So I’m reading this book (the title of which shall be omitted, because I don’t think I want to remember it for even that long). It’s about a small town targeted by (yet another) serial killer who preys on young girls and has digusting sexual fantasies. It’s got the arrogant rich bastard, the arrogant rich bastard’s son who is also an arrogant bastard, the haunted police investigator whose wife cheated on him, the heroine whom everyone pines for and who is kind and comforting and great with kids but generally completely helpless. And in the end, the serial killer turns out to be the sweet mentally challenged kid, who kidnaps the heroine and tortures her.

Am I the only one who sees a problem with all the %%% clichés here? (and seriously, the guy with the mental troubles is a serial killer? Way to go to ease the mistrust and prejudice towards people who didn’t have much of a choice in what life dealt them)

Also, seriously, what’s with the serial killers in US novels? I’m getting tired of sexual fantasies and extreme violence towards women. Perhaps some people enjoy reading about that. I certainly don’t.

Because I’ve noticed I’ve become really, really badly distracted…
I might be a tad slower and/or forgetful in posting/answering email/the like. If you don’t hear from me and you were expecting something, it’s because RL (aka the wedding) has struck. My mind’s a bit like a colander at the moment, so don’t hesitate to remind me…

Temporarily titled The Shipmaker until I can think of something better. 5000-ish words, Xuya story.

Ships were living, breathing beings. Dac Kien had known this, even before she’d reached the engineering habitat–even before she’d seen the great mass in orbit outside, being slowly assembled by the bots.

Her ancestors had once carved jade, in the bygone days of the Le dynasty on Old Earth: not hacking and cutting the green blocks into the shape they wanted, but rather whittling down the stone until its true nature was revealed. And as with jade, so with ships. The sections outside couldn’t be forced into becoming a ship. They had to flow together into a seamless whole–to be, in the end, inhabited by a Mind who was as much a part of the ship as every rivet and every seal.

Interesting facts… For writing this story, I researched, in no particular order: Vietnamese names (I know the naming system, but looking through the dictionary for suitable first names took more time than I’d envisioned), the history of Vietnam and of the Vietnamese language, shipbuilding, aircraft-building, feng shui, physiology of pregnancy and childbirth, and childbirth in Ancient China.
Grand total: 2.5 days, including a long conversation with the H about the merits of building in orbit vs. planetside.

The actual writing of the story? took me 1 day, and 1 other day to fill in the little holes I’d left.
(we’re not talking 12-hour days here, as I was at the dayjob all along, more like lunchbreaks, a bit of commute time, and large chunks in the evenings).

I think we’ve proved I’m a research addict. Quite hopelessly so.

Also, it feels good to write stuff again.

Swamped. Or ocean-ed, quite possibly.

Working on a new short in the Xuya continuity, involving spaceships and poets.

Made my first serious phở ersatz, mostly pre-prepared broth and paste, but with veggies and spices thrown in for a better taste. Yummy… Next up, I think, is using pre-prepared beef broth (instead of the pre-made phở broth, which is full of MSG). The full broth including beef is at least three hours’ simmering, too long to make for an evening dish, but I can live with cubes of beef broth and additional spice. Now to find some cloves, which my local supermarket doesn’t stock…

Vietnamese continues apace; we now have a book. Or rather, four books, out of which the first one is entirely dedicated to pronunciation. Arg. Still struggling with normal vowels and consonants, and then we move to diphtongs…
Fun stuff I’ve learnt: my default tone isn’t the level one (ngang), but rather the falling-rising one (hỏi). When I’m really tired, I default to this, with hilarious results…
Also, the day I can pronounce “Wednesday” in Vietnamese is going to be a red-letter one (“ngày thứ tư”, lit. “the fourth day”, regroups four sounds I can’t manage,, the “ng”, the “th” which should be somewhat harsh but distinct from the “t”, and the “ư”).

Just watched the first episode of Eleventh Hour with Rufus Sewell. Er, wow. Admittedly, biology isn’t one of my strong tracts, but the science in this, for once, held up pretty well. OK, it still wasn’t 100 % OK, but at least it didn’t have me screaming at the TV (as I did for pretty much every science fiction show I ever watched). Special points for NOT attempting defibrillation when the heart monitor flatlines, but instead doing what doctors actually do, ie CPR. Sure, there was nothing earth-shatteringly out of this world as regards the science (people trying to clone humans[1]), but it felt particularly realistic precisely for that reason.

Also, bonus points for actually having a scientist with a strong sense of ethics, which is a welcome change from all the people without scruples you see in TV shows–and for having him actually specialised in biology rather than being McGyver (I’m looking at you, Samantha Carter).

Later googled stuff, and found this article on IO9 about how the show gives science a bad name. Er, ok, I’m not sure why the strong reaction here. Without being over-alarmist, science does have good and bad sides, and I don’t see why the show shouldn’t be able to focus on the excesses of science applied blindly and without morals (there’s plenty of books and movies that present science like some kind of miracle, and this is no more realistic than the alarmist approach of Eleventh Hour ). And Jacob Hood not being in a lab? Given the guy’s sense of practical (trying to write down the plate number of a car by standing in front of it…), I’m thinking he has a PhD in theoretical science, and that if you give this guy a lab (ie one with dangerous products), he’d blow it up in no time.

