In possibly the fastest turnaround I’ve had from finishing the final draft to publication, you can now read my story “Scattered Along the River of Heaven” in Clarkesworld.

Or, if audio fiction is more to your liking, you can listen to the podcast by the awesome Kate Baker.

This is the pseudo-Asian SF story with bots, a dying colonial empire, and a prison orbiting a black hole–aka the one where I had to improvise four pseudo-Chinese poems before I could actually write any of the story’s scenes. It was, well, not fun to write, but very instructive. And scary. This is a very scary story, because it’s ambitious, and touches on matters I’ve been thinking about for a while, and I feel very much exposed publishing it.

Would love to know what you thought of it (either at Clarkesworld or here)–this is possibly the best thing I’ve written yet, and I’m curious (OK, and scared, but what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, right?) to see people’s reaction to it.

I’ll post author notes and thoughts on writing processes tomorrow, so do stay tuned 😀

(apologies. I’ll go into brief bragging mode right now–as this kind of post is wont to do. Feel free to skip and return when this blog returns to more standard content)

So… 2011…

It was a momentous year in many respects. First off, because of the writing: I got nominated for both a Nebula and a Hugo, and picked up the British Science Fiction Award for Best Short Fiction, for “The Shipmaker”, a story very dear to my heart. I also saw “The Shipmaker” reprinted in a scad of anthologies including two Year’s Best (Dozois’, and an audio compilation). 2011 is also the year I completed Obsidian and Blood, through publication of Harbinger of the Storm in January, and Master of the House of Darts in November, and saw the first volume translated into French.

In RL, several things happen that I won’t go into, but the two things I can mention is that I changed jobs, and that the H and I moved back into Paris, after several months of intensive flat remodeling.

Those changes, though, translated in terms of fiction output: not going to go into them in detail, but this year was disastrous for me in terms of productivity. I did complete Master of the House of Darts, but then things ground to a halt, and I wrote very little short fiction for a good eight or nine months. Things started tentatively looking up again in September, after the move: I finished 3 pieces of flash fiction, and completed or extensively revised 4 short stories (“Breath of the Nine Dragons”, “The Bleeding Man”, “Starsong”, and “Scattered Across the River of Heaven”, that last being the best thing I’ve ever written, I think). Also finished a novella, On a Red Station, Drifting; and started work on assorted short stories. I was probably more productive in November/December than anywhere else in the year…

I continued with my Vietnamese lessons, with Mom instead of Grandma, and saw marked progress (both because Mom’s way of teaching jibes in more with me than Grandma’s, and because I also started to take it semi-hemi-seriously by compiling vocabulary lists and regularly listening to tapes). I can now reasonably ape pronunciation, but it remains hard for me to pronounce a word “cold” and have it come out OK (case in point, yesterday I attempted to say tháng giêng, aka January, to a friend of mine, and she went blank for a minute before context enabled her to catch up). On the plus side, I can now say “hello” and “thank you” to a variety of people and be understood (you think it’s simple–it’s not, because it requires knowing all the pronouns. You can’t just say “thank you” without explicitly addressing the person). I can also read a restaurant menu, and can order a bowl of phở, which is essential for surviving. I’ve also made huge progress with VNI, the input system for Vietnamese characters: I can’t type fast in Vietnamese, but I know all the numbers by heart. Hope the progress continues in 2012.

All in all, it’s been a great year, and I’m very thankful. Here’s to 2012–hope you all have a fabulous year!

What about you? What did you do in 2011? What are you most proud of?

I have finished the novella edits!!!

Wow. This was hard to write; mainly, I think, because it combined a length I wasn’t used at writing at, a culture I’m more than moderately familiar with (which means I put in tons of small details without bothering to pause for explanation), and loads of RL stuff happening during the writing.

Title is “On a Red Station, Drifting” (I wanted “dreaming”, as a reference to Dream of Red Mansions, but “drifting” is more appropriate for about all the main characters). Clocks in at 39,700 words, which I’m reliably told is 300 words under the point when it becomes a (short) novel. Just a last editing pass to do in order to get some of my em-dashes out, and it should be good to go.

Have some dancing dinos. I’ll be off for Japanese food with my sis.

And this is your annual closure notice of the blog 🙂

Hope you all have a merry Christmas for those who celebrate (and a happy Chanukah, Kwanzaa and other traditions around this time of year I am surely forgetting). I’ll be back after the New Year, with plenty of good resolutions…

And here’s your traditional Virgin Mary, Vietnamese-style:

Đức Mẹ La Vang, aka Our Lady of La Vang, a major Vietnamese Virgin (you’ll find a lot of overseas parishes are called after her. La Vang’s somewhere in the centre of Việt Nam, and it’s a huge pilgrimage centre).

Sorry, I couldn’t find a larger image, but here are two bonus ones of other Vietnamese Virgin Maries, courtesy of the H:
Continue reading →

So, last week, the post office sends us a message saying that they tried to deliver a bulky package to our home, but couldn’t because the mailbox was too small. I’ve been burnt before at this game, so I cajoled the H into going to pick it up at the post office.
Best idea I ever had, because this is what the package looked like:

After a lot of fighting the thing with scissors, I opened it, and behold:

I have my contrib copies of Master of the House of Darts!

