Calling on the combined wisdom of readers of this blog…
Would anyone happen to know good recipes which involve tortilla flour? (not tortillas, obviously :-p. We don’t own a tortilla press, and it’s a bit too much of a hassle without one).
Thanks in advance!
H and I are preparing the signs for the tables at the wedding reception. Just so you see the context: there are 24-25 tables, and every one of them has a name so people can find it. All the tables have related names, what is called the “theme” of the wedding (for instance: species of goldfish, islands, famous doctors[1]). Every table has a 4-page leaflet on it for orientation purposes. The first page bears the name of the table with about two paragraphs of explanations (example: if all the tables are named after famous doctors, every table has two paragraphs of doctor biography), and the inside has the menu (which comes in three flavours: French, English and French children’s menu).
Me: “So we’re agreed on this, I’m sending the layout to the parents so they can comment on it.”
H: “Yup, looks good to me with this colour choice.”
Me: “And then I’m stopping until we have the green light from them. I still have to write 23 bits of text for every table, and if we change the layout I’d have to go over all 24 documents and change the layout for every single freaking one of them. *pause* It’s kind of a shame you can’t apply a global layout across documents.”
H: “I bet you could use a Python script to generate an RTF file according to your specifications.”
Me: “I don’t speak Python. Maybe VBA? *pause* Hang on, theoretically, all we’d have to is look in the master document, find the anchors where the bits of text are, and then do a standard substitution from the command line, using sed or something like this…”
H: “…”
Me: “You’re right. Let’s not go there.”
[1]I’m not spoiling the “theme” of the wedding until we get closer to the date. You’re free to guess, though :=)
So I’m reading this book (the title of which shall be omitted, because I don’t think I want to remember it for even that long). It’s about a small town targeted by (yet another) serial killer who preys on young girls and has digusting sexual fantasies. It’s got the arrogant rich bastard, the arrogant rich bastard’s son who is also an arrogant bastard, the haunted police investigator whose wife cheated on him, the heroine whom everyone pines for and who is kind and comforting and great with kids but generally completely helpless. And in the end, the serial killer turns out to be the sweet mentally challenged kid, who kidnaps the heroine and tortures her.
Am I the only one who sees a problem with all the %%% clichés here? (and seriously, the guy with the mental troubles is a serial killer? Way to go to ease the mistrust and prejudice towards people who didn’t have much of a choice in what life dealt them)
Also, seriously, what’s with the serial killers in US novels? I’m getting tired of sexual fantasies and extreme violence towards women. Perhaps some people enjoy reading about that. I certainly don’t.
Because I’ve noticed I’ve become really, really badly distracted…
I might be a tad slower and/or forgetful in posting/answering email/the like. If you don’t hear from me and you were expecting something, it’s because RL (aka the wedding) has struck. My mind’s a bit like a colander at the moment, so don’t hesitate to remind me…
Temporarily titled The Shipmaker until I can think of something better. 5000-ish words, Xuya story.
Ships were living, breathing beings. Dac Kien had known this, even before she’d reached the engineering habitat–even before she’d seen the great mass in orbit outside, being slowly assembled by the bots.
Her ancestors had once carved jade, in the bygone days of the Le dynasty on Old Earth: not hacking and cutting the green blocks into the shape they wanted, but rather whittling down the stone until its true nature was revealed. And as with jade, so with ships. The sections outside couldn’t be forced into becoming a ship. They had to flow together into a seamless whole–to be, in the end, inhabited by a Mind who was as much a part of the ship as every rivet and every seal.
Interesting facts… For writing this story, I researched, in no particular order: Vietnamese names (I know the naming system, but looking through the dictionary for suitable first names took more time than I’d envisioned), the history of Vietnam and of the Vietnamese language, shipbuilding, aircraft-building, feng shui, physiology of pregnancy and childbirth, and childbirth in Ancient China.
Grand total: 2.5 days, including a long conversation with the H about the merits of building in orbit vs. planetside.
The actual writing of the story? took me 1 day, and 1 other day to fill in the little holes I’d left.
(we’re not talking 12-hour days here, as I was at the dayjob all along, more like lunchbreaks, a bit of commute time, and large chunks in the evenings).
I think we’ve proved I’m a research addict. Quite hopelessly so.
Also, it feels good to write stuff again.
Swamped. Or ocean-ed, quite possibly.
Working on a new short in the Xuya continuity, involving spaceships and poets.
Made my first serious phở ersatz, mostly pre-prepared broth and paste, but with veggies and spices thrown in for a better taste. Yummy… Next up, I think, is using pre-prepared beef broth (instead of the pre-made phở broth, which is full of MSG). The full broth including beef is at least three hours’ simmering, too long to make for an evening dish, but I can live with cubes of beef broth and additional spice. Now to find some cloves, which my local supermarket doesn’t stock…
Vietnamese continues apace; we now have a book. Or rather, four books, out of which the first one is entirely dedicated to pronunciation. Arg. Still struggling with normal vowels and consonants, and then we move to diphtongs…
Fun stuff I’ve learnt: my default tone isn’t the level one (ngang), but rather the falling-rising one (hỏi). When I’m really tired, I default to this, with hilarious results…
Also, the day I can pronounce “Wednesday” in Vietnamese is going to be a red-letter one (“ngày thứ tư”, lit. “the fourth day”, regroups four sounds I can’t manage,, the “ng”, the “th” which should be somewhat harsh but distinct from the “t”, and the “ư”).
