Friday
Friday morning started out with a lovely Codexian breakfast in local diner Eggspectation.
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Matthieu and I stayed in Montreal for a while after Worldcon, to do some sightseeing (we’re leaving tomorrow). We visited the McCord Museum, which tells the history of the city from a social point of view (how people winter, how they have fun, how they make money and how they meet each other). Not that it wasn’t interesting, but there was one corner of the museum that drew our attention…
Turns out they were having an exhibition on space travel in popular culture, and that one of the pieces was a giant Lego Death Star. Awesome…

So, ya know, like the geeks that we are, we felt compelled to take lots of pictures…

The Thing in its Entirety

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Thursday
So, Thursday morning started out pretty low-key: we had breakfast at Muffin Plus, a lovely café that does tons of differently-flavoured muffins (and they had plenty of kinds of tea, too). Then we followed on to a second breakfast with fellow Codexian Jenny Rappaport (as in, an extra set of drinks, not a second helping of muffins. That would have been bad). We also met fellow Codexian Matt Rotundo in the lobby, where he was checking in.
Traci and I went looking for a fleece in downtown Montreal, and scouted out the important places (ie, the Indigo bookstore, for future use). Continue reading →

My friend and critique partner Janice Hardy, whose wonderfully dark YA novel The Shifter is coming out in October, has a contest on her blog to win an ARC:

If you’ve been to my website, you’ve noticed I love chickens. I can’t say why, I just find them hysterically adorable. So for the next ten days, send me your very best chicken jokes. The joke that makes me snarf something out my nose from laughing so hard wins a signed ARC (advance reading copy) of The Shifter.

To enter, put your entry at the bottom of Janice’s post.
(and if you don’t win, I highly recommend pre-ordering the book on amazon. It’s the pulse-racing story of a girl who can shift pain into people, and who is desperately trying to keep her head low–but finds herself faced with a dilemma when her ability turns out to be the only thing that might help her save her sister)

I was planning to put up a worldcon post today, but I’ve clogged the blog enough as it is. Tomorrow it is, then.

For your listening pleasure: “Blighted Heart” is now available as a podcast (recorded by Beneath Ceaseless Skies). Go here (for the table of contents of BCS audio) or directly here for the mp3.

In other related news, “Blighted Heart” is also Story of the Week over at Fantastic Reviews Blog, courtesy of Aaron Hughes:

“Blighted Heart” is a powerful, beautifully written story, and a great example of why de Bodard was the runner-up for this year’s John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, losing out very narrowly to David Anthony Durham.

Wow.

An interesting post from writer Jason Sanford about the new wave of SF: Scifi Strange.

The movement combines a literary (and sometimes experimental) style with a multi-cultural viewpoint and examination of basic human desires and needs, all while staying within the real-world parameters of SF’s literature of ideas.

(yes, you won’t find it in the blog post. I cheated and lifted it from another post Jason made in the TTA Press forums)

Jason mentions a bunch of writers from Interzone: Eugie Foster, Gareth L. Powell, Mercurio D. Rivera and me–along with Paolo Bacigalupi, Ted Chiang, Ian McDonald, and Nnedi Okorafor.

That’s interesting (basically New Weird, but in SF 🙂 ). It does describe pretty well the SF I write, as well as the SF I enjoy; and I can think of a couple other writers who are dealing with it, like Sara Genge.

What do you think? Is that a new movement, or has it been there all along? Any other exciting things happening in SF on a large scale?

So, a little bit more in the way of actual con reporting…
(usual disclaimer applies: I have a bad memory, and it was a really busy con, so there’s probably going to be holes…)

Wednesday:
The day started pretty early on Wednesday for me and Matthieu, since the plane was leaving at 11:00 (wakeup time: 6:00am). We’d packed ahead of time: the only pause in that came when we’d finished piling up Matthieu’s suit and my evening dress, and realised no space was left in the suitcase. Ie, no space for books..
Eek. A quick re-arrangement of containers followed, in order to make sure that we’d have at least some extra space available.
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My short story “Golden Lilies” is up at Fantasy Magazine.

It was the smell which woke me up, insinuating itself between the planks of my coffin: cooked meat mingling with the sweet odour of aromatic rice, and the tangy hint of fruit and spices — a powerful summoning if there ever was one.

Read more.

For those of you who prefer their fiction in audio form, it’s also available as a podcast read by the talented M.K. Hobson (who does a truly awesome job).

Interview of me on Bibliophile Stalker. Thanks to Marshall for all the time-consuming labour, and to Charles for giving it a good home!

The con was great: met lots of new people and had lots of fun. Sunday was spent, as envisioned, on sheer adrenaline, going through two panels and a reading with a mounting heartrate, before rushing back to the hotel room to change into my evening dress for the Hugos.

And the Hugo Awards…

Well, it’s a good thing that they started out with the Campbell, which saved us nominees a lot of freaking out. David Anthony Durham won and made this awesome and very touching speech about community acceptance.

I subsequently was surprised to find out that though David led in all rounds of voting, by the end he had 161 votes to my 158, and that three-vote difference was all that separated me from actually having to improvise a speech up there…

Ah well. Such is life. I’m not complaining: I did take second place, and overall it’s been a really awesome year for me. Even though I didn’t win, I’m honoured to have just been nominated and to have stood in such good company. And I’ll make sure to keep an eye on all my fellow nominees, as I’m sure they’re off to great things.

Thanks a lot to everyone who voted for me; and special extra thanks to the Codex/Liberty Hall voting block, T.L. Morganfield, and Chris Kastensmidt for clapping and screaming so loud when my name was announced as part of the list of nominees. You guys totally made my night.

A couple of wins that had me really thrilled: Electric Velocipede took Best Fanzine–huge congrats to John Klima, who I’m sure would have loved to be there to collect his award.
Congrats to Elizabeth Bear for taking the Hugo for Best Novelette (she totally rocks), and to Ann Vandermeer and Stephen Seagal from Weird Tales for Best Semiprozine Hugo. My ROF illustrator Frank Wu took Best Fan Artist (and nearly broke something while running up the stage).

And I took a peek at the nomination ballot for the Campbell and saw familiar names: Chris Kastensmidt, Sara Genge, J. K. Cheney, fellow WOTFer Stephen Kotowych, and fellow Angry Robot author Colin Harvey. Huge congrats to all!

There will be a more detailed post when we come back from Canada and offload the camera’s pictures. In the meantime, here’s a picture of me in my Hugo outfit, courtesy of Cheryl Morgan: