Snippet: The Great Market had used to be held in the same place week after week–Les Halles, the belly of the city, the exuberant display of abundance of an empire that had believed itself immortal–against all the evidence of history. But Les Halles had been destroyed in the War; and the fragile magical balance that had followed led to an arrangement where the Great Market rotated between the major Houses. 

Things researched: geography of Ile de La Cite. Zola’s life, of all things.

Plot direction of the day: drastic alterations to outline for chapter. Wondering how to cram in extra body count.

As you might remember, I’m taking part in the Clarion West Write-a-thon, and people actually went and sponsored me (!). So, accordingly, here’s a snippet from the novel-in-progress as a thanks to them (the first scene, in fact). Usual disclaimers apply–this is my alpha draft (aka I’ve revised it minimally so it looks good on the page but I’ve not taken a hatchet to it), it’s very much a work in progress and I’m not sure how much I’ll keep, etc.

Enjoy! (and if you want to sponsor me, it’s over there)

It is almost pleasant, at first, to be Falling.
The harsh, unwavering light of the City recedes, leaving you in shadow–leaving only memories of relief, of a blessed coolness seizing your limbs–nothing has turned yet into longing, into bitterness, into the cold that will never cease, not even in the heat of summer.
The wind, at first, is pleasant too–softly whistling past you, so that you almost don’t notice when its cold fingers tear away at your wings–feathers drift off, blinking like forgotten jewels, catching fire and burning like a thousand falling stars in the atmosphere. Some part of you knows you should be experiencing pain–that the flow of crimson blood, the lancing pain in your back, the burning sensation that seems to have got hold of your whole body–they’re all yours, they’re all irreversible and deadly. But you feel nothing–no exhilaration, no relief; not the burning agony of your wounds. Nothing; but that sense of unnamed relief–that knowledge you won’t have to face the judges in the City again.
Nothing, until the ground comes up to meet you, and you land in a jumble of pain and shattered bones–and the scream you didn’t think you had in you scrapes your throat raw as you let it out–like the first, shocked breath of a baby newborn into a universe of suffering.

Meanwhile, I’ll be off researching the history of Ile de la Cité, and renewing my subscription to the Paris Library network…

So… as people might have noticed, I was Guest of Honour at Finncon 2013 in Helsinki. This was my first stint as a GoH, and all I can say is wow. This set a really high bar for GoH gigs.

Helsinki Harbour

The H and I flew into Helsinki on Wednesday afternoon (after a brief negotiation session with the airline, who for some reason had decided I was too far along in my pregnancy to fly and dubiously eyed my gynecologist’s certificate that I could fly). After resting in the hotel, we headed to Harald, a Viking restaurant complete with plastic helmets, where we met the con people and the other guests of the convention (Peter Watts, Caitlin Sweet, Finnish author J. Pekka Mäkelä, academic Stefan Eckman, Cheryl Morgan and Swedish authors Mats Strandberg and Sara B Elfgren), and had lots and lots of food, complete with Viking roleplaying game in which many speeches were made and some rotting shark meat was consumed (by Peter, who drew the short straw on this one, but who got to be initiated as a Viking with a nifty certificate).

Thursday was the day of the press conference at the Helsinki Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, where I saw hard copies of my Finnish short story collection, Perhonen ja Jaguaari (The Butterfly and the Jaguar), met my publishers (Osuuskumman is a publishing cooperative, which means many members!), and had a lovely interview about World SF. This was followed by a cruise around the Helsinki archipelago (wonderful landscapes), a quick shopping trip to find the Moomin shop (which resulted in the acquisition of an apron), and an evening spent at a sauna. I couldn’t do the sauna thing, sadly, but it looked like an experience–after finishing in the sauna, participants took a dip in the nearby (icy) sea and emerged much reinvigorated, and about ready to try the wonderful buffet of Finnish delicacies (courtesy of Hanna and Maya), which included moose meatballs, Karelian cake (pastry and rice. I was in love), cranberry fizzy drink (which actually tasted like berry and not like sugar), fresh mushroom pie, and a variety of barbecued food (the stuffed mushrooms wrapped in bacon were a big hit, very nicely juicy and tasty).

Then it was time for the con proper, which lasted over three days. The Cable Factory is actually a series of rooms spread around a courtyard, which made for interesting going-arounds (you had to go in and out of buildings); the dealers’ room was *huge* and stuffed with entirely too many books (I resisted temptation, but the H succumbed). All in all, it was a very busy event, and I’m sorry I had to miss on some of it (naps were my best friends, and panels can be pretty draining!). I was joined at the hip to Tom Crosshill, for some odd reason; we did a short story workshop together (my first teaching experience!), an GoH interview, and a bunch of panels. The English-language track was very interesting: we went to a hilarious panel about TV series that never were with Cailtin Sweet and Karin Tidbeck, and attended  Peter Watts’ GoH talk about researching Blindsight full of interesting science tidbits, and I got to catch up with Karin Tidbeck and Nene Ormes (who has such beautiful covers for her Swedish urban fantasy series that I wish I could actually read the language!). At least it looks like Mats and Sara’s book, The Circle, is available in English; I’ve bookmarked it for future checking-out.

