Wasn’t sure how public this was, but apparently people have already been announcing their own acceptances over the Internet. So…

Gardner Dozois has picked up my Xuya story “The Shipmaker” (which is in the current issue of Interzone) for his Year’s Best.

Er, wow? Particularly pleased, as this was the first story where I attempted to put Vietnamese on the map of my alternate universe–there aren’t that many Vietnamese main characters in spec-fic[1], and it’s high time I did my bit to remedy this.

If you need me, I’ll be in the corner, jumping and squeeing…

ETA: and it looks I get to share a TOC with Yoon Ha Lee’s “Flower, Mercy, Needle Chain”, which is one of the absolute best SF stories I read this year. W00t.

[1]There’s plenty of Vietnam War stories, which tend to be told from the American point of view–so not really fitting the billl. Plus, while the war was definitely traumatic for the country, it’s not the only thing that defines Vietnamese culture…

In an effort to widen my reading habits, I was looking for examples of novels with well done non-Western futures (“well done” varies depending on your mileage, of course, but mostly what I wanted was books where the main characters didn’t feel like Europeans with slightly different names and better costumes).

I have read (and enjoyed) China Mountain Zhang, River of Gods, Brasyl, most Octavia Butlers (the Xenogenesis trilogy, the Parable duology, and all the Patternists) and am eyeing The Dervish House, Midnight Robber, the David Wingrove Chung Kuo series, and Who Fears Death.

Any others I should know about? Thanks in advance!

So we’re watching Farscape season 4, which definitely has its ups and downs–and we’d be more in the downs right now. Among my (many) sources of irritation is the way Crichton refers to the child Aeryn is carrying as “my child, my DNA”–which is so darn utterly selfish.

Why on earth is it so difficult to acknowledge that the being in Aeryn’s womb belongs to both of them?

And it’s struck me, even as I was ranting against this, that there are an awful lot of series/movies which feature precisely that trope: the male character finds out he’s going to be a dad, and runs after the woman while continuously referring to the future child as his and his only. Way to respect the mother, dude.

Current mood:

angry

…or do all Hollywood trailers look the same? I’ve just watched the ones for the new Narnia and the new Pirates of the Carribbean, and was bored about halfway through.
(only positive point in Pirates looks to be the return of Geoffrey Rush, whom I’ve always loved. I hope they don’t bungle his part).

I don’t like working with music in general–it distracts me when I’m fighting against code or complicated maths, and it just makes me miss the important bits when reading a set of technical specifications. However, when writing, it’s a whole other problem. I find music is helpful–only certain kinds of music, mind you, to get me in the proper mood.

Basically, I require anything that doesn’t require me to focus on the actual lyrics, or distract me with a strong, aggressive beat: either songs I know well, soft instrumentals I don’t know–or light pop, where the lyrics aren’t much of a problem… Songs in languages I don’t speak so well–Spanish or Vietnamese–are more of a hindrance because of that knee jerk reflex to try and understand every single word of the song. Songs in languages I don’t speak at all (say, Japanese or Chinese) are not a problem, and they’re generally a welcome change.

But I kind of like variety in my music, too; and recently I found that I knew by heart most of the songs in my itunes library, which was a little boring (even more so for the H, who I think was about ready to kill me because I listened to the same stuff over and over). I bought a few more CDs, but I was really looking for was a radio station that would have music I liked. I used to be a big fan of Pandora‘s system, which basically learnt what you liked over time and presented similar songs to you–but Pandora threw me out because I don’t live in the States (a common problem in my life, see ebooks).

Until a recent post by Tobias Buckell alerted me to the existence of Last.fm. Basically, download the Scrobbler app for Mac, which links to itunes and analyses your recent playing history–and then offers you a choice of “radio stations”: either the stuff by people you already love and listen to (the “library radio”), or mixes between the familiar and guesses as to what you’ll like (the “mix radio”). And, like Pandora, you can like songs or ban them in order to improve the accuracy of suggestions. So far, I haven’t had to do that: the mix radio has been pretty accurate (unlike Pandora, actually, which had a tendency to offer me metal out of nowhere, based on some weird association).

Consider me addicted 🙂

Yup, it’s paying. 3 euros per month, but at that price, given how often I listen to music, I’ll fork out gladly.

(for the record, the stuff I listen to tends to be Vienna Teng, Dar Williams, Emmylou Harris, the Innocence Mission–lots of singer-songwriters with a folk or classical vibe, and some classical/religious music)

“A little white stone holding up quetzal feathers”=a spring onion
You have to admit there’s a certain resemblance…

Current Mood: amused

This is part 2 on a post chronicling my trailer-making experiments. For part 1 see here.

Here’s the Harbinger trailer again, so you can see what I’m talking about:

Step 4: Get Music
This has always been the trickiest part for me. Basically, you need a soundtrack you can cut up and modify (I’ll come back to syncing the music and the images later), and I had a lot of trouble finding those. A quick survey of people doing their own books trailers showed them either using public domain stuff (like old interpretations of classical music), or having musician friends/acquaintances who could provide them with slightly cheaper alternatives to mainstream music (I don’t even want to know how much the majors charge for using bits of song, given how bad they are at authorising authors to quote lyrics for a reasonable sum of money).
Continue reading →

Some Servant of the Underworld mentions (sorry for the long list, I kind of haven’t updated in a long while on this):
–Windrose Meanderings (loved it)
–You Fight Like Anne Rice (didn’t care so much for the style or the main character)
–Solar Bridge (thought the milieu tended to overwhelm the novel)
–Jonathan McCalmont at the Zone (to say that he didn’t like it is an understatement. It’s the review with claws I was referring to earlier. I’ve skimmed through it but not really read it–I can deal with this kind of deconstruction, but only after book 3 is completed).
–Violin in the Void (thought the setting was great, but was worried some people might think the pace was laggy, and that Neutemoc was a pain)
–Miranda Suri (in a more general post about other mindsets, why we should write them and what are the pitfalls. In which I get mentioned next to Lord of Light, one of my all-time fave SF books. Wow).
–starlady38 (really liked it, thought Mihmatini was awesome)
–trollsmyth (thinks it would make an awesome tabletop RPG. I’d tend to agree–it would be extra fun to dump PC into Tenochtitlan. I’d GM that kind of thing myself, if GMing didn’t interfere with my creative processes).

Those posts have been in the queue for a while, but I’ve never had the leisure to properly edit them before putting them online.

Basically, I thought I’d share my experience in making book trailers. It’s limited: I made my first book trailer in 2009 in the leadup to the release of Servant of the Underworld, and reiterated the process a year later when I made the trailer for Harbinger of the Storm. To my surprise, the HoU trailer was highlighted on a number of websites as being attractive, which proves that at least I got something right.

As usual, I’m not saying this is the way to go: just pointing out what worked for me, and what I learnt in the process. I’d be delighted to hear other people’s experience on the subject.

Continue reading →

%%% The snowpocalypse has struck.
Have I mentioned my workplace is up a series of two hills? Buses are failing to run that particular route (and about 80% of Parisian routes, in fact).
Luckily, I got some work documents and will peruse them at home.