Keeping this brief…

In 2013, I published a handful of stories (see here for a complete list), and managed to write a couple more. I worked on my novel (but see below why the progress on that got a little interrupted…); attended a couple cons (Eastercon, Nebula Awards and Rencontres de l’Imaginaire).

I won a Nebula Award (for “Immersion”), a Locus Award and was twice finalist for the Hugo, finalist for the Sturgeon and finalist for the Sturgeon Memorial Award.
I got my novelette, “The Waiting Stars”, into Gardner Dozois’s Year’s Best.

Also made my first foray into self-publishing with the release of the e-edition of On a Red Station, Drifting. The response to it has been overwhelming; in general, this has been a year to be greatly thankful for–my gratitude goes to everyone who supported me, whether by reading my stuff, promoting my stuff, listening to my (numerous) twitter rants and/or giving me pregnancy/parenthood/writing/misc. advice. Much much appreciated; I’m humbled to have such generous people around me.

And, of course, the major production of the year was the successful (and mostly eventless, though those things are always more eventful than you’d like!) delivery of the snakelet. The side-effects included selling the old place, buying the new place and moving into it–still an ongoing project. My current level of parenthood is “apprentice”, I reckon…

2014 should see publication of a few stories; hopefully work on that %%% novel (I’m finding it hard to concentrate on anything longer than a few thousand words lately–we didn’t get the baby model that had long, quiet naps!); and attendance at Worldcon and possibly Nine Worlds (we should be in London August 8th-August 18th).

Hope everyone has a great end of year and a very happy 2014, and see you on the other side!

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…

In case you had any doubt, not much writing is happening–snakelet is a bit of a full time job…

Desultorily planning my novel (I know how to fix my plot problem, I just don’t have the time to tackle the chapter–each time I sit down too write there’s a scream from the bedroom…).

I’ve just discovered that there’s emails I haven’t answered to, so if you sent anything to me from 1st Sept to 10th Sept and are still waiting on an answer, would you mind poking me? I didn’t have email access while in hospital and obviously misplaced a couple things when we got home with the snakelet…

-The awesome Rochita Loenen-Ruiz and her sister interview Benjanun Sriduankaew:

I think of short stories as presenting a question, even if it’s something as simple as ‘how will the characters get what they want?’  It’s my hope that readers will be engaged by that question even if the story isn’t presenting a direct answer – so that’s what I hope they take away: a question. But I also hope to excite a sense of wonder and a sympathetic interest, when possible.

Read more here (and fully concur with the reminder that Benjanun’s eligible for a well-deserved Campbell Award for Best New Writer next year at Loncon3!)

Hum, so, that story about the phoenix?

I’ve sold it to Subterranean Online for a future issue. Many thanks to Yanni Kuznia for the invitation, and to Gareth L Powell and Rochita Loenen-Ruiz for the feedback (extra thanks to Rochita for putting up with my total absence of a brain). It’s set in the Xuya continuity, some time after On a Red Station, Drifting (and even has a returning minor character from that novel). Features mindships (of course), the Four Saintly Beasts, and the Vietnamese concept of “duyên” (wonderfully economical concept, a headache to translate into English though!). Also, I actually wrote this while feeding the snakelet nonstop, which is probably worth a zillion achievement points all by itself…

6000 words, which I count a great victory (the snakelet being a major force for distraction). Temp title: “Days of the War, as Red as Blood, as Dark as Bile” (just until I find something slightly less unwieldy).

Snippet:

In the old days, the phoenix, the vermillion bird, was a sign of peace and prosperity to come; a sign of a just ruler under whom the land would thrive.

But those are the days of the war; of a weak child-Empress, successor to a weak Emperor; the days of burning planets and last-ditch defences; of moons as red as blood and stars as dark as bile.

#

When Thien Bao was thirteen years old, Second Aunt came to live with them.

She was a small, spry woman with little tolerance for children; and even less for Thien Bao, whom she grudgingly watched over while Mother worked in the factories, churning out the designs for new kinds of sharp-kites and advance needle ships.

(am aware Thien Bao is a man’s name in Vietnamese–there’s an in-story reason for it, but am struggling to manage the related exposition. Might just give up and go for a more traditional woman’s name)

Hoping to level up into progress on the novel after that (but not wholly optimistic).

Because that sentence came fully formed into my brain yesterday afternoon. No idea where it’s all going, though…

In the old days, the phoenix, the phuong hoang, was a sign of peace and prosperity to come; a sign of a just ruler under whom the land would thrive.

But those are the days of the War; of a weak child-Empress, successor to a weak Emperor; the days of burning planets and last-ditch defenses; of moons as red as blood and stars as dark as bile.

(for those who are wondering: I am indeed slowly working on the novel, but right now my brain is a bit frazzled and it’s hard to muster the energy for something long…)

Just a quick note to inform those who don’t know already of the birth of the snakelet last week–which in turn explains my continued radio silence. We’re all well, but overwhelmed–as those things happen 🙂
Blog’s going dark for a while, though I may update with the occasional rant…

Ok, so I’m biased because I wrote the preface for this, but you can now buy the e-edition of Djibril al-Ayad and Fabio Fernandes’s We See a Different Frontier here on amazon.

(I admit I’m not a big fan of the cover, but that’s my  personal opinion, and the fiction collected in the antho itself is well worth a closer look)

The anthology collects SFF from the point of view of people outside the usual SFF hegemony, with countries such as Brazil, Singapore, the Philippines, etc.; and writers such as Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, Joyce Chng and Benjanun Sriduangkaew. Stories focus on imperialism, the difficulties of navigating a postcolonial history and of being the silenced voices on the world scene–it’s a very chewy, fertile terrain in which to plant fiction, and by and large this is a stunning anthology. The stories I loved most were Rochita Loenen-Ruiz’s “What Really Happened in Ficandula”, an angry tale of retribution and revenge that stretches across generations, Dinesh Rao’s “Bridge of Words”, an elegiac story about diaspora and losing one’s language, and Benjanun Sriduankaew’s splendid “Vector”, about the rewriting of history and the fight of the oppressed to impose their own voices over those of their oppressors.

Do give it a try. It’s a great read, and it’s stuff that needs to be tackled in SFF.