Aka, yipee, the snakelet let me write! Still no headspace for a novel, though I’m slowly getting back into my research and wrote a whole new scene in my chapter 5 (aka, all Hell breaks loose for one particular character, who really has no luck whatsoever).

Temp title “What the Sea Holds no Sway”. Snippet:

 In Bao Lan’s dreams, bots danced: they banked and dipped and turned over the red soil of Mars, moulding the clouds of dust they raised into ephemeral figures–the boy Cuoi and his banyan, the strategist Khong Minh and his crane-feather fan–they whirled and reared, tracing words in the flowing writing of calligraphy masters, poems like the ones hung on doorways for New Year’s Eve, bringing up memories of bygone feasts in a vanished land, in the days before the evacuation…

Sent it off to a couple readers, and meanwhile will go see what the %%% is wrong with our hot water supply…