So, now that it’s official…

Back in July, the awesome Stephen Gaskell got Nancy Fulda, Benjamin Rosenbaum and me together, and convinced out to collaborate on The Numbers Quartet. The idea was to use a similar format as The Alphabet Quartet published in Daily Science Fiction, but using numbers instead of letters as prompts: we have stories based on pi, the golden ratio, the speed of light… We wrote twelve of them all in all; and we sold the resulting compendium to Daily Science Fiction, where the pieces will appear, starting in January (one piece every week, 12 in all).

Mine form a loose trilogy of pieces set in Việt Nam’s three great cities (Hà Nội, Huế, Sài Gòn, from North to South, and inspired respectively by Euler’s number e, Boltzmann’s constant k, and the speed of light c). I wrote them all in August, back when we were travelling over the US and having fun at Worldcon; thank God they were flashes… Mostly near-future SF (with a softer edge for one of them). They should be published starting from February: the ordering of stories mean I’m not in the first four pieces, but you can check out Nancy’s, Steve’s and Ben’s pieces starting January 4th.

You can now listen to the podcast of my pseudo-Chinese story “As the Wheel Turns” over at issue 9 of Dark Fiction Magazine (where I am in the stellar company of Juliet McKenna, James Barclay Andrew Reid and Kev Clark).

Click here for the podcast. Thanks to Sharon Ring, Kate Sherrod and the rest of the Dark Fiction Magazine team!

-StarShipSofa has put up their issue 200, which includes a reading of “The Jaguar House in Shadow” (thanks to Morag Edward). Listen to it here.

-And you can also get The Year’s Top Ten Tales of Science Fiction, which includes “The Shipmaker” (and, uh, has me in great company) here, or via amazon. This includes the awesome “Flower, Mercy, Needle, Chain”, which was among my favourite stories last year.

-Not audio fiction, but if you happen to speak Hungarian, here is “A Jaguár Háza, árnyékban”, the translation of “The Jaguar House, in Shadow” in Hungarian. Many thanks to Csilla Kleinheincz!

Electric Velocipede are revamping their website to prepare for their launch as a e-zine. In the runup to that, they’re republishing fiction from their previous issues online. Among which is “The Dragon’s Tears”. Probably the best description of this is that I wrote as a homage to the Chinese fairytales I read when I was a child–I wasn’t very up to date on historical research then, but I think I nailed the feeling I got when I was six or seven, and immersed in a big fat book of wonderful stories with dragons, immortal carpenters, and crabby Iron-Crutch Li, where everything and everyone could turn out to be magical (and possibly deadly. That’s part of the deal with magical people).
Also, as Anne S. Zanoni points out, she sent me one of the sweetest mails ever after she proofread this–I’m a big Patricia McKillip fan, so being compared to her while I still felt like a raw newbie was, well, pretty magical…

Huan Ho sealed the last window, leaving only a crack in the shutter. Tonight, he thought, his eye on the empty streets, the neighbours’ barred shutters. Tonight he had to pass the door on the hill, or let the sickness take his mother.

Read more here, and do check out the rest of the cool stuff while you’re there.

Little weekend shameless self-promotion:

• You can listen to the BSFA-shortlisted “The Shipmaker” here on StarShipSofa, in a very dramatic reading by the awesome Amy H. Sturgis
• Asimov’s has made its Nebula Awards nominees available, among which “The Jaguar House, in Shadow” in pdf format (html still available on my website here)

I have also received both my BSFA and my Nebula voting ballot (and a neat little booklet with all the BSFA nominated short stories). As I said to the H, seeing my name on there feels really weird.

Ah, well. Back to the grind–in this particular case, fighting with a rebellious short story (right now, it’s winning).

Wow, that was fast. Courtesy of Andy Cox and the Interzone editorial team, you can now find “The Shipmaker” online, over at the TTA press website. Do feel free to come back here and comment on it after you’ve read it–any and all feedback appreciated.

