In an Asian cookbook that was among the bookstore’s pick for the month:
“Nước mắm sauce: pick it amber, and not black and/or smelly, as the last denotes inferior quality.”

Er… I guess it depends on your definition of “smelly”? My nước mắm sauce is as smelly as they come, and it’s certainly not inferior quality (it’s got the official Vietnamese seal of approval). Amber says weak to me, aka the Thai fish sauce I tried a few months ago that just wouldn’t decent dipping sauce no matter how much I poured. But I guess if we’re talking about European palates…

(yes, the BF thinks my latest batch of nước chấm is a little…extreme? I think I finally managed to mix it with the proper kick)

Yesterday, my Mom and I went to eat Vietnamese–and Mom wrangled some freshly-ground chillies from the restaurant, which she gave me to take home. So, yesterday evening, all proud of my new toy, I mix some fresh nước mắm sauce, and my hand hovers over the chillies, wondering how much to put in. After a while, I settled on the smallest unit I knew, one coffee spoon–dumped it in, and mixed everything.

After trying out the sauce with some fried rolls, I might need to rethink my smallest unit…

Also, it’s been said many times, but don’t let me loose in an Asian foodstore. I managed to get out with only a handful of bottles (sesame oil, undiluted nước mắm, and rice vinegar) , some fresh noodles, some fruit and some ginger, but still, it was a heavy trek back home. (also, I’m now the proud owner of a garlic press, various wooden spatulas of different shapes, and a large vegetable peeler…)

And as a parting short, via SF Signal: Samurai Wars, aka the Star Wars Universe redone in ukiyo-e (traditional apanese) style. Made of awesome (for some reason, can’t link to any of the images, but check out the following: Admiral Ackbar, Jabba the Hutt, Obi-Wan Kenobi).

-James Maxey reviews Servant of the Underworld in IGMS’s latest “Lit Geek” column:

Perhaps it’s true that there are no new ideas in literature, but every so often you run into two old ideas smashed together to create something you’ve never witnessed before. This is definitely the case with Aliette De Bodard’s Servant of the Underworld.

-Dave Gullen does the same in the latest issue of Hub Magazine:

Contemporary fantasy writing has a substantial number of problems with originality, writing quality and sheer story-telling passion. You’ll find little of those faults here, de Bodard’s style is clean and focused, the narration vivid and as the story builds to the climax, exciting and urgent. You don’t have to read the glossary or the historical and writing notes at the end of the book to know that this was a work of dedication, one that consumed the author during the months it took to research and write this book. The energy comes off the page in both the writing and the story.

-And here’s madscientistnz’s take:

The mystery was interestingly complicated (but then I can never guess who’s done what, so all mysteries intrigue me) and I really liked that the stakes started out high and kept getting higher. I loved the Aztec setting, so exotic and different, and I’m always interested in characters whose culture and mindset is different to mine.

The happy writer will now proceed to edit more Harbinger chapters (and to add a pronunciation guide at the beginning, just in case)

Because my life isn’t made only of ash-spitting volcanoes…

A long, long time ago, I wrote a novel, Phoenix Rising, about which the least said the better (oh, all right, if you really want to know: it was set in a pseudo-Andalucian world and involved a hierarchy of storytellers/bards taken from Ancient Ireland. It was also, very much, 200,000 words of me not being a very good writer. Better than the previous novel I’d written, which was 200,000 words of derivative Robert Jordan, but not by much).

When I started being a Real Writer^TM (defined as the time I started submitting the stuff I wrote in a timely manner), I tinkered with it for a while and then trunked it. However, while the novel itself might have had a lot of irretrievable flaws, I still liked the universe. I liked the Andalucian vibe, and I liked my poets, my minstrels, my housevoices and my loremasters and the world they were part of, and all the myths I made up while I was writing the novel. And I was really sad to let them go.

So I decided I was going to recycle bits and pieces. I abstracted a very small part of the novel’s mythos, an isolated incident that was only mentioned once–and wrote a short story around it.

