When I started up the cooking experiments, way back near the beginning of this blog, I had a heck of a time mixing up that basic staple of Vietnamese cooking, dipping sauce (aka nước chấm). My grandmother’s instructions went something like this: “a little nước mắm (concentrated fish sauce), a little lime, a little sugar, and mix everything”. Of course, she’s been mixing it her whole life, so she can do it by colour. I, on the other hand, am not very good at colour, and have a boundless capacity for screwing up proportions (ask anyone who participated in New Year’s Eve, where I cooked 40 spring rolls, and enough venison for 15 people–which would have been great had there actually been 40 of us at table instead of 9…)

So when I started mixing my own fish sauce, I went by the (cook)book. I filched recipes from Mai Pham’s Pleasures of the Vietnamese Kitchen and from Bach Ngo’s The Classic Cuisine of Vietnam, and used the same proportions. Invariably, though, the result ended up tasting really bad, and I ended up having to top up ingredients in a frantic attempt to get the taste and colour back into familiar ranges.

I thought it was further proof of my lack of talents at cooking–until I read this article on Andrea Nguyen’s Viet World Kitchen blog, on how to buy fish sauce. Down near the middle, there’s a note that says that fish sauce sold in the US is single-grade–with an average of 20°in purity (ie, 20% pure fish concentrate, 80 water).

But, see, in France, unlike in the US, fish sauce comes in several grades–25° or 35°. And my mom, my grandma and I (and most Vietnamese) buy 35°. So basically, I’ve been trying to get proportions right with the wrong kind of fish sauce, and all the quantities of those recipes should be adjusted by 20/35 (which is about 60%).

No wonder those recipes all tasted really foul, and that the only recipe which ever worked was the one I picked up on a French blog…

-Ove Jansson aka Cybermage:

Aliette de Bodard has done it again. Harbinger of the Storm is an action packed Aztec mystery opera with magic, interventions from the gods and more twists and turns than the first book. (…) The story is self contained and can be enjoyed standalone, but you will not want to miss out on the first. I wish it was 2012 already even if the world is going under while I read the final Obsidian and Blood.

–Violin in a Void:

[Acatl] leads us into an increasingly dark and bloody tangle of mythology and political intrigue that is not merely a worthy successor to Servant of the Underworld, but a tighter, pacier and altogether more exciting read. (…)It’s a complex but intriguing story, and I for one am thoroughly satisfied with this sequel. According to De Bodard’s blog the final book in the Obsidian and Blood trilogy will be titled The Master of the House of Darts, and its due for release in November 2011. If De Bodard continues to build on what she’s done so far, it’s going to be epic.

–Publishers Weekly (starred review):

Political intrigue and rivalry among a complex pantheon of divinities drive this well-paced murder mystery set at the height of the Aztec Empire in the late 15th century.(…) De Bodard incorporates historical fact with great ease and manages the rare feat of explaining complex culture and political system without lecturing or boring the reader.

Er, wow? PW starred review is certainly most intimidating, and I’m very glad a lot of people seem to think HoS is a better book than its predecessor. I’d be going for a liedown if I wasn’t %%% busy…

’tis a bit blurry, but this is what I got up to this weekend, in between snatches of writing that %%% book.

Nem nướng, aka pork patties, Vietnamese style. Not quite there, as I was missing the roasted rice powder (had roasted rice, but no grinder or mortar sturdy enough). For next time.

Meanwhile, back to the (literary) grinder. Almost done…

The blog is still on official darkness notice, but just a quick word to go and read Ekaterina Sedia’s superb post, “Seeing Through Foreign Eyes”, on writers and foreign cultures (touches on insider vs. outsider cultural approaches, and the disproportionate value attributed to “outsider” books):

So the issue with books set in foreign cultures, I think, that even though many SF/F readers call for more perspectives and diversity, they don’t really want that. They want someone familiar to show them some exotic stuff without actually challenging the readers’ assumptions or values. But really, if you want to experience a different perspective and a different mindset, read a book in translation.

Yes, yes and yes.

Happy New Year of the Cat/Rabbit for those who celebrate. (I’m firmly in Cat territory)

Part 2 of the Codexian blog tour, in which the amazing Nancy Fulda tells us about writing and sculpture:

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The Renaissance sculptor Michelangelo once said: “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”

He also said: “The marble not yet carved can hold the form of every thought the greatest artist has.”

