“Có công mài sắt, có ngày nên kim”: “If you work hard enough at sharpening iron, one day you’ll have a needle” (literally “Put effort [into] sharpen[ing] iron, have one day in the end [a] needle”). Basically, insofar as I can tell, the closest equivalent would be that nothing is obtained without hard work. Again, I’m pretty sure of my translation, a lot less sure about my reading of the proverb. Progress continues apace; I’m turning to vocabulary…

…uite effectively. So far, so good. Trouble is… I haven’t been able to find this particular tea here. I’m therefore hunting for a substitute. Am I right in thinking a good grade of Sencha tea from Japan would taste about the same, or am I completely off-base? I haven’t been very impressed with the one variety of Sencha that I bought, but it was definitely the cheap kind (google tells me that Yabukita is a particular category of sencha, but I haven’…

…ed of light… We wrote twelve of them all in all; and we sold the resulting compendium to Daily Science Fiction, where the pieces will appear, starting in January (one piece every week, 12 in all). Mine form a loose trilogy of pieces set in Việt Nam’s three great cities (Hà Nội, Huế, Sài Gòn, from North to South, and inspired respectively by Euler’s number e, Boltzmann’s constant k, and the speed of light c). I wrote them all in August, back when w…

…ry. It’s been knocking around my head for a while, ever since Aimé Césaire died: I wanted to write a story about poetry and language and decolonisation and national identity. It took me four years to find the words, and I ended up throwing a lot of personal stuff in it (much more than really makes me comfortable); but I’m proud of it, though a little fearful that it’s not going to be up to scratch. We shall see… The revised snippet from the beginn…

…Red Station, Drifting” (I wanted “dreaming”, as a reference to Dream of Red Mansions, but “drifting” is more appropriate for about all the main characters). Clocks in at 39,700 words, which I’m reliably told is 300 words under the point when it becomes a (short) novel. Just a last editing pass to do in order to get some of my em-dashes out, and it should be good to go. Have some dancing dinos. I’ll be off for Japanese food with my sis….

…to survive the game without being betrayed by the dastardly Cylons, we studied the tea thing. She thinks (and I agree) that it doesn’t have much to do with sencha. Rather, the key point is that said tea is packaged in tea-bags (to be more accurate, in a tea bag, and then sealed in a foil-backed tear-away bag). As Cécile said, green tea is extremely fragile, and can lose its flavour within months of being harvested and dried [1]–however, by the ti…

…). To give you an idea of how large she is, here is a second picture: Kind of those huge white Buddha statues that you frequently see in Việt Nam (probably in the rest of Asia, but I haven’t been elsewhere that has a strong Buddhist tradition, sorry), except that she’s the Virgin Mary. The H loves her (I prefer the La Vang Virgin–particularly because of the people receiving the revelation, and because of course Christ wears red, the colour of good…

…-Kate Elliott on “Ways of Struggling with Gender” (and the American male warrior trope)–well worth checking out and discussing…

…e auctioned off in exchange for donations. Over 900 people in Mindanao, Philippines, have died in the floods that Typhoon Sendong (local name)/Washi (international name) just days before Christmas. Hundreds more are missing, and thousands have been displaced. If you can donate or bid, please take a look! The community is here: help_mindanao….

In possibly the fastest turnaround I’ve had from finishing the final draft to publication, you can now read my story “Scattered Along the River of Heaven” in Clarkesworld. Or, if audio fiction is more to your liking, you can listen to the podcast by the awesome Kate Baker. This is the pseudo-Asian SF story with bots, a dying colonial empire, and a prison orbiting a black hole–aka the one where I had to improvise four pseudo-Chinese poems before I…