It’s now official: my alt-hist Aztec novelette, “The Jaguar House, in Shadow”, originally published in Asimov’s, July 2010, has been nominated for a Nebula Award.

This would be the bit where I feel faint (I’ve known for a week, but it still feels very unreal. In my book, Nebulas are pretty much a thing which happens to other people). Many many thanks to everyone who nominated it, and I guess I should start looking into the following things: a ballgown, a hotel reservation, and plane tickets for Washington…

Here’s the complete list of nominees (plenty of familiar names in there, too, how cool–special congrats to Chris Kastensmidt for making the ballot!). I’ve put together links fairly quickly; should update this when I get home and have more free time.

Short Story
‘‘Arvies’’, Adam-Troy Castro (Lightspeed Magazine 8/10)
‘‘How Interesting: A Tiny Man’’, Harlan Ellison® (Realms of Fantasy 2/10)
‘‘Ponies’’, Kij Johnson (Tor.com 1/17/10)
‘‘I’m Alive, I Love You, I’ll See You in Reno’’, Vylar Kaftan (Lightspeed Magazine 6/10)
‘‘The Green Book’’, Amal El-Mohtar (Apex Magazine 11/1/10)
‘‘Ghosts of New York’’, Jennifer Pelland (Dark Faith)
‘‘Conditional Love’’, Felicity Shoulders (Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine1/10)

Novelette
‘‘Map of Seventeen’’, Christopher Barzak (The Beastly Bride)
‘‘The Jaguar House, in Shadow’’, Aliette de Bodard (Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine 7/10)
‘‘The Fortuitous Meeting of Gerard van Oost and Oludara’’, Christopher Kastensmidt (Realms of Fantasy 4/10)
“Plus or Minus’’, James Patrick Kelly (Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine12/10)
‘‘Pishaach’’, Shweta Narayan (The Beastly Bride)
‘‘That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made’’, Eric James Stone (Analog Science Fiction and Fact 9/10)
‘‘Stone Wall Truth’’, Caroline M. Yoachim (Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine 2/10)

Novella The Alchemist, Paolo Bacigalupi (Audible; Subterranean)
‘‘Iron Shoes’’, J. Kathleen Cheney (Alembical 2)
The Lifecycle of Software Objects, Ted Chiang (Subterranean)
‘‘The Sultan of the Clouds’’, Geoffrey A. Landis (Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine 9/10)
‘‘Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance’’, Paul Park (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 1-2/10)
‘‘The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen’s Window’’, Rachel Swirsky (Subterranean Magazine Summer ’10)

Novel
The Native Star, M.K. Hobson (Spectra)
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, N.K. Jemisin (Orbit UK; Orbit US)
Shades of Milk and Honey, Mary Robinette Kowal (Tor)
Echo, Jack McDevitt (Ace)
Who Fears Death, Nnedi Okorafor (DAW)
Blackout/All Clear, Connie Willis (Spectra)

The Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation
Despicable Me, Pierre Coffin & Chris Renaud (directors), Ken Daurio & Cinco Paul (screenplay), Sergio Pablos (story) (Illumination Entertainment)
Doctor Who: ‘‘Vincent and the Doctor’’, Richard Curtis (writer), Jonny Campbell (director)
How to Train Your Dragon, Dean DeBlois & Chris Sanders (directors), William Davies, Dean DeBlois, & Chris Sanders (screenplay) (DreamWorks Animation)
Inception, Christopher Nolan (director), Christopher Nolan (screenplay) (Warner)
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Edgar Wright (director), Michael Bacall & Edgar Wright (screenplay) (Universal)
Toy Story 3, Lee Unkrich (director), Michael Arndt (screenplay), John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, & Lee Unkrich (story) (Pixar/Disney)

Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy
Ship Breaker, Paolo Bacigalupi (Little, Brown)
White Cat, Holly Black (McElderry)
Mockingjay, Suzanne Collins (Scholastic Press; Scholastic UK)
Hereville: How Mirka Got Her Sword, Barry Deutsch (Amulet)
The Boy from Ilysies, Pearl North (Tor Teen)
I Shall Wear Midnight, Terry Pratchett (Gollancz; Harper)
A Conspiracy of Kings, Megan Whalen Turner (Greenwillow)
Behemoth, Scott Westerfeld (Simon Pulse; Simon & Schuster UK)

For more information, visit http://www.sfwa.org/
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go for a liedown…

The first draft of Master of the House of Darts is complete (well, almost. I need to fill in a number of gaping holes. But I made it to the end, and the plot basically holds together). Now for a round of edits before uploading it to my crit group.

*phew*

I’d be off for a liedown, but it’s party night.

