OK, so it’s time to shake up things a bit. 4 days left until the UK/Australia release of Servant of the Underworld, my Aztec murder-mystery with blood magic (and ghostly jaguars, and fingernail-eating monsters).

So what I figure out is that I’m going to set the stage a bit, by doing a series of posts on setting. The first will be on the Valley of Mexico and the Aztec Empire; the second on the city of Tenochtitlan; the third on religion and the Sacred Precinct, and the fourth and last on my main character Acatl and his patron Mictlantecuhtli, aka Lord Death. First one should run tomorrow.

Stay tuned :=)

Saw a couple of reviews trickle in during the holidays:
-Liviu Suciu at Fantasy Book Critic:

The novel fits most comfortably under the heading of “dark fantasy” with the tropes of contemporary urban fantasy – magic, sorcerers, powerful supernatural beings – called Gods here – lots of blood and violence, mostly urban setting – but is set in the Aztec Empire at its peak in the late 15th century.
The world-building is exquisite and we *believe* we are transported to the 15th century Tenotichtlan and together with the superb voice they formed the main reason I enjoyed this book so much… Highly recommended; Ms. de Bodard is a writer to watch.

-Nik Butler at Loudmouthman:

The mystical Aztec setting had every opportunity to become a tongue twisting and convoluted mish mash of vowels and golden thingies. Fortunately none of this occurs as day to day temple life and the duties of its citizens are described you can feel the richness of this bloody empire without once tripping over some unpronounceable God or location.
This is Book 1 in a trilogy and I am eager to get my hands on the next book when it is released.

*happy writer*

If you want something that looks like a book, Angry Robot has a sample of Servant of the Underworld to download, which contains the first chapter. Available in Mobipocket, EPUB or PDF.

Or you can also read the first three chapters online at My Favourite Books (they were cut into five parts to make them more manageable, hence the number of links).

In the silence of the shrine, I bowed to the corpse on the altar: a minor member of the Imperial Family, who had died in a boating accident on Lake Texcoco. My priests had bandaged the gaping wound on his forehead and smoothed the wrinkled skin as best as they could; they had dressed him with scraps of many-coloured cotton and threaded a jade bead through his lips – preparing him for the long journey ahead. As High Priest for the Dead, it was now my responsibility to ease his passage into Mictlan, the underworld.

I slashed my earlobes and drew thorns through the wounds, collecting the dripping blood in a bowl, and started a litany for the Dead.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia interviews me at Innsmouth Free Press on Servant, writing in other cultures and my pet history peeves.

The Shine competition has gone live: basically, guess the next sentence AND guess the story. See if you can spot the collab I did with Gareth L. Powell 🙂

And chapter 2 of Servant of the Underworld is now live at My Favourite Books.

So, first off, this is the result of having too much spare time the weekend before last and discovering the joys of imovie:

Yup, I made a book trailer. Go on, take a look, it’s only one minute long *grin*

Makes you want to read the book? Well, you can also drop here at My Favourite Books and read the first chapter. They’ll be posting the first five chapters of the book, one per day.
(while you’re at it, you can also head over to SFSignal, which is running similar excerpts from fellow AR author Lavie Tidhar’s steampunk fantasy The Bookman)
Should keep you busy until the book comes out in January 🙂

Meanwhile, I’ll go back to Harbinger, where a lot of innocent people are about to find out how dangerous Tenochtitlan can be on a bad day…

Erk. Tonight’s activity consisted of transcribing my handwritten notes on the proofs into a big email to AR towers. My fingers, they hurt…

Tonight’s secondary activity is trying to transfer a homemade video from a Mac to a PC, and getting a big headache (the video is a Quicktime movie file, and I want it to be readable in Windows Media Player). So far, not so good. Will poke around some more.

And, while I was out there researching my mythology, I found this awesome resource on the Aztecs. Theoretically, it’s educational activities for kids, but it’s amazingly (and obsessively) detailed. My new stop for nifty details.