It was a somewhat frustrating experience, because I ended up stripping far more of the context than I’d intended (the Andalucian vibe, in particular, sort of vanished somewhere into a black hole). But still, it was good to come back to this world, to walk the paths again with my characters and their idiosyncracies–and to see them deal with the weight of history and myth.

The result was “Silenced Songs”, a story about poetry and song, and about how people live in the wake of loss and grief and guilt.

I’m delighted the finished piece sold to the anthology “Music for Another World”, forthcoming from Mutation Press. Yay for old universes 🙂 (and many, many thanks to everyone from LH who critted either the novel or the short story).

PS: incidentally, I’m only part of the first batch of authors. The anthology still has slots open, with an April 30th deadline. If you feel musical…

So, it would seem that the Villa Diodati Workshop (due to take place now-ish in Northern Germany) has been cancelled due to an Act of God. Possibly the only workshop to be ever cancelled because of a volcanic eruption.

Guess I have no excuse not to work on Harbinger now…

My story “Desaparecidos” is now available in the June 2010 issue of Realms of Fantasy. This was actually the one that got me pulled from the slush, so I’m very pleased to see it published (with Realms closing for a while, it did end up feeling like forever…). Like the other writers in the issue, I’ve written a piece on the origin of the story, which you can read here (and be sure to check out the other background pieces–sounds like a set of fascinating stories). And the table of contents is here. (as an aside, isn’t mine the best story description ever? Kind of sums up a lot of my fiction…)

Snippet:

Caldera de los Angeles (Crater of the Angels)
About 15 km (10 miles) from downtown El Águila. Count about three hours of a fairly taxing climb to reach the top, but the inside of the caldera–with its magnificent lake and forest–is well worth the exertion.
Legend has it that the Crater marks one of the numerous places where the rebellious angels fell down from Heaven–hence its name.
From A Traveller’s Guide to the Acamba Valley

In other news, I was pleased to see that “The Lonely Heart” (published in Black Static, to be reprinted in Panverse’s Eight Against Reality), garnered an Honorable Mention in Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year, and that “After the Fire” (published in Apex, podcast on StarShipSofa), is a notable story of 2009 for the Million Writers Award

The writer took a day off for some administrative formalities–except that of course, we’re having a massive train strike here in France, and the person with whom we were supposed to do the formalities can’t make it to Paris. Well, at least I caught up on sleep, and am slowly catching up on email backlog and stuff.

Got BF’s crit of Harbinger of the Storm yesterday. Basically, lots and lots of problems, but most of these should be small fixes: the basic structure of the novel looks to be sound. I’ll brainstorm some extra fixes, and then go roll up my sleeves and tackle revisions…

Finished a short story for the upcoming Villa Diodati workshop. Temp title is “Age of Miracles, Age of Wonders”. Set in the same universe as “Memories in Steel, Feathers and Bronze” (upcoming in Beneath Ceaseless Skies), and “Prayers of Forges and Furnaces”.

Snippet:

The god
The weals on Coztic’s back have begun to heal by the time they reach Axahuacan. The marks of the chains on his ankles and wrists–the deep burn lines rimmed with red, puffed skin, encrusted with scabs–haven’t. At night, when the moon rises over the desert, its light as pale as the face of corpses, he shifts in the copper cage and feels pain lance through his limbs, as familiar and as welcome as an old enemy.

The hierarch walks ahead of the cage and of its guards, the metal of its face turned straight ahead. If it thinks of anything–if metal and cogs and wheels can have thoughts–it doesn’t say.

I have three major deadlines at the end of the month (the novel, one other sekrit one, and a work-related one). April is going to be loads of fun…

In no particular order:

-Cheese is considered a gel or a paste and, as such, is not allowed in a cabin luggage. It would be nice if a. They actually advertised this elsewhere than after your luggage got stuck at security, and b. they didn’t make you wait ten minutes while they search someone else’s luggage to tell you this. It would have spared me some careening through the airport trying to get the luggage checked in, in time to make my flight (for the record: I had to plead a bit with Air France, but I managed to check it in about 3 minutes before check-in closed). If I were feeling optimistic, I’d go for c. they should make it easier to check in your luggage with its “illegal” items (of which they are now so many I feel like giving up), at the very least by making it easy to go back to the check-in counters (I had to basically go out the airport and come back again), or even (God forbid) have a checkin counter at security. But, you know, that would be cheating.

