…Er, yes, there will be a Villa Diodati report. That, however, would require full use of my brain, which is still lost somewhere in the boonies… Instead, I’ll leave you with Lavie Tidhar’s editorial for the World SF blog, which does a tremendous job of articulating how I feel about the quality of stories, and in a much better way than anything I could write….

…ue 6 (Spring 2010), a short story of multiple lives in a Chinese universe (complete with karmic wheel of rebirth, psychopathic ancestor spirits, and random Barbarian invasions). It was workshopped on OWW under the title “Dai-Yu’s Choice”, where it received feedback from the usual suspects: Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, Linda Steele (who was kind enough to crit it in tremendous detail), and Chris Kastensmidt (whose unshakable faith in that one proved right)…

…wn, but more trouble getting heard. 5. If you find yourself twisting the research to fit your original plot idea, ask yourself if you’re really going the right way about it. For instance, if you wanted A in your plot set in Ancient Vietnam, and it turns out Ancient Vietnam has no such thing as A, for the love of God please don’t go about grabbing obscure parts of Vietnamese culture and twisting them so you can still have A (or, if you must do it,…

…y Obsidian and Blood, the massive omnibus containing the series of Acatl’s adventures, plus all the short stories (they’re all in the ebook edition but not in the print one due to space constraints; if you buy the print edition, you’ll get a link to download the ebook supplement). Get your complete trilogy now! More info, including buy links, here. I’ll be guest posting at various places over the Internet, though it’s going to be a very short blog…

-Issue number 1 of International Science Fiction is now available for download (will you look at that gorgeous cover!). With fiction by Joyce Chng, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz and Marian Truţă -Received my issue of Interzone, which had “The Flower of Shazui”, a Chen Qiufan story translated by Ken Liu. Very gritty story set in the Shenzhen special economic zone–I really liked the interplay between the characters and the ending, which was sad but fitting….

…ough what I did was upload the EPUB file direct without trying to format a compatible Word document, which I’m given to understand is more of a headache (I did end up fighting a bit with their uploading system, which flagged non-existent errors and wouldn’t let me publish). Cheryl Morgan also very kindly offered to publish the book on her Wizard’s Tower Books ebookstore, which puts me in fabulous company as well as giving me a more targeted market…

…count on the residual heat from the pan itself. If anyone wants to chip in with induction stove experience, feel free! And if you have any questions/comments/disagreements, please do post them….

…d-reading was destruction: every memory he touched shivered and started to come apart. If he stayed for much longer, there would be nothing left but a broken, drooling idiot. He had done it before. But that was not his purpose. The girl, after all, was not who he had come here for. He carefully disengaged himself from her mind. She was still standing, but with difficulty. The fear in her eyes was deeper now, and he knew she would be forever scarre…

…ttention (due to its late release in December and being edged out by her upcoming novel), is really amazing. It’s about the scholar Chih, stuck in the mountains with three tigers, but also about the sapphic courtship of a tiger and a scholar. It’s about history, and stories, and who gets to tell what, and it absolutely nails down the oral form while managing to hit all my buttons. It sounds like the grown-up version of the tales my bà ngoại told m…

…stuff I put up on my website). You have to be a member of Anticipation to download it–but isn’t all this nifty stuff worth the price of admission? -Speaking of the Campbell… congratulations to David Anthony Durham for being selected as part of the newest crop of Wild Cards writers. -Last Campbell stuff, I promise 🙂 Mary Robinette Kowal has finished interviewing all five of us on her blog. –J. Cheney has a good story up at Fantasy Magazine, “Early…