000 words for the small ones, 3,000 for those where lots of things happen and/or lots of characters are present). The last three or four chapters are a great deal fuzzier than the first, because no novel plan survives the writing of the first draft; I’ll always end up making up stuff at the end according to what has gone on before, so might as well not waste time planning them in great detail. So far, so good. There have been a few hitches: namely, a lack of suspects (soon remedied: populating the imperial court with suspects was amazingly easy), and some research failure (the aforementioned dating problems which required me to spend a long evening poring over Aztec-to-Julian calendar correlations). But so far it’s going well.

Of course, things always deteriorate later on, in the Dreaded Middle. I’m hoping that if I write fast enough, I won’t have time to second guess myself (which happened with Foreign Ghosts, grinding everything to a halt because I was stupid enough to listen to my chattering inane monkeys and stop writing). Fingers crossed…

On related matters, there’s now a release date for books 1 and 2 in the US: Servant of the Underworld will be in bookstores in August 2010, and Harbinger of the Storm in November 2010. Wow. Sounds like World Fantasy will be a lot closer to my book release than I thought.

Oh, and incidentally, Charles Tan’s interview of me is now live at SF Signal. This is all part of Lavie’s cunning plan to ensure you all take a look at The Apex Book of World SF. Other interviews from the other contributors will go live Monday to Friday (I spoke to French dark fantasy/urban fantasy writer Mélanie Fazi over the weekend at the Utopiales con, and I know she’s part of that batch of interviews, so looking forward to that one).