Ok, this is the bit where I jump up and down (and possibly throw some squeeing, too). This was the news I was sitting on last week, which was killing me (I’ve known for a while, but the signed contracts arrived last week, which made it even harder to wait).

My awesome agents at Zeno Agency have sold French rights to all three Obsidian and Blood books to Mathieu Saintout of Bibliothèque Interdite (the aptly named “Forbidden Library”). Bibliothèque Interdite is currently publishing Games Workshop books, but is planning to launch their new imprint at the end of the year.

I’m going to be translated in French. For French bookshops. This is going to be so weird. But so great.

This clearly calls for leaping Bubble Bobble dinosaurs:

Very literally, in this case….
My Aztec steampunk weird alt-hist “Age of Miracles, Age of Wonders” has sold to Interzone (with mechanical creepy man, imprisoned god, blood magic, and a mining town in the Old West). Many thanks to the VD6 crew, Nancy Fulda, Stephen Gaskell, Sara Genge and Ralan Conley, for the crits that helped me fix the ending of this.

And I would also seem to have sold my Aztecs-in-space SF story “Shipbirth”, part of the Xuya continuity, to Asimov’s (do you detect a trend in story themes? :=) ). Many thanks to everyone who took a look at it on OWW: Allison Starkweather, Cécile Cristofari, Terra LeMay, L.K. Pinaire, Christine Lucas, and Ilan Lerman. And an extra dose of thanks to Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, who read it in record time and helped me fix a very important plot point.

I will be going for a liedown and more novel brainstorming.

Because my life isn’t made only of ash-spitting volcanoes…

A long, long time ago, I wrote a novel, Phoenix Rising, about which the least said the better (oh, all right, if you really want to know: it was set in a pseudo-Andalucian world and involved a hierarchy of storytellers/bards taken from Ancient Ireland. It was also, very much, 200,000 words of me not being a very good writer. Better than the previous novel I’d written, which was 200,000 words of derivative Robert Jordan, but not by much).

When I started being a Real Writer^TM (defined as the time I started submitting the stuff I wrote in a timely manner), I tinkered with it for a while and then trunked it. However, while the novel itself might have had a lot of irretrievable flaws, I still liked the universe. I liked the Andalucian vibe, and I liked my poets, my minstrels, my housevoices and my loremasters and the world they were part of, and all the myths I made up while I was writing the novel. And I was really sad to let them go.

So I decided I was going to recycle bits and pieces. I abstracted a very small part of the novel’s mythos, an isolated incident that was only mentioned once–and wrote a short story around it.

It was a somewhat frustrating experience, because I ended up stripping far more of the context than I’d intended (the Andalucian vibe, in particular, sort of vanished somewhere into a black hole). But still, it was good to come back to this world, to walk the paths again with my characters and their idiosyncracies–and to see them deal with the weight of history and myth.

The result was “Silenced Songs”, a story about poetry and song, and about how people live in the wake of loss and grief and guilt.

I’m delighted the finished piece sold to the anthology “Music for Another World”, forthcoming from Mutation Press. Yay for old universes (and many, many thanks to everyone from LH who critted either the novel or the short story).

PS: incidentally, I’m only part of the first batch of authors. The anthology still has slots open, with an April 30th deadline. If you feel musical…

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.

Just found out that “Golden Lilies” was among the top five stories of Fantasy Magazine as voted by the readers–along with stories by Jessica Lee, Camille Alexa, Aidan Doyle, and Cate Gardner. My deepest thanks to everyone who voted for it!

In other news, I sold my Aztec steampunk story “Memories in Bronze, Feathers and Blood” to Beneath Ceaseless Skies, to appear in an upcoming issue. Many thanks to the Liberty Hall people who took a look at it, and to my WIBite pals for the help (including a new, catchier title and a better ending paragraph).

My SF dystopia “Father’s Flesh, Mother’s Blood” will be appearing in Jason Sizemore’s anthology Dark Futures. Many thanks to Jason for the invite and eventual acceptance, to Marshall Payne for helping me settle on a title, and to everyone who took a look at it on OWW: Colum Paget, Ilan Lerman, Mark Hunken, and Alter Reiss (special thanks to Alter for helping me see my original ending was rubbish). EDIT: and to Justin Pilon for the awesome crit, as usual.
It’s Chinese alt-history once again (I’m in this phase), the dark counterpart to my gender-change story Heaven Under Earth (which I love but haven’t managed to sell yet), featuring possibly one of my more unpleasant, bigoted set of characters. Also, changes of identity and invasive surgery. The usual unsettling stuff

You can check out the table of contents here, which includes Codexians Alethea Kontis and Geoffrey Girard as well as Paul Jessup and Ekaterina Sedia.

