Courtesy of my grandmother…
Apparently, the Vietnamese word for “vampire” is “ma cà rồng”. It’s unfortunately close to the word “macaron“, aka the Italian meringue-based confectionery. Cue much hilarity when my grandmother described Edward Cullen as a macaron…
(and yes, my grandmother has read Twilight, which she refers to as the macaron novel… *helpless laughter*)
My short story “Blighted Heart” can now be found in the anthology The Best of BCS, along with tales from wistling (Tony Pi), snickelish (Sarah L. Edwards), and therinth (Erin Cashier). If you feel like trying out stories about creepy corn-men, Russian witches and a homonculus forced to do an alchemist’s dark bidding, then here’s the place :=)
Available in a variety of ebook formats including Kindle and epub.
Also, a belated nod to a joint interview with Gareth L. Powell (courtesy of the tireless Charles Tan) about our collaboration, “The Church of Accelerated Redemption”, now available in the Shine Anthology.
So, as I’m trying to get this %% manuscript out the door…
I have this character. His Nahuatl title is cihuacoatl, and I’m not planning to use it lest I give people headaches. So I have a choice between two translations: the Snake Woman, or the Female Snake.
Although the first one is the traditional, correct Nahuatl translation, I’m afraid it will have also everyone thinking he’s a woman. But I’m not 100% up-to-date on connotations, and for all I know the second one also strongly implies a woman, too…
What do you think–Snake Woman or Female Snake/Female Serpent?
EDIT: what about “She-Snake”?
The April Villa Diodati workshop, aka Volcanic Dust workshop, has been successfully rescheduled for June.
*happy writer*
I will now go back to the trenches of impending-deadline novel-writing…
In an Asian cookbook that was among the bookstore’s pick for the month:
“Nước mắm sauce: pick it amber, and not black and/or smelly, as the last denotes inferior quality.”
Er… I guess it depends on your definition of “smelly”? My nước mắm sauce is as smelly as they come, and it’s certainly not inferior quality (it’s got the official Vietnamese seal of approval). Amber says weak to me, aka the Thai fish sauce I tried a few months ago that just wouldn’t decent dipping sauce no matter how much I poured. But I guess if we’re talking about European palates…
(yes, the BF thinks my latest batch of nước chấm is a little…extreme? I think I finally managed to mix it with the proper kick)
Yesterday, my Mom and I went to eat Vietnamese–and Mom wrangled some freshly-ground chillies from the restaurant, which she gave me to take home. So, yesterday evening, all proud of my new toy, I mix some fresh nước mắm sauce, and my hand hovers over the chillies, wondering how much to put in. After a while, I settled on the smallest unit I knew, one coffee spoon–dumped it in, and mixed everything.
After trying out the sauce with some fried rolls, I might need to rethink my smallest unit…
Also, it’s been said many times, but don’t let me loose in an Asian foodstore. I managed to get out with only a handful of bottles (sesame oil, undiluted nước mắm, and rice vinegar) , some fresh noodles, some fruit and some ginger, but still, it was a heavy trek back home. (also, I’m now the proud owner of a garlic press, various wooden spatulas of different shapes, and a large vegetable peeler…)
And as a parting short, via SF Signal: Samurai Wars, aka the Star Wars Universe redone in ukiyo-e (traditional apanese) style. Made of awesome (for some reason, can’t link to any of the images, but check out the following: Admiral Ackbar, Jabba the Hutt, Obi-Wan Kenobi).
-James Maxey reviews Servant of the Underworld in IGMS’s latest “Lit Geek” column:
Perhaps it’s true that there are no new ideas in literature, but every so often you run into two old ideas smashed together to create something you’ve never witnessed before. This is definitely the case with Aliette De Bodard’s Servant of the Underworld.
