H-3 (in this case, H meaning “holidays”, or the closest thing thereof). Arg. Will survive.

Currently reading: my back issues of Asimov’s (haven’t had time to open one all summer long). Really liked Nancy Fulda’s “Backlash”, a story of time-travel and fixing mistakes–a quick romp, but with all-too-believable depths about families, past mistakes (and a particularly nasty and realistic depiction of PTSD). Also, Mary Robinette Kowal’s “For Want of A Nail”, an AI story set on a generation ship, where the protagonists fix one set of problems to find another, worse one behind. Sparse and poignant. And from the July issue, Alice Sola Kim’s “The Other Graces”, a story about a Korean “yellow-trash”, which encompassed a bunch of things about immigration and fitting in.

Currently working on: wedding, wedding and wedding. With a sidedash of blog posts.

Currently making: Murgh Biryani, from Charmaine Solomon’s The Complete Asian Cookbook. Well, almost. Clever substitutions took place, ’cause my shelf spice isn’t that big, and I plain shorted out on saffron, making for rice that was rather whiter than expected. But yum yum.

And in other news…

Almost done with the tables–now for the actual table plan… I think we’ve sorted out most of the printing problems, even though we still have to drop the booklet at the printer’s.

Actual writing: er… Does research count? Preparing a story to complete the “Shipbirth/Shipmaker” set of stories, still not sure where it’s going other than the fact that it involves transport ships.

Reading: opened a random book taken from the library (Tess Geritsen’s The Apprentice), which had a serial killer raping and kidnapping women. Suppressed an urge to hurl it at the wall, and closed it. I really need to find a decent thriller that doesn’t have a serial killer torturing women in it, before my faith in the crime genre falters altogether…

And your Vietnamese word of the day is mặt trời: “the sun” (lit. “the face of the sky”). Meanwhile, I’ll go back to practising my tones. Still can’t get the level tone right (you’d think it would be the simplest one, but it seems I can’t maintain my voice level at all).

H and I are preparing the signs for the tables at the wedding reception. Just so you see the context: there are 24-25 tables, and every one of them has a name so people can find it. All the tables have related names, what is called the “theme” of the wedding (for instance: species of goldfish, islands, famous doctors[1]). Every table has a 4-page leaflet on it for orientation purposes. The first page bears the name of the table with about two paragraphs of explanations (example: if all the tables are named after famous doctors, every table has two paragraphs of doctor biography), and the inside has the menu (which comes in three flavours: French, English and French children’s menu).

Me: “So we’re agreed on this, I’m sending the layout to the parents so they can comment on it.”
H: “Yup, looks good to me with this colour choice.”
Me: “And then I’m stopping until we have the green light from them. I still have to write 23 bits of text for every table, and if we change the layout I’d have to go over all 24 documents and change the layout for every single freaking one of them. *pause* It’s kind of a shame you can’t apply a global layout across documents.”
H: “I bet you could use a Python script to generate an RTF file according to your specifications.”
Me: “I don’t speak Python. Maybe VBA? *pause* Hang on, theoretically, all we’d have to is look in the master document, find the anchors where the bits of text are, and then do a standard substitution from the command line, using sed or something like this…”
H: “…”
Me: “You’re right. Let’s not go there.”

[1]I’m not spoiling the “theme” of the wedding until we get closer to the date. You’re free to guess, though :=)

Because I’ve noticed I’ve become really, really badly distracted…
I might be a tad slower and/or forgetful in posting/answering email/the like. If you don’t hear from me and you were expecting something, it’s because RL (aka the wedding) has struck. My mind’s a bit like a colander at the moment, so don’t hesitate to remind me…

Swamped. Or ocean-ed, quite possibly.

Working on a new short in the Xuya continuity, involving spaceships and poets.