This is the bit where I’d go for a liedown were it not early morning here…

I’ve sold “The Jaguar House, in Shadow” to Asimov’s. It’s a novelette set in the Xuya universe (where China discovered America before Colombus, the same as “The Lost Xuyan Bride”, “Butterfly Falling at Dawn” and “Fleeing Tezcatlipoca”, not to mention novel Foreign Ghosts, currently with my agent). It focuses on the Aztecs in Greater Mexica, and the Jaguar Knights, elite spies and manipulators caught in the bloody aftermath of the civil war. Complete with blood sacrifices, crazy priests and hallucinogenic drugs.

The mind wanders, when one takes teonanácatl.

If she allowed herself to think, she’d smell bleach, mingling with the faint, rank smell of blood; she’d see the grooves of the cell, smeared with what might be blood or faeces.

She’d remember–the pain insinuating itself into the marrow of her bones, until it, too, becomes a dull thing, a matter of habit–she’d remember dragging herself upwards when dawn filters through the slit-windows: too tired and wan to offer her blood to Tonatiuh the sun, whispering a prayer that ends up sounding more and more like an apology.

Wrote the first draft of this in Brittany last summer (somewhat amusingly, the previous sale I made to Asimov’s, “The Wind-Blown Man”, was also written in Brittany, so there’s clearly something in the air here). I workshopped this on OWW, where it got very helpful crits from Christine Lucas (silverwerecat), Rachel Gold and Swapna Kishore.

If anyone wants me, I’ll be in the flat, jumping up and down and making incoherent noises.

I’ve been sitting on this one for a loooong while, but I’ve finally been allowed to make it public: the collaboration I wrote with Gareth L. Powell, “The Church of Accelerated Redemption”, has sold to Jetse de Vries’ Shine Anthology, due out 2010 from Solaris.

This one was one heck of a hard one. Many many thanks to Marshall Payne and the BF for reading it at least two or three times, and to Jetse for having such awesome rewrite suggestions. And to Gareth for being such fun to work with.

No snippet, as Jetse has a competition planned. Watch the Shine anthology blog on Monday, 30th November for more details

Meant to post about this earlier, and then it slipped clean out of my mind (July wasn’t a good month for my brain-alignment).

I’ve sold “As the Wheel Turns” to GUD for their issue 6 (Spring 2010), a short story of multiple lives in a Chinese universe (complete with karmic wheel of rebirth, psychopathic ancestor spirits, and random Barbarian invasions).

It was workshopped on OWW under the title “Dai-Yu’s Choice”, where it received feedback from the usual suspects: Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, Linda Steele (who was kind enough to crit it in tremendous detail), and Chris Kastensmidt (whose unshakable faith in that one proved right). Thanks everyone for helping me whip it into shape!

EDIT: posted this a little too quickly, and forgot about the uber-awesome Marshall Payne, whose line-edits were super-helpful, as usual.

Prologue: the Wheel
In the Tenth Court of Hell, stands the Wheel of Rebirth.

Its spokes are of red, lacquered wood; it creaks as demons pull it, dragging its load of souls back into the world.

And before the Wheel, stands the Lady.

Every soul who goes to the Wheel must endure her gaze. Every soul must stop by her, and take from her pale hands the celadon cup, and drink.

The drink is herbs gathered from the surfaces of ponds, tears taken from the eyes of children, scales from old, wise dragons. To drink is to forget; for no soul can come back into the world remembering past lives, or the punishments meted out to it within the other Courts of Hell.

No soul.

Save one.

So, remember last year, when I went to World Fantasy and got stuck in a dingy hotel because my flight had been cancelled?

Well, it turns out some clouds definitely have big silver linings, because among the people stuck with me in the hotel were John Berlyne and Marc Gascoigne. We started talking; nine months later, one of them is my agent, and one of them has offered me a deal for three books, starting with Servant of the Underworld, and going on to two sequels.

http://angryrobotbooks.com/2009/08/angry-robot-signs-aliette-de-bodard-lavie-tidhar/
http://angryrobotbooks.com/2009/08/an-author-a-publisher-and-an-agent-walk-into-a-bar/

Publication date is Spring 2010 by new HarperCollins imprint Angry Robot. The books are a mix of murder mystery and fantasy, set in Aztec times, featuring death-priest-cum-investigator Acatl (and fun stuff like ghostly jaguars, bloodthirsty gods, and fingernail-eating monsters). They’re in the same world as “Obsidian Shards”, “Beneath the Mask”, and “Safe, Child, Safe”, forthcoming in Talebones.

It’s been brewing for a while, so I’ve already exhausted most of my screaming and squeeing, but still… Wow, wow and wow.

My many many thanks to everyone who took a look at the manuscript and kicked it into shape (and it goes without saying, but thanks to Marc for the offer and to John for the negotiation).

I’d be off for a liedown except that I really, really have to pack.

PS1: there’ll be a more detailed thank-you post later. I want to make sure I don’t forget anyone who’s looked at it, and this probably means waiting after Worldcon when my head is back on my shoulders
PS2: you can also drop by fellow Zeno Agency authorLavie Tidhar’s blog and congratulate him on the sale to Angry Robot of what sounds like a fun series
PS3: maybe I should send British Airways a thank-you note