Big congratulations to Written in Blood crit buddy Janice Hardy, whose middle-grade novel The Shifter has been released today!

Nya is an orphan struggling for survival in a city crippled by war. She is also a Taker—with her touch, she can heal injuries, pulling pain from another person into her own body. But unlike her sister, Tali, and the other Takers who become Healers’ League apprentices, Nya’s skill is flawed: She can’t push that pain into pynvium, the enchanted metal used to store it. All she can do is shift it into another person, a dangerous skill that she must keep hidden from forces occupying her city. If discovered, she’d be used as a human weapon against her own people.

Rumors of another war make Nya’s life harder, forcing her to take desperate risks just to find work and food. She pushes her luck too far and exposes her secret to a pain merchant eager to use her shifting ability for his own sinister purposes. At first Nya refuses, but when Tali and other League Healers mysteriously disappear, she’s faced with some difficult choices. As her father used to say, principles are a bargain at any price; but how many will Nya have to sell to get Tali back alive?

The book is also featured over at John Scalzi’s blog at The Big Idea, where she talks about the genesis of the novel and of how to salvage bad ideas. Go check it out (and buy your copy if you’re lucky enough to be in the US. Me, I’ll have to wait until amazon ships mine…)

You can go over to Janice’s series blog if you want more information; or to her writing blog, where she has regular posts about writing, rewriting, editing and the publishing process.

The fried spring rolls I made Saturday afternoon are still sitting in the fridge (I always forget that the recipe I have makes for 30-35 pieces, ie enough for at least 3 meals…). ’tis a good thing, for I’m feeling pretty lazy tonight.

Well, “lazy” is relative, of course. I have something to prepare for:

It’s a little blurry, but this farmhouse in Putten is where we’re going to be spending the Fifth Villa Diodati workshop this weekend (see a larger version here). As usual, much writing, discussing and cooking will be done.
Now I’m off to read stories for the workshop 🙂

In the tradition of SF Signal‘s Mind Melds, the World SF blog is hosting a series of round tables by authors. The first topic, “On environment and background”, just went up, with answers from fellow AR author Kaaron Warren, fellow Shimmer author Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Vandana Singh and me. Thank to Lavie Tidhar and Charles Tan for starting this!

It would seem my short story “The Dancer’s Gift”, my story published in the Spring 2008 issue of Fictitious Force and repackaged as part of my short fiction sampler for the Campbell, has garnered an Honorable Mention on the long-list Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year from Nightshade (there’s a shorter list of 50 HM that’s in the book and that I didn’t make).

Er. Wow. The full list can be found here. It includes Patrick Samphire, Angela Slatter (who’s got a whole host), Sarah L. Edwards, Colin Harvey, J. Kathleen Cheney, Gord Sellar, Lavie Tidhar, Cat Rambo, John Brown, Mary Robinette Kowal, Lon Prater, James Maxey, Maura McHugh and Elizabeth Bear. (hopefully I didn’t miss anybody)

In other news, Lavie Tidhar’s World SF Blog is moving over to WordPress. So if you want to keep receiving the latest news about World SF (and I’d definitely recommend you to, because it’s chockfull of fascinating overviews of SF in the non-anglophone world), here’s where you should go:

http://worldsf.wordpress.com/
LJ syndication (not entirely sure this is working yet)

Lavie has also posted something I should have thought of earlier: Elisabeth Vonarburg’s planned GOH speech for Worldcon, which is a very interesting overview of her relationship with English. Read it here.

My name is Elisabeth Vonarburg and I don’t speak Klingon.

I do speak English, though, more or less. But just in case, I brought my Faithful Igor, who will translate the less intelligible parts if needs be.

In fact, I love the English language. I loved it first, and learned it much on my own because it was the language of Peter, Paul & Mary, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen (whom I didn’t know was a Canadian and a Montrealer, at the time, when I was living in France. In that respect, France is not very different from the States : lots of Canadians get lost in the shuffle. Hey, they speak & write in English, don’t they ? More or less.)

Finished off one short story this morning, temporary title “In Our Minds, In Our Hearts”. Another dark sf one, 2800 words. I did a first cutting pass, which I’ll probably need to take up again, but in the meantime I put it up on OWW for crits (it’s for a market the submission deadline of which is fast approaching, so I’m going to have to move a little faster on this one…).

Here’s a snippet:

In her dreams, Jiaotan saw Father–hands outstretched, the flesh of the fingers fraying away to reveal the yellowed, tapering shapes of bones, the deepset eyes bulging in their orbits, pleading, begging her to take him away.

“You’re dead,” she whispered. “Rest in peace, with the Ancestors–watch over us from Heaven.”

But the Ancestors were bones and dried sinews, shambling upright from the wreck of their graves–anger shining in the hollows of their eye-sockets as they walked past the devastated gardens, the withered trees, the dried-out waterfalls and rivers. And clouds marched across Heaven, a billowing mass of sickly grey–spreading to cut the path of The Golden Orchid as it rose away from Earth…

#

Jiaotan woke up with a start, instinctively bending over to cough out the fluid that blocked her lungs. But something held her–pressed against her as tightly as the embrace of Earth.

