(with a few that are a bit old, but I’d missed them before…)

-Keyan Bowes on “Why I write American”, chiming in on the differences between Asian (where she used to live) and American fiction as she perceives them
-Amal El-Mohtar on “Towards a Steampunk Without Steam”, a great discussion on why imposing Victorian values on steampunk is a bad idea (and yes, it’s an old post)
-Gabrielle Gantz interviews me for The Faster Times
-Lawrence M Schoen interviews me for his feature Eating Authors
-Val’s Random Comments weighs in on Master of the House of Darts (aka, thank God, the book is working)
-Jaoob at Drying Ink reviews Master of the House of Darts

In other news, huge congrats to the Angry Robot overlords Marc Gascoigne and Lee Harris for winning the World Fantasy Award last night! (even though a bit sad there wasn’t a Bragelonne win, as this would have been the very first win of a non-Anglophone) The complete list of winners is here.

And Happy Halloween everyone–we don’t celebrate here, so I’m going to stick to some phở…

Just a reminder that you have until Nov. 1st to enter the Master of the House of Darts competition, which comes with lots of neat prizes . You can enter via a comment or a repost, but for the best chance to win, don’t forget you can make up an Aztec recipe! So far, we’ve had prickly pear juice, chicken mixiotes, Aztec brownies, poultry with spicy fruit sauce, and gummy hearts that look like real hearts (not a recipe per se, but good enough as Aztec food ). Come and join in the fun, either here or here!

(the less experiences cooks can also tell me who their favourite character in Obsidian and Blood is )

(mostly posting this because a couple of people, including desperance, were interested. This is cooking 101–I knew how to do this before I left my parents’ house, and God knows I knew next to nothing cooking-wise back then–so don’t expect any great revelations…)

So… rice. I was 20, I think, when I realised that the way I’d learnt to cook rice didn’t correspond to what the majority of French people expected. The French way of cooking rice is a bit like cooking pasta: boil water with salt, put rice in water, drain in a colander.

Which is pretty close to a heresy in my book (and in a looot of other people’s books if they’re not French), so as I promised: here’s the way I cook rice. As usual, making no particular claims; just what I learnt (and adjusted).

Picking your rice: what I always get is jasmine rice, the new crop if it’s that time of the year (though be aware the new crop isn’t as dry as the older ones, which means you might need slightly less water. We’ll come back to that later). You can cook jasmine rice on a stove with a basic nonstick saucepan; some varieties, such as Japanese rice and glutinous rice, can’t be handled that way (you need to steam it in a special container, or to have a rice cooker).
Whatever you pick, get starchy rice, and not the varieties that come with the starch all but removed like Uncle Ben’s or the stuff that’s on Western supermarket shelves. Arborio is also unsuitable for this; and I’ve had variable luck with Basmati, which sometimes has a tendency to burn the bottom of the pan; I suspect the rice needs way more water than the jasmine, but I could be wrong about this…

Storage: store rice in a cool dry place, away from light. You don’t want beasties getting into it; otherwise it’ll keep almost forever, but will lose its fragrance as time passes (I once ate rice that was 3-4 years old. Not bad, but kind of funky–like everything was off with it). My maternal grandmother mixes 9/10 jasmine rice, 1/10 glutinous rice; which gives a nicer texture once it’s cooked.

Rinsing rice: you need to rinse the rice before you cook it, to get rid of the excess starch. Rinsing is probably a misnomer, because it’s more a case of washing. Basically, take the amount of rice you want, put it in a casserole dish or a bowl, put some water, swirl the rice around a bit until the water gets opaque. Dump the water, put more water, rinse again, and so on for a few rounds. Most of the time I stop at 4, but that’s because I’m lazy. (I was always told 7 times was the right number). A lot of cookbooks will advise you to rinse the rice until the water runs clear. That’s an exaggeration: the water never gets clear. (rice is mostly starch, and the water gets clouded with starch. If it didn’t, it would be because you’d removed the starch altogether…). You HAVE to rinse the rice, otherwise the flavour will be lost in the starch excess. Especially jasmine rice, which has a delicate aroma that is easily crushed.

The rice in its bowl after a couple of washings. Look, you can almost see the grains!

Quantities? I’m not crazy about the imperial system, but rice is definitely a staple you measure by volume, and not by weight. I use 300mL of uncooked rice for a 2-person meal, which is 1.5 rice cooker cup (note that a rice cooker cup is around 200mL, unlike an imperial measuring cup).

Adding water: now that the rice has been washed, put it into your pan. A nice, thick bottom is a good idea, in order to spread the heat evenly; and a nonstick pan is also a good idea, because there’s still starch in your rice, and the grains are going to cling like limpets to the bottom of the pan. Then measure out 1.25 times the volume of rice in water: if you put 1 cup rice, add 1.25 cup water, and so on. (I tend to adjust a bit depending on how old–and dry–the rice has got).

Steam cooking: cook on high heat (the water should be boiling) until the “eyes” form. The rice is still wet, but lots of little holes are beginning to form as the steam lifts from the grains.

The “eyes”. Aren’t they pretty?

