Wordcount: 9,500/100,000

Awesome title ideas: no further ones.

Body count: 1, 3 in progress. Oh, and 1 owl.

Best moment of the day: Acatl being called in to examine a sick man (yup, he only does autopsies 🙂 )

Unexpected moment of the day: throwing in a further autopsy, just for the heck of it. Oh, and a character turning abruptly responsible.

Missing research: well, a missing book, really. I forgot Ross Hassig’s Aztec Warfare on the bus Thursday evening, and just realised it. Darn. I had to forget the expensive research book…

Missing bits: we’re down to extra bits, with a little scene that I mean to use at the beginning of chapter 4.

Wordcount: 8,000/100,000

Awesome title ideas: meep. None. Temp title is Gatherer of the Slain, which sucks.

Body count: 1, 1 in progress. Oh, and 1 owl.

Best moment of the day: Teomitl helping Acatl change boats–causing the grandmother of all traffic jams in the canal.

Unexpected moment of the day: inverting two chapters in the book for dramatic effect.

Missing research: still need to find out more about coronation wars.

Missing bits: 3 AA batteries for my Neo, so I can type on my bus journey.

Oh, BTW, my nano page is here (updated irregularly, but I’m making an effort).

Mainly for the UK people, or anyone who’s already read SoU (it’s got minor spoilers for SoU, so read at your peril): you can read chapter 1 of book 2, Harbinger of the Storm, here.

4000 words on the draft of book 3 today. Chapter 1 dusted and done.

Body count: 1, 1 in progress
Best moment of the day: Acatl trying to sacrifice an uncooperative owl. Many scratches ensued. Good thing blood is magical…
Missing research: need to find out if a character (Nezahualpilli) took part in the coronation war of the new Aztec Emperor. Will hit the history books.

Also, my birthday gift is apparently that I get to see my French editor to talk book, translation, promotion etc. (well, I had to place the meeting somewhere, might as well be on a nice day :=) )

OK, I’m back, and slowly digging my way out of the morass of emails and related stuff. The weather is grey, cold, and overcast, and we’re having massive strikes in France. Sometimes, I swear, I do wonder why I ever come back from holiday…

Books read: Liz Williams’ Bloodmind, which was great but with what I thought was way too much backstory, until I figured out it was a sequel to Darkland. Sigh. Will go procure original.

Coming up this week, a guest blog by Janice Hardy. And, er, the US release of Servant of the Underworld, next Wednesday (I will not hyperventilate I will not hyperventilate)

Meanwhile, for the Romanian speakers among you, the SRSFF version of my Asimov’s article “The View from the Other Side”, courtesy of Antuza Genescu for the translation (and many thanks to Cristian Tamas for the offer, as usual).

So, first off, my many thanks to everyone who entered–I didn’t imagine I’d have so many people showing up for this, and I’m delighted I get to pick the winner from so many guesses.

My thanks also to everyone who signal-boosted this over FB, twitter, or their own blogs, getting an absolutely gob-smacking amount of traffic my way.

Broadly speaking, the guesses fell in two geographical zones: Latin America and Asia. Which, er, is unfortunate, because I’m much, much closer to home: specificaly, in Malta (ex-home of the eponymous order).

So the winner is, by a rather large margin, Kulsuma, who suggested Algeria.

Runners-up: three people suggested Turkey, which is the nearest neighbour. I don’t have prizes for everyone, so my magic hat awards the prize to Shirley.

Khajidu and Benjamin DeHaan, you nevertheless get a surprise runner-up prize.

Congratulations to everyone!! I’ll be sending mails to everyone awaiting a prize, but if your name is on this list and you don’t get email from me, don’t hesitate to nag me.

Meanwhile, I’m back to lounging by the swimming pool…

PS: I do owe you guys an apology for the clues. I did say English was not an official language, and it turns out I was wrong. My bad. I was going in good faith from what the H told me, but I made one assumption too many, as it turns out English is an official language in Malta–just not the one most widely spoken (people speak Maltese. English seems to be mostly for gvt. business). People have varying mastery of it, especially in some of the more remote places…

So, the synopsis for book 3 came back from AR towers with a couple of very perceptive editorial comments. I’ll need to sit down and rework it, but I’m going to start working on it as soon as I’ve finished the current short story.