Photography by Henry Söderlund

There was also some great costuming going on; the T-Rex has got to be the most unforgettable costume I’ve ever seen (complete with sound effects!), but you also had Zelda, Harley Quinn, Iron Man (shown here in the Tardis!), … I had to miss on the parties due to major fatigue crashes, but I did manage to make the Dead Dog Party Sunday night, in which much fun was had (and many fajitas consumed). Overall, a really great experience–thanks to all organisers and the attendees, and I hope to make it to another Finncon where I actually try the sauna and eat the smoked fish (and party until the end of the night, though I realise that is unlikely to happen any time soon…)

Oh, and if you want more Finland in your conventions? The same team (or at least a team with a significant amount of overlap) is putting in a bid for Worldcon in Helsinki in 2015, which looks set to be a truly awesome convention (plus, come on, you know you’ve always wanted to try a sauna by the sea). If you’re involved in Worldcon site selection or want to be involved, can I suggest checking them out?

(other people can correct me on this, but it looks like you have to be at least a supporting member of LoneStarCon 3 to vote? The instructions here seem to indicate there’s an additional fee involved?)

So, it would appear that “Immersion” has won a Locus Award for Best Short Story. It’s kind of very… humbling when you see that the past list of winners includes Ted Chiang, Ursula Le Guin, and Roger Zelazny… My deepest thanks to everyone who voted/nominated/spread the word, and special extra thanks to E. Lily Yu, who very kindly agreed to accept for me.

Lots of friends among the winners and finalists–big congrats to, among many others, Pat Cadigan, Elizabeth Bear, Ellen Datlow and Jonathan Strahan.

Meanwhile, the radio silence continues–a bit swamped currently with snakelet and snakelet supplies. Slowly chipping away at the novel, and hoping that maternity leave will leave me some energy pre-snakelet to get some way into the actual writing. Am looking forward to being Guest of Honour at Finncon next week while the H explores Helsinki (I’m allowed to attend the con but not to wander around the city).

So, in the interest of actually being held accountable for stuff…

I’ve joined the Clarion West write-a-thon: my goal is to have 50,000 words of my (untitled) novel set in a post-apocalyptic, colonial Paris completed by August 2 (ok, maybe by end of August). Can’t say much about it (I *hate* talking about what I’m writing while I’m writing it), but it’s got fallen angels, Vietnamese dragons and immortals, and plenty of magical fireworks.

You can see a snippet from the WIP on my write-a-thon page–as well as information for donating, and links to all the pages by fabulous other writers such as Rochita Loenen Ruiz, Stephanie Burgis and Floris M Kleijne.

Aka, why make it simple when I can make it complicated…

One of the things I really love about a language is listening to the music of its poetry/folk songs/etc. (I spent a lot of my formative years in English reading the Norton Anthology of Poetry); and it’s always fascinating to see how different languages approach poetry, even though it means that poetry has to be the most untranslatable form of text. Vietnamese poetry doesn’t put quite so much emphasis on rhyme as French poetry (mostly, I suspect, because it’s really easy to make words rhyme in Vietnamese). The major feature is how it uses the tonal system to create its patterns, and it takes great advantage of the language’s conciseness to deliver its punch. I can’t really pretend I understand much of how it works, being only a novice, but here’s my attempt at dissecting a poem.

The source is John Balaban’s Ca Dao Viet Nam, basically folk songs from the villages; the poem itself is interesting in that any attempt at faithful translation is bound to be much, much longer than the original, not only because of the language issue, but also because the text itself is filled with Buddhist imagery that doesn’t translate all that well in English.

“Thức tỉnh hồn mê tiếng chuông Linh Mụ
Dặn dò nợ trần duyên rửa sạch
Qua đò đã tây phương.”

