For part 2 of their feature on Harbinger of the Storm, the tireless Brad Beaulieu and Greg Wilson interview me. Go check it out here (and check out the other episodes while you’re at it!)

The awesome Sirens this fall and make a joint presentation on “Magical and Monstrous Female Beings in South Asian Myth and Folklore” (which sounds like a really interesting subject to discuss, and one that I bet hasn’t been covered to death at cons). If you feel like hiring her or donating money, go here.

–Bandits, ’cause it was fun and I could always use a rewatch
–Ladyhawke: it looks kind of cheesy, but I’ll admit I can’t resist Rutger Hauer as the good guy (for a change)

Also added to my wishlist: The Scent of Green Papaya, and possibly the Vertical Ray of the Sun. Yup, want to try out some Vietnamese movies. But first, I have a pile of stuff to watch…

What I tried out this weekend (we went to the countryside with friends and had a go at pretty much anything that sounded fun):
-archery: far, far easier when the bowstring’s tension isn’t cramped up to max, and my hand is shaking with the mere act of holding it steady. Also, I apparently have beginner’s luck, because I can shoot in the centre of the target by accident.
-bowling: still have a very peculiar notion of what constitutes a straight line. It seems I can send the ball spinning very fast, or I can send it spinning very straight, but not both. Interesting, if not necessarily helpful to make quills fall…
-paintball: my natural position as a paintball gunner is entrenched within our camp, drenching anyone who gets too close in a hail of bullets (aka, “last resort obstacle”). And, er, faces and legs make nice targets (people have to peek out to shoot sometimes, but they rarely have the decency to show their whole torsoes).
-cooking: yum yum. We took turns doing the cooking, and we ate some super food (piperade, pasta saltimbocca , pierrade sausages and skewers (hmm, pretty much untranslatable. Pierrade is a hot stone on which the cooking is done), and schnitzels (you have not lived until you see a cook soften up the meat for the schnitzels by beating them up with a frying pan. In the absence of mallets…).

All in all, it was great. Now feeling refreshed and ready to attack the last week of work, before starting the packing and the moving (and a side touch of the holidaying).

OK, it’s late, and I have a backlog of other stuff, but…

You should really go read Kari Sperring’s post on history and why it matters to people.

Here’s my point. History is not a theme park. It’s not a story, either. It’s people’s real lives. If you’re going to write about it, about any part of it, you need to do your homework properly, you need to be respectful, because — as Ms Willis did with me — otherwise, you’re going to find someone’s sore place, someone’s vulnerability, someone’s sacred or difficult or secret thing, and you’re going to do damage. Other countries aren’t theme parks, either, nor museums, nor big bags of useful resources. They’re homes to millions, they’re people’s lives, too.

And while I’m talking about this, let’s have a look at another phrase I’m seeing a lot lately, ‘Eurocentric fantasy’. This, as far as I can tell, means fantasies set in backgrounds drawn from a sort of default idea of mediaeval Europe (usually Western Europe at that). I understand what people mean by this, and what they are thinking about. The thing is, as a European myself, these fantasies don’t feel ‘Eurocentric’ to me. They don’t feel like Europe at all, they feel like a mix of 50s Hollywood historicals and Las Vegas, they are theme park fantasies — right up there with that ‘England’ where everyone is either Hugh Grant or a Cockney, and we have names like Rupert and Gwendolen

(comments disabled because the discussion should really be happening over there, but yes. Yes. Yes)

OK, so apparently, this is how you can tell that Torchwood has become a joint US-UK production:

While the previous jackets of Torchwood featured the entire team in varied/neutral postures (the boxset of seasons 1-
3, the DVD of Children of Earth), or even a stylised abstract (the boxsets of season 1 & season 2), this one has everyone carrying guns (and a mean-looking guy in a suit who could advertise for Hollywood FBI). And, as a bonus, Eve Myler in a highly sexualised aggressive posture (the two guns pointed downwards, the leather jacket, the tight-fitting pants. She could be any number of pseudo bad-ass heroines).

