Sunday update

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So, came back from the grandparents’, surviving sunstroke in the process. (memo, get a hat next time, and stop forgetting that I’m now much less tolerant to sunlight than I used to be a few years ago). Still, it was a good weekend.

Fixed my random quotes plugin (which had replaced one keyword with another–I was rather relieved it turned out to be so simple, as I was already gearing myself to deactivate my plugins one by one to work out which one had the compatibility issue).

Downloaded myself a Chinese-English dictionary for the ipod, Dian Hua (thanks to wistling‘s recommendation). It’s got a bunch of great expressions (my favourite so far is “arm-flinging shopkeeper”, “someone who asks others to work but does nothing himself”. If you factor in the long sleeves the Chinese used to favour, this has a very visual flavour).

Sigh. I would so love to learn Chinese, but have so not the time to actually make a stab at it. In another lifetime maybe…

Bunch of reviews

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Medley of reviews for Ys (Interzone 222)

  • Colin Harvey at Suite101:

    One of the delights of reading de Bodard is that sense of otherness, be it a Chinese legend re-worked, or a straight SF-nal alternate history like ‘The Lost Xuyan Bride.’ De Bodard is one of the candidates for the John W Campbell Award for Best New Writer of 2008, and rightly so. Recommended.

  • Read More »

Just to tide you over…

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Quickie post, because the weekend is going to be crazy busy (going to the grandparents’, which is going to involve crawling through summer holiday traffic for about 350 km, so not looking forward to this).

The Year’s Best Science Fiction appears to be out: I already knew it contained my alt-history novelette “Butterfly Falling at Dawn”; what I didn’t know was that I also received two Honorable Mentions, one for “The Dragon’s Tears” in Electric Velocipede, and one for “Horus Ascending” in Intergalactic Medicine Show. Wow. (thanks to snickelish for letting me know, and I’ll settle back to the impatient wait for my contrib copy)

Only a handful of days left to vote for the Hugos (and the Campbell *g*): voting ends 3rd of July, 23:59 EST.
I hadn’t thought the deadline would be so early, to be honest, and I’m still two novel nominees short of a full house. Darn. Oh well, I’ll make do with what I’ve read.

Still hammering at my short story. I’ve now replaced the human sacrifice with syringes (I’m holding it as a possible incident later on).

(Oh, and my plugin for random quotes on the homepage appears to be broken, probably not agreeing either with the new wordpress or with some other plugin. Sigh.)

EDIT: via Doug Cohen, the artist who’s going to be illustrating “Desaparecidos” for Realms of Fantasy: Rob Alexander. Looks like really gorgeous stuff, can’t wait to see the final product.

An achievement, of sorts

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So, the dayjob is sinking its claws deep into me, making it a teeny bit hard to focus on writing currently (to be fair, I’m also getting through every single Stephen Erikson book, and having teensy troubles putting them down…).

The leak in the kitchen has reached over the sink. If nothing else, it’s interesting to see that four successive touches of pain were applied to the ceiling. Sigh. I really hope we get to the bottom of this before the last of the paint peels off, and something else (and presumably worse) starts happening…

4 episodes into season 2 of Battlestar Galactica. Gotta love the fact that the number of survivors seems to be steadily diminishing, episode after episode. Somewhat to my surprise, Gaius Baltar has grown slightly more bearable, if not actually likeable. And there’s still a few things that bug me, but I love it that they’re not afraid to tackle some dark places, and also to drop in religious issues (yeah, the religion is utterly bogus, and its mythos makes me want to gnash teeth, but I like seeing issues like those in my SF, and I don’t see them often).

(no spoilers please, this is my first viewing)

-I don’t blog much about rejections, but I can’t resist this one: I got my first alas-o-gram from Gordon Van Gelder at F&SF. I’m told it’s some kind of rite of passage :)
-Tangent Online has relaunched (thanks to Eric James Stone‘s proficiency with software, apparently), and it has a nice review of Black Static 9 and my story “The Lonely Heart”:

The story unwinds slowly, building character and mood, and utilizes the backdrop of a changing China as a smart counterpoint to the traditional spook story at its core, where lust and necessity clash over the heart of one man.

-800 words on a new story. Had a perfect, moody beginning that was unfortunately two days too early. Would have been good for a novel, I think, but it feels too leisurely for a short story. So I replaced it with a bloody scene of human sacrifice, which always raises tension a notch :)

Breasts for Books

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From James Maxey:

Followers of my blogs, and the readers who read the acknowledgement pages of my books, will know that I lost my partner Laura Herrmann to breast cancer in May 2005. I’ve been interested in cancer research since then and have privately made contributions to cancer related charities, but I’ve never put out any sort of appeal on my blogs to solicit for this cause, until now.