Final cooking: when the “eyes” form, turn the heat to the lowest setting you have. Cover, and leave to cook for about 20 minutes. Don’t lift the lid during that time, or the steam will escape: I was always told this would ruin the rice. I suspect what really happens is that the water goes away, and the rice burns on the bottom. Plus, dry rice just doesn’t taste very good.

A word of warning: I’ve not tried any of that on a gas stove (me and gas don’t get along), so you might need to adjust a bit. Also, from my mom’s experience, cooking rice on an induction stove is a little trickier. I suspect it’s because the temperature of the pan adjusts more or less instantly when you turn off the heat, and the final cooking stage is much more difficult when you can’t count on the residual heat from the pan itself. If anyone wants to chip in with induction stove experience, feel free!

And if you have any questions/comments/disagreements, please do post them.

Officially, Master of the House of Darts should be on sale today (the downside to living several thousand kilometers from the bookstores is that I won’t see it, but I’m sure it should be around physical bookstores. Otherwise, ebooks work too )

Now I can stop blogging like crazy, get some sleep, and research rice cultivation in Asia (don’t ask, it’s for a story…) Also, I am proud that I have finished sorting out my books!!!
(it bugs me, though, that I seem to have lost two of the buggers somewhere in the move. We have absolutely *no* idea where they are, and I don’t think anyone would want to steal a book of Vietnamese fairytales and an Ancient Vietnam mystery book).

In other news, H and I are enjoying the anime Ergo Proxy, though we’re mostly at the “crazy theories” stage…

So, in order to celebrate the impending release of Master of the House of Darts (small reminder: you can see the trailer here), I’m holding a little competition.

Prizes are as follows:

-1st prize: your choice of EITHER:
-a glyph artwork (it’s from Guatemala I think), which will look fabulous with a frame and hung upon your wall, a signed copy of Writers of the Future XXIII, which has the very first Acatl short story with the original Marcus Collins artwork, and a signed copy of Master of the House of Darts.

OR:

-a signed copy of Writers of the Future, a signed copy of Master of the House of Darts as above, and a tuckerisation. I will put a character with your name (adapted for correct ethnicity if the story requires it), and a few telling details in the next work I tackle. I’m hoping it’s Unclean Spirits, the Foreign Ghosts sequel, but if the series doesn’t sell and I never end up writing the sequel within a reasonable amount of time, I’ll shift it to an appropriate novelette. In addition, you will also get a sneak peek at the Vietnamese space station novella.

-2nd prize: whichever of the two prizes above the 1st place winner doesn’t choose.

-3rd prize: your choice of signed book, either Writers of the Future, Servant of the Underworld, or Harbinger of the Storm.

The rules are as follows: I will put everyone’s names in a hat, and draw at random. Your name gets put in the hat as many times as you have points. Get points in the following manner (they’re all cumulative, so you can do several of those things at the same time):

1. 4 points for creating and posting your favourite Aztec-inspired dish (a few hints here, and you can also google “Aztec food” for plenty of other websites. Basic staples include maize, cactus, turkey, various spices and chillies, and cacao beans). I will NOT judge how authentic the recipe is, or even check to see that it’s eatable, but mainly how creative you are!
(however, do not try to sell me a hamburger as your favourite Aztec food…)
ETA: sorry, wasn’t clear. Post the Aztec dishes in the comments of this post or its LJ mirror.
2. 2 points for telling me, in the comments, your favourite character in the Obsidian and Blood books, and why. There’s a handy list of characters here if you’ve forgotten their names (which can always happen with Nahuatl tongue-twisters…)
3. 1 point for simply commenting, either on this blog post or on the LJ mirror
4. 1 point per repost of this on FB, LJ, Twitter, etc. (comment with a link to the post(s)/RT and I’ll credit you).

ETA: sorry, my brain went on holiday… You have until next Tuesday (Nov. 1st) to enter.

This is open to anyone, wherever you are in the world–so get cooking and reposting

Yup, once again, I have way too much time on my hands…

Let me know what you think, and I’d be very grateful if you shared/RTed/etc.
(sorry about the preview–I’ve tried to pick the best image I could, but youtube’s automatic choices aren’t excellent, to say the least…)

ETA: sorry, the competition is coming a bit later today, when I’ve finished with the various picture uploads…

So, here’s the bonus question: our mah-jong game (a gift from my grandma, bought in Vietnam) came with 16 extra tiles. We have 152 normal tiles (4 copies of the three sets+dragons+winds, and 4 seasons and 4 flowers). From googling things up on the next, we think that the extra tiles we can’t identify are Vietnamese jokers (this site and this site both describe the Vietnamese mah jong variant as having 16 jokers, which can replace a variety of tiles, from the “Emperor” who can replace pretty much anything, to the “Dragon Lady” who can replace any dragon, and so on). However, to start with, those two websites don’t agree on which tile is which! Also, neither of them has the full set of our tiles…

On the off-chance that someone would know either Vietnamese mahjong, or how to read Chinese characters–do those tiles below mean anything to you? (bear in mind it’s a Vietnamese mah jong game, so the Chinese characters are approximative, to say the least…)

And bonus question: anyone have the Vietnamese rules of the game? Sloperama mentions that there are only 19 ways of “going out”, which should correspond to the special hands in Classical Chinese mah jong, but the Classical Chinese rules I can find on the net pretty much fail at having 19 special hands…

ETA: following the find of a Vietnamese set of rules (in Vietnamese *sob*) I am pretty reasonably sure that the two topmost ranks are as follows, from left to right:
Blue: tile which replaces any tile, tile which replaces circles, tile which replaces bamboos, tile which replaces cracks
Red: tile which replaces any ordinary tile (bamboo, circles, cracks), “Great Flower’ aka tile which replaces any flower, tile which replaces any Dragon, tile which replaces any Wind
I have no idea of their names in English.