The cover art for Servant of the Underworld:

Isn’t it full of awesome? (some stuff might shift around a bit, but overall it’s meant to be pretty much final)

For the curious, the central design is lifted from the Calendar Stone. It represents the Sun God along with the Four Ages of the World, which makes it pretty appropriate for the book (I won’t say why because of spoilers). You can find explanations on the symbols here (scroll down a bit for the first ring).

Now I’ll go and have that much delayed dinner…

My Servant of the Underworld proofs have just arrived, and I have a little over a week to check them. I think I’m going to be scarce on the internet this week…

But, OMG, it looks like a real book. It’s both elating and scary (as in, oh dear, I can’t hide behind other TOC-mates anymore).

The BF’s only complaint so far was a lack of cover art 🙂 (which should arrive sometime in the week, I’m told. Another reason to be freaking out…)

So, now that I’ve got some decent sleep…

Spent the afternoon of yesterday at the BF’s PhD defence: he was working on quantum physics (entangled-photon sources, to be precise). I knew just enough quantum physics that the defence was somewhat familiar, but sadly not enough to actually understand most of what was going on. The question session lasted one hour (at which point they lost me completely), but in the end they awared him his PhD, with a Very Honorable Mention–which was pretty much the highest grade they could give him, so much happiness.

Then there was the cocktail, and the evening with drinks at Matthieu’s place–and I went to bed completely knackered. Slowly emerging now 🙂

-Sent revised version of Foreign Ghosts (the Xuya novel) to agent, and am now working on an appealing blurb they can use for marketing (and struggling a bit since this is multi-character in a weird setting).
-Updated the Servant of the Underworld page. I can haz blurbs!
-Got my synopsis for Book 2 of Servant of the Underworld approved by Angry Robot towers: it will tentatively be called Harbinger of the Storm. After much brainstorming, it looks like the series title has settled onto Obsidian and Blood.
Looks like book 2 of Obsidian and Blood is going to be the next project on my plate (right after I tackle the revisions for Servant of the Underworld).

Have I mentioned the bit where I feel perpetually swamped? I had some inkling that might be the lot of the novelist, but I didn’t think it would come quite that fast…

Finished off one short story this morning, temporary title “In Our Minds, In Our Hearts”. Another dark sf one, 2800 words. I did a first cutting pass, which I’ll probably need to take up again, but in the meantime I put it up on OWW for crits (it’s for a market the submission deadline of which is fast approaching, so I’m going to have to move a little faster on this one…).

Here’s a snippet:

In her dreams, Jiaotan saw Father–hands outstretched, the flesh of the fingers fraying away to reveal the yellowed, tapering shapes of bones, the deepset eyes bulging in their orbits, pleading, begging her to take him away.

“You’re dead,” she whispered. “Rest in peace, with the Ancestors–watch over us from Heaven.”

But the Ancestors were bones and dried sinews, shambling upright from the wreck of their graves–anger shining in the hollows of their eye-sockets as they walked past the devastated gardens, the withered trees, the dried-out waterfalls and rivers. And clouds marched across Heaven, a billowing mass of sickly grey–spreading to cut the path of The Golden Orchid as it rose away from Earth…

#

Jiaotan woke up with a start, instinctively bending over to cough out the fluid that blocked her lungs. But something held her–pressed against her as tightly as the embrace of Earth.

In other news, I finally got the website to display the navigation links below individual posts like this one, which involved some hacking of the php, accompanied by some forays into the WordPress documentation (in case you’re wondering what I’m talking about, it’s the small “Next Post/Previous Post” thingies below the frame of individual posts, which weren’t included in the standard free WordPress theme I based the website on).
Also updated the Servant of the Underworld page with information for preordering on Waterstone’s: this one felt weird, because Waterstone’s was the bookshop where I bought everything while in the UK, so being listed there is definitely peculiar…
I have no idea why Saturday mornings are the ones reserved for the website coding: you’d think that after coding all week I’d be bored with it, but apparently I’m a glutton for punishment…