Made my first serious phở ersatz, mostly pre-prepared broth and paste, but with veggies and spices thrown in for a better taste. Yummy… Next up, I think, is using pre-prepared beef broth (instead of the pre-made phở broth, which is full of MSG). The full broth including beef is at least three hours’ simmering, too long to make for an evening dish, but I can live with cubes of beef broth and additional spice. Now to find some cloves, which my local supermarket doesn’t stock…

Vietnamese continues apace; we now have a book. Or rather, four books, out of which the first one is entirely dedicated to pronunciation. Arg. Still struggling with normal vowels and consonants, and then we move to diphtongs…
Fun stuff I’ve learnt: my default tone isn’t the level one (ngang), but rather the falling-rising one (hỏi). When I’m really tired, I default to this, with hilarious results…
Also, the day I can pronounce “Wednesday” in Vietnamese is going to be a red-letter one (“ngày thứ tư”, lit. “the fourth day”, regroups four sounds I can’t manage,, the “ng”, the “th” which should be somewhat harsh but distinct from the “t”, and the “ư”).

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).

So, one thing that’s always been part of my life: I have a somewhat uncommon first name, and it’s not often that I see other people who have it. And, in particular, not often that I see characters in books with that first name. A result is that I tend to assume anyone named “Aliette” has to bear some ressemblance with me (I was once the proud owner of a green children’s book called “Aliette goes skiiing”, which never failed to make me smile, because, boy, am I abysmal at skiing).
So there’s apparently an author out there writing a series of mysteries set in France and featuring an inspector called Aliette Nouvelle (which comes out a little disturbing in French, because we have “Beaujolais nouveau”, which is this year’s vintage, and this reads a little bit like Aliette is some kind of wine…. It’s a good vintage, honest 🙂 ).
Anyway, I found this from the backcover of one of the books according to Amazon, and thought it too funny not to share:

Aliette (…) is a new heroine for the 90s—smart, single and intuitive, but more interested in quietly and non-violently getting the job done than in receiving front-page coverage for her sometimes unorthodox methods of crime-solving. She knows she is regarded as a rising star in the force and believes that her years of hard work and her excellent record are about to bear fruit.

Look, I’m a famous detective :=)

The weather was sort of nice (ie not too much rain). I dunked the H into the Brittany sea (a harsh experiment when all your swimming has been done south of Bordeaux, where the water is markedly warmer); we cycled to a few nice places (with raincoat on), and we did some shopping for clothes and shoes and stuff. And slept a lot. A nice, eventless holiday 🙂

Saw the cover and TOC for the September issue of Asimov’s, which will contain my non-fiction piece “The View From The Other Side” on non-Western, non-Anglophone SF. Happy to be sharing a TOC with Nancy Fulda and Mary Robinette Kowal (and, wow, why am I occupying so much space on that cover…?)

In other news, would anyone happen to have a copy of the latest (July) Locus? I’m told there are nice reviews of “The Jaguar House in Shadow” (which was in the July issue of Asimov’s) in both the Gardner Dozois and the Rich Horton column, and obviously I forgot to renew my subscription at this key moment… Thanks in advance!
ETA: didn’t realise I’ve been unclear–I just wanted a peek at the review contents, not the copy itself (wouldn’t want to despoil anyone here…)
ETA: thanks to the awesome Cate Gardner, my curiosity is now suitably sated.

So, it looks like I have about half an outline for book 3. Missing: any kind of sense, and a number of plot elements which come in way too late. Slowly chipping away at it…

Also, I’m sitting on a piece of good news I’m dying to share, but can’t right now (and nope, it’s not the one in the next post). Stay tuned for an update (I hope soonish, but you never know in this crazy environment…)

And finally, I’ve started learning Vietnamese. Currently struggling a lot with a number of wrong-footed instincts (tonal languages are %% counter intuitive when you’ve never learnt one, and I’m mixing up a lot of the many many vowels as well. On the plus side, the alphabet’s mostly recognisable)…

PS: and here’s an obligatory short reminder that you can win a pretty anthology, simply by leaving a comment in this post until next Wednesday.

Because I promised pics:

Yesterday, the BF and I tied the knot at the Town Hall of the 15eme Arrondissement in Paris. Well, sort of. France is a bit centralised when it comes to wedding: you have to get married at the Town Hall before you can get married in church. The big ceremony and banquet and so on is in August at the church wedding, but this was the bit where we got married for the Republic 🙂