(somewhat rambling, as we’re still in the midst of watching it).

A while ago, I bought a set of the first four seasons of Doctor Who (the reboot, not the older series), for a couple reasons: first and foremost was our overdose on American TV shows, which have an amazing tendency to sound the same and display the same set of clichés (seriously, if there’s one more attempt to depict Mexico as a lawless place held by cartels, I’ll scream). Second was, well, the embarrassing feeling we might be missing out on something, and that rather more embarrassing feeling of being completely at sea when a group of fans (and there are many of those) started to debate the merits of the various doctors and companions. Third, we’d got a season of Torchwoood as a gift, watched it, and kind of liked it (well, OK. Most of the plots sucked, but who doesn’t love Captain Jack? And there were a few gems there, even though really well-hidden).

Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago, when we finally cracked those open and started watching them. So…

Well, for starters, it *is* a rather nice change to US TV. It’s got a very camp side, a sense that it’s not entirely taking itself seriously (much like the Doctor). I don’t know if it’s deliberate or not, but having what I presume are old enemies from the show appear again gives it a retro style that contributes to the overall campiness. I’m not necessarily using that in a bad way, but it’s honestly very hard to take seriously an episode such as “Bad Wolf”, which features parodies of all major reality TV shows (Anne-Droid, anyone?), and also hard to be genuinely frightened by the Daleks. Or the one with werewolf Queen Victoria and the kungfu monks…

I don’t know if this is just me getting better as a writer, but this time around I can very clearly see the difference between the various scriptwriters and their episodes–unlike US TV shows, where I can seldom remember who wrote what, and the quality of an episode seems less linked to who wrote it. I don’t know if US shows have a more unified scriptwriting policy? In any case, another major difference to most US shows is that the variance in quality is also striking: there are episodes which really, really suck, and episodes which are really great (“Girl in the Fireplace”, for instance. Like many people, I’m a Moffat fan). It’s interesting to see. Russell Davies, for instance, has a greater liking for the overblown drama, which sits ill with me; I tend to prefer more restraint.

Unlike the H, I already had some idea of the basic principles; and while the show does a great job of explaining things as they come along, the regeneration thing was rather difficult for him to swalllow. Overall, mind you, I’m not entirely sure that we got over it: it’s rather a shock to have got used a particular actor and then see him vanish, and Christopher Eccleston was just plain great. Now I understand where all those intense discussions about the Doctor’s incarnations come from.

It’s still rather desperately all-White (there is Mickey, but so far he hasn’t been a major character), though I do appreciate the variety of social classes on display, and the fact that the show doesn’t restrict itself to London (yay for Cardiff and its temporal rift). At times, it also felt like “companion waits for Doctor to save her”, which I can sort of understand given the show’s setup, but still… still, it’s a woman waiting for a humanoid-shaped man to save the day, which did get annoying after a while. I don’t know if things get better after that (we’re at “Girl in the Fireplace”).

It’s also, well, not profound–purely entertaining, which it does very well, but hardly in the league of shows that ask hard questions (your mileage may vary, but I tend to put shows such as Trigun or Battlestar Galactica here, at least in their first few eps. Stargate, for instance, is also pure entertainment, with awful assumptions made about aliens, Earth and the good old US of A).

So, anyway, that’s how we feel so far. Still two seasons and a half to go (plus the specials, and season 5). We’ll see how it goes.

I forgot to post about that last week because of being so busy, but Colin Harvey has accepted my short story “The Axle of Heaven” for his anthology Transtories, published by Aeon Press. It’s, er, more Chinese fantasy? Mostly inspired by a really late-night reading of Wolfram Eberhart Dictionary of Chinese Symbols.

Many many thanks to those who took a look at it (fairly limited set: my husband, followed by Carmelo Rafala).

-Behold, the final draft of Master of the House of Darts has been delivered to the Angry Robot overlords. Which should leave me time to catch up on a number of things I owed people (blog posts…), and to start work on the Xuya novella. Which in turn involves reading Dream of Red Mansions again. Cool.
-Servant of the Underworld has been longlisted for a British Fantasy award, which is making me all tingly. And, what’s more, I see lots of familiar names in that list, including Patrick Samphire, Stephanie Burgis (twice!), Lauren Beukes, Dave Gullen, Chaz Brenchley/Daniel Fox, Martin Owton, Rosanne Rabi­nowitz, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Adam Christopher, Beth Bernobich… Many thanks to my nominator(s).
-I have tandoori chicken, naan, and I am running water for a bath. With bubbles.

So, this is what I’ll be getting up to:

Saturday, 12:30-2:00pm, Waterstone’s Birmingham High Street: Angry Robot signing

Saturday, from 4pm, Churchill: Angry Robot signing
Yes, this is the AR afternoon. Featuring Lavie Tidhar, Lauren Beukes, Colin Harvey, John Meaney/Thomas Blackthorne, Dan Abnett, Andy Remic, and Ian Whates (hope I haven’t forgotten anyone…). Come see us!

Sunday, 7:30pm-9:00pm, Gladstone: Author reading with the fabulous Simon Morden.

(full programme grid here, though lacking the names of participants)

I was on a panel, but sadly it looks like I can’t be signing and panelling at the same time…

Also, not making any promises, but there should be some baking happening before Eastercon–think sweet things

Otherwise, I’ll be in the bar. Not sure yet about my arrival time, but I should be operational Friday late evening (10:00pm-ish), and I’ll be leaving Monday in the afternoon. Looking forward to seeing some of you there!

ETA: adjusted schedule to reflect new signing times (there’s a snafu with the grids, which is that they only work modulo 90 minutes…)

So, a lot of things are still being hammered into stone, as I understand them, but it looks like I’ll have a reading slot at Eastercon (Sunday 7:30 to 9:00 pm currently). At least, it hasn’t moved around too much in the successive re-organisations of the programme grid.