So it’s been about six months, and I thought I’d report a bit on our experience with the rice cooker.

First, a word of warning: this isn’t going to be a post of great revelations about rice cookers–it’s mostly us discovering obvious things. If you already know about rice cookers, especially high-end models, you can probably skip this blog post. We feel very much like we’ve just discovered something half the world already knows about…

I was very ambivalent about the appliance at first, thinking it a big investment with little return–after all, I could already cook rice at home without too much trouble, so why pay so much for a dedicated machine? (I did want a rice cooker, but one of the cheaper models. The H was the one who convinced me to get a high-end, fuzzy logic cooker).

Our rice cooker. It’s a Philips HD4751 (yeah, I know. Philips isn’t a company you’d associate with rice cookers, but they’ve recently started expanding into Malaysia and Singapore, and their electronics are CE-certified. See below for why this matters)

The biggest pro by far is freeing space on the stove–it might not look like much, but so many Asian dishes require cooking ingredients separately, and the four spots on the stove can get crowded very fast–especially if one of them is a huge wok, which tends to eat into the space of the other spots…

Second obvious pro: cooking rice on the stove is fairly easy (as long as you’re not cooking glutinous rice or Japanese short grain rice, which I’m given to understand is a little more complicated), but it does require a bit of attention. By contrast, the rice cooker pretty much takes care of itself: once the rice and water are in, I can go do other things (like chopping up vegetables or preparing a marinade), secure in the knowledge that I won’t have a burnt mess at the bottom of the casserole dish. All I have to do is open up the thing when the timer runs out, and fluff it a bit so that the rice doesn’t stick together, and then close it again–and it stays inside snug and warm until the rest of the ingredients are actually cooked (I’m given to understand the long keep-warm function is one of the big advantages of a higher-end model like ours; the cheaper ones don’t work so great).

The thing also handles other kinds of rice: sushi rice (which was handy for our few forays into Japanese cuisine); brown rice (which is nigh-impossible to cook on a stove), and cháo (congee/rice porridge). Cháo can be made on the stove, but again, the rice cooker makes it much more convenient.

Also, it has a steaming setting! See, the H and I both love dim sum, in particular ha kau, cha siu buns and other classic Chinese dishes. Accordingly, we tried several options for steaming our dim sun. Metal baskets, bamboo baskets, baskets lined with baking paper or foil (and believe me, piercing dozens of holes in baking paper or foil in order to let the steam pass is one of the most soul-destroying activities in the kitchen)… The steaming bit worked great, but what didn’t work was the get-the-dumplings-out-the-basket-without-tearing-them-apart bit. In other words, the damn things tended to stick to the hot surface, which made it very hard to get some decent-looking meals.
Our rice cooker, on the other hand, comes with a plastic white basket which slots over the main reservoir–and things actually don’t stick to it. I’m in love. Plus, you can cook rice and dim sum at the same time (the dim sum get cooked by the steam from the rice). Win!

Cons: if you don’t eat enough rice, of course, it’s pretty much a worthless investment. On the other hand, I’ve found that our global consumption of rice in the household increased–rice suddenly became as lazy an option as pasta when we both came home knackered from the day job.

One thing I do miss is the burnt bits at the bottom (they have a special name in Vietnamese, but I can’t remember for the life of me what it is). When they’re not charred, but just the right shade of golden, they make for delicious eating, and of course you can’t get those with a rice cooker, which makes perfect rice every time…

One minor con: we did need to get hold of someone who spoke Traditional Chinese before we could use the thing. As you can see, everything on it is labelled in Chinese characters, which can be a bit of a drawback when the instruction booklet isn’t explicit: it did include numbered diagrams, but it also suffered from a flaw I’ve often seen in Philips instruction booklets, which is that there are numbers missing, rendering the system pretty much useless. Thankfully, an amazing number of people showed up here, on FB and on LJ to help us interpret the labels.

Last con if you live in Europe: getting hold of the %% thing in the first place. Most rice cookers sold in the 13th Arrondissement (our local Chinese/Vietnamese district) are simpler models–most high-end rice cookers are made for the Asian markets, and are not CE-certified, which prevents them from being imported in Europe. It took us a whole afternoon to find this one.*

So, overall, very happy with the purchase. Coming late to the whole concept (or, indeed, the whole cuisine thing :-p), but definitely a fan. We’re probably one of the few French households with a sophisticated rice cooker and no coffee-maker whatsoever…

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* Yes, we could probably have asked one of our numerous friends living in Asia to buy one for us, and bring it back–the thought didn’t occur to us until it was far too late…

I was reminded by SFWA that members have until Tuesday to finalise their nominations for the Awards. Mostly, I was all but done–I wished I’d had time to read more novels, but, alas, most of what I read last year wasn’t published in 2010.

