…ake nước màu (caramel sauce) in my cast-iron enamelled pot (which was a welcome change from the bad saucepan I used the last time). The sauce is cooling as we speak; I’ll be hunting for a jam pot next. Have to say oven mitts are great for protection during the risky endeavour of heating up sugar… Now I’m off to spread the laundry to dry. Ah, heady days… (also bought a copy of Nigella Lawson’s How to Eat, and am currently reading it with fascinatio…

…o basically come to the conclusion I needed to take a baseball bat to my existing scenes and change the existing structure to better reflect the plot arc. This is part of my “Vietnamese in space” series with the Rong people (the same as in “Immersion”). It’s also, er, a somewhat angry story about colonialism, cultural legacies and virtual realities. Should be in the March issue of Clarkesworld. Many thanks to Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, Tricia Sullivan,…

…ugo nominations deadline is on March 10th; I’ve already put up an awards recommendation post (and supplementary recs here). But since the Hugos include non-fiction categories, I thought I’d add a few more recommendations in that direction: Best Fanzine: Both the World SF Blog and Europa SF have done a great job of taking SF past the Western Anglophone bias that still dominates the field: Europa SF is mainly focused on Europe whereas the scope of t…

…it can at me 🙂 ). I’m on twitter a bit more if you want to know what I’m up to–those days it’s mostly funny articles, cute animal pictures and the occasional rant. I’ll try to have author’s notes up for the upcoming “The Weight of a Blessing” in Clarkesworld. And then I’ll go back to hibernating… In the meantime, have a cute video of an otter shooting basketball hoops (thanks to Farah Mendlesonh)….

…Paul Weimer was kind enough to ask me to take part in a Mind Meld on Food in Science Fiction vs Fantasy. You can find it here; lots of food for thought (pun intended :p)….

…Just a note that my angry short story “The Weight of a Blessing” is now up at Clarkesworld. This was a really tough story to write, for much the same reasons as “Scattered Along the River of Heaven”, though this one took months to get right… Have a look and tell me what you think?  …

…“wow”. Also appears he’ll spearhead a discussion of “Immersion” next Sunday over at his blog. <hr> [1] Incidentally, I find it amusing that the theme of “forgotten history” or “rewritten history” drives this anthology, as much as it drove my latest Clarkesworld story….

…system can bear (I do butter and cheese fine, and small quantities of milk in pastries that are well cooked, and that’s about my upper limit). Does she have any later books where the reliance on these ingredients isn’t as important? I got the impression that one of her later books (can’t remember which one?) drew a bit more from South and East Asian cooking? And Nigellissima is Italian food?…

…e of the subjects I grappled with in writing the story was perceptions of history, history as a legacy, and enshrined historical bias –particularly painful when inflicted by a dominant culture to a dominated one (the continued insistence of the West that “colonisation had good sides!”, for instance, keeps erasing all the horrible things that were done to maintain political and cultural dominance–mass arrests, torture, genocide, erasure of language…

…Just very, very busy… (not with writing, in case you had any doubts. Mostly %%% RL). Working a bit on the novel though progress is damnably slow. So far have three main characters, cool worldbuilding, and no plot whatsoever….