The wonderful M.G. Ellington has been kind enough to lend me some space on the Apex blog, where I ramble on what I should have done when writing Obsidian and Blood:
When I settled down to write my novel, the Aztec noir fantasy Servant of the Underworld, I had only the vaguest idea it might turn into a series. My first thought was to finish the darn thing, and not really to map out what might be happening to my characters after the plot was over.
That was 2007; now we’re in 2010. I’ve sold Servant and two more books in the Obsidian and Blood trilogy to Angry Robot; I’ve turned the sequel, Harbinger of the Storm, to my publisher; and I’ve just completed a tentative synopsis for the as-yet-untitled book 3. Looking back to how I wrote the series, there are a few things I did right, and a few things I should have paid more attention to.
Go check it out!
In other linkage news, Mike Johnstone reviews the February 2010 issue of Asimov’s, which contains my alt-hist “The Wind-Blown Man”:
Her prose deftly taps into the atmosphere, rhythm, and thoughtfulness of Chinese tales (Buddhist, Taoist myths): it is measured, unhurried, soothing; it suggests a depth just tantalizingly out of reach.
That’s all for now. I’ll go back to RL stuff and programming (and %% implicit conversions).
Just watched the first episode of Eleventh Hour with Rufus Sewell. Er, wow. Admittedly, biology isn’t one of my strong tracts, but the science in this, for once, held up pretty well. OK, it still wasn’t 100 % OK, but at least it didn’t have me screaming at the TV (as I did for pretty much every science fiction show I ever watched). Special points for NOT attempting defibrillation when the heart monitor flatlines, but instead doing what doctors actually do, ie CPR. Sure, there was nothing earth-shatteringly out of this world as regards the science (people trying to clone humans[1]), but it felt particularly realistic precisely for that reason.
Also, bonus points for actually having a scientist with a strong sense of ethics, which is a welcome change from all the people without scruples you see in TV shows–and for having him actually specialised in biology rather than being McGyver (I’m looking at you, Samantha Carter).
Later googled stuff, and found this article on IO9 about how the show gives science a bad name. Er, ok, I’m not sure why the strong reaction here. Without being over-alarmist, science does have good and bad sides, and I don’t see why the show shouldn’t be able to focus on the excesses of science applied blindly and without morals (there’s plenty of books and movies that present science like some kind of miracle, and this is no more realistic than the alarmist approach of Eleventh Hour ). And Jacob Hood not being in a lab? Given the guy’s sense of practical (trying to write down the plate number of a car by standing in front of it…), I’m thinking he has a PhD in theoretical science, and that if you give this guy a lab (ie one with dangerous products), he’d blow it up in no time.
Also, Rufus Sewell… totally yummy :=)
Please tell me it stays that good. Pretty please. I like the bit when I watch a science-y show and don’t scream at the TV. I really do.
[1] The episode has the surrogate mothers of the clones dying of complications. And, yeah, I know that based on what we’ve done on animals and for IVF, we can suspect that the biggest problem with human cloning is going to get viable embryos rather than worrying about mothers dying in childbirth. But since we haven’t actually tried the whole thing on humans, I’m ready to buy that the cloning process could be less straightforward than we think. In any systems, there’s always some weird interactions, and I’ve seen weirder things than an egg with a reconstituted nucleus messing up the delicate balance of a pregnancy.
Went over to the supermarket to buy some celery. When I got to the tills, the cashier looked at the vegetable with a dubious air. He then turned to his colleague brandishing it and asked, “How much is that?” His colleague shrugged and said he had no idea what the thing was.
“It’s celery,” I pointed out.
He still looked very much bemused. After he found the barcode for it and I was in the process of paying for the shopping, he wanted to know if there was any use for it and what you actually did with this weird-looking veggie.
Clearly, celery isn’t as recognisable as carrots :=)
Wedding preparations continue apace. Various blog posts and interviews are being redacted.
On the minus side, I’ve written a grand total of 2 paragraphs of fiction, and stopped because I have wonderful characters but no plot. I dearly want to blow up something, but I suspect the correct solution is to go research the heck out of something (I had a similar problem when writing “Age of Miracles, Age of Wonders”, which solved itself when I decided the action was going to take place in a 19th-century mining town, and researched accordingly).
Oh, yeah, and the synopsis for Book 3 of Obsidian and Blood, having had the agent-go-ahead, is now in the hands of my editor. Temp title Master of the House of Darts, subject to editorial approval/my changing my mind/the weather.
Bookwise, I seem to make up for my lack of fiction writing by reading a lot: I finished The Cardinal’s Blades (fun, if not unforgettable) and a French SF by Gérard Klein, Le Temps n’a pas d’Odeur (Time has no smell). I ordered Dream of Red Mansions in a beautiful 4-volume edition (Foreign Press, the same Chinese publisher I got Three Kingdoms from), got myself a copy of Daniel Abraham’s Seasons of War (the only way to get The Price of Spring in paperback), and started on Lynn Flewelling’s Nightrunner series (love the characters, in spite of fairly standard worldbuillding).