I had more time this year for short fiction, and thanks to the bebook, managed to read more than last year, by downloading stuff which looked cool from the SFWA forums (and there was plenty of it). Voting for the Nebulas is the biggest honour and privilege I derive from being a member of SFWA (most of the rest being really focused on the US), and I fully intend to make the most of it

Meanwhile, if you’re a member of SFWA and unsure what to vote for, may I suggest:
-”Alternate Girl’s Expatriate Life”, by Rochita Loenen-Ruiz (Short Story): a great story of immigration, alienation and man vs. machine. Available on the SFWA forums.
-”Flying in the Face of God” by Nina Allan (Novelette): about space explorations, its cost and its impact on those who are left behind. Available here as a PDF from the TTA press website.
-”The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers from Beneath the Queen’s Window” by Rachel Swirsky (Novella): a tale of a woman summoned again and again from beyond death to practise magic–dealing with loss, prejudice and the evolution of cultures and countries, and a great reversal on the “summoning demons” trope. Available here from Subterranean.

(my own stuff is here if you feel like trying it out: “The Jaguar House in Shadow”, an Aztec alt-hist novelette on friendship, betrayal and honour, has already garnered favorable reviews from Locus, and at least one nomination; and of course I’d be pleased as punch if you deemed it worthy)

When I started up the cooking experiments, way back near the beginning of this blog, I had a heck of a time mixing up that basic staple of Vietnamese cooking, dipping sauce (aka nước chấm). My grandmother’s instructions went something like this: “a little nước mắm (concentrated fish sauce), a little lime, a little sugar, and mix everything”. Of course, she’s been mixing it her whole life, so she can do it by colour. I, on the other hand, am not very good at colour, and have a boundless capacity for screwing up proportions (ask anyone who participated in New Year’s Eve, where I cooked 40 spring rolls, and enough venison for 15 people–which would have been great had there actually been 40 of us at table instead of 9…)

So when I started mixing my own fish sauce, I went by the (cook)book. I filched recipes from Mai Pham’s Pleasures of the Vietnamese Kitchen and from Bach Ngo’s The Classic Cuisine of Vietnam, and used the same proportions. Invariably, though, the result ended up tasting really bad, and I ended up having to top up ingredients in a frantic attempt to get the taste and colour back into familiar ranges.

I thought it was further proof of my lack of talents at cooking–until I read this article on Andrea Nguyen’s Viet World Kitchen blog, on how to buy fish sauce. Down near the middle, there’s a note that says that fish sauce sold in the US is single-grade–with an average of 20°in purity (ie, 20% pure fish concentrate, 80 water).

But, see, in France, unlike in the US, fish sauce comes in several grades–25° or 35°. And my mom, my grandma and I (and most Vietnamese) buy 35°. So basically, I’ve been trying to get proportions right with the wrong kind of fish sauce, and all the quantities of those recipes should be adjusted by 20/35 (which is about 60%).

No wonder those recipes all tasted really foul, and that the only recipe which ever worked was the one I picked up on a French blog…

-Ove Jansson aka Cybermage:

Aliette de Bodard has done it again. Harbinger of the Storm is an action packed Aztec mystery opera with magic, interventions from the gods and more twists and turns than the first book. (…) The story is self contained and can be enjoyed standalone, but you will not want to miss out on the first. I wish it was 2012 already even if the world is going under while I read the final Obsidian and Blood.

-Violin in a Void:

[Acatl] leads us into an increasingly dark and bloody tangle of mythology and political intrigue that is not merely a worthy successor to Servant of the Underworld, but a tighter, pacier and altogether more exciting read. (…)It’s a complex but intriguing story, and I for one am thoroughly satisfied with this sequel. According to De Bodard’s blog the final book in the Obsidian and Blood trilogy will be titled The Master of the House of Darts, and its due for release in November 2011. If De Bodard continues to build on what she’s done so far, it’s going to be epic.

-Publishers Weekly (starred review):

Political intrigue and rivalry among a complex pantheon of divinities drive this well-paced murder mystery set at the height of the Aztec Empire in the late 15th century.(…) De Bodard incorporates historical fact with great ease and manages the rare feat of explaining complex culture and political system without lecturing or boring the reader.

Er, wow? PW starred review is certainly most intimidating, and I’m very glad a lot of people seem to think HoS is a better book than its predecessor. I’d be going for a liedown if I wasn’t %%% busy…

’tis a bit blurry, but this is what I got up to this weekend, in between snatches of writing that %%% book.

