So, a quick Villa Diodati report…

The house

This one was a Dutch co-production, courtesy of Floris Kleijne and Rochita Loenen-Ruiz. Floris sadly had to bow out for personal reasons, but he kindly stayed around to ferry us around, and we enjoyed his company for Friday evening and Sunday morning.

The crit room, filled with food

The weekend was, as usual, filled with good food, cooked by Jeff Spock, Benevolent Dictator Ruth Nestvold, and Stephen Gaskell.

Incidents included: a plugged sink (fixed by the heroic Jeff), a rallye outside the house which boxed us for Saturday afternoon (watching cars zoom past the house was somewhat disturbing), and a fall of several tiles following a rather strong storm. Otherwise, though, it was made of awesome. As Ruth remarked, it’s funny how you can throw several writers together and have them get along like a house on fire.

The Surrealist Oracle (random questions, random answers). Highlight: Stephen: “What was your worst pick-up line?” Ruth: “I am the master of the universe!”

The writers present were Floris Kleijne (partially), Ruth Nestvold, Jeff Spock, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, Sara Genge (who is steadily taking over the world), Deanna Carlyle, and Stephen Gaskell. We workshopped stories, ate good food, and discussed novel processes. Also, we made a second attempt at producing collaborative fiction, this time with more success (the key, I think, is that the more people there are, the shorter the piece you should try to produce. In this case, a 350-word piece looked about right for 7 of us).

See, the crits aren’t so painful after all…

Overall, tremendous fun, and as usual, looking forward to the next one.

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…