My Xuya short story “A Hundred and Seventy Storms” has been published online as part of Uncanny Magazine‘s July/August 2016 issue. Aka “wow I hadn’t actually used Kepler’s Laws in a long, long time” (I needed to do some quick and dirty planetary design. Was very proud I remembered most of them °_°). Snippet: This is the room where The Snow Like a Dancer dies, year by year and piece by piece. When they wheel in the cradle where she rests, she alwa…

…r as I can tell, the Xuya universe series is eligible in the Best Series category (meets the total wordcount and had 3 new volumes released in 2016: take your pick between “A Salvaging of Ghosts” , “A Hundred and Seventy Storms”, and “Pearl” in the excellent anthology The Starlit Wood–you can read the first two free online, or you can check out the Cheat Starter Guide to Xuya)…

…ion and while it can hurt to read it and worry about the characters you’ve come to love over several hundred pages, there’s also hope to be had. The House of Binding Thorns is an incredible book in a series that I can’t get enough of. If you enjoyed works like Susan Ee’s Penryn and the End of Days series or Kaori Yuki’s Angel Sanctuary, this book will be right up your alley. Trust me. K Hart at longandfullemptywithwords: The relationships between…

…erful empire, her country is losing the game of power. In Eldris, an Ephterian princess, Thanh finds both romance and intoxicating risk. Eldris may desire her, but she doesn’t respect what Thanh holds dear. Giang, Thanh’s humble handmaiden, who appeared to her the night of a terrible fire and who has deep secrets of her own, might be the one who holds the key to love, freedom, and true power. More info at Tor.com! And if you feel minded to preorde…

…like a hybrid of le Carré and Milton, all tinged with the melancholy of golden ages lost. –Jessie Potts at Romantic Times (RT Top Pick for August): Will grab readers and force them to pay attention to the amazing writing and the phenomenal characters (…) It’s a whirlwind, it’s heartbreaking and it’s one of the best fantasy novels of 2015. –Library Journal (starred review): A fascinating Paris of decay and cruelty. Phillippe is a marvel of a chara…

…This is awesome: the Pacific Asia Museum has online exhibitions (with downloadable pdfs): Rank and Style: Power Dressing in Ancient China Visions of Enlightenment: Art of Buddhism Nature of the Beast: Animals in Japanese Paintings and Prints (hum, yes, I’m straightening out the ranks in Foreign Ghosts, why do you ask?)…

…It’s great for backups, and also for working on the same folder on several computers (since I own three, and on two different OS, this is rather welcome). Free, available for PC, Mac and Linux. (for actual writing, I use Word, which I can get on any platform–including computers that aren’t mine. Plus, I tend to receive edits in Word’s Tracking Changes format, so it makes my life easier. I wish Word would stop randomly crashing on huge files, but I…

…panese). It’s been a runner-up for the Million Writers Awards for Best New Online Magazine, and deservedly so. If you want to support, go here. (I am somewhat biased as they’re publishing some of my fiction, but I do enjoy the mag consistently, which is rare) Fellow VDer Rochita Loenen-Ruiz has just arrived in Clarion West: she’ll post regular updates of her experience on her LJ: her first post can be found here. She’s also got a post over at Fant…

…Van Gelder at F&SF. I’m told it’s some kind of rite of passage 🙂 –Tangent Online has relaunched (thanks to Eric James Stone‘s proficiency with software, apparently), and it has a nice review of Black Static 9 and my story “The Lonely Heart”: The story unwinds slowly, building character and mood, and utilizes the backdrop of a changing China as a smart counterpoint to the traditional spook story at its core, where lust and necessity clash over the…

…for an Egg” in Asimov’s), Steve Gaskell one (“Micro Expressions” in Cosmos Online), Jeff Spock one (“Everything that Matters” in Interzone), Benjamin Rosembaum one (“True Names” in Fast Forward 2, cowritten with Cory Doctorow), and Benevolent Dictator Ruth Nestvold a whooping four (“Troy and the Aliens” in Abyss and Apex, “An Act of Conviction” in Helix, “Mars: A Traveller’s Guide” in F&SF, and “The Rivers of Eden” in Futurismic, co-written with J…