Doug Cohen has posted the TOC for the February 2010 issue of Realms of Fantasy, which will contain my story “Melanie” and associated artwork by Frank Wu (you can see the cover here, which is also the interior illustration for Ann Leckie’s “The Unknown God”). I would seem sharing a TOC with Harlan Ellison.

And, over at the Asimov’s website, the next issue announces “The Wind-Blown Man” as “a debut […] sure to turn heads” (along with a story by Codexian Caroline M. Yoachim).

Finally, Rich Horton mentions me, albeit very briefly, in his year-end summary of Interzone (for “Ys”).

Er, wow. I feel spoiled.

(via Marc Gascoigne and Jennifer Jackson)

I couldn’t stop laughing yesterday. “When the stars are right” indeed…

The indefatiguable Charles Tan interviews Jetse de Vries as part of a series on World SF. More interviews to come, all week long.

And friend Marshall Payne interviews Angela Slatter (frequent Shimmer contributor, awesome reteller of fairytales) over at the Super-Sekrit Clubhouse–interviews, funny cartoons and more.

Doing nanowrimo again this year–like last year and the year before last, I’m mostly using it as a springboard to kickstart a novel-in-progress: this time is Harbinger of the Storm. Truth is, Nanowrimo is slightly above what I deem a comfortable writing speed: I’m more a 1,000-words-a-day kind of person than a 1,666-words-a-day madwoman. But the key point is peer pressure: seeing how everyone else is doing forces me to hammer away at the keyboard every day, or to make up for lost time.

Last year, it didn’t work out so well: I wrote perhaps 1/3 of Foreign Ghosts before real life intervened and I had to reschedule. However, in 2007, I got 50,000 words of Servant of the Underworld done over November (and, because I’m just that kind of madwoman, I got the other 50,000 words done over December. The BF’s comment on the whole process was something like “never again”, because he scarcely saw me for two months). This time, I’m allowing myself a longer period to write the draft (though winning nano would still be kind of cool).

Like 2007 and 2008, I have my roadmap: a more-or-less complete synopsis: 25 chapters, 4,000 words per chapter, knowing that the average length of a scene is around 2,000 words (1,000 words for the small ones, 3,000 for those where lots of things happen and/or lots of characters are present). The last three or four chapters are a great deal fuzzier than the first, because no novel plan survives the writing of the first draft; I’ll always end up making up stuff at the end according to what has gone on before, so might as well not waste time planning them in great detail. So far, so good. There have been a few hitches: namely, a lack of suspects (soon remedied: populating the imperial court with suspects was amazingly easy), and some research failure (the aforementioned dating problems which required me to spend a long evening poring over Aztec-to-Julian calendar correlations). But so far it’s going well.

Of course, things always deteriorate later on, in the Dreaded Middle. I’m hoping that if I write fast enough, I won’t have time to second guess myself (which happened with Foreign Ghosts, grinding everything to a halt because I was stupid enough to listen to my chattering inane monkeys and stop writing). Fingers crossed…

On related matters, there’s now a release date for books 1 and 2 in the US: Servant of the Underworld will be in bookstores in August 2010, and Harbinger of the Storm in November 2010. Wow. Sounds like World Fantasy will be a lot closer to my book release than I thought.

Oh, and incidentally, Charles Tan’s interview of me is now live at SF Signal. This is all part of Lavie’s cunning plan to ensure you all take a look at The Apex Book of World SF. Other interviews from the other contributors will go live Monday to Friday (I spoke to French dark fantasy/urban fantasy writer Mélanie Fazi over the weekend at the Utopiales con, and I know she’s part of that batch of interviews, so looking forward to that one).

About 2 chapters and a bit into Harbinger of the Storm, and already struggling with continuity issues. For starters, I know I worked out all the dates for Servant of the Underworld using my trusty Aztec calendar–unfortunately, I lost the file somewhere in transit between my old laptop and the new mac. Bottom line, I’m rereading the manuscript and hoping for clues that will tell me when exactly everything was taking place…

Also, fun activity of the day: work out maths. If you know the European year for something (say, 1481), and the Aztec sacred day for something in the same year (say, One Movement), what is the European date? It’s trickier than it sounds, mostly because the Aztec system is so weird.

For starters, you have two calendars: one is the solar year, which is 365 days, and, like in most civilisations, is separated into months, in this case eighteen months of twenty days plus five “empty days”.

Then, overlapping it, you have the sacred or religious calendar, which is 260 days long. This is the one that has the cool day names like Seven Serpent, Two Jaguar and so on. It’s the one in which the divinatory records were made, and hence the one in which a lot of the dates come from. It doesn’t really have months: “Serpent” is a daysign that recurs every twenty days. The calendar goes something like this: you have thirteen numbers, and twenty day signs. You increment both simultaneously until you run out of numbers, wrap the numbers around to 1 while continuing to number the day-signs to 20, then wrap that around to 1, while continuing to count the day numbers to 13, and so on…
Simply put, if I use a second set of numerals for the day signs instead, the count goes 1-1, 2-2, … 13-13, 1-14, 2-15,… 7-20, 8-1, etc.
In full names, it goes all over the place: One Crocodile, Two Wind, Three House… Thirteen Reed, One Jaguar. Two Eagle, … Seven Flower, Eight Crocodile… It’s not quite as disorganised as it looks like: the key is not counting the months, but going instead for the trecenas, the groups of thirteen days that go from one to thirteen (in the example above, the first trecena runs from One Crocodile to Thirteen Reed, and the second trecena starts on One Jaguar).

