It’s the 28th of the month again, and I’m blogging over at SFNovelists on Narrative, Resonance and Genre in different cultures. Go check it out!

I get profiled over at Stomping on Yeti as an author worth watching, along with Rachel Swirsky, John Langan, Leah Bobet and Greg Van Eekout (it’s part 4 of a 5-article feature that’s going to profile 25 authors worth keeping an eye on in 2010). Many thanks to Patrick for the awesome comments.

The details she weaves into her work are exotic and refreshing and the worlds she creates, be they past or present, beg for further exploration.

And Cara over at Speculative Book Review lists Servant of the Underworld as one of her top five books for the year.

On a random, aggrieved note after reading a hundred pages of The Cardinal’s Blades: I love the book. I love the mesh of Three Musketeers with dragons, and it’s been such a long time since I had any proper swashbuckling. But one thing makes me cringe at almost every page: the Spaniard, Anibal Antonio Almadès di Cardio. Because Spanish doesn’t have grave accents. Neither does it have a nobility with titles like “di Cardio”: the nobility mark is “de” just like French (I know I’ve seen the “di” elsewhere–my best guess is that Italians might have that, but I’m not sure). I do wish some Spanish-speaker had reread that bit and corrected it, because it continually jolts me out of the narration and makes me want to scream at things.

So, one thing that’s always been part of my life: I have a somewhat uncommon first name, and it’s not often that I see other people who have it. And, in particular, not often that I see characters in books with that first name. A result is that I tend to assume anyone named “Aliette” has to bear some ressemblance with me (I was once the proud owner of a green children’s book called “Aliette goes skiiing”, which never failed to make me smile, because, boy, am I abysmal at skiing).
So there’s apparently an author out there writing a series of mysteries set in France and featuring an inspector called Aliette Nouvelle (which comes out a little disturbing in French, because we have “Beaujolais nouveau”, which is this year’s vintage, and this reads a little bit like Aliette is some kind of wine…. It’s a good vintage, honest 🙂 ).
Anyway, I found this from the backcover of one of the books according to Amazon, and thought it too funny not to share:

Aliette (…) is a new heroine for the 90s—smart, single and intuitive, but more interested in quietly and non-violently getting the job done than in receiving front-page coverage for her sometimes unorthodox methods of crime-solving. She knows she is regarded as a rising star in the force and believes that her years of hard work and her excellent record are about to bear fruit.

Look, I’m a famous detective :=)

Well, I’m pretty sure I had a weekend, except it seems to have disappeared…

Aside from wedding stuff, we went to see Wild Target, a dark comedy about an ageing hitman who finds himself dealing with a young, awkward apprentice, and a con artist/kleptomaniac, both of whom he has to protect from the goons sent after them. Hilarious, well worth several watches (interestingly, learnt afterwards it was a remake of a French farce, Cible Emouvante. Might track the original down…).

Did one blog post for a guest blog, and am still working on another one. Also decided I’d had enough of not doing any actual writing (I did revisions and synopses, but I miss my first drafts), and started thinking on a new story, aka “Chinese dynasty on space station”.

Er, wow.
Duncan Lawie reviews Servant of the Underworld for Strange Horizons. It’s pretty special, because SH is huge, and because it’s the one venue I regularly go to in order to read reviews–so to be reviewed there does make me feel like a star…

And, what’s more, it says things like:

(…)Servant of the Underworld is rounded and complete in itself, although the title page suggests this is the first volume of “Obsidian and Blood.” If Aliette de Bodard can continue as well as she has started, Acatl deserves to become as well known as that other priestly investigator, Cadfael.

*writer goes for a liedown*
(I know you’re meant to ignore reviews good and bad and focus on writing, but–wow. Just wow.)

So, I came home tonight and found a huge parcel in the living room. By “huge”, I mean, “a large piece of burlap wrapped up around something heavy, pulled up, and tied with a little knot around the neck”. And by “parcel”, what I mean is “sack”, because that’s the first thing it reminded me. I asked the H what the heck that was, and he said with a huge smile, “you can tell me, because it’s addressed to you”.
After half an hour with scissors and several paper cuts (there was a cardboard envelope inside the burlap, which is sadism), I finally managed to unwrap the package. Inside was a rather large hardcover I had ordered a while ago (A4-sized, 500 pages).
Now don’t get me wrong. I’m happy to have got my book. I’m happy they saw the need to protect it on its journey from the states. I understand the fact this wouldn’t fit inside a standard envelope, and that something a little more drastic might be called for.
But really? A sack of burlap five times the volume of the book?

