Just a quick update that work has eaten my brain.

I shall be looking at my pretty birthday present from my parents: a shiny new MacBook Air 13.3″. Just set it up now. Wow. The keyboard is very comfy, and it makes a nice change from my old 10″ eeePC (which is a nice machine for writing on and a crap one for making revisions on).

This weekend I have a blog post to write, a story to revise, and various other things to consider that I had no brain-space for during the week, in addition to accompanying the H on a supply hunt to Chinatown (aka, where are my 5kg of rice?). Should be fun 🙂

Or, you know, not. Apparently I would seem to have a thing called a birthday today; and my surprise birthday present is a trip to London courtesy of my sis and the H (!!).
Am currently near Bayswater in a surprisingly large room–no idea what’s in store for today, but it sounds like fun.

I’m not the only one to have a November birthday: fellow authors Lavie Tidhar, David Tallerman and Lee Battersby are also November babies, and to mark the occasion Angry Robot is offering 50% off ebooks–see here for details, but you can basically net yourself all three Acatl books and the short stories in a handy ebook format.

And to tide you over while I, er, go off and not blog very much, you can find me here at Luc Reid’s blog talking about crossing over and insider/outsider writing.

Have fun! (I know I will 🙂 )

So, the H comes home tonight and shows me the picture above. “Wanna take a guess on what this is?” he asks with a (suspiciously) broad smile. I take a look. “Ratatouille?” I hazard, knowing it can’t be that.

Apparently, this is what a La Défence restaurant sold as bò bún. It has, let’s see… carrots, rice (badly cooked, according to the H), shrimps and some other unidentified vegetables that the H assured me were all Western in origin. No bò (beef) or indeed bún (rice vermicelli) anywhere to be seen.

I am not really sure whether I want to laugh or to cry at this stage…

Not much to see, sadly–I wish I could say it’s all been exciting new writing, but for the most part it’s been exciting proofreading and interviewing…
We did watch Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking. Plus points: Rupert Everett, who makes a surprisingly entertaining Holmes and who has got great interactions with Ian Hart’s Watson. Also, it was nice to see a return of Holmes’ moral principles, which have been mostly glossed over in Sherlock. Also, Michael Fassbender (who doesn’t like movies with Michael Fassbender). Minus points: the plot, which is voyeuristic and not really convoluted enough for me to forgive the “let’s kidnap and torture young women” vibe. As the H said, it was a great shame the movie lacked suspects altogether and made its conclusion pretty foregone.
I’m off to Bristolcon for the weekend, where I’ll be hanging out with Gareth L Powell, Tricia Sullivan, Patrick Samphire and Stephanie Burgis. Internet connection will hopefully be sporadic (I have a story to write!). To tide you over: go read Mari Ness’s snarky review of the pilot for Revolution (which sounded hopelessly racist and hopelessly science-light in its trailer).

So… tentatively have new story, “Memorials” (temp title, as it’s suitable but not very striking), clocking in at 9k words or so. I was convinced it was completely broken, now I’m not so sure–let’s see what happens… (whatever happens with it, many thanks are owed to Tricia Sullivan for bombarding me with reasons to complete the story and push through my, er, not-so-pleasant thoughts about my worth as a writer etc.).

Cam finds Pham Thi Thanh Ha in her house, as she expected. By now, she doesn’t question the aunts’ knowledge or how they came by it. She does what she’s told to, an obedient daughter beholden to her elders, never raising a fuss or complaining–the shining example of filial piety extolled in the tales Thuy so painstakingly reconstitutes in her spare hours.

Thanh Ha is a big woman, who must tower over her extended family–though right now, her cheeks are hollowed with grief, and the black band of mourning on her sleeve seems to have sucked all joy from her. “Younger aunt… Cam.” She hesitates over the name, a subtle way to make it clear that Cam had better get to the purpose of her visit quickly. “Be welcome here.”

I’m slowly starting to clear my backlog of stuff, and am quite embarrassed to discover I completely dropped the ball on some stuff I owed. One of those days. Arg arg arg.

For a break, I think I’ll go write a silly little story (the operative word being “little”), and work on reviews of some fiction I’ve read (Tran-Nhut’s The Banquet of the Unicorn and Rattawut Lapcharoensap’s Sightseeing).

(on the plus side, I now know all the suitable pronouns in Vietnamese to address strangers, at least for the next 5 years or so–I now have no excuse to go practise when ordering food in restaurants…)

Found this on twitter. Kathleen Alcalá on SFF alternate universes vs reality:

Last quote on the importance of ethnic sensibilities: Your alt reality is my everyday life.

Yes. It’s a brilliant summary of what’s wrong with the “rule of cool” SF (and why you need to be careful about which bits of which cultures you put into your story, as I argued elsewhere)

Activity this week is likely to be sparse, as I have to fit in a Vietnamese lesson, a few appointments left over from before the summer, and a workshop in Brittany with Kari Sperring, Tricia Sullivan and Rochita Loenen-Ruiz. Can’t guarantee I’ll post, but maybe by next Monday I’ll have solved that %% virtual reality story.

Words mean something; they weigh, like contracts between families in the olden times. Cam uses them cheaply, for they’re the weapon by which she makes her way in life.

Yup, not terrifically original, but I rather like it.

Snippet from our holiday in Brittany:
Me: “So, I want this story to be about child refugees and their experience. It kind of needs something else to be SF, though…”
The H: “Space stations? Spaceships? AIs? Nanomachines?”
Me: “Ooh. I like nanomachines. Sold, now I have to think of a plot to go with those. Mmm…”

Yup, this is how my SF gets plotted, which kind of explains a lot of things…
(I usually get the setting from combining one societal thing with one science/SF thing; however, at this stage I’ll throw in a random element to provide the actual plot that goes with the setting. Lately, it’s been a fairytale motif, go figure)

Off to a short but well-deserved holiday in Brittany until Sunday late evening. Probably no internet, or at any rate much ice cream, swimming and cycling which will keep me off the Internet.
There’ll be no hemi-semi-weekly cooking post on Wednesday, and the posts I had in the queue (on cultural appropriation and engineering in SF) are set back by about a week. Will be back next Monday. If you feel like you need a fix of Aliette de Bodard, may I point you to the #feministSF chat on Sunday afternoon/evening (depending on your timezone), which will focus on “Immersion” and Sofia Samatar’s “A Brief History of Nonduality Studies”?

The H, after we discovered I’m going to have to cut down on dairy consumption due to mild intolerances, “Kind of curious though, most Vietnamese don’t eat dairy. Where do they get their calcium from?”

Me, after a quick spot of google and some thought given to the matter. “Well, uh, from seafood and algae and nuts, I guess? And, ha, I think I understand why they eat the shells on the shrimps now!”

(I *always* eat my shrimp shells, which puzzles the H as he can’t envision why I’d want to)