…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’…

…ly learnt they were mindmaps after I started using them. I have downloaded Freemind on the computer (neat cross-platform tool), but for some reasons mindmaps work better for me on paper–one of the rare things that still does. So I take a huge A4, and draw little circles and little arrows, et voilà! Suddenly all my problems vanish. Ha, I wish. But what usually happens is that I get past whatever had me stumped (in this particular, a troublesome rev…

…rather than being linked to it by blood). So not quite what I want to be studying intensively… In other news, work has started again on the novella that wouldn’t die (complete redraft), so I’m going to be scarce this week. And, hum, the week after (which is Christmas anyway)….

…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…

…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 beginning (didn’t do much beyond touching it up) I grieve to think of the stars Our ancestors our gods Scattered like hairpin wounds Along the River of Heaven So tell me Is it fitting that I spend my days here A guest in those dark,…

…novella edits!!! Wow. This was hard to write; mainly, I think, because it combined a length I wasn’t used at writing at, a culture I’m more than moderately familiar with (which means I put in tons of small details without bothering to pause for explanation), and loads of RL stuff happening during the writing. Title is “On a Red Station, Drifting” (I wanted “dreaming”, as a reference to Dream of Red Mansions, but “drifting” is more appropriate for…

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…

And this is your annual closure notice of the blog 🙂 Hope you all have a merry Christmas for 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…

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

…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….