-brought up more boxes! More specifically, the extra books–the shelves are currently 80% filled, and I’m staring in mounting dread at all four boxes in the living room. Also, I seem to have lost a few books, which is annoying when they’re, say, #12 in a series of 18 (the Amelia Peabody series by Elizabeth Peters, to be more specific). On the plus side, I found my much-cherished copy of Elizabeth Bear’s New Amsterdam, and all my bandes dessinées (don’t have many of them, but I cling to them…).

-spent a nice afternoon/evening with friends doing some tabletop RPG, and then some mah-jong. Darn, I’d forgotten how much I enjoy mah-jong. One day, we’re going to be proficient enough to stop playing with the “simplified rules” (ie, no taking into account of special hands, and no bonuses. Counting a hand with the various points and doubling systems is already troublesome enough when we play about once a year, and never with the same people each time…). Also, one day, we’re going to figure out what the extra tiles in our game mean, ie how to use Vietnamese jokers…

-edited the heck out of the novella. Temp title is “On a Red Station, As If Within A Dream”, which sucks (mostly because there is absolutely no connection whatsoever. Well, OK. It is a red station in several respects, but the dream aspect? Not so much. Lobbed it off to H for his opinion while I tackle next project’s research.

Snippet:

Linh had been on Prosper Station for less than two hours before her disguise was pierced. She didn’t actually see the two men in station livery enter the room she was in—it was, in any case, far too large, filled from end to end with the makeshift houses erected to receive the mass of refugees aboard Prosper. But she was magistrate, fitted with enough mods to notice even the smallest discrepancies; and so she heard their passage: the hush that passed over the noise of the crowd, leaving only the crackling sound of maize frying in the cooking units—a wave of silence, steadily headed for her.

She’d expected this, but wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or anxious. Try as she might, her identity couldn’t be hidden–not once her name had been added to the rosters of the Temple of Literature on the First Planet.

The checklist includes a massive banquet scene, all the tropical fruit I could cram into 140 pages (longan, pitaya aka dragon fruit, lychees, coconuts, pineapple ), quotes from Chinese classics such as Three Kingdoms and (in a very meta fashion) Dream of Red Mansions, bad Vietnamo-Chinese poetry (I wrote it myself, which explains a lot of things…). Also, it has an entire scene amongst giant vats of fish sauce. Pure win, I tell you

So… I was talking about character sheets earlier. Character sheets are what I use to keep track of who does what in the trilogy–and who did what before the books actually started. I kept them regularly updated before each book, because they’re easy references, and save me the trouble of having to look up a particular details among the 25 chapters of a novel…

As usual: this isn’t an exhaustive system, or even the best system. It just happens to be the one that worked best for me.

I know lots of people go for physical description, but I’ve never found them particularly useful: I prefer to know what my character thinks, rather than what they look like, and as a result, though I did leave some spot for physical attributes on the character sheet, I never filled them out. (I think I’ve filled them once or twice, if a character has particularly notable physical traits such as scars).
I went for a format Tim Powers mentioned at Writers of the Future, which was to define a character by what they loved most, hated most, wants most and feared most. Those have to be four different things, not two pairs of polar opposites–otherwise you’re not getting much mileage from the system.
It’s actually quite interesting to see how different characters have totally different wishes (how they can, for instance, want the same things most, but not have any of the other three headings identical, and how this turns them into totally different people).

I used this as the basic format, then I threw in a bunch of other things: most useful for me were the attitudes of the various characters to the most important concepts in their societies, which helped to pinpoint the various mindsets (note that everyone is a believer, and no one is anti-religion, as this would have been historically inaccurate–not to mention awkward in a world where the gods are manifest. Though there are various degrees of appreciation, or lack thereof, for the priests in general). I added a biography, because I was tired of having a character rever to some events as having happened XXX years ago, and always getting the dates wrong…

Here’s the spoiler-free sheet for Acatl–mostly as it was at the beginning of Servant of the Underworld, though I added in a few things following Harbinger of the Storm.

(cut for length)
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(via pretty much everyone on my f-list)

Katherine Jennings illustrates “The Dalek Game”, aka she takes book titles in which she randomly replaces a word by “Dalek”. For instance, The Dalek in the Willows, Where the Wild Daleks are, …

It’s hard to pick a favourite, but I love this one, derived from Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat (and Connie Willis’ To Say Nothing of the Dog.