Because of moments like those: I was looking for something else entirely (specifically, information about religion in Tlatelolco for a minor character in book 3), and happened upon an awesome tidbit of information related to the time period, which will fit great into the novel.
Research is made of awesome.

PS: apparently, book 3 is now listed on amazon, with a Sept. 1 2011 release date (and no title). Good to know while you’re writing it…
EDIT: OK, according to AR this is an erroneous listing, and the book will *not* be released on Sept 2011. Phew.

On a happier note…

My friends’ Bday gifts to me: season 1 of The Big Bang Theory, season 1 of Torchwood, and mangas.

*happy geek*

Well, more like a rant… Loved episode 1 to bits, but in general I have the feeling this episode was a little under par. Also, it had a number of massive issues around its depictions of Chinese–the sheer number of movies featuring a powerful Chinese sect (somewhat Triad-like) is really annoying, and it’s a shame this episode doesn’t buck the trend. Let’s not even mention the clichés of the Chinese girl obsessed with the tea ceremony or the eeevil Triad (sorry, sect) pillaging the riches of its own country. Yeah, right.

I have the same problem with the Triads intruding in the UK as I have with the Russian mafia or the Colombian drug-lords in thrillers: behind a premise like that, there’s a strong subtext of “oh, we were doing fine until those *people* started bringing their own criminality over. Really, all British citizens are fine. It’s just foreigners who bring their dirty laundry”. And I thought it was particularly noticeable in that episode, especially given the poor characterisation of the Chinese.

And for once, Sherlock is painfully slow on the uptake–I don’t know any Chinese, but my first reflex on seeing those symbols would have been “some Asian language, probably derived from Chinese” (yes, they’re numbers from an obsolete system, but some of the signs, like the “one” sign, definitely have a familiar component…).

Oh, and yeah–the big bad General Shan looked about as Chinese as me or you. I could be wrong, but I’d have pegged her as some kind of South-East Asian (Thai or Vietnamese, I think, but I can’t find the actress’ name to check). Kind of undercut her seriousness as the top person of the eeevil Chinese sect.

Wordcount: 17,000/100,000

Awesome title ideas: no further ones.

Body count: 1, 3 in progress. Oh, and 1 owl.

Best moment of the day: the Tlatelolco marketplace.

Unexpected moment of the day: the merchant. Thin, armed to the teeth, and determined to defend his goods…

Missing research: none so far.

Aka what happens when I have too much time on my hands and am procrastinating on the writing of book 3.

Want to know more? There’s the first chapter up here.

Wanna preorder? Random house | Amazon US | UK | B&N | Book Depository

(brought to you by the department of shameless self-promotion)

So, I thought I’d trying out something new when a story comes out: author’s notes, the equivalent of DVD extras. Might contain mild spoilers, though this time they don’t. Every story has those extra little bits that I couldn’t fit into the main narrative, and I figured I’d share some of them with you.

We’ll start with “The Shipmaker”, which is in issue 231 of Interzone, now out in the wild. It’s the Jason Sanford special issue, with three stories by him (you can see previews here, here and here), and an interview. The remaining stories are by Matthew Cook, and by me.

Continue reading →

You know modern English only has one set of second-person pronouns and basically no formal address that uses pronouns? And how French has “tu/vous”, informal/formal forms of address?

Well, I have the whole weekend to work out how characters in Obsidian and Blood should address one another in the French translation, whether by tutoiement or vouvoiement–in order to help out the translator.

Arg.
(don’t get me wrong, I’m overjoyed I get that kind of control over the translation, but it’s just that I now have to mentally translate my characters interactions into French, and it’s a teensy little bit painful)

–Bourgeois Nerd reviews Servant of the Underworld:

(…)we rarely get fantasy based in a non-Western setting and grounded in a different culture, and hardly ever does anything set in Mesoamerica get written. Servant of the Underworld changes that, introducing us to a world of jade and obsidian, where gods walk the world, mortals walk the divine realms, and blood powers the universe.
(…)
The next book in the series, Harbinger of the Storm, comes out in January, and I for one can’t wait to return to the shadows of Tenochtitlan.

-Made a trailer for Harbinger of the Storm, which is still in the editing stage. Hopefully it can be shared soon. What amazed me was how much faster it went, compared to the previous Servant of the Underworld trailer. I could feel I’d learnt a lot in the time in between, even though I didn’t touch anything remotely trailer-related in a year (aside from watching friends’ trailers, which I guess gave me a lot of cool ideas I could borrow). I’ll do a specific post a bit later about how I went about it and what I learnt.

-Finally, watch this space on Monday for author’s notes about “The Shipmaker” (now in out in issue 231 of Interzone)

Also, this:

Yup, made phở from scratch this week. Yum yum. Recipe forthcoming when I have a moment.
(ignore the poor lighting. The house’s electricity installation doesn’t quite satisfy late at night)

Via Douglas Cohen:

Hi Everyone,

I’m about to ask for your help with something. As I noted when I announced that Shawna and I would be coming back, there are a number of submissions that were in various states of consideration when the magazine announced its closure. The only right thing to do was release these manuscripts from consideration. Now, the manuscripts I had that were going to be passed along to Shawna were discarded. In the interests of goodwill, I’ve subsequently contacted all of these authors and invited them to resubmit their manuscripts to me via email if they’re so inclined. (PLEASE NOTE: this is a special exception made just for them under the circumstances–we’re still at this time just accepting submissions via snail mail).

However, there are also quite a number of submissions that are sitting with Shawna, enough that I thought it would be a good idea to post this note. Here’s the thing: Shawna is going to have a lot of reading ahead of her as we build the magazine’s fiction inventory back up. Since I don’t have the manuscripts, it would drive me rather insane to hunt down all of the email addresses to all of the authors who have stories with Shawna. And it would be rather time consuming for Shawna to email all of these people to see if they’d like their manuscripts to still be considered. Then she’d also still have to wait to hear back, which eats up more time. I’d rather Shawna be able to use this time to read stories as we get the magazine caught up. Some folks have already told me they still want their stories to be considered. But I’d like to hear from the rest of you. If you had a story that was with Shawna and would still like it to be considered, please email me (slushmaster@gmail.com) and tell me the name of your story. It will save Shawna the trouble of reading a story that has since been withdrawn. It also wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to let me know you’re officially withdrawing your story or that you’ve already sold it elsewhere.

So here’s where you come in, Internets. Blog about this. Tweet about this. Facebook about this. Help us out. As Picard would say, “Make it so.”

Thanks all.

ETA: Please don’t contact me regarding general slush submissions. Not that those stories aren’t important, but it will just create too much confusion. We’ll figure this out a little later, thanks.

Wordcount: 14,600/100,000

Awesome title ideas: no further ones.

Body count: 1, 3 in progress. Oh, and 1 owl.

Best moment of the day: Teomitl interacting with children.

Unexpected moment of the day: Acatl’s family dynamics. The previous family meal scene was in book 1, and wow, how things have changed, two books later.
Unexpected moment of the day, #2: finding out all Aztec priests painted their whole bodies black. Ah. Would have been good to know this before I wrote two freaking books featuring a priest as a main character…

Missing research: not that I can see for tonight. Spent a lot of time figuring out how many nephews and nieces Acatl had, and what they were up to. The pile of books near my chair is now a complete mess.