…and the voting for the Nebulas to sort out before, er, end of March? I’ve downloaded the Nebula Voters’ packet: I’ve read everything except the novels and the novellas, so that’s next (and the novel shortlist is very tasty, plenty of stuff in there I wanted to check out. Big advantage of being a SFWA member is, first, that I get those in the voters’ packet, and second, that I get a good to-read list for this part of the year. Last year I didn’t h…

…An Apology. Due to the fallout of the ceremony (and the fact that several committee members were angrily accosted late at night in the bar, which is not a very pleasant experience), they’ve had a spate of resignations. They’re short of people now, for various reasons. If you want to volunteer, now would be a good time. ETA: fixed this, as fjm pointed out that I had been mistaken. -Foz Meadows on Why Teaching Equality Hurts Men. I’m actually not c…

…Wise Man’s Fear in Book Spot Central’s Annual tournament: vote early, vote often, etc. (especially since I suspect it’s going to take me a miracle to reach the second round given the competition…) Meanwhile, I think I have a first scene for the book, except that it doesn’t have enough magical fireworks. Will go add them in….

…t ideas for publishing and/or organising recipes on WordPress very much welcome at this stage, since I really feel I’ve done nothing but a short-term hack to fix the problem… In the process, I reorganised my website a bit, and moved a few pages around (hopefully nothing traumatic), as well as set up missing pages (*cough* Obsidian and Blood omnibus *cough*). And the weekend was meant to be spent looking at my US taxes, but this has come to a halt…

…is also pretty amazing compared to most mainstream Western TV). [3] I’m not saying everyone commutes to an office job today–just that it’s become far more common and accepted in our current society….

…accent, incidentally). However, every time I opened my mouth, I seemed to come up with a different version of fail. So, the good point: there’s a logic. The bad point: most pronunciations appear to have very little to do with what I expect as a French/English speaker. And they depend on the vowel immediately preceding the consonant, which explains why I could never work out a consistent system (I naively expected that one consonant=>one pronuncia…

…Still brainstorming and researching the history of Paris. And still tentatively making changes to the blog to have better recipe formatting: apologies, it might look a little broken down for the next week or so. And started counting down to Eastercon. Wow. Can’t quite believe it’s so soon….

…nity to drag him to Chinatown Olympiades for the first time, one of the biggest Chinese restaurants in the XIIIe (which turned out to be kind of busy a Saturday at noon, lol). I introduced him to their dim sum menu (which is extensive compared to what you get in a lot of Paris Chinese restaurants), and we had a very pleasant meal altogether. Afterwards, we joined the queue of people in the Asian food stores, and bought a 5kg bag of the 2012 crop o…

< sarcasm > I don’t usually post anything about politics on this blog, but I did want to point this out: if you’re one of the French presidential candidates, aka the ones who have been repeatedly bashing on immigration and foreigners and generally centering the debate on pretty hateful xenophobic stuff, you shouldn’t be surprised that some madman with a gun decides to start shooting minorities they don’t approve of. < /sarcasm > (on a not-sarcast…

So, a long, long while ago, I wrote a story called “A Bitter Taste”, a pseudo-Hindu fantasy about war and destined victories (hint: it doesn’t quite turn out the way you’d think 🙂 ). I subsequently sold it to an anthology called Scheherazade’s Facade, which was about characters who didn’t follow gender conventions (my story had a hermaphrodite). The TOC included awesome people such as Tanith Lee, Sarah Rees Brennan and Paolo Chikiamco. That was t…