-The very first Angry Robot podcast: set to be a monthly affair featuring AR and genre-related stuff. The inaugural episode features Marc Gascoigne and Lee Harris (who are apparently having loads of fun with this), speaking among others about their new releases and the future of publishing. You can subscribe here (itunes subscriptions forthcoming).
-Many congratulations to Gareth L. Powell, SF writer, occasional co-author and great all-around guy, for signing up with Solaris for his novel The Recollection. Congratulate him here.
-Interesting post over at I09 on “Is avoiding tropes the same thing as telling fresh stories?”
-Janice Hardy has a contest to win an ARC of Blue Fire, second book in her (MG) Healing Wars trilogy. Also, if you’re interested in different approaches, you can see the covers of the US, UK and German editions of books 1 and 2 here.
-Jeff Spock writes about stories for casual games. Fascinating stuff about why cliché and archetypes are good for you.

My friend T.L. Morganfield has written a series of awesome posts on Using Critiques:

Using Critique: Part 1: First Things First
Using Critiques: Part 2: I’ve got a pile of critiques, but what do I do with them?
Using Critiques: Part 3: Where to get critiques, and how to develop lasting professional relationships through them.
The final part is forthcoming.

Well worth a read. Go check them out!

Yesterday, my Mom and I went to eat Vietnamese–and Mom wrangled some freshly-ground chillies from the restaurant, which she gave me to take home. So, yesterday evening, all proud of my new toy, I mix some fresh nước mắm sauce, and my hand hovers over the chillies, wondering how much to put in. After a while, I settled on the smallest unit I knew, one coffee spoon–dumped it in, and mixed everything.

After trying out the sauce with some fried rolls, I might need to rethink my smallest unit…

Also, it’s been said many times, but don’t let me loose in an Asian foodstore. I managed to get out with only a handful of bottles (sesame oil, undiluted nước mắm, and rice vinegar) , some fresh noodles, some fruit and some ginger, but still, it was a heavy trek back home. (also, I’m now the proud owner of a garlic press, various wooden spatulas of different shapes, and a large vegetable peeler…)

And as a parting short, via SF Signal: Samurai Wars, aka the Star Wars Universe redone in ukiyo-e (traditional apanese) style. Made of awesome (for some reason, can’t link to any of the images, but check out the following: Admiral Ackbar, Jabba the Hutt, Obi-Wan Kenobi).

Except that the day job has caught up with my brain again.

Seen this morning in the news:
-The Great Bank Robbery (in French): er, it would seem one of our most prestigious banks, a Paris branch of the Credit Lyonnais, was robbed movie-style by a bunch of thiefs who dug into the vault from one of the neighbouring cellars, tied up the security guard, and calmly proceeded to empty 200 safes–before leaving with their loot, setting fire to the whole building so they couldn’t be traced. The friend who pointed this out to me was reminded of Sherlock Holmes’ “The Red-Headed League”. Not entirely inaccurate…
-(via Charles Tan) “Falling from Grace”, a romantic comedy that apparently couldn’t sell in the mainstream–because the main character is Asian, and they’d have had to pigeonhole it under “Asian-American movies”. I have watched the trailer, and cannot for the life of me fathom why the Asian thing would be a problem. It doesn’t even seem like her private life is particularly and spectacularly “Asian” (whatever that would mean) in a way that might possibly disturb the faint of heart–sure, there’s a few specific quirks, but all in all you could imagine the same kind of movie with any colour for the main character, adapting the various sub-episodes. But, because the actress is not White, it becomes a special interest movie.
*headdesk* I think Hal Duncan is right when he calls the whole phenomenon “segregation”: it fits the definition pretty much bang to rights (not the “Black/White” issues, but the larger meaning of separation). It seems to me like a side-effect of quotas: you fit people into little boxes (like “please check the appropriate box: which race are you?”), and then you carry this over into, well, pretty much every aspect of daily life: “if you fit into such and such a box, then you’ll like this–we’ll put it into a special section so you can head right over and be among like-minded people”. And the über-box is for people who don’t check any of those boxes, who don’t have quotas, and who become (or rather remain) the mainstream. It’s scary as heck, from where I stand (admittedly not in the US, and in a country where intolerance has a whole different slew of expressions).

Ok, end of rant, I swear. Back to my Miles Vorkosigan reading (God, those books are so funny it hurts. Poor Miles).

Your Sunday morning pimpage:
-Fellow WIBite Keyan Bowes has a story up at Cabinet des Fees, “Nor Yet Feed the Swine”, a creepy take on the Curlylocks nursery rhyme. Bet you’ll never see strawberries the same way after reading it…

-Fellow VDer Stephen Gaskell‘s “Aequestria” is in the current issue of Interzone: a neat SF take on colonisation, with a nice twist at the end (and gorgeous, full-colour artwork by Jim Burns).

