Temporarily titled The Shipmaker until I can think of something better. 5000-ish words, Xuya story.

Ships were living, breathing beings. Dac Kien had known this, even before she’d reached the engineering habitat–even before she’d seen the great mass in orbit outside, being slowly assembled by the bots.

Her ancestors had once carved jade, in the bygone days of the Le dynasty on Old Earth: not hacking and cutting the green blocks into the shape they wanted, but rather whittling down the stone until its true nature was revealed. And as with jade, so with ships. The sections outside couldn’t be forced into becoming a ship. They had to flow together into a seamless whole–to be, in the end, inhabited by a Mind who was as much a part of the ship as every rivet and every seal.

Interesting facts… For writing this story, I researched, in no particular order: Vietnamese names (I know the naming system, but looking through the dictionary for suitable first names took more time than I’d envisioned), the history of Vietnam and of the Vietnamese language, shipbuilding, aircraft-building, feng shui, physiology of pregnancy and childbirth, and childbirth in Ancient China.
Grand total: 2.5 days, including a long conversation with the H about the merits of building in orbit vs. planetside.

The actual writing of the story? took me 1 day, and 1 other day to fill in the little holes I’d left.
(we’re not talking 12-hour days here, as I was at the dayjob all along, more like lunchbreaks, a bit of commute time, and large chunks in the evenings).

I think we’ve proved I’m a research addict. Quite hopelessly so.

Also, it feels good to write stuff again.

Swamped. Or ocean-ed, quite possibly.

Working on a new short in the Xuya continuity, involving spaceships and poets.

Made my first serious phở ersatz, mostly pre-prepared broth and paste, but with veggies and spices thrown in for a better taste. Yummy… Next up, I think, is using pre-prepared beef broth (instead of the pre-made phở broth, which is full of MSG). The full broth including beef is at least three hours’ simmering, too long to make for an evening dish, but I can live with cubes of beef broth and additional spice. Now to find some cloves, which my local supermarket doesn’t stock…

Vietnamese continues apace; we now have a book. Or rather, four books, out of which the first one is entirely dedicated to pronunciation. Arg. Still struggling with normal vowels and consonants, and then we move to diphtongs…
Fun stuff I’ve learnt: my default tone isn’t the level one (ngang), but rather the falling-rising one (hỏi). When I’m really tired, I default to this, with hilarious results…
Also, the day I can pronounce “Wednesday” in Vietnamese is going to be a red-letter one (“ngày thứ tư”, lit. “the fourth day”, regroups four sounds I can’t manage,, the “ng”, the “th” which should be somewhat harsh but distinct from the “t”, and the “ư”).

The wonderful M.G. Ellington has been kind enough to lend me some space on the Apex blog, where I ramble on what I should have done when writing Obsidian and Blood:

When I settled down to write my novel, the Aztec noir fantasy Servant of the Underworld, I had only the vaguest idea it might turn into a series. My first thought was to finish the darn thing, and not really to map out what might be happening to my characters after the plot was over.

That was 2007; now we’re in 2010. I’ve sold Servant and two more books in the Obsidian and Blood trilogy to Angry Robot; I’ve turned the sequel, Harbinger of the Storm, to my publisher; and I’ve just completed a tentative synopsis for the as-yet-untitled book 3. Looking back to how I wrote the series, there are a few things I did right, and a few things I should have paid more attention to.

Read more.

Go check it out!

In other linkage news, Mike Johnstone reviews the February 2010 issue of Asimov’s, which contains my alt-hist “The Wind-Blown Man”:

Her prose deftly taps into the atmosphere, rhythm, and thoughtfulness of Chinese tales (Buddhist, Taoist myths): it is measured, unhurried, soothing; it suggests a depth just tantalizingly out of reach.

That’s all for now. I’ll go back to RL stuff and programming (and %% implicit conversions).