Over at the Super-Sekrit Clubhouse, Marshall Payne interviews Vylar Kaftan, about writing, life in California, and her short story “Break the Vessel”:
Interview with Vylar Kaftan

The easiest part [of crafting a story] is characters. They just appear on the page and flesh themselves out like magic. Possibly because I’ve been people-watching forever. The hardest part is letting go of my own ridiculously high standards and accepting that things are always, always lost in translation from imagination to words—and that’s just the nature of the beast.

(and while you’re at it, check out the rest of the Super-Sekrit clubhouse: fun cartoons, birthday posts, and more neat interviews)

Fellow Angry Robot author and Apex Book of World SF Lavie Tidhar gets interviewed over at SF Signal on World SF. Fascinating stuff: go check it out.
Interview with Lavie Tidhar about World SF

To me, [World SF] is first of all the kind of SF written in languages other than English, but that doesn’t take into account that small – but visible! – part of writers choosing to work in English despite it being their second – or even third! – language. And then, English has become such a universal language that in many places it has acquired its own regional flavor – take India or Malaysia or South Africa. And then, what about writers from one background living in another? Is Nnedi Okorafor an American writer or a Nigerian writer? Identities today can easily have two or three layers.

(in related shameless promotion offers, you can preorder the Apex Book of World SF here and get Lavie’s super collection HebrewPunk for only $10.00, in addition to my story “The Lost Xuyan Bride” and lots of cool-sounding contributions in the book per se)

Given a choice between:

-a novel where there is one point-of-view character per scene, and where the scenes more or less follow chronological order, but can be quite short (one scene=2,000 words approximately)

-a novel where each chapter is set in the point-of-view of a single character (one chapter=4,000 to 5,000 words approximately), but where the timeline ends up more warped than in the previous option

which one would you prefer, and why?

(I ask because I’ve seen both and enjoyed both, and I’m not quite clear on where I want to take Foreign Ghosts yet…)

EDIT: as zweipunktnull, I’ve been a little unclear. You only have 3 point-of-view characters in the entire novel. They alternate, in more or less equal shifts.

Sunday morning, in a house full of bagels (a cooking experiment that went somewhat wrong due to an oven that just wouldn’t bake the darn things–they’re somewhere on the cusp between “crispy” and “burnt to a crisp”).

I’ve finally hammered that %% short story into a sort of decent shape. Longer than I thought it would be (sigh–what’s new), mainly due to a character who wouldn’t stay secondary. It’s a horrible, horrible tale about horrible people in a depressing world; somehow I can’t seem to write horror that isn’t sordid.

Provisional title “As Heaven Meant Us” (I’m hesitating between that and “Father’s Flesh, Mother’s Blood”, which is neater but less accurate). It’s in the same universe as “Heaven Under Earth”, except a great deal nastier.

Snippet:

The group waiting at the gates of the house looked innocuous enough: two scholars, dressed in the grey robes of their profession, and an escort of neutered men holding repulsive screens to protect their masters against the howling winds of New Zhongguo. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

But, even where he was–sitting inside, watching the scene on the security cameras–, Leyou could see that the scholars held themselves a little too eagerly, a little too hungrily. And the cloth of their robes was impeccable, with not a trace of the omnipresent red dust on the large sleeves and carefully-embroidered hems: their robes were new and never-worn, barely out of the Imperial Weaving Mills. If Leyou were out there now, he’d find that they smelled of cinnabar and bleach–an odour too deeply sunk under their skins to be scrubbed away.

Cutters.

I’ve noticed something fun recently: I used to finish the draft, set it aside and move on to something else. For the past few stories, however, I can’t seem to get the ending right first thing: I have to come back and tinker for a few days with the last few paragraphs, until I get to the point where the last sentence(s) feel punchy enough (and it can get very nitpicky, with me swapping one word for another until it seems to work). Weird; I never was so obsessive. I guess that’s my way of trying to improve on endings.

Today is Chris Kastensmidt’s birthday, so hop over to his blog and help him blow the candles 🙂

And in the grand tradition of Marshall Payne’s birthday posts, I’m putting up a little (video-game related) something for him:

Video game meme by ~Malu-CLBS on deviantART
(drat, couldn’t manage to make it bigger, you have to click on it to enlarge)

Garked from the T-party group list (with thanks to Helen Callaghan):

Animals with lightsabers

And a small sample, just to make you wander over:

The BF has just finished reading Foreign Ghosts, aka the Xuya novel, in between two rounds of writing summaries for his PhD dissertation (it’s like synopses: no one agrees on what length they want).

Yay!

On the plus side, a lot of his comments are small, easy fixes; the book seems to hang together, and he loves the universe.

On the minus side, one of the characters made no sense to him, so I clearly need to do some motivation work. Also, he wants me to reorder scenes so that it’s a little less fragmented, ie one chapter per POV rather than 2-3 scenes per chapter in strict chronological order.

Hum, good thing I’ve got Scrivener if I decide to go down this road.

(I haven’t decided yet how I’m going to tackle his comments–still at the processing phase, plus at the “trying to finish short story draft” phase)

It’s official: I’m starting a pile of books at home, given the stuff that’s been trickling in for the Norton Jury. I’m amazed and humbled that people actually go to all the trouble of shipping stuff to me in France, just so I can read it.

In the meantime, my bus rides just got a lot busier 🙂

Over at his blog The Willpower Engine, Codex founder Luc Reid interviews Nancy Fulda, creator of AnthologyBuilder, the do-it-yourself anthology website (and writer, editor, and awesome Villa Diodati member). There’s some fascinating stuff about balancing work and family, as well as behind-the-scenes on the creation and maintenance of the website.

Entrepreneurial Motivation and Creating a Business from Scratch: An Interview with Nancy Fulda.

Has anyone got a recommendation for good task management software on a mac? I’ve been using Thunderbird’s calendar, but it’s a little wonky as a solution…