In this, I think, sculpting is not so very different than writing. As authors, we stand like Michelangelo before the lump of our incompleted stories, stupefied not by lack of ideas, but by their plethora. An unfinished story is full of potential. It might become anything: an action-adventure saga, a conflicted character story, an incisive satire.

It is this potential that dazzles us. And it is this same potential which so often causes us to stumble.

A story is defined, not so much by what it is, but by what it is not. Faced with the rough surface of a draft that has not yet been freed from the stone, the writer might feel tempted to do it all: concentrate on character and plot and symbolism and prose style. He is afraid to cut away too much, and so his chisel strokes are awkward, and hesitant, and ultimately unsatisfactory. The angel within the stone remains buried beneath a jumble of beautiful clutter.

Michelangelo said, “The more the marbles wastes, the more the statue grows.” This is, I believe, an early incarnation of the well-known injunction to Murder Your Darlings.

All life is nurtured by death, and a story is defined not so much by what it is, but by what it is not. Our fiction cannot take on life unless we are willing destroy all of the beautiful possibilities but one: the best one. We must be willing to slay the poetic character story in order to set the action-adventure free. We must murder the satire so that drama can rise from its ashes.

I hear objections shouted from the crowd already.

Yes, of course it’s possible to mingle plot with characterization. Like Abraham, we are sometimes spared from destroying something precious in the pursuit of something we treasure even more. But let’s remember something about Abraham: he was firm in his priorities.

You want a deeply conflicted protagonist who fights bad guys with paperclips, and by the way, he loves to compose limericks? Fair enough, but you’d better figure out which of those three elements is most important to you, because if any of the others get in its way, you’re going to have to clear them out. Failure to do so will imprison your angel.

This is why critique groups can be so frustrating, by the way. Each critiquer gives voice to one of the thousand Stories-That-Might-Have-Been. Each of them calls for a distinct, if superficially similar, narrative. It’s no wonder new authors sometimes feel lost in the babble.

The only solution is to find your angel. Your angel, not anyone else’s.

In other words, find your rough draft’s dominant draw — the aspect of the story that ignites your aesthetic passion, the part of it you love most. That’s your angel.

A story’s ending is often indicative, here. Critiquers may complain that the end doesn’t mesh with themes presented earlier. That’s because the writer was still exploring ideas. At the end of the first draft, when it’s time to wrap things up, his subconscious emphasizes those elements which have become most meaningful to him — and they are often not the same elements that dominated the opening scenes.

For heaven’s sakes, folks, don’t smother your angels! Be very cautious if someone tells you to change your ending. Ask yourself whether it’s the beginning that ought to change, instead.

Find your angel, writers. Don’t stop carving until you’ve set him free.

And if it seems like a lot of work along the way? And if we’re tempted to feel jealous of the people who do it better than we do?

Well, a certain Renaissance sculptor once said: “If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful at all.”

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Nancy Fulda’s fiction has appeared in venues including Asimov’s, Jim Baen’s Universe, and Norilana Books’ Warrior, Wisewoman anthology. She is a Phobos Award recipient, a two-time WOTF Finalist, and an assistant editor at Jim Baen’s Universe. Nancy also manages the custom anthology web site at http://www.anthologybuilder.com, where visitors can assemble a print-ready anthology of stories by prominent authors. Nancy keeps a blog at http://nancyfulda.livejournal.com. She lives in Germany with her husband, their three children, and no cats. You can order a collection of her short fiction here.

Blog’s going dark–will respond to comments and other pending stuff in a bit. I’m off to finish drafting that %%% book before the internet can terminally distract me.

In the meantime, the Codex blog tour is under way, and you can find me over at Nancy Fulda’s blog, Suite101 (courtesy of fellow AR author Colin Harvey), and Lawrence M. Schoen’s blog. Many thanks to my wonderful interviewers for lending me a bit of space on the internet–and stay tuned for more guest posts on this blog (after the novel is done, of course…)

Also, my short story “After the Fire”, originally published in Apex, has been reprinted in Descended from Darkness Vol 2, a compilation of Apex short stories for the past year. (a sneaky way for me to share a TOC with the always awesome Rochita Loenen-Ruiz).

That’s all. I’m off to usher in the Apocalypse….

So, in the coming weeks, I’ll be taking part in the Codexian blog tour, which aims to feature fellow Codex writers–in this particular case, through guest blogs. First at the bat is Gareth D. Jones, who talks about languages and translations.

