Hit 3k on a sekrit project, and started planning another round of edits to Foreign Ghosts (following very perceptive comments from my agent). And got to the end of book 2 (out of 3) in the novella, which makes 22k words. Cool bits: inserted a school called “The Abode of Brush Saplings” (a reference to the Hanlin academy, aka Court of Brush Wood, the Chinese office reserved for the very highest-ranked scholars. My students aren’t there yet, so I needed a name for the incubator 🙂 ). Mixed up all my generation references when I attempted to get the name of a particular ancestor and their generation number–this baby is going to need a complete pass to clarify the family relationships and the generations when I’m done… And put in more nice food (more pittaya aka dragon fruit) and extra references to dragons and storms. Now I probably need more actual, you know, SF and techno-porn in there… *embarrassed shrug*

We are also very rich in fruit and veggies currently, following a weekend at the in-laws where we picked apples from a farm (and got 4 kg’s worth of sub-varieties I’d never heard of, an example of how sadly normative the high-street grocery market has become in France), and a weekend where my mom dropped off some more fruit and vegs (tomatoes, raspberries and potatoes). I’m planning Singaporean croquettes (a recipe I filched from Charmaine Solomon’s The Complete Asian Cookbook, which involves ground beef, cumin, potato purée and breadcrumbs. Yum yum).

And this is made of awesome: the newest edition of the Czech magazine XB-1, which contains “Stavitelka korábů”, the translation of “The Shipmaker” (with thanks to Martin Šust and my nameless translator–I’m pretty sure they’re not nameless, but I can’t navigate the Czech website well enough to find out their name…).

(and yes, before you ask, quite obviously “-ard” is a masculine name ending in Czech, therefore I get to be known as “Aliette de Bodardová”, which is pretty darn cool)