This interview of me is now up on Rick Novy‘s video podcast, NovyMIRror.

In case you’re wondering why it’s just audio: Rick’s intention was that we each film our separate bits with webcams, and then he’d do the montage. But I was too ill at ease with the idea of filming myself (I’m your basic introvert, and the only audio/video I’ve ever done was a podcast, more a year ago) so Rick was kind enough to go with just audio.

Many many thanks to Rick for the awesome work (and for his patience while I got this recording thing right).

Read recently:

-Lian Hearn, Through the Nightingale Floor, Grass for His Pillow, Brilliance of the Moon: awesome YA set in a land much like Feudal Japan before the Shogunate. Takeo, an orphan raised in the forbidden religion of the Hidden, is adopted by Lord Otori after the massacre of his family. But Takeo has only exchangd one set of problems for another: as heir to a great house, he has to compound, not only with the power intrigues of the otherlords, but also with his real family–the Tribe, an alliance of assassins/mercenaries–who will stop at nothing to use him. Add to this his mad passion for young Kaede, heiresss to a powerful domain–and Takeo is just set for more than he can handle. Continue reading →

Mostly happy stuff:

-Illustration of “Ys” (story in Interzone 222) here, in colour, courtesy of the awesome Mark Pexton

-Came home to my May 2009 Locus, to find, rather to my surprise, a review of “The Lonely Heart” by Rich Horton (in a focus on the Campbell Award Nominees, which had lots of good stuff to say about Felix Gilman’s “Catastrophe” in Weird Tales, Tony Pi’s “Silk and Shadow” in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Gord Sellar’s “Cai and Her Ten Thousand Husbands”:

Aliette de Bodard has caught my eye with some strong traditional fantasy tales and some fine work set in an alternate history ruled by the Aztecs”. “The Lonely Heart”, from Black Static for February/March is a different and darker tale (though de Bodard has always shown a great deal of range in both subject matter and tone)…

(the issue also had nice things to say about J. Kathleen Cheney’s “Early Winter, Near Jenli Village” in Fantasy Magazine, which you really should read if you haven’t)

-Also was pointed out to this by Scott H. Andrews: a list of writers in semiprozines to watch out for, in which, hum, I appear a bunch of times… (I second the recommendations for Shweta Narayan and Angela Slatter, BTW. They both write terrific fiction). 

In non-selfish self-promoting links, I’ve found a new webcomic to get addicted to: Freakangels by Warren Ellis and Paul Dufield. Set in a post-Apocalyptic, flooded London, this focuses around the Freakangels, a group of people cursed with strange powers. It soon becomes clear that it’s their combined powers that ended the world, and that they’re trying to make amends for it by making Whitechapel into a haven of peace for refugees in a world gone mad. Things would be going swimmingly well, were it not for the twelfth Freakangel–Mark, the one they expelled from their group, and who now plans to kill them one by one… It’s got great character interaction, vivid art and a plot that bites. Not sure where it’s going or how long it’s going to take to get there, but it’s a super nice ride.

(Iain Jackson had a column over at Strange Horizons about the best comics of the year, and I intend to check several others of those out, looks like a good list)

My Top Five Most Used Writing Software:

–Freemind: mindmapping software, great for brainstorming. It’s free and available for PC, Mac and Linux, too.

–Scrivener: awesome novel-writing software for the Mac, although so far I’ve mainly used it for writing detailed synopses. It has lots of nifty features such as index cards, full-screen mode for text processing… Paying, and only available for the Mac.

–Writers’ Café: my index-card tool of choice on Windows, allows a good view of several storylines. There’s all sorts of other stuff, but I haven’t really looked at them. Paying, and cross-platform PC/Mac/Linux.

–Sonar: sub tracking system written by the awesome Simon Haynes. I used to have Duotrope, but since I’m often offline, I rather prefer my information to be where I can access it even with the internet down. Free, available for Windows and Linux. Simon also has novel writing software, ywriter, which is good (just not suited to the way I work, because it’s somewhat overdetailed for my first draft process).

–Dropbox: basically, a versioning system made easy. Dropbox synchronises the contents of your local files with an online repository. It’s great for backups, and also for working on the same folder on several computers (since I own three, and on two different OS, this is rather welcome). Free, available for PC, Mac and Linux.