Last week, I received several cases of my latest book Dragonseed. One of the ongoing themes of Dragonseed is the idea of healing, both from physical and spiritual wounds. Within the book there’s a miraculous object called a dragonseed: Eat the seed, and all your injuries will be healed. Even your oldest scars will vanish.

I have some science fiction hoodoo underlying the dragonseed. The technology to create a pill that will both diagnose and cure any illness is pretty far out in our future, if it exists at all. But, the part of this that isn’t science fiction or hoodoo is that I believe that technology has the power to work miracles. We have MRI and PET scans that can look into a human body and see it working in minute detail. We have developed surgical tools and techniques that can remove diseased tissues from a human body without doing undo damage to healthy tissues. My father had a heart attack recently, and the doctors had to place stents in his arteries. The incision to perform the operation was small enough to cover with a band-aid. And, right now, there are researchers who are taking apart cancer cells molecule by molecule to understand the genetic engines that drive them to a degree unimaginable only a few decades ago.

We live in an age of miracles because we live in an age of knowledge. Modern computers are finally powerful enough to process all the complex data contained within a human cell. The only barriers remaining between our present understanding a cure for any disease you can name are time and money.

These are not insignificant barriers. New technologies are always expensive. And, to be blunt, the world has a limited supply of really smart people, and a nearly unlimited supply of problems for them to solve. For better or worse, money is one of the most important driving forces of where the smart people focus their energies. In the sixties, it was decided we would put a man on the moon. We threw money at the problem, and produced a glut of rocket scientists. In the eighties and nineties, computer technology was fed enormous sums of money by the stock market, and smart people focused their energies on designing hardware and software, and with the result that today my cell phone has more memory than I do. There is a lot of money today flowing into health care, but only a fraction of this money goes to research of any given disease. I’d like to invite you to increase the fraction going to breast cancer research, both due to my personal connection to the cause, and because I think that this is the right moment in history to truly make a difference. I firmly believe this is a disease than can be cured within our lifetime. I don’t know if one day we will simply swallow a magic pill and be healed, but I do know that the day will come when we will be able to profile any cancer cell and match it with the appropriate drug to wipe it out.

To help bring this day closer, if only by a minute or two, I’d like to announce my “Books for Breasts” promotion. Anyone who contributes to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation through the “Team Dragon” fundraising page will get a free signed copy of Dragonseed.

You can contribute to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer foundation by clicking here. This will take you to my personal fundraising page; just click the button that says “support James.” Then, to get your signed copy of Dragonseed, just email me your mailing address to nobodynovelwriter@yahoo.com. I’ve set aside 50 copies for this cause; if I give them all away by the end of July, I’m pretty sure I can get my hands on another 50.

I’ve set up a modest goal of raising $300 through this promotion. This means I need to average contributions of $6, which is less than you’d pay for the book on Amazon. However, I’ll send you a book for a contribution in any amount, even if it’s just a buck. Spend a buck, get a book, save some breasts. Who’s with me?

Monday Plug Post

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Misc

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Stuff I’ve enjoyed recently:

  • Stephen Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen (at book 6 now, trying to justify the expense of buying book 8 )
  • Girl Genius (a fun Hugo-nominated comic, featuring Mad Scientists, a kick-ass heroine, and armies of evil robots)
  • Pride and Publishing: why editors are like suitors
  • Slowly but steadily getting back into the short story swing: rewriting a collab story with weird aliens
  • Ordering the (almost) complete Battlestar Galactica (missing the last season, but it was such a bargain we can buy the last season later)

Stuff I have not so much enjoyed recently:

  • The leak in the kitchen ceiling, which has resulted in the pain peeling away, plus various water-related damage (and the bit where it doesn’t stop isn’t cool)
  • General fatigue, spurred on by the workload
  • Matlab, mex files and the %%% syntax rules for those, which don’t allow anything beyond ANSI C. Code compiles fine in Eclipse, but not in mex, which is ironic when they use the same compiler… (obligatory geek bit # 1)
  • Fighting with php to put my latest blog post on my homepage. Ended up retrieving my own rss feed (obligatory geek bit #2)

15 books

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Ganked from a number of friends on the interwebs.

Don’t take too long to think about it. List 15 books you’ve read that will always stick with you — The first 15 you can recall in 15 minutes.

  • The Book of Atrix Wolfe by Patricia McKillip
  • Hogfather by Terry Pratchett
  • Pawn in Frankincense from Dorothy Dunett
  • Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny
  • The Lions of Al Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay
  • And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
  • Hart’s Hope by Orson Scott Card
  • Waylander by David Gemmell
  • Helliconia Summer by Brian Aldiss
  • The Chinese Gold Murders by Robert Van Gulik
  • The Earthsea Quartet by Ursula Le Guin
  • The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley
  • The Mahabharata (abridged version)
  • River of Gods by Ian McDonald

There’s a lot of those that I read as a teenager (and very few things I’ve read recently, but I’m a firm believer in putting at least 2-3 years between me and a book to see if I still remember it).