-Jetse de Vries throws a mean launch party (but I already knew that). The Shine launch party was filled with good alcohol, good food (the aforementioned cheese), and plenty of awesome people. Got a chance to chat to some UK-based friends, as well as to Ellen Datlow (who was over for Worldcon), and a number of other contributors to the anthology: Gareth L. Powell, Eva Maria Chapman, and Alastair Reynolds (well, strictly speaking, I caught Alastair in the dealers’ room on Monday morning, but it still counts).

-It was good to see people again (in particular to be rooming with Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, who is in the process of being co-opted into the convention circuit). Also had many great conversations about immigration, identity, and Asian immigration in particular with a number of people throughout the con (somewhat depressing that countries seemed to become more and more closed to foreigners from the “wrong” parts of the world, but overall it gave me a lot of food for thought)

-Went to a few panels, but not many. I survived my own (the one about Writing in a Foreign Language, which was very interesting, as we had a group of people with very different experiences of English), and I think I made it to two others (one about Clarke, and one about whether there was a time limit on SF novels). Spent way too much time schmoozing and drinking and talking, as usual 🙂

-I am not a night person. Was up early most mornings (8:00am-ish), tried to talk past 1:00am in the evening–and ended up going for what I assumed was a short nap Sunday evening at 8:00pm. Yeah, right. Woke up at 11:30pm and wandered down to find the con winding down. Grr.

-The dealer’s room is starting to be dangerous for me–but not for the reasons you’d think. Going to three Eastercons means I’m starting to know a lot of people, and as a result it was hard for me to wander down the aisles quietly (also, I’m a surprisingly chatty person in the company of like-minded people).

-Goodies. What I love about this eastercon team (same one that put together Eastercon 2008, both most impressive cons in terms of organisation) is that they give a mug in the goodies bag, which is awesome. I also got an extra mug courtesy of Carl Rafala of Immersion Press, who had printed out personalised mugs for all the authors in his forthcoming The Immersion Book of Science Fiction. And in the way of books, I got myself a copy of Ian McDonald’s King of Morning, Queen of Day (great urban fantasy), Mary Gentle’s Golden Witchbreed, Eric Brown’s Helix, Lavie Tidhar and Nir Yaniv’s The Tel-Aviv Dossier (courtesy of the Chizine team), and Daniel Fox’s Jade Man’s Skin, the follow up to the great Chinese/Taiwanese-flavoured fantasy Dragon in Chains.

Well, looks like that’s all I have in the way of con reporting. Eastercon is still one of my fave cons: it’s big but not too big, it’s handy to get to (no transatlantic flights), it’s always very nicely run, and lots of awesome people are there.
So, until Birmingham…

So while I was at Eastercon (brief con report to come), the David Gemmell Legend Awards shortlist came up–and Pierre Pevel’s The Cardinal’s Blades (with cover by John Sullivan and Sue Michniewicz) did a clean sweep, being nominated in Best Novel, Best Newcomer and Best Artwork. W00t, let’s hear it for translated fiction!
(the website possibly has a textual version of the nominees, but I couldn’t find it. I direct you to this post instead)

And, of course, the Hugos were also announced Sunday evening–mega congrats to everyone, but special mentions for Eugie Foster for being on the novelette ballot with her fabulous “Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast” (first published in Interzone 220); to Rachel Swirsky with her equally fab “Eros, Philia, Agape” (Tor.com. I personally preferred “A Memory of Wind”, which is on the Nebula Ballot, but both are tremendous stories); and, finally, to Tony C.Smith and the StarShipSofa team for making the “Best Fanzine” category.

*happy writer*

My story “Desaparecidos” will be in the June 2010 issue of Realms of Fantasy. You can see the cover here on facebook, via Doug Cohen (although “Desaparecidos” features angels, the cover is actually an illustration for the Bruce Holland Rogers story).

I finally get to share a TOC with tlmorganfield–which is so completely made of awesome. This is going to be a collector issue 🙂