From a long four-day weekend in Brittany (sea, cycling and sand… There was sun, but the temperature was still pretty cool. Pleasant, but I didn’t really feel like taking off my jacket in the evening).
Just learnt that Charles N. Brown, publisher, editor and co-founder of Locus passed away. I had the luck to meet him once at the Writers of the Future workshop, and to sit at his table, where he regaled us with anecdotes and advice. He was in many ways a towering man, and he will be missed.
Frank Wu has just posted the art for “Melanie”, which is to be published in ROF.
Apparently, I got him to draw his wife naked…
(seriously, it looks nifty, and it’s got loads of stuff from the story, including the maths symbols, which aren’t random but are honest-to-good formulas, the kind my main character in the story could have been revising like mad. I love having that kind of little details)
Thanks to Doug, Frank and Brianna for the coolness 🙂
So, yesterday, I took the plunge and migrated.
I’d bought and been using a mac mini for a while, but hadn’t actually committed to making it my main writing computer, mainly because it involved transferring a lot of stuff I wasn’t 100% sure I could transfer.
But my venerable, four-year-old Windows XP laptop being on its last legs, something had to be done (the aforementioned computer has a broken keyboard, a DVD player that can’t read DVDs anymore, and was taking about 30 minutes to start, from the moment I turned it on to the moment I could launch Word or Firefox).
I do have another Windows laptop (the eeepc 1000H I bought a year ago), but the screen is way too small to do some serious editing on a long-term basis.
Hence the switching over to the mac, which took me most of Sunday and Monday evening.
For the curious, here’s the stuff I installed/transferred:
Continue reading →
Eric, the main character of Ken Loach’s “Looking for Eric”, is in a rut: he’s on his own for raising his two stepsons, a truant and a delinquent; he lost the love of his live twenty years ago; and, just recovered from a serious car accident, is unable to muster enough dynamism to properly do his job. His life is increasingly slipping away from him–until one night, his idol Eric Cantona appears to him and tries to get him to change…
OK, when I first saw the trailer for this, the idea seemed pretty ridiculous. I mean, how can you even think Cantona would make a decent guardian angel? Plus, the only other Ken Loach movie I saw in its entirety was Land and Freedom, set during the Spanish civil war: I was forced to sit through several viewings of it in Spanish class and was not very much amused or enthralled.
However, this one works. Loach’s always been very good at depicting the lives of working-class men, and here he paints a quiet, tender picture of the fraternity of postmen (and football fans in their spare time). It could have been a very grim movie, since it deals with lots of violence and harsh facts of life–but instead, it’s a gently absurdist fable about taking charge of one’s life. Loach doesn’t shy away from the grimness of Eric’s life, but the darkness acts as counterpart to plenty of laugh-out loud moments (the scenes between Cantona and Steve Evets, who plays Eric, are brilliant tongue-in-cheek fun). The finale was made of awesome Monty Python silliness.
I actually walked out of this one smiling, and that is no mean feat.
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…
So, came back from the grandparents’, surviving sunstroke in the process. (memo, get a hat next time, and stop forgetting that I’m now much less tolerant to sunlight than I used to be a few years ago). Still, it was a good weekend.
Fixed my random quotes plugin (which had replaced one keyword with another–I was rather relieved it turned out to be so simple, as I was already gearing myself to deactivate my plugins one by one to work out which one had the compatibility issue).
Downloaded myself a Chinese-English dictionary for the ipod, Dian Hua (thanks to wistling‘s recommendation). It’s got a bunch of great expressions (my favourite so far is “arm-flinging shopkeeper”, “someone who asks others to work but does nothing himself”. If you factor in the long sleeves the Chinese used to favour, this has a very visual flavour).
Sigh. I would so love to learn Chinese, but have so not the time to actually make a stab at it. In another lifetime maybe…
Medley of reviews for Ys (Interzone 222)
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.
Quickie post, because the weekend is going to be crazy busy (going to the grandparents’, which is going to involve crawling through summer holiday traffic for about 350 km, so not looking forward to this).