Spreading the word

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It’s been posted all over my f-list, but once more won’t hurt…

Writer Cat Valente is in dire financial straits. If you are in a position to give help, no matter how small, check out the LJ community adoptingcat.

Meme meme

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Your result for Which fantasy writer are you?…

Tove Jansson (1914-2001)

13 High-Brow, -25 Violent, 1 Experimental and -17 Cynical!

Congratulations! You are High-Brow, Peaceful, Experimental and Romantic! These concepts are defined below.

Tove Jansson was a Finnish painter, sculptor and writer. She was part of the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland and so wrote her books, including her most famous works, the Moomin books, in Swedish. The Moomin books (1945-70), though perhaps not considered fantasy by some, are nevertheless fine examples of world-building for children, centred around the inhabitants of the Moomin Valley, where a family of white trolls known as moomin trolls live, and always return to, though they occasionally leave for adventures in the outside world. Though many of the Moomin books are pure childrens’ books, Jansson conducted the experiment of letting the series turn more adult as she went along, the last three books (one collection of short stories and two novels) being psychologically complex stories that are just as fit, or sometimes perhaps more fit, for adults. Still, Jansson’s somewhat romantic vision of the Valley as a peaceful haven of family life in the midst of a sometimes frightening and dark world is retained through-out the books. Though she considered herself a painter rather than a writer, Tove Jansson will always be remembered as one of the greatest, perhaps the greatest writer of children’s books of all times.

You are also a lot like Philip Pullman.

If you want some action, try Gene Wolfe.

If you’d like a challenge, try your exact opposite, David Eddings.

Your score

This is how to interpret your score: Your attitudes have been measured on four different scales, called 1) High-Brow vs. Low-Brow, 2) Violent vs. Peaceful, 3) Experimental vs. Traditional and 4) Cynical vs. Romantic. Imagine that when you were born, you were in a state of innocence, a tabula rasa who would have scored zero on each scale. Since then, a number of circumstances (including genetical, cultural and environmental factors) have pushed you towards either end of these scales. If you’re at 45 or -45 you would be almost entirely cynical, low-brow or whatever. The closer to zero you are, the less extreme your attitude. However, you should always be more of either (eg more romantic than cynical). Please note that even though High-Brow, Violent, Experimental and Cynical have positive numbers (1 through 45) and their opposites negative numbers (-1 through -45), this doesn’t mean that either quality is better. All attitudes have their positive and negative sides, as explained below.

High-Brow vs. Low-Brow

You received 13 points, making you more High-Brow than Low-Brow. Being high-browed in this context refers to being more fascinated with the sort of art that critics and scholars tend to favour, rather than the best-selling kind. At their best, high-brows are cultured, able to appreciate the finer nuances of literature and not content with simplifications. At their worst they are, well, snobs.

Violent vs. Peaceful

You received -25 points, making you more Peaceful than Violent. This scale is a measurement of a) if you are tolerant to violence in fiction and b) whether you see violence as a means that can be used to achieve a good end. If you aren’t, and you don’t, then you are peaceful as defined here. At their best, peaceful people are the ones who encourage dialogue and understanding as a means of solving conflicts. At their worst, they are standing passively by as they or third parties are hurt by less scrupulous individuals.

Experimental vs. Traditional

You received 1 points, making you more Experimental than Traditional. Your position on this scale indicates if you’re more likely to seek out the new and unexpected or if you are more comfortable with the familiar, especially in regards to culture. Note that traditional as defined here does not equal conservative, in the political sense. At their best, experimental people are the ones who show humanity the way forward. At their worst, they provoke for the sake of provocation only.

Cynical vs. Romantic

You received -17 points, making you more Romantic than Cynical. Your position on this scale indicates if you are more likely to be wary, suspicious and skeptical to people around you and the world at large, or if you are more likely to believe in grand schemes, happy endings and the basic goodness of humankind. It is by far the most vaguely defined scale, which is why you’ll find the sentence “you are also a lot like x” above. If you feel that your position on this scale is wrong, then you are probably more like author x. At their best, romantic people are optimistic, willing to work for a good cause and an inspiration to their peers. At their worst, they are easily fooled and too easily lead.


Take Which fantasy writer are you?
at HelloQuizzy

Hum, ok. Clearly, I need to find out more about the Moomins. But I did score the only writer who’s not a native English speaker :-)
(and for the record, I like Pullman, but could do without the preaching. I do love Gene Wolfe on a good day–defined as one where I have full use of my brain. Used to like Eddings but don’t think I could stomach him now).