So, in case you didn’t get the memo, RL & the dayjob are still eating away at my sanity spare time. In the meantime however, we had a rather busy weekend, but we did take time to eat a phở at a new place in the 13e, and that’s where I ate this: Yup, durian bavarois (I was originally going for durian macaroon, but got sold this instead, which was way less sweet and made all of yumminess). The perfect end to a meal with a phở. Funny observation of…

…The amazing Fran Wilde has interviewed me for her series “Cooking the Books”–interviews focused on food and SF writers (you can understand why I was deliriously happy to be picked as an interview subject 🙂 ). I wax lyrical about the power of food, lemongrass chicken in “Immersion”, and my recipe process here….

…y entertaining read if you don’t mind violence (there’s a lot of graphic wounds and battlefield scenes which don’t shy on the hours of suffering for the wounded), or sex (lots of explicit sex and ribald jokes, also I think some rapey content–there’s very little fetishisation of it, but it’s… explicit, as said before). It’s also not a monument of feminism, but it was rather a breath of fresh air to see several female main characters with their own…

…Quite happy to announce that my Interzone story “Ship’s Brother” will be reprinted in Gardner Dozois’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Thirtieth Annual Collection. This is, er, pretty awesome? First time I ever sell two reprints to two different Year’s Bests… You can find the complete TOC here….

Not really a lot of activity on this blog at the moment… I’m completely swamped with a lot of non-writing related things (mostly the day job, with a few side surprises). I’ve been hammering at the new story (aka Aztecs in space) while on the bus, as well as on a revision of “The Jaguar House, in Shadow”, and on some edits. And I’m running late on a bunch of crits I owe people. Eek. I think I’ll go to bed to get some sleep. With luck, I’ll manage…

…I said selling two different stories to two different Year’s Best was a first for me? I spoke a little too soon… Sean Wallace just let me know that Rich Horton wants to reprint “Scattered Along the River of Heaven” and “Heaven Under Earth” in his Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2013. That’s four freaking different stories to three different Year’s Best anthologies… *faints* If you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll be off to do some massive squeei…

…A reminder that pre-orders are open for my limited-edition hardback Xuya novella “On a Red Station, Drifting”, and that you save £3 off the cover price of £10 if you preorder–see here for details, including a sampler scene from the book! (and if you’re still hesitating, there’s a more detailed review over here by @requireshate)…

…the end of this one). I felt like I sailed over a plateau, albeit a very uncomfortable one, when I started injecting more of my personal life and experience into my stories (probably why writing a lot of them felt like pulling teeth, lol)–and I was the first one surprised to have so many stories recognised (in addition to the Year’s Best, “Immersion” also got mentioned here, here and here, got massively recommended for the Nebulas, and got nominat…

…Aannd we finally have liftoff on the holidays! Am going to enjoy my much-deserved week of rest and enjoy Christmas and the New Year. The blog is going dark for a week or so; in the meantime, have a few Virgin Mary pictures to tide you over (all from Vietnam, in case you were wondering 🙂 ). To all those who celebrate, Merry Christmas and a Happy (Western) New Year, and see you on the other side!…

…Mệnh which has developed a rather… unorthodox method for testing people’s identities and credentials. The brief for Carbide Tipped Pens was to centre the story around a given science: I picked something I’m exceedingly familiar with, probabilities and applied mathematics. Expect… way too many probability distributions and goodness-of-fit tests, a mindship-human partnership, and funky things with memory encryption and advanced cyphers (also, the us…