Now, the Aztec Calendar lets you enter a date in Julian or Gregorian calendar, and gives you the Aztec date for this day (in this case, the solar year, the trecena, and the sacred day). The key is then working out where you are in the year, and how far ahead you have to advance to reach your goal of day One Movement in the year 1481 (which is solar year Two House). In practise, I worked out the trecena for the day One Movement, and how distant it was from the trecena for my random date (basically, for the maths geeks, count in increments of 13 modulo 20, which gives you the number of trecenas, ie the number of days, which you then convert back into months).

If that sounds painful and confusing, that’s because it is. But it worked–I now know where in the year the book is supposed to be set 🙂

My story “After the Fire” is now up at Apex Magazine, as part of the special World SF issue edited by Lavie Tidhar. It’s, er, sort of a post-apocalypse story, set in a China where the Empire never fell. Well, sort of set in China…

In her dreams, Jiaotan saw Father: hands outstretched, the flesh of the fingers fraying away to reveal the yellowed, tapered shape of bones, the deep-set eyes bulging in their sockets, pleading, begging her to take him away.

“You’re dead,” she whispered. “Rest in peace, with the Ancestors–watch over us from Heaven.”

But the Ancestors were bones and dried sinews, shambling upright from the wreck of their graves–anger shining in the hollows of their eye sockets as they walked past the devastated gardens, the withered trees, the dried-out waterfalls and rivers. And clouds marched across Heaven, a billowing mass of sickly grey spreading to cut the path of The Red Carp as it rose away from Earth…

The issue also includes Nir Yaniv and Aleksandar Žiljak, and an interview with Maylasian writer Tunku Halim (courtesy of the tireless Charles Tan)

I workshopped “After the Fire” (as “In Our Minds, In Our Hearts”) on OWW rather close to the deadline for handing it in–so many thanks to Mark Hünken, Tom Crosshill, Sylvia Volk and Max Griffin for helping me whip this into shape. And thanks to Lavie for the editing and the title help, as well as giving me the opportunity to write in a genre and a length I don’t often try.

And don’t forget that The Apex Book of World SF has been released, giving you a chance to read “The Lost Xuyan Bride” on paper alongside many other tales from cool writers such as Mélanie Fazi, Jetse de Vries and Kaaron Warren. You can read a sample of the book online, Aleksandar Žiljak’s “An Evening In the City Coffeehouse, With Lydia On My Mind”–as Lavie puts it, a mixture of Boogie Nights and Men in Black.

So, the blog is going dark this weekend, as the BF and I are going to Nantes for the Utopiales. First time ever, and everything was booked on a slightly rushed plan (ie, 15 days before the actual con), so we’ll see how it goes. I’ll have wifi at the hotel, but I don’t think we’ll actually be much at the hotel (I have a professional entry which lets me come in and out as I want, but the BF has a standard one, and he can only enter once. Weird con, if you ask me, but then again my only experience so far has been anglophone cons).

I’m slightly miffed, because a number of people I know are at WFC, including Ken Scholes, the whole Zeno Agency, WIBites Dario Ciriello, Juliette Wade and Janice Hardy (and lots more whom I’d really have liked to see). But one transatlantic con for two people a year is quite enough for the budget, sadly.

Fun experiences of the day: I ordered a book on a German bookstore’s website (volume 5 of the Utena manga, in case you’re curious–I’m not clear why there are so many copies of vol 1-4 around, and vol 5 just seems to have vanished from about every single English website I tried). Since I don’t speak much German, it was, er, interesting… Thank God I did have a few words in my brain, because going only by Google translator would not have worked. Now let’s see if it arrives. The last thing I ordered from Spain never did make it, though I did get refunded.

2,000 words on Harbinger today. Things are heating up (quite literally, in this case).

Busy, busy (a mainstay of my life so far 🙂 )
The big news of the day is that I have (finally) started on Harbinger of the Storm. A bit over 2,000 words so far (had to pause to do laundry, dishwashing and other fun things in the same register). Right at the part where the priests start insulting each other. Should be fun…
And only a bit to go before a fave character walks back in. Darn, I love sequels. It’s like putting comfy old clothes on.

aka very, very busy. Just realised that I’d failed to book tickets for the British Museum’s Aztec exhibition, and that they were disappearing relatively fast (basically, no weekend availability until mid-December). So booked myself and the BF for December 12th, early morning. First time the BF and I go to London, so I can show him all the nice places (giant Waterstone’s, anyone?). Still not sure on the travelling, so we’ll have to do that too.

Also just saw that Quai Branly, Paris’s ethnological museum, was holding a special on Teotihuacan. Is it Mexico year, or something? (not that I’m complaining, just figuring out when we visit with a huge slobbering grin on my face).

I am currently salivating over the catalogue of the British Museum exhibition and the various souvenirs (and the BF is already worrying about how he’ll have to drag me out of the place).

Meanwhile, I have printed out the synopsis for Harbinger of the Storm, and have been rereading Servant of the Underworld and made notes about how to proceed (mostly for character coherence). I’m also rereading stuff about Aztec power and the imperial court. Should be able to start the draft soon-ish…

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll have to go and fight the laundry into submission (and the ironing, and the critting, and the cooking…)