And, as promised, here is J. Damask (Joyce Chng) on her process of writing Wolf at the Door–enjoy!

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Back in the first half of 2009, I was pregnant with my second child. I was also filled with an inexplicable energy to write. Novels, short stories – you mean it, I wrote them. Call it a weird side-effect from pregnancy: I was just incredibly productive.

I wanted to write an urban fantasy story. Yes, urban fantasy, not the kind I saw popping up everywhere, replete with kick-ass heroine, hunky hero and assorted kinds of were-animals. I wanted to write an urban fantasy set in Singapore, the land of my birth. The main character would be a mother with kids. She would not fit the mould of the stereotypical werewolf. Most of all, she would be Chinese.

So, I wrote. At first, the story grew into a novella, Full Moon, Dragon Gate. But you know about novellas: they are hard to sell. I ended up putting the novella on the back-burner. I delivered and two months later, decided to write a 50k novel for Nanowrimo. That’s right. 50k in a month. I had a newborn to look after. What was I thinking? People were going “You must be kidding me!”

Throughout the entire process, I was telling myself that I was crazy. Why would I want to write the novel within a month? But I did and Wolf At The Door was born.

As the story goes (no pun intended), I shopped around for a publisher. The rest, you, know, is history.

Perhaps it was/is the drive to see more urban fantasy (and heck, SFF) novels from Southeast Asia that pushed me on. There are novels set in the United States of America, Britain and even Australia. I want to see stories coming from Singapore and the rest of the Southeast Asian countries. I mean, just look at the mythologies – they are so perfect for urban fantasy, the old adapting/co-existing/interlacing with the new (urbanization). I want to see more urban fantasy – creatures of myths and legends living side by side or within the human population. I want to see more of the cultures.

[You see, I keep repeating "I want"...]

So, if you want more diversity in urban fantasy, be sure to enjoy Wolf At The Door.

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J Damask (aka Joyce Chng) lives in Singapore, loves gardening and is a cat herder. She has a writery blog at A Wolf’s Tale.

So, apparently, you can search the contents of Gardner Dozois’s Year’s Best Science Fiction on Amazon.com, and, hum, in addition to publication of “The Shipmaker” in the volume itself, I have 4(!) Honorable Mentions: for “Father’s Last Ride” in The Immersion Book of Science Fiction, “Desaparecidos” in Realms of Fantasy, and my two Asimov’s stories, “The Jaguar House, in Shadow” and “The Wind-Blown Man”. Particularly happy for “The Wind-Blown Man”, which was a hassle to write because of the world-building (making up a new kind of science based on Daoist alchemy and not overly polluting the text with references to current science was a tricky balance to strike).

(and huge congrats to the friends on the HM list, but most particularly to T.L. Morganfield for “The Hearts of Men” in Realms of Fantasy, a story I’ve always believed would go far; and to Lavie Tidhar, who’s just racking up the HMs)

Meanwhile, a further 1000 words on the novella. Stopped because my cool ideas weren’t integrated well enough (ie, need to think a little more on how the science would work on a day-to-day basis without sounding too much like an engineer). Also, I fear people will tear out their hair with names like “Lê Thi Linh”, “Lê Thi Huu Phuoc”, etc. Yeah, Vietnamese without the diacritical marks is a bit of a hassle as well…

I can haz DVD of Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame. In Mandarin with English subtitles.

It’s movie night

Aka bánh mì chiên tôm. Literally, fried bread with shrimp. It’s hard for me to explain about shrimp toast. It’s always been one of my favourite foods, though I didn’t actually eat so much of it when I was younger; but when I started cooking for myself, it was one of the first recipes I tried to reproduce. And, boy, those do bring back memories…

 

So, I guess it’s official now: my story “Prayers of Forges and Furnaces” will be in Sean Wallace’s Mammoth Book of Steampunk. Kind of hard to describe that one–sort of Aztec meets the Wild West (I’ve always pictured it in some sort of post-Apocalyptic Mexico, in the northern deserts). It’s got the requisite mine, train network, and the lonely gunslinger (well, OK, not quite what you think, on any of those things). And robots, too, because they always make stories more fun! Set in the same universe as “Age of Miracles, Age of Wonders”.

Many many thanks to Marshall Payne and Rochita Loenen-Ruiz for helping me with this one. I’ve always been absurdly fond of this story, and I’m glad to see it find a good home.

Snippet:

The stranger came at dawn, walking out of the barren land like a mirage–gradually shimmering into existence beside the bronze line of the rails: a wide-brimmed hat, a long cloak, the glint that might have been a rifle or an obsidian-studded sword.

Xochipil, who had been scavenging for tech at the mouth of Mictlan’s Well, caught that glint in her eyes–and stopped, watching the stranger approach, a growing hollow in her stomach. Beneath her were the vibrations of the Well, like a calm, steady heartbeat running through the ground: the voice of the rails that coiled around the shaft of the Well, bearing their burden of copper and bronze ever downwards.

(and wow, will you look at that awesome TOC!)

… as evidenced below:

(yup, you can tell that we ran out of nice-looking bowls for the food…)

From left to right and top to bottom: rice, bok choy in oyster sauce, tôm rang thịt ba chỉ (caramelised shrimp and pork belly), nước tương dến ớt (sweet soy sauce with ginger), sweet and sour sauce, bún canh gà (chicken broth with vermicelli), nước mắm gừng (ginger-lime dipping sauce), sour-sweet sauce, and Hainan chicken (one of those Chinese dishes that emigrated to Vietnam). There were a couple minor disasters, such as confusing the pork belly and the shrimp when preparing the marinade (a little embarrassing, as it’s the pork that needs to be covered with sugar and nước mắm in order for its fat to caramelise on high heat), and not having enough ice (pretty much a vital component for the chicken), but overall, it all went fairly smoothly.