Also, Rufus Sewell… totally yummy :=)

Please tell me it stays that good. Pretty please. I like the bit when I watch a science-y show and don’t scream at the TV. I really do.

[1] The episode has the surrogate mothers of the clones dying of complications. And, yeah, I know that based on what we’ve done on animals and for IVF, we can suspect that the biggest problem with human cloning is going to get viable embryos rather than worrying about mothers dying in childbirth. But since we haven’t actually tried the whole thing on humans, I’m ready to buy that the cloning process could be less straightforward than we think. In any systems, there’s always some weird interactions, and I’ve seen weirder things than an egg with a reconstituted nucleus messing up the delicate balance of a pregnancy.

Went over to the supermarket to buy some celery. When I got to the tills, the cashier looked at the vegetable with a dubious air. He then turned to his colleague brandishing it and asked, “How much is that?” His colleague shrugged and said he had no idea what the thing was.

“It’s celery,” I pointed out.

He still looked very much bemused. After he found the barcode for it and I was in the process of paying for the shopping, he wanted to know if there was any use for it and what you actually did with this weird-looking veggie.

Clearly, celery isn’t as recognisable as carrots :=)

Wedding preparations continue apace. Various blog posts and interviews are being redacted.

On the minus side, I’ve written a grand total of 2 paragraphs of fiction, and stopped because I have wonderful characters but no plot. I dearly want to blow up something, but I suspect the correct solution is to go research the heck out of something (I had a similar problem when writing “Age of Miracles, Age of Wonders”, which solved itself when I decided the action was going to take place in a 19th-century mining town, and researched accordingly).

Oh, yeah, and the synopsis for Book 3 of Obsidian and Blood, having had the agent-go-ahead, is now in the hands of my editor. Temp title Master of the House of Darts, subject to editorial approval/my changing my mind/the weather.

Bookwise, I seem to make up for my lack of fiction writing by reading a lot: I finished The Cardinal’s Blades (fun, if not unforgettable) and a French SF by Gérard Klein, Le Temps n’a pas d’Odeur (Time has no smell). I ordered Dream of Red Mansions in a beautiful 4-volume edition (Foreign Press, the same Chinese publisher I got Three Kingdoms from), got myself a copy of Daniel Abraham’s Seasons of War (the only way to get The Price of Spring in paperback), and started on Lynn Flewelling’s Nightrunner series (love the characters, in spite of fairly standard worldbuillding).

I get profiled over at Stomping on Yeti as an author worth watching, along with Rachel Swirsky, John Langan, Leah Bobet and Greg Van Eekout (it’s part 4 of a 5-article feature that’s going to profile 25 authors worth keeping an eye on in 2010). Many thanks to Patrick for the awesome comments.

The details she weaves into her work are exotic and refreshing and the worlds she creates, be they past or present, beg for further exploration.

And Cara over at Speculative Book Review lists Servant of the Underworld as one of her top five books for the year.

On a random, aggrieved note after reading a hundred pages of The Cardinal’s Blades: I love the book. I love the mesh of Three Musketeers with dragons, and it’s been such a long time since I had any proper swashbuckling. But one thing makes me cringe at almost every page: the Spaniard, Anibal Antonio Almadès di Cardio. Because Spanish doesn’t have grave accents. Neither does it have a nobility with titles like “di Cardio”: the nobility mark is “de” just like French (I know I’ve seen the “di” elsewhere–my best guess is that Italians might have that, but I’m not sure). I do wish some Spanish-speaker had reread that bit and corrected it, because it continually jolts me out of the narration and makes me want to scream at things.

So, one thing that’s always been part of my life: I have a somewhat uncommon first name, and it’s not often that I see other people who have it. And, in particular, not often that I see characters in books with that first name. A result is that I tend to assume anyone named “Aliette” has to bear some ressemblance with me (I was once the proud owner of a green children’s book called “Aliette goes skiiing”, which never failed to make me smile, because, boy, am I abysmal at skiing).
So there’s apparently an author out there writing a series of mysteries set in France and featuring an inspector called Aliette Nouvelle (which comes out a little disturbing in French, because we have “Beaujolais nouveau”, which is this year’s vintage, and this reads a little bit like Aliette is some kind of wine…. It’s a good vintage, honest 🙂 ).
Anyway, I found this from the backcover of one of the books according to Amazon, and thought it too funny not to share:

Aliette (…) is a new heroine for the 90s—smart, single and intuitive, but more interested in quietly and non-violently getting the job done than in receiving front-page coverage for her sometimes unorthodox methods of crime-solving. She knows she is regarded as a rising star in the force and believes that her years of hard work and her excellent record are about to bear fruit.

Look, I’m a famous detective :=)

Well, I’m pretty sure I had a weekend, except it seems to have disappeared…

Aside from wedding stuff, we went to see Wild Target, a dark comedy about an ageing hitman who finds himself dealing with a young, awkward apprentice, and a con artist/kleptomaniac, both of whom he has to protect from the goons sent after them. Hilarious, well worth several watches (interestingly, learnt afterwards it was a remake of a French farce, Cible Emouvante. Might track the original down…).

Did one blog post for a guest blog, and am still working on another one. Also decided I’d had enough of not doing any actual writing (I did revisions and synopses, but I miss my first drafts), and started thinking on a new story, aka “Chinese dynasty on space station”.