-And, with some delay because I hadn’t got around to reading it until recently, Angela Slatter‘s “The Chrysanthemum Bride” in Fantasy Magazine, a horror story set in Ancient China, about a vain woman taken to be the bride of the Emperor. You know it’s going to end badly and suspect some of the ending, but you still can’t stop until the end…

Mostly of the short fiction kind:
-Lois Tilton reviews “Melanie” (in the February 2010 issue of Realms of Fantasy) and “Safe, Child, Safe” (an Acatl story in the last issue of Talebones). She thinks the learning displayed in glowing symbols on the arms in “Melanie” is “A Neat Idea”, and mostly likes the other story as well.
(she also lists her Top Ten for 2009, among which are several friends such as J.Kathleen Cheney, Sarah L. Edwards, and Lavie Tidhar. Go f-list!!)
-K.V Taylor mentions “In the Age of Iron and Ashes” (Beneath Ceaseless Skies #33) over on her blog, as having this “killer South Asian influence”–quoting, in particular, the Shiva concept, the Mahabharata and the Bhagavad Gita (all of which were used at some point in the story, though more as a layer of pseudo-Hinduism over “traditional” fantasy tropes. This wasn’t meant to be authentic Indian, by a large margin). Neat. [1]
-Over at Fantastic Reviews Blog, “By Bargain and By Blood” (Hub issue 108) is Aaron’s Story of the Week:

This makes Aliette de Bodard only the third author to receive two different story recommendations on this blog, joining Paolo Bacigalupi and Catherynne M. Valente.

Er, wow? That’s some company…

---

[1]The particular setup of “In the Age of Iron and Ashes” refers to the Muslim invasion of India in the 13th Century. I read a series of elegiac texts about the loss this incurs, one of which featured a dancer on the walls of some Indian city, as a symbol of the beauty that was going to be lost in the carnage that followed. I can’t find the text for the life of me. I think it’s back at my parents’ place.

Dario Ciriello, the founder of my writers’ group Written in Blood, is interviewed by Charles Tan on Panverse Publishing, genre fiction, and writing. Go Dario!

Saw a couple of reviews trickle in during the holidays:
-Liviu Suciu at Fantasy Book Critic:

The novel fits most comfortably under the heading of “dark fantasy” with the tropes of contemporary urban fantasy – magic, sorcerers, powerful supernatural beings – called Gods here – lots of blood and violence, mostly urban setting – but is set in the Aztec Empire at its peak in the late 15th century.
The world-building is exquisite and we *believe* we are transported to the 15th century Tenotichtlan and together with the superb voice they formed the main reason I enjoyed this book so much… Highly recommended; Ms. de Bodard is a writer to watch.

-Nik Butler at Loudmouthman:

The mystical Aztec setting had every opportunity to become a tongue twisting and convoluted mish mash of vowels and golden thingies. Fortunately none of this occurs as day to day temple life and the duties of its citizens are described you can feel the richness of this bloody empire without once tripping over some unpronounceable God or location.
This is Book 1 in a trilogy and I am eager to get my hands on the next book when it is released.

*happy writer*

And to start off 2010:
-you can read “In the Age of Iron and Ashes” in the newest issue of Beneath Ceaseless Skies, along with a story by B. Gordon

They ran the girl down, in the grey light of dawn: a ring of copper-mailed horsemen, racing after her until her exhaustion finally felled her.
Yudhyana sat on his horse, shivering in the cold morning air, and thought of home—of the narrow, spice-filled streets of Rasamuri, and of his daughters shrieking with delight as he raced them in the courtyard. Anything to prevent him from focusing on what was happening.
Read more

-the French website Elbakin has launched its new web design, which is very clean and very handy to navigate. Among their latest stuff is an interview of Chris Evans, author of the Iron Elves series. (it’s also available in English for the non-bilingually oriented). They’re a portal for everything fantasy, but I really do love the fact that the new design makes the reviews very handy to read (I’m always interested in their take on things, and it’s quite informative to see how things come across in the French community–which I’m not really part of, with the whole writing-in-English thing).
-on that topic, I’m glad to see that Pyr has snapped up the US rights for Pierre Pevel’s The Cardinal’s Blades (swashbuckling à la Dumas, with dragons, translated by Bragelonne’s Tom Clegg). It’ll be interesting to see the reaction to that one.

-My novelette “The Wind-Blown Man” (aka the Daoists in space story) is now available in the current issue of Asimov’s (along with “The Stone Wall Truth” by fellow Codexian and writer extraordinaire Caroline Yoachim, which has a tantalising snippet up on the website). And, er, I would appear to be on the cover, right there with the famous people…

Here’s a snippet:

On a clear day, you could almost see all the way into Heaven.

That was what Shinxie loved about White Horse Monastery: not the high, lacquered buildings scattered across the mountain’s face like the fingerprints of some huge Celestial; not the wide courtyards where students sat like statues, the metal of their second-skins gleaming in the sun; but the clear, crisp air of the heights, and the breathless quiet just before dawn, when she could see a flash of light overhead and imagine it to be the reflection of Penlai Station.

In those moments, she could almost imagine herself to be free.

Quite curious to see the reaction to this one, as it was a bit of a challenge: it’s got a completely different scientific history of the world, a weird melding of science and religion, and it’s entirely told from the point of view of insiders to the culture (unlike “The Lost Xuyan Bride”, where having a European as the viewpoint character made a number of things easier to deal with exposition-wise).

-Apex is organising a Story of the Year Award. Up for consideration is my Chinese post-apocalyptic story “After the Fire”, but there is a lot of fine stuff on display. My personal favourites were Peter M. Ball’s “To Dream of Stars: An Astronomer’s Lament” and Rochita Loenen-Ruiz’s “59 Beads”. Both horrific in quite different ways. But go ahead, read and vote :=)

-Over at Strange Horizons, Andy Sawyer reviews The Apex Book of World SF, and says very nice things overall.