Er, wow.
Duncan Lawie reviews Servant of the Underworld for Strange Horizons. It’s pretty special, because SH is huge, and because it’s the one venue I regularly go to in order to read reviews–so to be reviewed there does make me feel like a star…

And, what’s more, it says things like:

(…)Servant of the Underworld is rounded and complete in itself, although the title page suggests this is the first volume of “Obsidian and Blood.” If Aliette de Bodard can continue as well as she has started, Acatl deserves to become as well known as that other priestly investigator, Cadfael.

*writer goes for a liedown*
(I know you’re meant to ignore reviews good and bad and focus on writing, but–wow. Just wow.)

So, I came home tonight and found a huge parcel in the living room. By “huge”, I mean, “a large piece of burlap wrapped up around something heavy, pulled up, and tied with a little knot around the neck”. And by “parcel”, what I mean is “sack”, because that’s the first thing it reminded me. I asked the H what the heck that was, and he said with a huge smile, “you can tell me, because it’s addressed to you”.
After half an hour with scissors and several paper cuts (there was a cardboard envelope inside the burlap, which is sadism), I finally managed to unwrap the package. Inside was a rather large hardcover I had ordered a while ago (A4-sized, 500 pages).
Now don’t get me wrong. I’m happy to have got my book. I’m happy they saw the need to protect it on its journey from the states. I understand the fact this wouldn’t fit inside a standard envelope, and that something a little more drastic might be called for.
But really? A sack of burlap five times the volume of the book?

Current mood: amused

-The very first Angry Robot podcast: set to be a monthly affair featuring AR and genre-related stuff. The inaugural episode features Marc Gascoigne and Lee Harris (who are apparently having loads of fun with this), speaking among others about their new releases and the future of publishing. You can subscribe here (itunes subscriptions forthcoming).
-Many congratulations to Gareth L. Powell, SF writer, occasional co-author and great all-around guy, for signing up with Solaris for his novel The Recollection. Congratulate him here.
-Interesting post over at I09 on “Is avoiding tropes the same thing as telling fresh stories?”
-Janice Hardy has a contest to win an ARC of Blue Fire, second book in her (MG) Healing Wars trilogy. Also, if you’re interested in different approaches, you can see the covers of the US, UK and German editions of books 1 and 2 here.
-Jeff Spock writes about stories for casual games. Fascinating stuff about why cliché and archetypes are good for you.

Urk. The spam comments have grown so numerous (hundreds in a few days) that I can no longer check them individually. Hope this doesn’t affect legit commenters here. (and I guess I ought to feel flattered at the attention).

The LJ crossposting is misbehaving a little–it sometimes turns itself off for no particular reason. Some fiddling will inevitably happen…

Also running into a few issues with scheduled posts, which might end up in double posts until I work out the system.

But, overall, the brand new WordPress seems spiffy (and I like the new colour scheme for the CMS backend. Much easier on the eyes).

Does anyone know if there are tools for managing tags and categories? Specifically, I wanted to merge several tags into one automatically, and/or migrate tags to categories. Any ways to do this which don’t involve massive amounts of love labour?

The weather was sort of nice (ie not too much rain). I dunked the H into the Brittany sea (a harsh experiment when all your swimming has been done south of Bordeaux, where the water is markedly warmer); we cycled to a few nice places (with raincoat on), and we did some shopping for clothes and shoes and stuff. And slept a lot. A nice, eventless holiday 🙂

Saw the cover and TOC for the September issue of Asimov’s, which will contain my non-fiction piece “The View From The Other Side” on non-Western, non-Anglophone SF. Happy to be sharing a TOC with Nancy Fulda and Mary Robinette Kowal (and, wow, why am I occupying so much space on that cover…?)

