Electric Velocipede are revamping their website to prepare for their launch as a e-zine. In the runup to that, they’re republishing fiction from their previous issues online. Among which is “The Dragon’s Tears”. Probably the best description of this is that I wrote as a homage to the Chinese fairytales I read when I was a child–I wasn’t very up to date on historical research then, but I think I nailed the feeling I got when I was six or seven, and immersed in a big fat book of wonderful stories with dragons, immortal carpenters, and crabby Iron-Crutch Li, where everything and everyone could turn out to be magical (and possibly deadly. That’s part of the deal with magical people).
Also, as Anne S. Zanoni points out, she sent me one of the sweetest mails ever after she proofread this–I’m a big Patricia McKillip fan, so being compared to her while I still felt like a raw newbie was, well, pretty magical…

Huan Ho sealed the last window, leaving only a crack in the shutter. Tonight, he thought, his eye on the empty streets, the neighbours’ barred shutters. Tonight he had to pass the door on the hill, or let the sickness take his mother.

Read more here, and do check out the rest of the cool stuff while you’re there.

John Klima let me know this afternoon that he was accepting “Heaven Under Earth”, a sort-of-Chinese SF novelette for Electric Velocipede. Yay! Very much thrilled to be in such a lovely magazine again.

This was very much a group project given the number of rewrites it went through… Many thanks to everyone who took a look at it: Justin Pilon, Marshall Payne, Patrick Weekes, Oliver Dale, Pam L. Wallace, and the VD gang: Ben Rosenbaum, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, Floris Kleijne, Stephen Gaskell, Sara Genge, John Olsen, Jeff Spock, Ruth Nestvold, Chance Morrison, and Deanna Carlyle

Snippet:

Husband’s new spouse is brought home in a hovering palanquin decked with red lanterns, its curtains displaying images of mandarin ducks and kingfishers–the symbols of a happy marriage.

First Spouse Liang Pao has gathered the whole household by the high gate, from the stewards to the cooks, from the lower spouses to their valets. He’s standing slightly behind Husband, with his head held high, with pins of platinum holding his immaculate topknot in place–in spite of the fact that he’s been unable to sleep all night. The baby wouldn’t stop kicking within his womb, and the regulators in his blood disgorged a steady stream of yin-humours to calm him down. He’s slightly nauseous, as when he’s had too much rice wine to drink–and he wonders why they never get easier, these carryings.

With gender changes. And babies. Also, red kites.