*bangs head against wall*

[1] Not that I particularly liked Torchwood, but I just happened on this while browsing Amazon.
ETA: mind you, the US jacket for Children of Earth isn’t half-bad in the bad-ass babe department, either…

-Tess Gerritsen on “Non-white heros: the kiss of death in the marketplace” (I realised for the first time that Gerritsen herself was Chinese-American, something that was–I now realise–carefully passed up in bios and promo material, at least over here). And urk. I’d read a thriller with an Asian detective in a heartbeat…

-Cora Buhlert on “Women Writers, international writers, marginalised writers”. Towards the end, she speaks of the tendency to assume that ESL learners have bad English, a fact which I’m all too aware of: I have a stack of reviews which complain about the lack of fluency in my writing style, and what’s fascinating about those is that they all, without exception, were written by people who knew English wasn’t my native language. See Juliette Wade’s awesome post on the subject. It’s an interesting (if infuriating) phenomenon). Though nobody has been pressuring me yet to write more “French” stories. Thank goodness, I wouldn’t know where to start on those…

-Over at the World SF blog, Joyce Chng interviews Malay writer K.S. Augustin.

-Liz Wiliams on “Science Fiction reflects the extremes of human belief”

Yes, I know. Blog’s been fairly quiet. I’m chugging away on the novella, slowly rediscovering the joys of worldbuilding and writing (which took a big hit when my headspace was occupied by the job hunt, the flat renovation, and sundry RL items). Also, dealing with Harbinger of the Storm French translation, plus the edits for Master of the House of Darts just came in, and I realised I hadn’t written the acknowledgements or the historical footnotes at all. Darn. And I thought the summer was going to be quiet…

So, as some of you doubtless know, I’ll be in California/Nevada in the runup to Worldcon, roughly August 5th-August 16th. We’re mainly on romantic/catching-up-with-friends mode, but I did have time to plan one thing: I’ll be doing a reading, a Q&A and signing over at the excellent Borderlands Books, on Sunday, August 7th from 3:00pm to 4:30pm.
So, if you happen to be in the vicinity and want to meet me–and chat on writing stuff, Aztec stuff, or just life stuff–here’s a handy time and place!
(and it’s going to be my first and last US event for a while, because I’ve gone way over my yearly quota of travelling, and it’s unlikely I’ll be returning to the US till mid-2012–at best)

Also, if you have recommendations for restaurants and places to be while in San Francisco, this is the thread 🙂

A longish, crucial scene wrapped up.
Things included: dragon fruit. Longans. References to the Oath of the Peach Garden, and the poetry club in Dream of Red Mansions (which I think translates to Crab Flower Club, but I’m not too sure. My version has “Crab Apple Club”. I hope they’re the same plant or at least the same reference…). And another unwitting reference to Dream of Red Mansions.
Also, I might have been rather mean with a particular character. Ah well. Such is life. She’ll recover 🙂

Over at Speculate!, Brad Beaulieu and Gregory A Wilson are running a three-week special on Harbinger of the Storm: this week is the review of the book; next week will be an interview with me, and the following week will focus on writing techniques used within Harbinger.

Many thanks to Brad and Greg for the opportunity–not only did they read and dissect the book from cover to cover, they also arranged a three-way chat on Skype across three different time zones on a weekday, which is nothing short of heroic.

The podcast has featured authors such as K.J. Anderson, Patrick Rothfuss and N.K. Jemisin, and Brad and Greg have a palpable and infectious enthusiasm for all things genre. Go listen here, and check out past episodes, too!

In other shameless news, I opened my copy of Interzone 234 to discover that “The Shipmaker” had taken 4th place in the Readers’ Poll (behind Nina Allan’s “Flying in the Face of God” and two neat Jason Sanford stories), and that the illustration by Richard Wagner had tied for 1st place. Wow…