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For a relatively little-known author, my stories have been translated into a surprising number of languages – 20 at the last count. I’ve always been interested in languages, leading me to investigate other tongues that don’t have any established markets for genre fiction, make contact with friendly translators and ask them to translate some of my very short flash fiction. My 100 word story ‘The Gondolier’ is now available in 33 languages, many of them appearing on my own website. Altogether you can read some of my stories in 38 languages, from Afrikaans to Welsh.

Aside from having my work translated, this interest has led me to spend quite some time considering how to deal with languages in my fiction. It’s easy to create characters who all speak English and share a cultural background similar to mine, but a large portion of science fiction is set somewhere in the future, or on another world, or amongst alien species. It’s not very likely that they’ll all conveniently speak English.

The problem is, I don’t feel very confident about creating characters from other real-life cultures who speak different languages. I have no problem creating a new species or inventing a culture, but I’m afraid that if I populate my story with, for example, French characters, I’ll end up writing horribly clichéd dialogue that will make genuine French people cringe. It will be like those characters in US dramas with fake English accents using American expressions that British people don’t use.

There are several ways around the language dilemma, and my experience with translations has given me some insights on the matter:

• Ignore it. Don’t even mention language. After all, in my stories that appear in Greek, everyone speaks Greek.
• Have everyone speak a common language, as in Jack Vance’s Gaean Reach, or Asimov’s Empire. Add planetary accents for variety.
• Oblige everyone to learn an artificial language. In Philip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld everyone learns Esperanto. This allows you to include cultural variety without worrying about language barriers.
• Supply Universal Translators, or a Protocol Droid fluent in 5 million forms of communication. Once the concept is introduced, you can write all the dialogue in English (or whatever language you happen to be writing in).
• Mention at the outset which language everybody is speaking, but then write in English anyway. This introduces the problem of using idioms and expressions that don’t appear in the language you’ve chosen, and phrases that rely on
  homonyms to have any meaning.

If I set a story in a far-future galaxy-spanning culture, do I assume that individual planets will maintain cultural identities inherited from Earth, or will mankind have become homogenous? The answer doesn’t always have to be the same. It doesn’t have to be politically correct either – there’s no reason to assume society will maintain the same values thousands of years from now.

Here are some of the things I’ve tried in various stories:

• A story set in Wales, where I’ve taken expressions my relatives use to make the characters sound authentic.
• A far-future tale where various ethnically diverse, bio-engineered colonists have settled on the same planet and have almost become separate sub-species. A human translator is needed for part of this story, but I’ve made him a character in his own right so that he adds to the translation rather than being a distraction. Others speak a common tongue, but in a Tolkienesque way they maintain their own ‘old tongues’. It was fun to work out how they would interact.
• A section of the novel I’m writing takes place on a Scottish colony planet. I’ve had a genuine Scot translate some of the dialogue into Scots for me. The worry now is that it will be too difficult to read and may have to be Anglicised. And how would that ever be translated into another language?

I am constantly impressed by the work of the translators. In the Catalan translation of ‘Roadmaker’, the translator resorted to a footnote to explain an untranslatable point. This was for a homonym that the character gets confused over. Evidently the equivalent words in Catalan are not at all similar, so there is no reason he would get confused in that language. It’s at this point that I have to stop thinking too hard on the matter, for fear that I’ll end up writing in simplistic language to make it easier on the translators.

There are six thousand languages and dialects on Earth. It’s worth including at least some of them in our fiction.

Gareth D Jones is from the UK. His stories have appeared in over forty publications and twenty languages. He also writes reviews and drinks lots of tea. Work of his is forthcoming in The Immersion Book of Steampunk, published by Immersion Press.

Coming up next: Nancy Fulda talks about writing and art.

So…

Apparently, Harbinger of the Storm should be out in the US–and on all good electronic platforms (Kindle, Nook, etc.) as well.

You can read an excerpt here. Basically: murder and mayhem in the imperial palace. Mihmatini and Teomitl get into trouble. Oh, and star-demons, which is always good for sheer terror.

Go forth, buy, read, and so on, and so on. Meanwhile, tonight is Thai restaurant night.

I completely forgot to post about this, but book 3 now has an official title: Master of the House of Darts (yes, I know. It looks kind of the old unsuitable title, but after thinking it over AR feel that the coolness of it offsets the, er, sheer length of the thing). Release date: November 2011.

I’m currently around 75% of the way in, entering the big ugly climax with a ton of dangling plot threads. The H assures me this is business as usual 🙂