In other news, I finally got the website to display the navigation links below individual posts like this one, which involved some hacking of the php, accompanied by some forays into the WordPress documentation (in case you’re wondering what I’m talking about, it’s the small “Next Post/Previous Post” thingies below the frame of individual posts, which weren’t included in the standard free WordPress theme I based the website on).
Also updated the Servant of the Underworld page with information for preordering on Waterstone’s: this one felt weird, because Waterstone’s was the bookshop where I bought everything while in the UK, so being listed there is definitely peculiar…
I have no idea why Saturday mornings are the ones reserved for the website coding: you’d think that after coding all week I’d be bored with it, but apparently I’m a glutton for punishment…

Today is Support Our Zines Day. In the words of its founder, Damien G Walter:

Our ‘zines need support. Professional ‘zines rely on subscriptions to pay their staff and the writers who make the stories. Smaller ‘zines often rely on donations just to cover their costs. But with the speed of life in the 21st Century it can be difficult to remember to renew subsciptions or make donations to the ‘zines who’s work we enjoy.

So. We need to do something to remind ourselves how much we love our ‘zines of all kinds and want to support them. We need a ‘Support our ‘Zines Day’. (SOZD) A day when everyone who has enjoyed reading and listening all year subscribes / donates to their favourite publications. We need to promote it as far and wide as we can and let all readers of ‘zines join in.

More here.

I was going to make a list of ‘zines, but I realised this would be, er, long and that I was bound to forget someone. Instead, here’s a couple of stories I enjoyed recently:

• “The Festival of Tethselem by Chris Butler in Interzone: in the city of Tethselem stands the Figure of Frozen Time, a strange artifact–and it is said that, if it’s removed from its place, it will be as if it had never existed. But, nevertheless, a group of thiefs with their own agenda are determined to steal it… This had an intriguing idea at its heart, and the plot was carried to a resolution I didn’t see coming but that made perfect sense.
• “Blood Dauber” by Ted Kosmatka and Michael Poore, in Asimov’s: Bell is a zoo guardian, paid a pittance to do a job he loves–while his wife fumes at their poverty. But when Bell finds a strange insect and starts experimenting with it, things are bound to change in the zoo… This totally didn’t go where I expected–in a really good way. Bell is a fascinating though not always likable character, and the scientific speculation was pretty interesting (usually, I’m bored pretty quickly with it, but here it’s handled well and adds to the value of the story).
• “Tending the Mori Birds” by Caroline M. Yoachim at Fantasy Magazine: mori birds are harbingers of death, taking flight on the day of a person’s birth, and returning on the day of their death. Prem has been the guardian of the birds all his life, the one who bears witness to the deaths; but he finds himself strangely fascinated by the scarred neighbour who keeps watching him…. Another one that totally didn’t go where I expected. I loved the concept of the mori birds, and the language of the story is beautiful, carrying you from beginning to end.

Today is the release day for fellow Angry Roboter Colin Harvey‘s Winter Song:

The planet had fallen off the map.
When Karl Allman’s spaceship crashed, he had only one question:
“HOW DO I GET OUT OF HERE?”
Rock-hard SF adventure. No one here gets out alive.
FILE UNDER: Science Fiction [Starship Crash / Abandoned Colonists / Alien Slaughter / Hell Planet]

I haven’t read it yet (will order it with next month’s amazon budget), but I had the good fortune to read a draft of Colin’s next book, Damage Time (also coming from Angry Robot), and I can tell you that Colin excels at dark, atmospheric world building, as well as the handling of a strong, diverse cast in unusual situations. Go check it out! (or, failing that, go congratulate him here🙂 )

Well, it’s official: I’ve caught the grandmother of all colds, probably spread to me via the air conditioning system. The only question now is how long the BF will survive without catching it 🙂

On the plus side, my books arrived today–I immediately lent the Alastair Reynolds to the BF, who needed reading for a train journey, and kept the Daniel Fox in my grubby little paws. Also made some progress in a new story, after a couple abortive starts–1500 words so far, aiming for 2,500 so should be done soon.

In the cooking experiment series, we bought fresh Chinese noodles yesterday, and I cooked them with cha lua (alias Vietnamese sausage/ham). Yummy. I love this; usually, I stick it in a sandwich or cook rice to go with it, but frying noodles, scallions and putting soy sauce on top of everything was pretty nice.

Just ordered Alastair Reynolds’ Revelation Space (since I read Chasm City a few months back and really liked it), Daniel Fox’s Dragon in Chains (which I’ve been meaning to read forever), and Daniel Abraham’s A Shadow in Summer (which I own an e-copy of, but no proper paper copy). And a second-hand copy of Tim Powers’ On Stranger Tides (which has been optioned for Pirates of the Caribbean 4 in a rather neat move).

In other news, finished importing Foreign Ghosts in Scrivener, and I’m taking a look at the various storylines to see what’s not working (I figure I know where the chronology problem is coming from, and I need to drastically re-think one character’s motivations).

So far, so good…