Current mood: amused

So I thought I’d post about this here, because there’s a bunch of clichés floating around about Ancient China that are not exactly true, or at least not in the way you think. By order of growing annoyance:

-All Chinese practised special brands of martial arts: er, ok. While martial arts are pretty old (Shaolin Monastery, for instance, was founded in the 5th Century), martial arts have always been viewed with suspicion, and it’s only recently that they’ve become mainstream. The dominant and mainstream culture of Ancient China was Confucianism as practised by scholars, and this frowned upon sports (which were viewed as risky and unbecoming of an apprentice scholar, who had better things to do than rub in the dirt–such as learning the Classics by heart). To a lesser extent, diehard Confucianists also frowned upon religion, especially the excesses they engendered: both Daoism and Buddhism promote setting aside the world, and this didn’t sit well with a culture that valued ancestral worship and promoted family ties. Shaolin monastery, and many other places where martial arts were practised, were the target of several government purges because they were suspected of harbouring dissidents. So, if you have a martial arts practioner, chances are the authorities will not be looking kindly on them (nor his neighbours, if they’re scholars).

-All Chinese had pigtails: that one is a bit of a sore spot. When the Manchu invaded China in the 17th Century to found their own dynasty, they forced all Chinese to wear pigtails as a means of differentiating between Chinese and Manchus. The pigtail was a humiliation: before that, the Chinese wore their hair in buns.

-China has always been ruled by the Han Chinese: or not. It’s been more a “Chinese rule, mongol rule” for a long time: the Song dynasty (960–1127, 1127–1279) held only part of China, and co-existed with the Liao and the Jin dynasty, neither of which were ethnic Han, the Yuan (1271–1368) were Mongols (Gengis Khan founded the dynasty), the Ming (1368–1644) were Chinese (but pretty closed to external commerce as a backlash to the previous invasion), and the Qing (1644-1911), the last imperial Chinese dynasty, was founded by the Manchu, who have much more in common with the Mongols than with the Chinese (at the beginning. They adapted pretty well afterwards, though they never did get the hang of customs like bound feet).

-Chinese porcelain is pretty blue designs on white porcelain: ironically, this kind of design was way more successful abroad (both in Islamic and in European countries) than it ever was in China. Chinese ideas of beautiful porcelain is more celadon, or other techniques that produce a glaze without deliberate motifs.

-White is the mourning colour and very unlucky. Yes and no. White is the mourning colour, and is worn at funerals, associated with ghosts, etc. But strictly speaking, the colour this is referring to is su, which is that of unbleached hemp–a sort of brownish-yellowish pale colour, rather than pure white. Hemp was worn as mourning clothes because it’s uncomfortable as much as for the colour. Also, while some things associated with white are unlucky (wearing white in one’s hair, for instance), white has associations with virginity, purity and the unknown. You thus find a lot of references to white in Daoism.

-Chinese culture didn’t change for millennia: That’s about as rational as saying that French Gaul and France today are the same. There have been some pretty big upheavals (Mongol invasions, see above), but even then, the culture changed a lot. The traditions evolved: during the Han dynasties (3rd century BC-3rd Century AD), China didn’t know Buddhism, and even Daoism was still developing its ideologies. The flamboyant princesses of the Tang dynasty have very little in common with the Qing dynasty women, cloistered in their apartments and with very few rights of their own. Also, China is huge, and different regions have wholly different histories: the area around Beijing doesn’t have much in common with that around Guangzhou, climate-wise, food-wise, culture-wise…

-The very first Angry Robot podcast: set to be a monthly affair featuring AR and genre-related stuff. The inaugural episode features Marc Gascoigne and Lee Harris (who are apparently having loads of fun with this), speaking among others about their new releases and the future of publishing. You can subscribe here (itunes subscriptions forthcoming).
-Many congratulations to Gareth L. Powell, SF writer, occasional co-author and great all-around guy, for signing up with Solaris for his novel The Recollection. Congratulate him here.
-Interesting post over at I09 on “Is avoiding tropes the same thing as telling fresh stories?”
-Janice Hardy has a contest to win an ARC of Blue Fire, second book in her (MG) Healing Wars trilogy. Also, if you’re interested in different approaches, you can see the covers of the US, UK and German editions of books 1 and 2 here.
-Jeff Spock writes about stories for casual games. Fascinating stuff about why cliché and archetypes are good for you.

Urk. The spam comments have grown so numerous (hundreds in a few days) that I can no longer check them individually. Hope this doesn’t affect legit commenters here. (and I guess I ought to feel flattered at the attention).

The LJ crossposting is misbehaving a little–it sometimes turns itself off for no particular reason. Some fiddling will inevitably happen…

Also running into a few issues with scheduled posts, which might end up in double posts until I work out the system.

But, overall, the brand new WordPress seems spiffy (and I like the new colour scheme for the CMS backend. Much easier on the eyes).

Does anyone know if there are tools for managing tags and categories? Specifically, I wanted to merge several tags into one automatically, and/or migrate tags to categories. Any ways to do this which don’t involve massive amounts of love labour?

So, I’ve recently noticed I started writing Aztec steampunk (“Memories in Bronze, Feathers and Blood”, up at Beneath Ceaseless Skies, “Age of Miracles, Age of Wonders” forthcoming in Interzone, and “Prayers of Forges and Furnaces”, which I haven’t sold yet). I’ve had several people mentioning how it’s a bit odd to be mixing Aztecs with the steampunk aesthetic, and that set me wondering about where I was coming from when I was writing that kind of stuff.
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