My Aztec steampunk short “Memories in Bronze, Feathers and Blood” is now up at Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

This is what we remember: the stillness before the battle, the Jaguar Knights crouching in the mud of the marshes, their steel rifles glinting in the sunlight. And the gunshot—and Atl, falling with his eyes wide open, as if finally awakening from a dream…

Read the rest here.

It will also be podcast in a later issue, if you prefer your Aztecs to come in audio rather than in text :=p

Any comments/discussion on the story can be left here or at the Beneath Ceaseless Skies forums.

Not much to report here, apart from the occasional bout of cooking (Cantonese rice, Vietnamese fashion, courtesy of my grandma; and some sliced marinated beef that went great with the experimental tomato rice).

Research for book 3 continues apace; I’ve pretty much come to the conclusion that I need to hit the American Library in Paris and their JSTOR subscription for the info I need. If all goes well, I shall be near Schleswig (in Germany, up near the Danish border) from Friday to Monday, in order to attend the Villa Diodati workshop (aka the retread of the one that lost against the Icelandic volcano). Cross your fingers for me.

Very literally, in this case….
My Aztec steampunk weird alt-hist “Age of Miracles, Age of Wonders” has sold to Interzone (with mechanical creepy man, imprisoned god, blood magic, and a mining town in the Old West). Many thanks to the VD6 crew, Nancy Fulda, Stephen Gaskell, Sara Genge and Ralan Conley, for the crits that helped me fix the ending of this.

And I would also seem to have sold my Aztecs-in-space SF story “Shipbirth”, part of the Xuya continuity, to Asimov’s (do you detect a trend in story themes? :=) ). Many thanks to everyone who took a look at it on OWW: Allison Starkweather, Cécile Cristofari, Terra LeMay, L.K. Pinaire, Christine Lucas, and Ilan Lerman. And an extra dose of thanks to Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, who read it in record time and helped me fix a very important plot point.

I will be going for a liedown and more novel brainstorming.

As the radio silence might indicate, I’ve been fairly busy, though most of it wasn’t writing. Had a fun and busy weekend with friends and family, saw Neil Williamson on his way through Paris, tried an Asian recipe (cha siu, which turned out awesome and which I heartily recommend. There will be pics next time, I swear), and worked my way through more Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries.

And now it’s back to the grind–aka researching the next Obsidian and Blood novel. I’ve already got a fairly good idea of what it’s about, but now I need a detailed outline and a plot that (hopefully) makes sense. Got a pile of books on the sofa, a full teapot, and my trusty notebook…

Stole this from over the internet, and then stupidly forgot to note from whom I’d taken it…

The Rules of the Game Are:
Bold the women by whom you own books
Italicize those by whom you’ve read something of (short stories count).
*Star those you don’t recognize
Unmarked are those whose work you have not read
Continue reading →

So, have set the BF on Use of Weapons (while I really ought to try The Player of Games, if I can find it somewhere).

Meanwhile, I’m rereading Dorothy L. Sayers. It’s fascinating to see those books through the lens of the Thirties society they depict: they have a very strong class mentality, which I expected, but I didn’t expect the little tidbits that really tell you how much the world has changed. An example in the current one: the doctor who wants to specialise in cancer research, but can’t because there is no funding for it, or indeed any cases to be seen. (obviously, people in those times died off before cancer could set in).

Got myself a DVD of Angel with Spanish and English tracks and subtitles, to continue working on my Spanish. And, well, apart from working on a handful of edits for stuff, that would seem to be about it for the weekend. Good stuff. I shall now go back to my xa xiu cooking…

Basically, I need an oblong, portable musical instrument. The first one I thought of was the flute or another wind instrument, but for various story-related reasons, it can’t be an instrument you need to breathe in to make it work.

Any ideas? It doesn’t have to be stick-shaped, but it does need to be longer than it is large.

EDIT: wow, thanks for all the answers! I’m inclining towards a variety of stringed instruments (not sure yet if it’s lute/sitar/guitar/erhu, but it looks like my MC won’t know what it is anyway).

• In techie notes, I’m now proudly powered by Chrome (which is just way faster than my creaky safari, especially on my odd connection–the one that’s supposed to have a 54MBits/s bitrate but always ends up as a 200 kbits/s). Also sorted out plugins, in order to crosspost to Twitter, and to post to LJ (yes, I know, that was happening beforehand, but the update de-activated the “mirror to LJ by default setting”). And uploaded a raft of new ebooks to my Bebook mini, including a lot of Lord Peter Wimsey (I love those. Delightfully old-fashioned).
• Bones: I have now officially reached the end of season 3, and therefore of my Spanish-dubbed DVDs. Had to switch back to English for season 4, which is a bit of an annoyance. Mind you, the first two episodes of season 4, “Yanks in the UK”, were just…painful. In a “let’s take every preconceived idea about the UK and write an episode around it without bothering to factcheck them first. Oh, and let’s give everyone exaggerated accents to make it clear we’re in the UK” way. (and, er, death penalty in the UK? Maybe, y’know, it’s been suppressed for a while now…)
• Bunch of reviews for my short fiction
  • Matt at Garbled Signals on Asimov’s, July 2010, which contains my story “The Jaguar House, in Shadow”:
    

    This is a great mix of world-building, character, and action in one story.

  • Tangent Online reviews my story “Desaparecidos” in this month’s Realms of Fantasy:
    

    (…) her story is both well told and entertaining, and there is a nice plot twist at the halfway point (look out for the character Miguel) that does a good job of taking “Desaparecidos” in an unexpected direction

    I find it fascinating when the reviewer says that the story “never touches on religion”, because for me it’s very much one of my quintessential stories about religion–about faith and hope and the belief in some larger meaning or purpose, and how they can (or cannot) sustain us through our darker moments. And, in the end, it’s about miracles, what is just and what is fair–very much religious topics as far as I’m concerned. [1] I’m assuming what he did mean is that there was no preaching in the story, but still… Kind of struck me as odd.

[1] Not to mention the angels in the story, of course.

Have had a couple questions about my alt-history universe Xuya (where the Chinese, the US and the Aztecs share North America), I decided to take the plunge, and transcribe my notes into a more legible form. I figured that with three stories out (two in Interzone and one in this month’s Asimov’s, the universe had cemented well enough that people might want extra explanations.

So behold the brand new spiffy Xuya page: all you’ve ever wanted to know about Xuya (well, not quite yet, but it does have a few pointers about the chronology, where the stories fit in there, and a few items of general interest).
Enjoy!

BTW, since I’ve locked the comments on the page, this post here is as close as it’s getting to the official question thread–in the (unlikely[1]) event that you have any interrogations about Xuya-related stuff, ask in the comments, and I’ll do my best to answer.

[1] I’m a natural pessimist, and those are only short stories after all, with a small audience…

Someone has pre-ordered Harbinger of the Storm on amazon.
(I know because Harbinger has a ranking, and amazon doesn’t display rankings unless someone’s placed an order for the book). Probably just one person, but still… Wow.

In other news, 15 chapters to go until I finish Three Kingdoms. Then we can move on to a shorter book 🙂