Finished off one short story this morning, temporary title “In Our Minds, In Our Hearts”. Another dark sf one, 2800 words. I did a first cutting pass, which I’ll probably need to take up again, but in the meantime I put it up on OWW for crits (it’s for a market the submission deadline of which is fast approaching, so I’m going to have to move a little faster on this one…).

Here’s a snippet:

In her dreams, Jiaotan saw Father–hands outstretched, the flesh of the fingers fraying away to reveal the yellowed, tapering shapes of bones, the deepset eyes bulging in their orbits, pleading, begging her to take him away.

“You’re dead,” she whispered. “Rest in peace, with the Ancestors–watch over us from Heaven.”

But the Ancestors were bones and dried sinews, shambling upright from the wreck of their graves–anger shining in the hollows of their eye-sockets as they walked past the devastated gardens, the withered trees, the dried-out waterfalls and rivers. And clouds marched across Heaven, a billowing mass of sickly grey–spreading to cut the path of The Golden Orchid as it rose away from Earth…

#

Jiaotan woke up with a start, instinctively bending over to cough out the fluid that blocked her lungs. But something held her–pressed against her as tightly as the embrace of Earth.

In other news, I finally got the website to display the navigation links below individual posts like this one, which involved some hacking of the php, accompanied by some forays into the WordPress documentation (in case you’re wondering what I’m talking about, it’s the small “Next Post/Previous Post” thingies below the frame of individual posts, which weren’t included in the standard free WordPress theme I based the website on).
Also updated the Servant of the Underworld page with information for preordering on Waterstone’s: this one felt weird, because Waterstone’s was the bookshop where I bought everything while in the UK, so being listed there is definitely peculiar…
I have no idea why Saturday mornings are the ones reserved for the website coding: you’d think that after coding all week I’d be bored with it, but apparently I’m a glutton for punishment…

Garked from the T-party group list (with thanks to Helen Callaghan):

Animals with lightsabers

And a small sample, just to make you wander over:

Matthieu and I stayed in Montreal for a while after Worldcon, to do some sightseeing (we’re leaving tomorrow). We visited the McCord Museum, which tells the history of the city from a social point of view (how people winter, how they have fun, how they make money and how they meet each other). Not that it wasn’t interesting, but there was one corner of the museum that drew our attention…
Turns out they were having an exhibition on space travel in popular culture, and that one of the pieces was a giant Lego Death Star. Awesome…

So, ya know, like the geeks that we are, we felt compelled to take lots of pictures…

The Thing in its Entirety

Continue reading →

Stuff I’ve enjoyed recently:

• Stephen Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen (at book 6 now, trying to justify the expense of buying book 8 )
• Girl Genius (a fun Hugo-nominated comic, featuring Mad Scientists, a kick-ass heroine, and armies of evil robots)
• Pride and Publishing: why editors are like suitors
• Slowly but steadily getting back into the short story swing: rewriting a collab story with weird aliens
• Ordering the (almost) complete Battlestar Galactica (missing the last season, but it was such a bargain we can buy the last season later)

Stuff I have not so much enjoyed recently:

• The leak in the kitchen ceiling, which has resulted in the pain peeling away, plus various water-related damage (and the bit where it doesn’t stop isn’t cool)
• General fatigue, spurred on by the workload
• Matlab, mex files and the %%% syntax rules for those, which don’t allow anything beyond ANSI C. Code compiles fine in Eclipse, but not in mex, which is ironic when they use the same compiler… (obligatory geek bit # 1)
• Fighting with php to put my latest blog post on my homepage. Ended up retrieving my own rss feed (obligatory geek bit #2)