My SF novelette “On Horizon’s Shores” is now up in issue 14 of IGMS.

Alex and Thi Loan transferred at Sapalawa Spaceport, from their small shuttle to a military Naga craft — the only ones still allowed to crawl between the stars with the fuel shortage.

Because the thought of their mission on Horizon weighed on Alex’s mind, he said, “You’ve read the files?”

Thi Loan shrugged. “There isn’t much. Professor Kishore died — and then . . . suddenly there wasn’t enough fuel for the spaceships.” She smiled, a showing of white teeth against her tanned skin.

Read more at the IGMS website.

Many many thanks to Edmund Schubert, who did amazing editing–cutting and trimming a useless scene, improving the flow and clarifying a lot of plot that existed only in my head.

Also thanks to those who took a look at the first draft: T.L. Morganfield, Kevin Shaw, Fred Warren, cklabyrinth, Christine Lucas, Rod Santos and Justin Pilon.

And will you just look at that cover art? Wow. Just… wow. Dean Spencer has done a truly amazing job illustrating the story.

800 words today. I’ve successfully locked my main character in a room with a knife-wielding maniac, always a good recipe for success (well, for the story. The character’s chances must be lower). Darn, it feels good to be tormenting someone again. I haven’t been doing any first-drafting since Worldcon: I’ve done edits and copy edits, but haven’t actually started to write another story since then.

Tomorrow, celebrating the novel sale with my work colleagues: to that end, I’m making ham and goat-cheese cake. So far, the cake

• looks worryingly yellow
• has ballooned to an impressive size

(at least I know why the second point: I went a bit overboard on the baking soda…).

I’d post the recipe, but first I need to taste it.
EDIT: Matthieu pointed out that I’d screwed up with the oven’s settings, too, and that the thing was burning faster than it was baking. Sigh. Me, and cooking: 3 different people.

I’ve just been given official permission to post about this: my story “The Lost Xuyan Bride”, originally published in Interzone, will form part of the upcoming release of Polish online library Skryptorium at the Katedra site, edited by Jan Zeranski.

The site itself is not live yet, but we’ve been given permission to spread the word 🙂

You can see a preview of the working design here. The Skryptorium project aims to showcase SF/Fantasy short fiction in translation for the benefit of Polish readers.

Here are the current stories:

Aliette de Bodard – “The Lost Xuyan Bride”
Cory Doctorow – “I, Robot”
Jeffrey Ford – “Exo-Skeleton Town”
Daryl Gregory – “In the Wheels”
Ted Kosmatka – “Divining Light”
Jay Lake – “Tom Edison and his telegraphic harpoon”
Nedimma Nkemdili Okorafor-Mbachu – “Amphibious Green”
Jeff VanderMeer – “A Heart for Lucretia”
Zoran Zivkovic – “First photograph”

This is my first ever translation–thanks to Jan for the offer, and to everyone involved in the Skryptorium project.

And, er, wow. That’s some TOC.

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.

For your listening pleasure: “Blighted Heart” is now available as a podcast (recorded by Beneath Ceaseless Skies). Go here (for the table of contents of BCS audio) or directly here for the mp3.

In other related news, “Blighted Heart” is also Story of the Week over at Fantastic Reviews Blog, courtesy of Aaron Hughes:

“Blighted Heart” is a powerful, beautifully written story, and a great example of why de Bodard was the runner-up for this year’s John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, losing out very narrowly to David Anthony Durham.

Wow.

My short story “Golden Lilies” is up at Fantasy Magazine.

It was the smell which woke me up, insinuating itself between the planks of my coffin: cooked meat mingling with the sweet odour of aromatic rice, and the tangy hint of fruit and spices — a powerful summoning if there ever was one.

Read more.

For those of you who prefer their fiction in audio form, it’s also available as a podcast read by the talented M.K. Hobson (who does a truly awesome job).

I’ve sold my Chinese alternate-history “In the Time of Transcendence” to Asimov’s (the title is going to change as soon as I can work out a decent one…). Featuring a space centre in a monastery, Daoist philosophy, and forbidden love.

Many thanks to those OWWers who took a look at it: Christine Lucas, Tom Crosshill, Ilan Leman and Owen Kerr; and to Chris Kastensmidt for his comments.

EDIT: the new title is now “The Wind-Blown Man”.

That sound you hear? It’s me hyperventilating. I’ve been dreaming of breaking into Asimov’s for a while, and I don’t think it quite feels real yet. I think I’ll go back for a liedown…

Last few days to vote for the Hugos: deadline is July 3rd, 23:59 Eastern Daylight Time. (and, should you be still undecided as to which Campbell Award candidate you’re voting for, there’s still time to read the material in my short fiction sampler ).

I’m also told that the anthology Fantastical Visions IV, which contains my sort-of-Greek novelette “Healing Hands” and fellow Codexian David Walton’s “Dragonfly Savior”, is available for pre-order. Everything’s gorgeously illustrated by Stephanie Pui-Muin Law.

In other non-shameless self-promotional news, it’s summer in Paris and the weather is awesomely nice. I’m planning the rest of my holidays in addition to Wolrdcon (Brittany, here I come), and wondering where the blazes I put my cotton skirts, sandals and other suitable attire.

800 new words on my current WIP–leaving me stuck at the big scene with the blood 🙂

Onwards…

Medley of reviews for Ys (Interzone 222)

• Colin Harvey at Suite101:
  

  One of the delights of reading de Bodard is that sense of otherness, be it a Chinese legend re-worked, or a straight SF-nal alternate history like ‘The Lost Xuyan Bride.’ De Bodard is one of the candidates for the John W Campbell Award for Best New Writer of 2008, and rightly so. Recommended.

Continue reading →

So, the dayjob is sinking its claws deep into me, making it a teeny bit hard to focus on writing currently (to be fair, I’m also getting through every single Stephen Erikson book, and having teensy troubles putting them down…).

The leak in the kitchen has reached over the sink. If nothing else, it’s interesting to see that four successive touches of pain were applied to the ceiling. Sigh. I really hope we get to the bottom of this before the last of the paint peels off, and something else (and presumably worse) starts happening…

4 episodes into season 2 of Battlestar Galactica. Gotta love the fact that the number of survivors seems to be steadily diminishing, episode after episode. Somewhat to my surprise, Gaius Baltar has grown slightly more bearable, if not actually likeable. And there’s still a few things that bug me, but I love it that they’re not afraid to tackle some dark places, and also to drop in religious issues (yeah, the religion is utterly bogus, and its mythos makes me want to gnash teeth, but I like seeing issues like those in my SF, and I don’t see them often).

(no spoilers please, this is my first viewing)

-I don’t blog much about rejections, but I can’t resist this one: I got my first alas-o-gram from Gordon Van Gelder at F&SF. I’m told it’s some kind of rite of passage 🙂
–Tangent Online has relaunched (thanks to Eric James Stone‘s proficiency with software, apparently), and it has a nice review of Black Static 9 and my story “The Lonely Heart”:

The story unwinds slowly, building character and mood, and utilizes the backdrop of a changing China as a smart counterpoint to the traditional spook story at its core, where lust and necessity clash over the heart of one man.

-800 words on a new story. Had a perfect, moody beginning that was unfortunately two days too early. Would have been good for a novel, I think, but it feels too leisurely for a short story. So I replaced it with a bloody scene of human sacrifice, which always raises tension a notch 🙂