(for actual writing, I use Word, which I can get on any platform–including computers that aren’t mine. Plus, I tend to receive edits in Word’s Tracking Changes format, so it makes my life easier. I wish Word would stop randomly crashing on huge files, but I guess you can’t have everything)

Any other cool software I should be aware of?

Finally got myself motivated to download the Hugo Voter’s Packet. Wow, lots of good stuff here. Even discounting those books I’ve already read (Acacia, Thunderer and Little Brother), there’s still plenty to sink my teeth into. I’m becoming an adept of Stanza, nifty software that allows me to read ebooks on my ipod. Not optimal in a sunlit bus, but kind of neat all the same.

I’ve seen that the ballot is now online and that you have until the 3rd of July to vote. Almost finished the short fiction; now I need to get cracking on the novellas and the novels… (and boy, does it feel very weird to see my name down there for the Campbell, even if it’s not a Hugo).

The packet includes three of my short stories (“The Lost Xuyan Bride”, “Obsidan Shards” and “Autumn’s Country”); I’ve also reordered stuff on my website to put stories directly online (the Packet ones, and two extras, in addition to the stuff I’ve published in online zines).  I’m still looking for a way to list subpages within a post (I’ve found the wordpress syntax, but it seems to be working only in the sidebar).

I also have an author page up on Facebook, mostly following the example of Gareth. I suppose every little bit helps 🙂

And, as said above, I’ve finished up my Cambpell reading by the two novels I’d ordered a while ago: Thunderer and Acacia. Two very different beasts: a urban secondary-world fantasy with hints of Dickens and fabulous worldbuilding (indeed, the city of Ararat itself is as much a character as the people passing each other on the street), and an epic fantasy of political intrigue, a clever reflexion on how history is written by the winners until even the old myths become forgotten. For my money, I preferred Acacia, mainly because I’m a history buff, but both are pretty good books.

Currently working my way through Lian Hearn’s Tales of the Otori, superlative fiction set in a world inspired by Medieval Japan. Very well-researched, very well-written, and obviously told by a master.

And, since I’m between novels at the moment, I’m hammering away at an alternate history that involves a lot of weird science. 3000 words in, halfway through.

Issue 220 of Interzone, which contains my fantasy story “Ys”, is now available. This is part of a series on French myths (which also includes  “Melanie”, forthcoming in Realms of Fantasy):  it features an unwanted pregnancy, a creepy goddess, and the drowned city of Ys in Brittany, which perished when its princess yielded to the Devil’s advances.

Snippet:

September, and the wind blows Françoise back to Quimper , to roam the cramped streets of the Old City amidst squalls of rain.

She shops for clothes, planning the colours of the baby’s room; ambles along the deserted bridges over the canals, breathing in the smell of brine and wet ivy. But all the while she’s aware that she’s only playing a game with herself–she knows she’s only pretending that she hasn’t seen the goddess.

It’s hard to forget the goddess–that cold radiance that blew salt into Françoise’s hair, the dress that shimmered with all the colours of sunlight on water–the sharp glimmer of steel in her hand.

You carry my child, the goddess had said, and it was so. It had always been so.

Get more information and order the issue

So, I’ve finished the editing pass on Foreign Ghosts, which took it from first draft with a beginning and an ending to first draft I could lob off to poor Matthieu. And I’ve been thinking a lot about Xuya, my alternate-history universe, and why I write alternate history.

Continue reading →

Get Your Cyborg Name

I only have one comment: lol.

So, first there was the house:

Continue reading →

It seems my alt-history novelette, “Butterfly, Falling at Dawn”, has placed 10th in Interzone’s annual Readers’ Poll. *happy writer*

I’m pleased to see that several of my own favourites (“His Master’s Voice” by Hannu Rajaniemi, “Little Lost Robot” by Paul McAuley) have also made the Top Ten. (though I preferred “Rat Island” to “Greenland” in the Chris Beckett special issue).

Many thanks to those who voted for me–either positively or negatively, come to think of it. I’d rather you hated my guts than not remember me.  It’s a story that has a lot of extra meaning for me in many ways (more on that later).

PS: there will be a VD4 report, as soon as I’ve filched pictures to go with it, since I was a dweeb and forgot my camera.