In other news, would anyone happen to have a copy of the latest (July) Locus? I’m told there are nice reviews of “The Jaguar House in Shadow” (which was in the July issue of Asimov’s) in both the Gardner Dozois and the Rich Horton column, and obviously I forgot to renew my subscription at this key moment… Thanks in advance!
ETA: didn’t realise I’ve been unclear–I just wanted a peek at the review contents, not the copy itself (wouldn’t want to despoil anyone here…)
ETA: thanks to the awesome Cate Gardner, my curiosity is now suitably sated.

On a matter tangential to Eight Against Reality, the publisher, Panverse, is having a kickstarter funding appeal, where you can win copies of their books–and more importantly support the awesome Dario Ciriello in putting a novella market into orbit. Check it out!

And my own Honorable Mentions in the Year’s Best SF: I have four (?!), for “After the Fire” in Apex, “Dancing for the Monsoon” in Abyss & Apex, “In the Age of Iron and Ashes” in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and “Ys” in Interzone. Rather amusing that only one of those is SF 🙂

Your daily Aztec dose is this review of Servant of the Underworld. Not so much with the liking, but the book is being handed to someone else, so still pretty good 🙂

In other news, just a heads-up that the H and I are headed to Brittany to my parents’ until Wednesday, and that I won’t have internet access there. (but there will be tanning. Well, I hope. Currently I go all lobster rather than gracefully brown).

(there’s a scheduled blog post at the beginning of this week, too–just in case you’re wondering how it is that I manage to post without internet access…)
(I swear, next week there’ll be bona fide content here–with planned stuff on steampunk and Aztecs)

–Rochita Loenen-Ruiz has a great story in the new issue of Interzone, “Alternate Girl’s Expatriate Life”, about exiles from Metal Town and the expatriate life of a woman unlike any others. I read two versions of this, and it kept getting stronger. I have no doubt the final version is going to kick some serious ass.

-Friend Christopher Kastensmidt gets interviewed by MG Ellington over at the Apex Blog about his fantasy series set in colonial Brazil, The Elephant and Macaw Banner.

-Many friends get HMs in Gardner Dozois’s Year’s Best Science Fiction (the HM section is visible on amazon.com). Notably Rochita Loenen-Ruiz for her horror SF “59 Beads”, T.L. Morganfield for her alt-hist “The Happiest Place on Earth”, Sara Genge for her much-noted gender exploration “As Women Fight”, Juliette Wade for her first professional sale “Cold Words”, Stephanie Burgis for her quiet frontier fantasy “True Names”, J. Kathleen Cheney for her family Chinese fantasy “Early Winter, Jenli Village”, Marshall Payne for his gonzo SF “Sausages”, and the unstoppable Mary Robinette Kowal for basically every short story she published in 2009. And others, too (my eyes started to cross after a while)–and many other familiar names. Slowly and inexorably, my f-list is taking over the world.
(I have mentions too, but I’ll save them for another post, the point of this one being shameless plugging of awesome people I know).

Ok, this is the bit where I jump up and down (and possibly throw some squeeing, too). This was the news I was sitting on last week, which was killing me (I’ve known for a while, but the signed contracts arrived last week, which made it even harder to wait).

My awesome agents at Zeno Agency have sold French rights to all three Obsidian and Blood books to Mathieu Saintout of Bibliothèque Interdite (the aptly named “Forbidden Library”). Bibliothèque Interdite is currently publishing Games Workshop books, but is planning to launch their new imprint at the end of the year.

I’m going to be translated in French. For French bookshops. This is going to be so weird. But so great.

This clearly calls for leaping Bubble Bobble dinosaurs:

As determined by my trusty throw of the die, the winner of the Eight Against Reality anthology up for grabs is…

kara_gnome!

Congratulations! Contact me via LJ or mail to give me your mailing address and whether you wish the antho signed.

Thanks very much to everyone else for entering–I had no idea Written in Blood was so popular 🙂 There will be another contest coming soon (July if I get around to it, or September, ’cause the wedding is a bit in the way of organising stuff like this), to win a copy of Servant of the Underworld and a cool Aztec coaster.