(while you’re at it, you can read another shortlisted story, Nina Allan’s “Flying in the Face of God”, which is definitely worth spending some time with)

I swear there will be actual content on this blog soon, and not shameless self-promotion–but for that, my %%% fever is going to have to come down (`tis the season to be sick, apparently. 39°C and counting…)

So, not up to much that I can safely admit (sekrit projects, plus speaking about the novel in progress on this blog seems to curse me to a halt in the writing of the manuscript). To tide you over until the weekend, a few links:

-I’m guessing by now most people will have seen the Amy Chua piece on the Washington Post, about why Chinese mothers are superior. I don’t have much to say about it other than “batshit crazy Asian mother”–and yes, I have an Asian mother, so I can speak from my (admittedly limited) experience. I can see some of the points, and some things Amy Chua mentions are certainly familiar from my own childhood, though not pushed quite this far. My TV time was limited; so was my video game time; neither of my parents were particularly happy when I brought home bad grades, and yes, both of them always pushed me to go further because they believed I could do better. And I’m glad they did it; I’m glad they placed a higher value on education than on sparing my feelings, and nurtured my ambition and drive–to the point where I thought of doing something as crazy as writing in a second language and getting away with it.
But, seriously, not allowing your children to be in school plays, forcing them to play a musical instrument and tormenting your daughter until she gets the piano piece right? Wow. That’s some serious going south here.
Allow me to dig up quintessential Chinese wisdom here, in the person of Confucius: “To go beyond is as wrong as to fall short.” Ie, balance and perspective. Something that seems to be missing from all the horror stories about Asian moms (there were quite a few flying around on the internet in the wake of that article).

-And, in a lighter vein: Mature people truths (via Cat Rambo). Some of these are oh-so-painfully true.

-Finally, I’ve posted (with permission) on the SFWA forums “Alternate Girl’s Expatriate Life”, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz’s awesome story about expatriation, identity and what it means to be an immigrant in a strange land. Recommended by Richard Horton in his year-end summary of Interzone, and generally quite made of awesome. (and I’m not only saying that because Rochita is my friend). Well worth a read if you have forum access.

EDIT: apparently, the Amy Chua thing is only an excerpt from a larger book, which is intended to deal with the problems of her education system as well. Mea culpa.
EDIT #2: and, apparently, the WJS just quoted the most controversial part of Chua’s book without bothering to add a corrective, because controversy makes for more readers. Great. As I said on LJ, I feel like hitting something, preferably a WJS editor.

For those who might be interested: my novelette “The Jaguar House, in Shadow”, first published in Asimov’s, July 2010, is now available for free on my website for your reading pleasure. (and, of course, if you happen to be in the right fraction of the population, it’s eligible for the Hugos/Nebulas/Locus Awards/Asimov’s Awards etc.).

Jason Sanford listed it as one of the three best novelettes in Asimov’s for 2010; so did Richard Horton; and it’s already received at least one Nebula nomination.

Go here to read it, and don’t hesitate to pop back here and tell me what you thought!

It’s probably a testament to my general disorganisation that I’ve managed to confuse dates again: I was for some reason convinced that my Aztec noir novel, Servant of the Underworld, was scheduled for release Wednesday.

I just glanced at the date on my desk’s phone, and realised that, er, no, it was today. Cue panic and disorganisation.

I’m stuck at work, of course, with a zillion other things I should really be doing–but my first US book release is definitely worth a celebration. So feel free to party in my name, wherever you are. Virtual champagne and other delicacies appreciated from this side of the trenches 🙂

Extras, aka party over the blogosphere:

-Janice Hardy lends me some blog space to talk about outlines and novel planning.

-My French fantasy “Melanie”, originally published in Realms of Fantasy, is up on the World SF blog, as part of their new fiction feature. Look out for more great stories there!

-The book trailer, for those who want to get into the spirit of things:

-And, wow, amazon is already shipping it!!

My Aztec steampunk short “Memories in Bronze, Feathers and Blood” is now up at Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

This is what we remember: the stillness before the battle, the Jaguar Knights crouching in the mud of the marshes, their steel rifles glinting in the sunlight. And the gunshot—and Atl, falling with his eyes wide open, as if finally awakening from a dream…

Read the rest here.

It will also be podcast in a later issue, if you prefer your Aztecs to come in audio rather than in text :=p

Any comments/discussion on the story can be left here or at the Beneath Ceaseless Skies forums.