It’s the first time I have a slot that long (and my second reading. There was a first one at Worldcon a few years ago, which I also obsessed about). And yup, I’m very happy to have it, but also slightly worried. [1]

So, in the spirit of preparation: has anyone got any advice/links they’d like to share on how to manage a reading?

ETA: this might not be 100% clear, but I’m only expected to hold forth for 30-45 minutes. It’s a joint thing.

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[1]Stage fright, mostly. A panel is OK because I don’t feel alone in gathering the audience’s attention. With a reading, I feel pretty much alone, and pretty much like 50% of the draw for an audience (the other 50% being assured by my fellow reader, Simon Morden at the time of this writing). So, like, triple quadruple helping of pressure.
And, yes, hordes of butterflies in my stomach. I’m sure it will be OK in the end, but I like to be prepared.

Issue 22 of IGMS is now up, with my French post-apocalyptic merman tale “Exodus Tides”. It’s got a gorgeous illustration by the awesome Anna Repp (who already illustrated “Dragon Feasts”, and very kindly asked me for some input on the project before starting on it).
Unfortunately, the IGMS version by the story is in black and white, which I think lessens the impact. Here it is in full colour glory (you can also get it by clicking on the illustration by the story).

(if you’re wondering, the coastline really is that of Brittany, where I spent quite a good bit of my holidays when I was a child)

You can read the story here, and the whole issue here.

The TOC includes Marie Brennan, Tony Pi, Brad R. Torgersen and by George Norman Lippert.

As usual, there’ll be an essay on “The Story Behind the Story” up at the IGMS blog–keep an eye out for it. Oh, and if you feel like leaving comments, there should be a thread up in the IGMS forum soon, too. Or, you know, there’s always this post…

So, in the series of “cookbooks I use all the time”, this:

As the name indicates, it’s a list of ingredients vs. possible substitutions if say, you absolutely need rice wine but don’t have an Asian shop ready. It also lists cooking method substitutions: what to do if you don’t have a claypot or a barbecue grill. It’s not exhaustive (for instance, I couldn’t find an entry for potato starch), but it’s making a freakingly good attempt at being so: the list of ingredients includes various obscure French cheeses, panko, and a lot of the Asian ingredients I often find that I have to replace at the last minute (dropping an ingredient from a Vietnamese recipe is usually a bad idea, since they rely so much on the layering of flavours to achieve their effect–remove one, and the dish kind of lacks oomph). The substitutions are pretty smart, too (even though some of them seem a bit off to me at times). But mostly, they’re smart.

The thing I use it for most, though? It’s not the substitution list: it’s the little header besides each ingredient, which lists corresponding volume and weight equivalence (ie, 1 shallot=1 tablespoon chopped shallot=15 to 30g). Pretty much a lifesaver for all those recipes which call for ingredients by weight, whereas you tend to buy vegetables by units (well, I do, at any rate).

There’s also tables listing common ingredients such as apples, potatoes, vinegars and explaining their properties. It’s less useful for me, because they’re US varieties, and for instance, the apples list has about 20-30% varieties in common with the apples I can find here. If you live in the US, I’d imagine that section would be way, way more practical.
(and I do wish there was a section on the different starches and thickeners and their uses, but fortunately Cook’s Thesaurus has a great one).

Via Lavie Tidhar and the World SF blog:
Tsui Hark has directed a movie about Judge Dee/Detective Dee, called Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame. And here’s the trailer:

Isn’t it awesome? Sadly, it looks the movie never got a French release, but thank God for amazon.co.uk… Preordered my DVD today.
(I should perhaps explain that my love for all things of Ancient China started with Van Gulik’s Judge Dee stories–hence the squee)

ETA: actually, it’s getting a French release–in 10 days. *squee*

So, by now everyone’s seen Niall Harrison’s article about the (mis)representation of women in reviewing. Not everyone might have seen the followups: Juliet McKenna, Kari Sperring (who has started an awesome list of women to read), and Sherwood Smith, who has a great reflexion on which viewpoints are considered the norm (and great comments, too).

One sentence in what Sherwood wrote struck me:
The sense that men write about Important Things and women write about Domestic or Sentimental Things still appears to be pervasive.

And it did make me want to elaborate, on something I’ve been meaning to blog about but haven’t so far. Sherwood touches on it a bit, I think–mostly in the context of literature–but I kind of wanted to take it a step further.

See, the one thing I hate most about gender perceptions? That Important Things cannot be Domestic or Sentimental: the pervasive notion that the things men do are Important; and the things women do are not (I’m using “the things men do” in a sense of traditional gender roles–which, thankfully, have evolved quite a bit since the 19th Century). That somehow, it’s still more Important to talk about war and fighting as a soldier, still more Important to talk about science and inventing things–than it is to talk about taking care of a household, about raising children, all the myriad things that are the traditional prerogative of women. It’s sort of like saying, “as a woman, you cannot have worth until you do the things of men-essentially until you become a male surrogate.” And it saddens me, because it dismisses so-called “feminine” activities as unworthy: it’s just another way of putting men first. [1][2]

Not sure how clear this is? I’m struggling to articulate it into words.

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[1]Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s important that women who want to have a career be able to have one; that as a woman, you can be a soldier or a scientist or any occupation that catches your fancy. But I do think that as a man or as a woman, you should be allowed to stay home and take care of the kids, and be a good homecook–and not be ridiculed. That being a feminine boy should have as much worth as being a tomboy–which is so not the case today.
[2]Which is why we need more books that aren’t about traditional male activities such as saving the world and getting the girl; books like Jo Walton’s Lifelode, and Cao Xuequin’s Dream of Red Mansions (which, pretty impressively, was actually written by a man).