…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….

Remember the tea thing I was wondering about? (basically, why my Japanese sencha from London tasted way better than any loose-leaf green tea I’d ever had) cecile-c came over last weekend (we had a lovely Vietnamese meal in the XIIIe, and an intense gaming session of Battlestar Galactica); and in between struggling 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…

…those who celebrate (and a happy Chanukah, Kwanzaa and other traditions around this time of year I am surely forgetting). I’ll be back after the New Year, with plenty of good resolutions… And here’s your traditional Virgin Mary, Vietnamese-style: Đức Mẹ La Vang, aka Our Lady of La Vang, a major Vietnamese Virgin (you’ll find a lot of overseas parishes are called after her. La Vang’s somewhere in the centre of Việt Nam, and it’s a huge pilgrimage c…

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

…f 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….

…dialects gradually lost the struggle). I’m not saying it’s necessarily and completely a bad thing to have one dialect become dominant: if we had kept all the patois in French, we still wouldn’t be able to understand one another and wouldn’t have a sense of national identity; but there is still a tremendous loss in languages that can happen when a country unifies itself and becomes a whole. Somehow, all of this merged together into a story of colon…

…ause the grammar is so different from French and the whole act of translating really requires firing neurons in the right mindset. Kind of reminds me of Ancient Greek, actually. In worse… [1]Not totally true. There is a neutral and uncomfy pronoun “I”, “tôi”, which I can use for those cases. And, if the speaker is around my age bracket, “bạn” (friend), has the advantage of being genderless (but it’ll piss off someone much older than me really fast…

…human wombs–though it will take many, many decades of work before the incident described in “Starsong” leads to the creation of Minds). In other news, I just discovered I’m a little under halfway through the Vietnamese lesson book. I certainly don’t feel halfway proficient, but I have faith… Back to brainstorming a story. See you guys later… [1] The market I had in mind originally for this (and which set the punitive deadline) turned out not to b…

Not much to report… It’s become a tradition that whenever I sell something big, the H and I will go to a restaurant and have a nice meal, so we went to the 13e and had a nice phở to celebrate the Clarkesworld sale (the owner knew what I was going to order when I walked in, too–drawbacks of eating at a restaurant which accommodates Mum and Grandma on a regular basis 🙂 ). The couple next to us was a bit lost, I think–they started off by ordering a…

…es tries to duplicate female poses on genre covers, and posts pictures. Hilarious. (even though, yeah, women do move a little more easily at the hips than men, it’s true that none of those poses look exactly comfortable for men). genreviews does the same thing comparing male and female poses on covers. -Related: Fantasy Armor and Lady Bits, or why boob plates are the most impractical idea ever….