Nem nướng, aka pork patties, Vietnamese style. Not quite there, as I was missing the roasted rice powder (had roasted rice, but no grinder or mortar sturdy enough). For next time.

Meanwhile, back to the (literary) grinder. Almost done…

The blog is still on official darkness notice, but just a quick word to go and read Ekaterina Sedia’s superb post, “Seeing Through Foreign Eyes”, on writers and foreign cultures (touches on insider vs. outsider cultural approaches, and the disproportionate value attributed to “outsider” books):

So the issue with books set in foreign cultures, I think, that even though many SF/F readers call for more perspectives and diversity, they don’t really want that. They want someone familiar to show them some exotic stuff without actually challenging the readers’ assumptions or values. But really, if you want to experience a different perspective and a different mindset, read a book in translation.

Yes, yes and yes.

Happy New Year of the Cat/Rabbit for those who celebrate. (I’m firmly in Cat territory)

Part 2 of the Codexian blog tour, in which the amazing Nancy Fulda tells us about writing and sculpture:

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The Renaissance sculptor Michelangelo once said: “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”

He also said: “The marble not yet carved can hold the form of every thought the greatest artist has.”

In this, I think, sculpting is not so very different than writing. As authors, we stand like Michelangelo before the lump of our incompleted stories, stupefied not by lack of ideas, but by their plethora. An unfinished story is full of potential. It might become anything: an action-adventure saga, a conflicted character story, an incisive satire.

It is this potential that dazzles us. And it is this same potential which so often causes us to stumble.

A story is defined, not so much by what it is, but by what it is not. Faced with the rough surface of a draft that has not yet been freed from the stone, the writer might feel tempted to do it all: concentrate on character and plot and symbolism and prose style. He is afraid to cut away too much, and so his chisel strokes are awkward, and hesitant, and ultimately unsatisfactory. The angel within the stone remains buried beneath a jumble of beautiful clutter.

Michelangelo said, “The more the marbles wastes, the more the statue grows.” This is, I believe, an early incarnation of the well-known injunction to Murder Your Darlings.

All life is nurtured by death, and a story is defined not so much by what it is, but by what it is not. Our fiction cannot take on life unless we are willing destroy all of the beautiful possibilities but one: the best one. We must be willing to slay the poetic character story in order to set the action-adventure free. We must murder the satire so that drama can rise from its ashes.

I hear objections shouted from the crowd already.

Yes, of course it’s possible to mingle plot with characterization. Like Abraham, we are sometimes spared from destroying something precious in the pursuit of something we treasure even more. But let’s remember something about Abraham: he was firm in his priorities.

You want a deeply conflicted protagonist who fights bad guys with paperclips, and by the way, he loves to compose limericks? Fair enough, but you’d better figure out which of those three elements is most important to you, because if any of the others get in its way, you’re going to have to clear them out. Failure to do so will imprison your angel.

This is why critique groups can be so frustrating, by the way. Each critiquer gives voice to one of the thousand Stories-That-Might-Have-Been. Each of them calls for a distinct, if superficially similar, narrative. It’s no wonder new authors sometimes feel lost in the babble.

The only solution is to find your angel. Your angel, not anyone else’s.

In other words, find your rough draft’s dominant draw — the aspect of the story that ignites your aesthetic passion, the part of it you love most. That’s your angel.

A story’s ending is often indicative, here. Critiquers may complain that the end doesn’t mesh with themes presented earlier. That’s because the writer was still exploring ideas. At the end of the first draft, when it’s time to wrap things up, his subconscious emphasizes those elements which have become most meaningful to him — and they are often not the same elements that dominated the opening scenes.

For heaven’s sakes, folks, don’t smother your angels! Be very cautious if someone tells you to change your ending. Ask yourself whether it’s the beginning that ought to change, instead.

Find your angel, writers. Don’t stop carving until you’ve set him free.

And if it seems like a lot of work along the way? And if we’re tempted to feel jealous of the people who do it better than we do?

Well, a certain Renaissance sculptor once said: “If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful at all.”

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Nancy Fulda’s fiction has appeared in venues including Asimov’s, Jim Baen’s Universe, and Norilana Books’ Warrior, Wisewoman anthology. She is a Phobos Award recipient, a two-time WOTF Finalist, and an assistant editor at Jim Baen’s Universe. Nancy also manages the custom anthology web site at http://www.anthologybuilder.com, where visitors can assemble a print-ready anthology of stories by prominent authors. Nancy keeps a blog at http://nancyfulda.livejournal.com. She lives in Germany with her husband, their three children, and no cats. You can order a collection of her short fiction here.