“Thức tỉnh hồn mê tiếng chuông Linh Mụ”
“Thức tỉnh” is “to be enlightened, to see reason”; “hồn” is “soul”, mê” is “unaware, unconscious”, I think in the sense that said soul hasn’t been enlightened yet. “tiếng chuông” is “the peal of a bell” (but in this context, it’s interesting to see that “tiếng” also means language). Linh Mụ is a famous pagoda in Huế.
So the sentence would translate something like “The sound of Linh Mu’s bell awakens the unmindful soul”

“Dặn dò nợ trần duyên rửa sạch”
Dặn dò is “advise, recommend”, “nợ” is a debt (a karmic debt, in this context), “trần” I’m not too sure of (the dictionary suggests “ceiling”, “maximum”). “duyên” is a completely untranslatable Vietnamese word that means “bound to meet as lovers or friends [in a future life]”. “rửa sạch” is “wash”. So probably something like “Reminds it to incur no debt, washes it clean of worldly bounds”

“Qua đò đã tây phương”
“Qua đò” is “cross over/board a ferry”, “đã” is the past indicator, and “tây phương” is the Western Place, a Buddhist paradise. So “[has] already crossed over to the Western Place”. What’s missing is the subject of the actual sentence–from context I’m assuming it’s “the soul” of the first sentence, but I could be wrong…

So, putting it all together, should be
“The sound of Linh Mu’s bell awakens the unmindful soul
Reminds it to incur no debt, washes it clean of worldly bounds
Helps it to reach the Western Place”

And you pretty much see why this is hard-as-nails to translate properly, as I had to leave half the meanings out of the translation; not to mention that this is a really ugly translation, word-wise…

(Of course, I never pretended to be a very good translator, and poetry is as hard as nails to get–there’s a couple words I’m not sure I understand properly, and while I understand every word in the last sentence I’m not entirely too sure my interpretation is the one that’d most likely occur to a native speaker. But I figured it’d be fun to share my struggles)

In which John DeNardo was kind enough to let me ramble on and on about the importance of food: read it here.

(still swamped, in case you had doubts. What little time I do have is spent napping…)

So… due to various real life factors including but not limited to a massive cold that’s had me indoors for the last few days, there’s been radio silence. Slowly resuming writerly life including all the emails in my backlogged inbox; might be a while before I tackle everything, especially since June promises to be equally hectic… (aka what do you mean, we need to shop for baby stuff?!?).

Awake. Hungry. Still in shock that the Nebula Award on my table hasn’t done a vanishing act…

This will be very brief as I need to pack before leaving for the airport, but wow. Apparently I looked grey for about 30 minutes after the awards were done, to the point where N.K. Jemisin very kindly badgered someone into brewing me orange herb tea (and I remembered the half-consumed bar of cereals in my bag). Pregnancy memo: NEVER ever forget your blood sugar levels… (also, that adrenaline rush that I was counting on to keep awake? I think the pregnancy hormones screw up with that…)

If someone had told me I’d win a Nebula when I was younger and marvelling at all those books and short stories that had won the award… I would probably have laughed in their face, to be honest (which just goes to show how wrong you can be). Like I said yesterday, thanks to Neil Clarke, Sean Wallace and the rest of the team at Clarkesworld; to everyone who spread the word, nominated and voted for “Immersion”; to all my fellow nominees (it was a really strong ballot this year full of strong stories, and I wouldn’t have minded losing to anyone in my category!)–to Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, without whom this story wouldn’t have happened; and finally to my family–to Matthieu, my parents and sister, for putting up with me and my crazy ideas; and a particular thanks to my maternal family in Vietnam who made our visit there such a great experience, and planted the seeds of what would later become “Immersion”.

Thanks I didn’t have time the coherence to give in the speech: to everyone who read and critiqued it (Glen Mehn, and the crew of the 10th VD workshop: Ruth Nestvold, Sylvia Spruck Wigley, Floris M Kleijne, Stephen Gaskell, John Olsen, Nancy Fulda); to everyone who kept me awake and coherent and encouraged me yesterday; and everyone with whom I’ve been having conversations on this topic of cultural identity and cultural imperialism over the last few years (you know who you are!). And big big thanks to everyone who helped put the Nebula Awards weekend together and made it such an awesome experience (special mention to Steven H. Silver, who spent a lot of the weekend making sure I was OK and offering me chairs to sit on–which is much, much appreciated when you can’t really stand still for long…).

I have to admit to some intellectual curiosity as to what other non-native Anglophones won a Nebula? (as in, English not their native language, and not currently living in the US/UK/Anglophone West?) I know about Italo Calvino, Johana Sinisalo, etc., but it looks like they were non-winning finalists?

Having a lovely time at the Nebulas–had two interviews (one with Locus, and one with Juliette Wade and Jaym Gates), an autographing session that had a surprising number of people turn up (considering I had no books for sale at the moment), a lovely dinner with Sheila Williams in a grill place (yum salmon), and sort of managed to stay awake during the reception for the Nebula Awards nominees (sort of. I dozed off and they had to wake me up when they were about to make the announcements :p).

If I ever needed confirmation that pregnancy plus jetlag is a bad combination…

Today is the big day; I’m counting on adrenaline to keep me awake until the Awards ceremony (a nice idea in principle, but in reality I’m not really sure how much I have to spare). Off to have a shower, and to hunt down my breakfast.