-Dave Gullen does the same in the latest issue of Hub Magazine:
Contemporary fantasy writing has a substantial number of problems with originality, writing quality and sheer story-telling passion. You’ll find little of those faults here, de Bodard’s style is clean and focused, the narration vivid and as the story builds to the climax, exciting and urgent. You don’t have to read the glossary or the historical and writing notes at the end of the book to know that this was a work of dedication, one that consumed the author during the months it took to research and write this book. The energy comes off the page in both the writing and the story.
-And here’s madscientistnz’s take:
The mystery was interestingly complicated (but then I can never guess who’s done what, so all mysteries intrigue me) and I really liked that the stakes started out high and kept getting higher. I loved the Aztec setting, so exotic and different, and I’m always interested in characters whose culture and mindset is different to mine.
The happy writer will now proceed to edit more Harbinger chapters (and to add a pronunciation guide at the beginning, just in case)
Because my life isn’t made only of ash-spitting volcanoes…
A long, long time ago, I wrote a novel, Phoenix Rising, about which the least said the better (oh, all right, if you really want to know: it was set in a pseudo-Andalucian world and involved a hierarchy of storytellers/bards taken from Ancient Ireland. It was also, very much, 200,000 words of me not being a very good writer. Better than the previous novel I’d written, which was 200,000 words of derivative Robert Jordan, but not by much).
When I started being a Real WriterTM (defined as the time I started submitting the stuff I wrote in a timely manner), I tinkered with it for a while and then trunked it. However, while the novel itself might have had a lot of irretrievable flaws, I still liked the universe. I liked the Andalucian vibe, and I liked my poets, my minstrels, my housevoices and my loremasters and the world they were part of, and all the myths I made up while I was writing the novel. And I was really sad to let them go.
So I decided I was going to recycle bits and pieces. I abstracted a very small part of the novel’s mythos, an isolated incident that was only mentioned once–and wrote a short story around it.
It was a somewhat frustrating experience, because I ended up stripping far more of the context than I’d intended (the Andalucian vibe, in particular, sort of vanished somewhere into a black hole). But still, it was good to come back to this world, to walk the paths again with my characters and their idiosyncracies–and to see them deal with the weight of history and myth.
The result was “Silenced Songs”, a story about poetry and song, and about how people live in the wake of loss and grief and guilt.
I’m delighted the finished piece sold to the anthology “Music for Another World”, forthcoming from Mutation Press. Yay for old universes 🙂 (and many, many thanks to everyone from LH who critted either the novel or the short story).
PS: incidentally, I’m only part of the first batch of authors. The anthology still has slots open, with an April 30th deadline. If you feel musical…
So, it would seem that the Villa Diodati Workshop (due to take place now-ish in Northern Germany) has been cancelled due to an Act of God. Possibly the only workshop to be ever cancelled because of a volcanic eruption.
Guess I have no excuse not to work on Harbinger now…
My story “Desaparecidos” is now available in the June 2010 issue of Realms of Fantasy. This was actually the one that got me pulled from the slush, so I’m very pleased to see it published (with Realms closing for a while, it did end up feeling like forever…). Like the other writers in the issue, I’ve written a piece on the origin of the story, which you can read here (and be sure to check out the other background pieces–sounds like a set of fascinating stories). And the table of contents is here. (as an aside, isn’t mine the best story description ever? Kind of sums up a lot of my fiction…)
Snippet:
Caldera de los Angeles (Crater of the Angels)
About 15 km (10 miles) from downtown El Águila. Count about three hours of a fairly taxing climb to reach the top, but the inside of the caldera–with its magnificent lake and forest–is well worth the exertion.
Legend has it that the Crater marks one of the numerous places where the rebellious angels fell down from Heaven–hence its name.
From A Traveller’s Guide to the Acamba Valley
In other news, I was pleased to see that “The Lonely Heart” (published in Black Static, to be reprinted in Panverse’s Eight Against Reality), garnered an Honorable Mention in Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year, and that “After the Fire” (published in Apex, podcast on StarShipSofa), is a notable story of 2009 for the Million Writers Award