The Year’s Best Science Fiction appears to be out: I already knew it contained my alt-history novelette “Butterfly Falling at Dawn”; what I didn’t know was that I also received two Honorable Mentions, one for “The Dragon’s Tears” in Electric Velocipede, and one for “Horus Ascending” in Intergalactic Medicine Show. Wow. (thanks to snickelish for letting me know, and I’ll settle back to the impatient wait for my contrib copy)
Only a handful of days left to vote for the Hugos (and the Campbell *g*): voting ends 3rd of July, 23:59 EST.
I hadn’t thought the deadline would be so early, to be honest, and I’m still two novel nominees short of a full house. Darn. Oh well, I’ll make do with what I’ve read.
Still hammering at my short story. I’ve now replaced the human sacrifice with syringes (I’m holding it as a possible incident later on).
(Oh, and my plugin for random quotes on the homepage appears to be broken, probably not agreeing either with the new wordpress or with some other plugin. Sigh.)
EDIT: via Doug Cohen, the artist who’s going to be illustrating “Desaparecidos” for Realms of Fantasy: Rob Alexander. Looks like really gorgeous stuff, can’t wait to see the final product.
From James Maxey:
Followers of my blogs, and the readers who read the acknowledgement pages of my books, will know that I lost my partner Laura Herrmann to breast cancer in May 2005. I’ve been interested in cancer research since then and have privately made contributions to cancer related charities, but I’ve never put out any sort of appeal on my blogs to solicit for this cause, until now.
Last week, I received several cases of my latest book Dragonseed. One of the ongoing themes of Dragonseed is the idea of healing, both from physical and spiritual wounds. Within the book there’s a miraculous object called a dragonseed: Eat the seed, and all your injuries will be healed. Even your oldest scars will vanish.
I have some science fiction hoodoo underlying the dragonseed. The technology to create a pill that will both diagnose and cure any illness is pretty far out in our future, if it exists at all. But, the part of this that isn’t science fiction or hoodoo is that I believe that technology has the power to work miracles. We have MRI and PET scans that can look into a human body and see it working in minute detail. We have developed surgical tools and techniques that can remove diseased tissues from a human body without doing undo damage to healthy tissues. My father had a heart attack recently, and the doctors had to place stents in his arteries. The incision to perform the operation was small enough to cover with a band-aid. And, right now, there are researchers who are taking apart cancer cells molecule by molecule to understand the genetic engines that drive them to a degree unimaginable only a few decades ago.
We live in an age of miracles because we live in an age of knowledge. Modern computers are finally powerful enough to process all the complex data contained within a human cell. The only barriers remaining between our present understanding a cure for any disease you can name are time and money.
These are not insignificant barriers. New technologies are always expensive. And, to be blunt, the world has a limited supply of really smart people, and a nearly unlimited supply of problems for them to solve. For better or worse, money is one of the most important driving forces of where the smart people focus their energies. In the sixties, it was decided we would put a man on the moon. We threw money at the problem, and produced a glut of rocket scientists. In the eighties and nineties, computer technology was fed enormous sums of money by the stock market, and smart people focused their energies on designing hardware and software, and with the result that today my cell phone has more memory than I do. There is a lot of money today flowing into health care, but only a fraction of this money goes to research of any given disease. I’d like to invite you to increase the fraction going to breast cancer research, both due to my personal connection to the cause, and because I think that this is the right moment in history to truly make a difference. I firmly believe this is a disease than can be cured within our lifetime. I don’t know if one day we will simply swallow a magic pill and be healed, but I do know that the day will come when we will be able to profile any cancer cell and match it with the appropriate drug to wipe it out.
To help bring this day closer, if only by a minute or two, I’d like to announce my “Books for Breasts” promotion. Anyone who contributes to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation through the “Team Dragon” fundraising page will get a free signed copy of Dragonseed.
You can contribute to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer foundation by clicking here. This will take you to my personal fundraising page; just click the button that says “support James.” Then, to get your signed copy of Dragonseed, just email me your mailing address to nobodynovelwriter@yahoo.com. I’ve set aside 50 copies for this cause; if I give them all away by the end of July, I’m pretty sure I can get my hands on another 50.
I’ve set up a modest goal of raising $300 through this promotion. This means I need to average contributions of $6, which is less than you’d pay for the book on Amazon. However, I’ll send you a book for a contribution in any amount, even if it’s just a buck. Spend a buck, get a book, save some breasts. Who’s with me?
