-brought up more boxes! More specifically, the extra books–the shelves are currently 80% filled, and I’m staring in mounting dread at all four boxes in the living room. Also, I seem to have lost a few books, which is annoying when they’re, say, #12 in a series of 18 (the Amelia Peabody series by Elizabeth Peters, to be more specific). On the plus side, I found my much-cherished copy of Elizabeth Bear’s New Amsterdam, and all my bandes dessinées (don’t have many of them, but I cling to them…).

-spent a nice afternoon/evening with friends doing some tabletop RPG, and then some mah-jong. Darn, I’d forgotten how much I enjoy mah-jong. One day, we’re going to be proficient enough to stop playing with the “simplified rules” (ie, no taking into account of special hands, and no bonuses. Counting a hand with the various points and doubling systems is already troublesome enough when we play about once a year, and never with the same people each time…). Also, one day, we’re going to figure out what the extra tiles in our game mean, ie how to use Vietnamese jokers…

-edited the heck out of the novella. Temp title is “On a Red Station, As If Within A Dream”, which sucks (mostly because there is absolutely no connection whatsoever. Well, OK. It is a red station in several respects, but the dream aspect? Not so much. Lobbed it off to H for his opinion while I tackle next project’s research.

Snippet:

Linh had been on Prosper Station for less than two hours before her disguise was pierced. She didn’t actually see the two men in station livery enter the room she was in—it was, in any case, far too large, filled from end to end with the makeshift houses erected to receive the mass of refugees aboard Prosper. But she was magistrate, fitted with enough mods to notice even the smallest discrepancies; and so she heard their passage: the hush that passed over the noise of the crowd, leaving only the crackling sound of maize frying in the cooking units—a wave of silence, steadily headed for her.

She’d expected this, but wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or anxious. Try as she might, her identity couldn’t be hidden–not once her name had been added to the rosters of the Temple of Literature on the First Planet.

The checklist includes a massive banquet scene, all the tropical fruit I could cram into 140 pages (longan, pitaya aka dragon fruit, lychees, coconuts, pineapple ), quotes from Chinese classics such as Three Kingdoms and (in a very meta fashion) Dream of Red Mansions, bad Vietnamo-Chinese poetry (I wrote it myself, which explains a lot of things…). Also, it has an entire scene amongst giant vats of fish sauce. Pure win, I tell you 🙂