And it’s tea purchasing time :=)

I try to keep a balance between the different types of tea, but a quick glance at the tea boxes showed that I’m running low on white tea and on flavoured black tea (thanks to Mum’s trip to Vietnam last year, I have enough green tea to withstand a siege. And it’s a good one, too).

And this is where I’m dragging Matthieu:
L’Empire des Thés (awesome shop in the Chinese district which has a bewildering choice–including good blends and neat perfumed teas).

I was cleaning up house on my work computer, transferring the contents of folder A to folder B. After emptying folder A into folder B, I proceeded to dutifully erase folder B from the system.

There goes the totality of the data I was working on.

*bangs head against wall*

(It’s not as dramatic as it sounds: we do have backups, and I’ll probably get the data back tomorrow morning, but in the meantime I was left feeling rather silly).

I have a new computer screen–going from 17″ to a 21.5 with high definition.
It does look pretty different :=)

Quiet weekend, in which I finally got to celebrate the sale of my novel by taking my parents to couscous (couscous being something of a family tradition). Also, much cleaning and housekeeping, but that’s the boring part.

After much thinking, I finally invested in Things as a Task Management software: it’s a little pricey, but it looks good and feels at the right level of sophistication for me (ie, not too rigid in the structure of tasks, or too simple). Many thanks to everyone who recommended it to me!

And current addictions include Adrian Tchaikovski‘s Empire in Black and Gold (in his own words: the Roman Empire with World War II technology–and insects, and generally awesome worldbuilding), and Code Geass, an anime about the rebellion of a downtrodden Japan against their Britannian masters, led by a Magnificent Bastard who’s on the narrow boundary between completely unlikable and fascinating.

My wonder BF (1) is currently making a zucchini pie, in an effort to cut down on the household’s consumption of meat. I’ll be making spring rolls later this week, probably.

(1) the wonder BF is currently being an impressive little houseboy, since he’s (sadly) stuck at home while looking for a job–so far without much success…

Some tidbits about the writing of “On Horizon’s Shores” can be found here at Edmund Schubert’s blog. As usual, Edmund will also run tidbits on all the other stories, which are always interesting (and which, I, for one, am very much looking forward to reading).

My SF novelette “On Horizon’s Shores” is now up in issue 14 of IGMS.

Alex and Thi Loan transferred at Sapalawa Spaceport, from their small shuttle to a military Naga craft — the only ones still allowed to crawl between the stars with the fuel shortage.

Because the thought of their mission on Horizon weighed on Alex’s mind, he said, “You’ve read the files?”

Thi Loan shrugged. “There isn’t much. Professor Kishore died — and then . . . suddenly there wasn’t enough fuel for the spaceships.” She smiled, a showing of white teeth against her tanned skin.

Read more at the IGMS website.

Many many thanks to Edmund Schubert, who did amazing editing–cutting and trimming a useless scene, improving the flow and clarifying a lot of plot that existed only in my head.

Also thanks to those who took a look at the first draft: T.L. Morganfield, Kevin Shaw, Fred Warren, cklabyrinth, Christine Lucas, Rod Santos and Justin Pilon.

And will you just look at that cover art? Wow. Just… wow. Dean Spencer has done a truly amazing job illustrating the story.

Over at the Super-Sekrit Clubhouse, Marshall Payne interviews Vylar Kaftan, about writing, life in California, and her short story “Break the Vessel”:
Interview with Vylar Kaftan

The easiest part [of crafting a story] is characters. They just appear on the page and flesh themselves out like magic. Possibly because I’ve been people-watching forever. The hardest part is letting go of my own ridiculously high standards and accepting that things are always, always lost in translation from imagination to words—and that’s just the nature of the beast.

(and while you’re at it, check out the rest of the Super-Sekrit clubhouse: fun cartoons, birthday posts, and more neat interviews)

Fellow Angry Robot author and Apex Book of World SF Lavie Tidhar gets interviewed over at SF Signal on World SF. Fascinating stuff: go check it out.
Interview with Lavie Tidhar about World SF

To me, [World SF] is first of all the kind of SF written in languages other than English, but that doesn’t take into account that small – but visible! – part of writers choosing to work in English despite it being their second – or even third! – language. And then, English has become such a universal language that in many places it has acquired its own regional flavor – take India or Malaysia or South Africa. And then, what about writers from one background living in another? Is Nnedi Okorafor an American writer or a Nigerian writer? Identities today can easily have two or three layers.

(in related shameless promotion offers, you can preorder the Apex Book of World SF here and get Lavie’s super collection HebrewPunk for only $10.00, in addition to my story “The Lost Xuyan Bride” and lots of cool-sounding contributions in the book per se)

Given a choice between:

-a novel where there is one point-of-view character per scene, and where the scenes more or less follow chronological order, but can be quite short (one scene=2,000 words approximately)

-a novel where each chapter is set in the point-of-view of a single character (one chapter=4,000 to 5,000 words approximately), but where the timeline ends up more warped than in the previous option

which one would you prefer, and why?

(I ask because I’ve seen both and enjoyed both, and I’m not quite clear on where I want to take Foreign Ghosts yet…)

EDIT: as zweipunktnull, I’ve been a little unclear. You only have 3 point-of-view characters in the entire novel. They alternate, in more or less equal shifts.

Sunday morning, in a house full of bagels (a cooking experiment that went somewhat wrong due to an oven that just wouldn’t bake the darn things–they’re somewhere on the cusp between “crispy” and “burnt to a crisp”).

I’ve finally hammered that %% short story into a sort of decent shape. Longer than I thought it would be (sigh–what’s new), mainly due to a character who wouldn’t stay secondary. It’s a horrible, horrible tale about horrible people in a depressing world; somehow I can’t seem to write horror that isn’t sordid.

Provisional title “As Heaven Meant Us” (I’m hesitating between that and “Father’s Flesh, Mother’s Blood”, which is neater but less accurate). It’s in the same universe as “Heaven Under Earth”, except a great deal nastier.

Snippet:

The group waiting at the gates of the house looked innocuous enough: two scholars, dressed in the grey robes of their profession, and an escort of neutered men holding repulsive screens to protect their masters against the howling winds of New Zhongguo. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

But, even where he was–sitting inside, watching the scene on the security cameras–, Leyou could see that the scholars held themselves a little too eagerly, a little too hungrily. And the cloth of their robes was impeccable, with not a trace of the omnipresent red dust on the large sleeves and carefully-embroidered hems: their robes were new and never-worn, barely out of the Imperial Weaving Mills. If Leyou were out there now, he’d find that they smelled of cinnabar and bleach–an odour too deeply sunk under their skins to be scrubbed away.

Cutters.

I’ve noticed something fun recently: I used to finish the draft, set it aside and move on to something else. For the past few stories, however, I can’t seem to get the ending right first thing: I have to come back and tinker for a few days with the last few paragraphs, until I get to the point where the last sentence(s) feel punchy enough (and it can get very nitpicky, with me swapping one word for another until it seems to work). Weird; I never was so obsessive. I guess that’s my way of trying to improve on endings.