Temp title is “Master of the House of Darts”, which has the inconvenient of not fitting on a cover, so it’s only a placeholder until I have a brilliant idea for an alternative title. Going to be referred to as MHD/book 3, methinks… Focusing on human sacrifice, the Aztec way of waging war, and Tenochtitlan’s relationship with its neighbours.

Also, I’ve put up the combined character index for books 1 and 2 of the series online (warning, mild spoilers), and the combined Aztec glossary (no spoilers, bar if you want to see what concepts I used in books 1 and 2 🙂 ).

And for those French-speakers among you, Eclipse, the imprint of Bibliothèque Interdite, which bought the French rights to the series, has announced its initial lineup, which most notably includes Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker. Haven’t seen the actual books other than the mockups, but I do like the sober look very much (and they’re not systematically reordering a cover if they like the original version, which is interesting). Also, I’m a big fan of their big shiny banner (see below).

The wonderful M.G. Ellington has been kind enough to lend me some space on the Apex blog, where I ramble on what I should have done when writing Obsidian and Blood:

When I settled down to write my novel, the Aztec noir fantasy Servant of the Underworld, I had only the vaguest idea it might turn into a series. My first thought was to finish the darn thing, and not really to map out what might be happening to my characters after the plot was over.

That was 2007; now we’re in 2010. I’ve sold Servant and two more books in the Obsidian and Blood trilogy to Angry Robot; I’ve turned the sequel, Harbinger of the Storm, to my publisher; and I’ve just completed a tentative synopsis for the as-yet-untitled book 3. Looking back to how I wrote the series, there are a few things I did right, and a few things I should have paid more attention to.

Read more.

Go check it out!

In other linkage news, Mike Johnstone reviews the February 2010 issue of Asimov’s, which contains my alt-hist “The Wind-Blown Man”:

Her prose deftly taps into the atmosphere, rhythm, and thoughtfulness of Chinese tales (Buddhist, Taoist myths): it is measured, unhurried, soothing; it suggests a depth just tantalizingly out of reach.

That’s all for now. I’ll go back to RL stuff and programming (and %% implicit conversions).

Wedding preparations continue apace. Various blog posts and interviews are being redacted.

On the minus side, I’ve written a grand total of 2 paragraphs of fiction, and stopped because I have wonderful characters but no plot. I dearly want to blow up something, but I suspect the correct solution is to go research the heck out of something (I had a similar problem when writing “Age of Miracles, Age of Wonders”, which solved itself when I decided the action was going to take place in a 19th-century mining town, and researched accordingly).

Oh, yeah, and the synopsis for Book 3 of Obsidian and Blood, having had the agent-go-ahead, is now in the hands of my editor. Temp title Master of the House of Darts, subject to editorial approval/my changing my mind/the weather.

Bookwise, I seem to make up for my lack of fiction writing by reading a lot: I finished The Cardinal’s Blades (fun, if not unforgettable) and a French SF by Gérard Klein, Le Temps n’a pas d’Odeur (Time has no smell). I ordered Dream of Red Mansions in a beautiful 4-volume edition (Foreign Press, the same Chinese publisher I got Three Kingdoms from), got myself a copy of Daniel Abraham’s Seasons of War (the only way to get The Price of Spring in paperback), and started on Lynn Flewelling’s Nightrunner series (love the characters, in spite of fairly standard worldbuillding).

I get profiled over at Stomping on Yeti as an author worth watching, along with Rachel Swirsky, John Langan, Leah Bobet and Greg Van Eekout (it’s part 4 of a 5-article feature that’s going to profile 25 authors worth keeping an eye on in 2010). Many thanks to Patrick for the awesome comments.

The details she weaves into her work are exotic and refreshing and the worlds she creates, be they past or present, beg for further exploration.

And Cara over at Speculative Book Review lists Servant of the Underworld as one of her top five books for the year.

On a random, aggrieved note after reading a hundred pages of The Cardinal’s Blades: I love the book. I love the mesh of Three Musketeers with dragons, and it’s been such a long time since I had any proper swashbuckling. But one thing makes me cringe at almost every page: the Spaniard, Anibal Antonio Almadès di Cardio. Because Spanish doesn’t have grave accents. Neither does it have a nobility with titles like “di Cardio”: the nobility mark is “de” just like French (I know I’ve seen the “di” elsewhere–my best guess is that Italians might have that, but I’m not sure). I do wish some Spanish-speaker had reread that bit and corrected it, because it continually jolts me out of the narration and makes me want to scream at things.