Also, there was shrimp toast. More on that later.

Girlyman, Saint Peter’s Bones

Aka the song I cannot get out of my head right now.

In other news, the cooking for tonight has begun (not liveblogging this, because I’d rather keep everything a surprise :=) )

My recent cooking adventures: I went shopping for cooking supplies, timing this precisely with the opening day of the sales in Paris because I’m a klutz. All in all, it could have been worse: there weren’t many people in the cooking department–presumably because most people don’t shop for frying pans and saucepans during the sales I was looking for two things, a garlic press and a lid for my wok. Garlic press was a failure, as everything was so horrendously expensive (more than 5 times what I paid for my old garlic press in the 13th District, our local Asiatown). Lid worked out OK, though: I got this neat little thing that fits on pans of various widths. It’s got a valve for letting steam escape which I don’t need (a lot of wok cooking is steam cooking in the pan, which, er, needs the steam?), but which you can open or close, but it was better than most of the alternatives (which were either horrendously expensive, pierced with holes that I couldn’t close, or just plain not practical). As a note, I really wouldn’t have thought it was that hard to buy a pan lid…

Recipe-wise, I tried making chả lụa (Vietnamese sausage), which didn’t turn out great (I will try again, as I think I’ve got a fair idea of what went wrong during the recipe), and I finally found a pad thai recipe that worked for me, by dint of sheer adjustments with the condiments.

It’s below, though note that the authenticity of the recipe is totally not guaranteed. I’ve never had this anywhere but in the United States, so I’m mostly reproducing what I ate…

(my picture for it is awful due to major camera failure, so I’m using one from Steve Snodgrass. It mostly tells you what the dish ought to look like, and I make no pretense that mine was this pretty, especially since concentrated tamarind is inky black and tends to stain food the same colour…)

 

Coming soon: my major cooking adventure, aka how I undertake a Vietnamese dinner for a bunch of friends.

So, I finally got a chance to read J. Damask’s Wolf at the Door (published by Lyrical Press)–and really, really liked it. It’s a urban fantasy set in Singapore: Jan Xu is part of the lang, the Chinese werewolves: her pack is her family, and the thing around which her world revolves. She has married and settled down with her partner Ming, who isn’t a werewolf; and she has two small girls, whom she raises half like humans, half like wolves.

Then Marianne comes back. Marianne is Jan Xu’s sister, but there’s a catch: raised like all werewolves, Marianne failed to shape-shift when she hit puberty. Though considered a member of the family, Marianne has always chafed at what she saw as second-class membership of the pack, and left Singapore after quarrelling with Jan Xu. But now she’s back, boyfriend in tow–and she seems to have ideas of her own about where to take the pack…

This is original on several levels: the most obvious is the setting, which shows us not only Singapore seen through the view of an insider, with no exoticisation or over-description of familiar items and locations. It’s very casual about everyday life, but nevertheless effectively manages to convey not only Jan Xu’s life and her excursions to all ends of the city (including a hunting reserve in Malaysia), but also to effectively base its mythology on its setting, making the most of Singapore as a crossroads, teeming with immigrants who each bring their own folklore (I loved the bar which had vampires mingling with nagas). I also liked the way Damask ties her werewolves to Chinese folklore, rather than to European myths; it’s very nicely done.

The second thing is the emphasis on family. A lot of urban fantasy is focused on the single girl (who might have children of her own, but who is still secretly looking for The One); and while those are definitely strong stories, it was really nice to see a book which focused on, well, what happens after the wedding and the childbirths. Marianne’s returns has repercussions on Jan Xu’s family life, and her relationship with her husband and her two girls: some of my favorite scenes take place in the quiet times at the flat, when the emphasis is on how she and Ming can deal with the consequences of what happened, and how to best shield the girls from it all. Jan Xu also has strong ties to her extended family, which nicely dovetail into the pack mentality of werewolves.

It’s not perfect. There is a set of flashbacks to Jan Xu’s past as a teen vigilante (sort of The Famous Five, except with dragons and other supernatural creatures), which feel a bit out of place: I love the background and the fact that they place Jan Xu’s friends as strong individuals (and I would really love to see those expanded into a YA novel), but the way they’re scattered throughout the story feels a little haphazard, and I felt those sections could have greatly benefitted from tidying up. But, all in all, it was a very nice and interesting read, and definitely worth a look if you’re tired of urban fantasies set in the US.

J. Damask should swing by at some point for a guest post–look out for it soon!

You might have noticed I’ve been particularly distracted and/or busy lately. I wish I could say all that energy had gone into actual writing, but not so much…

Without going into gory details (there’s a bunch of things I’d rather save for private consumption), what I can say is that we have some big changes afoot. Namely, I’m changing jobs; and we’re moving flats, in order to be closer to where I will be working (and to my family).

It’s the moving flats that’s proving to be time-consuming, as we’re renovating the new flat pretty much from top to bottom, and of course you always spend so much time looking up what stuff you want to put there (and packing boxes).

At any rate, if you’ve been wondering, that’s where we are now; and why the attention span hasn’t been happening so much lately.

But I’m also in a position to confirm that both the H and I will be at Worldcon this summer. Looking forward to it; I’m on a few program items, and there are loads of friends I haven’t seen for a while there, too. We’ll be touring North California for a week or so before, doing the usual tourist stuff.