To celebrate, I’m giving away ten copies of the book. 5 are up at Goodreads (and I’ll note the giveaway is available worldwide). Another 5 are up for grabs here: the difference with the Goodreads ones is that I’m trading those for a review of the book posted on your blog or on amazon (I have a slight pref. for amazon because the book hasn’t been getting a lot of signal boost, but do post wherever you want on the Internet, and whatever you feel about the book–more than a few sentences, of course–and you’re obviously free to say if you didn’t like it). First come, first served. I’ll sign and personalise them if you so require.

Memo: you don’t have to have read the previous books in the trilogy to make sense of this one; it’s a standalone like an episode of a crime series, though obviously character arcs get wrapped (last book of the trilogy, yadda yadda). Post here or in the LJ mirror if you want to give a copy a good home.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Master of the House of Darts

by Aliette de Bodard

Giveaway ends January 08, 2012.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

Enter to win

ETA: wow, thanks everyone! All copies offered through aliettedebodard.com are gone now, but you can still get the ones from goodreads by entering the giveaway, as indicated above (you have until January 8th).

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.

Remember the tea thing I was wondering about? (basically, why my Japanese sencha from London tasted way better than any loose-leaf green tea I’d ever had)

cecile-c came over last weekend (we had a lovely Vietnamese meal in the XIIIe, and an intense gaming session of Battlestar Galactica); and in between struggling to survive the game without being betrayed by the dastardly Cylons, we studied the tea thing. She thinks (and I agree) that it doesn’t have much to do with sencha. Rather, the key point is that said tea is packaged in tea-bags (to be more accurate, in a tea bag, and then sealed in a foil-backed tear-away bag). As Cécile said, green tea is extremely fragile, and can lose its flavour within months of being harvested and dried [1]–however, by the time it gets to France, said green tea will often be months old, which leads to the simple and inescapable conclusion that, well, it’s not going to taste very good at this stage…

I don’t think the tea I brought back from London is necessarily uber-fresh (though it might be, since it was a direct export from Japan via plane, meant for the consumption of Japanese expatriates). However, remember our packaging? With a double layer of paper and then foil? This is probably better for its conservation than merely jamming it into jars that might not be full (ie contain large amounts of air), and might not be sealed hermetically.

This is not reassuring news, as it means I either should find another tea provider with ultra-fresh arrivals, or that I need to buy ecologically wasteful tea bags…

[1]Indeed, one of the reasons why black tea was so popular in Great Britain in Victorian times was that its flavour would survive the months it took to bring it from Asia to Europe, whereas green tea wouldn’t.

“con rồng, cháu tiên”: “child of dragons, grandchild of immortals”.
This one refers to an old tale: according to legend, the Vietnamese people are descended from the union of the dragon Lạc Long Quân and the immortal Âu Cơ: they had a hundred children together, but because they were so different (he was a dragon from the deep seas, she was an immortal and only felt at home in the mountains), they ended up separating. Lạc Long Quân, summoned home by his mother, took half the children and went towards the sea; and Âu Cơ took the other half into the mountains. This was the origin of the Vietnamese people.

I am currently learning preposition and interrogative words (the words that you tack on the end of a sentence to signal that it’s a question. Yup, it’s a tonal language, which means that raising your voice at the end of a sentence just results in your mangling the last words by giving it a rising accent…). Not exactly fun, but necessary.

“báo chết để da, người ta chết để tiếng”
A panther when dead leaves behind a skin; a man [lit. people] when dead leaves behind a name/reputation/words.

Pretty. Also, I learnt lots of new words 🙂

I’d like to think my vocabulary is improving, but 3 words a day isn’t very efficient to build up vocab (mind you, with me putting in about 15-30 min per day, I don’t reckon I can get more efficient than this). I got myself an Oxford picture dictionary English/Vietnamese; the unfortunate bit being that it’s for Vietnamese immigrants to Western countries, and therefore it uses English concepts: it’s OK for most everyday words, but it lacks Vietnamese syntax, and the concepts that are different just aren’t explained: the various kinds of uncles just get lumped under the same English word (yes, there are four words to describe uncles in Vietnamese: cậu, bác, chú, dượng respectively brother of mother, elder brother of father, younger brother of father, and any uncles that have married into the family rather than being linked to it by blood). So not quite what I want to be studying intensively…

In other news, work has started again on the novella that wouldn’t die (complete redraft), so I’m going to be scarce this week. And, hum, the week after (which is Christmas anyway).

Tired (everything was going fine until they stopped all traffic on the subway line I use to get home. There was a good reason–suicidee on the tracks–but still… kind of not fun when you’re the traveller stuck in an overcrowded train car).

For my next project, I am tackling the novella that wouldn’t die, using the supreme weapon of mindmaps–well, actually, I only learnt they were mindmaps after I started using them. I have downloaded Freemind on the computer (neat cross-platform tool), but for some reasons mindmaps work better for me on paper–one of the rare things that still does. So I take a huge A4, and draw little circles and little arrows, et voilà! Suddenly all my problems vanish. Ha, I wish. But what usually happens is that I get past whatever had me stumped (in this particular, a troublesome reveal halfway through the novella). Now I feel much better armed for tackling the rewrite. Mostly just pondering if I should edit, or just not bother with it and write clean scenes.

I owe a bunch of you on OWW reviews; those are coming, but probably tomorrow. Tonight I’m being first-drafty, and then domestic, alas (some jackets to clean, etc. etc.)

In other news, I have finally received season 6 of Doctor Who, yay!