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.

Today is Chris Kastensmidt’s birthday, so hop over to his blog and help him blow the candles 🙂

And in the grand tradition of Marshall Payne’s birthday posts, I’m putting up a little (video-game related) something for him:

Video game meme by ~Malu-CLBS on deviantART
(drat, couldn’t manage to make it bigger, you have to click on it to enlarge)

Garked from the T-party group list (with thanks to Helen Callaghan):

Animals with lightsabers

And a small sample, just to make you wander over:

The BF has just finished reading Foreign Ghosts, aka the Xuya novel, in between two rounds of writing summaries for his PhD dissertation (it’s like synopses: no one agrees on what length they want).

Yay!

On the plus side, a lot of his comments are small, easy fixes; the book seems to hang together, and he loves the universe.

On the minus side, one of the characters made no sense to him, so I clearly need to do some motivation work. Also, he wants me to reorder scenes so that it’s a little less fragmented, ie one chapter per POV rather than 2-3 scenes per chapter in strict chronological order.

Hum, good thing I’ve got Scrivener if I decide to go down this road.

(I haven’t decided yet how I’m going to tackle his comments–still at the processing phase, plus at the “trying to finish short story draft” phase)

It’s official: I’m starting a pile of books at home, given the stuff that’s been trickling in for the Norton Jury. I’m amazed and humbled that people actually go to all the trouble of shipping stuff to me in France, just so I can read it.

In the meantime, my bus rides just got a lot busier 🙂

Over at his blog The Willpower Engine, Codex founder Luc Reid interviews Nancy Fulda, creator of AnthologyBuilder, the do-it-yourself anthology website (and writer, editor, and awesome Villa Diodati member). There’s some fascinating stuff about balancing work and family, as well as behind-the-scenes on the creation and maintenance of the website.

Entrepreneurial Motivation and Creating a Business from Scratch: An Interview with Nancy Fulda.

Has anyone got a recommendation for good task management software on a mac? I’ve been using Thunderbird’s calendar, but it’s a little wonky as a solution…

Just in case whoever is concerned is reading this blog…

Someone tried to mail me something via FedEx mid-August. Unfortunately, it failed because I was out of the country at the time (and sent to an address where I have trouble receiving parcels). I’m assuming you got it shipped back–it’s not I’m not cooperating, but I was away from a while and didn’t really have the leisure to check mail…

800 words today. I’ve successfully locked my main character in a room with a knife-wielding maniac, always a good recipe for success (well, for the story. The character’s chances must be lower). Darn, it feels good to be tormenting someone again. I haven’t been doing any first-drafting since Worldcon: I’ve done edits and copy edits, but haven’t actually started to write another story since then.

Tomorrow, celebrating the novel sale with my work colleagues: to that end, I’m making ham and goat-cheese cake. So far, the cake

• looks worryingly yellow
• has ballooned to an impressive size

(at least I know why the second point: I went a bit overboard on the baking soda…).

I’d post the recipe, but first I need to taste it.
EDIT: Matthieu pointed out that I’d screwed up with the oven’s settings, too, and that the thing was burning faster than it was baking. Sigh. Me, and cooking: 3 different people.

Walking home today, I was stopped dead by an ad on a French shop, which went something like this:

[nameless shop] has teamed up with [big French charity] to offer you this exceptional deal!
Bring your used jeans back into the store and
1. Save 20% on the price of the new jeans
2. Help preserve the environment!

Turns out the charity is taking the jeans back and mostly selling them back for very low prices to poor people [1]. You know, I’d have thought that “help your neighbours in need” would have been a better description of what you were doing when giving back a pair of old jeans. And not a shameful one, either.

But obviously, the planet is a better draw. [2]

Sigh.

[1] The shabbiest part of the jeans will indeed be recycled to provide building insulation-so yes, it will protect the environment. But it’s the marginal part of what they’ll collect.
[2]Don’t get me wrong, I do think we should be more careful with the planet, and less wasteful in general. But people are important, too, and we’re very far from the point where we care for them all.