Still brainstorming the %% urban fantasy. Gotta figure out how to tie together a violent break-in and a fire at a middle school into the same plot… (preferably without having the same vilainous figure involved in both, because it’s such a cliché). On the plus side, I now have my romantic options for the MC figured, except there’s a pesky husband in the way… (I’m tempted to inflict random grievous bodily harm, but it feels like a copout).

I sent off everything for the Obsidian and Blood omnibus as well: all being well (haven’t heard back yet), the volume will contain all three Acatl short stories in addition to all three novels, a new Introduction by the author aka me, and a character index that was sadly missing from Master of the House of Darts. And I’m hoping we’ll be able to fix various egregious mistakes that were around in the text (as pointed out to me by translator extraordinaire Laurent Philibert-Caillat). So definitely worth investing if you’re a fan 😀

Misc other Obsidian and Blood news: Master of the House of Darts has been entered into Book Spot Central’s annual tournament, where books face off against each other. It’s in the same bracket as Patrick Rothfuss, Mira Grant, N.K. Jemisin and other powerhouses, so very much doubting it’ll get past the first round. But just in case… voting is March 13th-March 15th, I’ll try to post a reminder when it actually happens.
And Servant of the Underworld is book of the month over at Absolute Write Water Cooler’s Book study, so if you feel like discussing its merits (or lack thereof), feel free to hop on over to the thread and speak at length.

Meanwhile, we’re having stuffed zucchini with soy sauce, and I’m once again amused by the fact that, whenever we’re given a choice, the H uses the French/Western-shaped knives, whereas I feel much better when I have the santoku in my hands (I hate French knives, they feel all wrong, balance-wise).

Still brainstorming and researching the history of Paris. And still tentatively making changes to the blog to have better recipe formatting: apologies, it might look a little broken down for the next week or so.

And started counting down to Eastercon. Wow. Can’t quite believe it’s so soon.

So, I can’t believe I’ve spent an entire afternoon on this, but I’ve put up an index to the recipes I posted on the blog, and done my best to clean up their tags (and sort them out by ingredient and by place in the meal such as main course, side dish, dessert…). I looked for a plugin that would autoformat recipes in a consistent fashion, but all I found was either buggy (one plugin I tried didn’t even bother to close the italics tags, which meant anything you put after the recipe proper showed up like this…), or imperatively had to be edited in the visual editor (which I’ve deactivated because I put PHP in my pages).

You can find the index here: it’s still very much under construction, but I realised to my shock that I’d published 29 recipes on this blog, and that they were, erm, as well organised as my desk (which bears witness to the slow increase of entropy as time goes by).

Any brilliant ideas for publishing and/or organising recipes on WordPress very much welcome at this stage, since I really feel I’ve done nothing but a short-term hack to fix the problem…

In the process, I reorganised my website a bit, and moved a few pages around (hopefully nothing traumatic), as well as set up missing pages (*cough* Obsidian and Blood omnibus *cough*).

And the weekend was meant to be spent looking at my US taxes, but this has come to a halt because the H is acting as some kind of virus incubator, and is therefore not entirely up and about… At least I have brainstormed more Jade in Chains, and am currently reading through Kate Griffin’s A Madness of Angels (after finishing Ben Aaronovitch’s Moon Over Soho). Interesting contrast between the two so far.

I’m going much better now: the fingers are mostly not swollen anymore, and all I have left are biggish bruises on the fingertips (which make typing all but impossible, but at least I can flex my fingers).

The flipside of hurting my hand goes as follow:
-Basic language test: I basically switched to English the entire time the H and I were dealing with the (minor) emergency, and only switched back to French once my hand was safely bandaged. So, apparently, when in pain, I switch to English. Go figure…

-Basic rice cooking test: since I could only use the left hand, the H ended up cooking rice–an activity that, by unspoken agreement, is left to me along with Vietnamese cooking. And boy, is it hard to convince him to follow directions properly :=D (he was OK with most of it, but didn’t want to rinse the rice more than once or twice before cooking. I insisted. Being a man who likes his sticky rice, he also put a lot more into the mixture we cook [1]). So now the H knows how to cook rice, or more accurately which buttons to press on the rice cooker 😀

That’s all from me. As mentioned above, still not very easy to type more than a few paras. I’ll save my energy for working on a crit.

[1]I cook 9/10 normal jasmine rice, 1/10 sticky–makes for a much nicer texture.

(broken down in several posts as this grew too long)

1. Food: oh my God, the food. I might be a tourist and more than a little lost in Vietnam, but the food is always like coming home (and it’s no coincidence that the one place I’m never lost in is restaurants). Plus, you always eat well at Grandma’s house (thanks to the combined efforts of Grandma, my maternal aunt, and my cousin). We also tested and patented the food crawl as we were travelling: this is a technique by which you get up at 6:00, have a cup of tea, eat a breakfast soup at 9:00, have lunch at 11:00, then have a boat ride on the Mekong and have a copious snack at 15:00, and proceed to dinner at 17:00 (all the while being pointed to food in various peremptory ways, and being told to eat in either French or Vietnamese). That’s discounting special events where you are well and properly stuffed, banquet-style (our stay intersected my great-grandmother’s death anniversary, and a two-year death anniversary for my great-uncle, which is basically when the period of mourning ends for the descendants); and it explains why we came back from Vietnam sated, but determined to undergo a diet of salads. [1]

2. Orientation: Grandma very sensibly wrote the address of the house on a bit of paper (well, OK. First she told me to repeat it out loud, then she grimaced and said she was going to give me a bit of paper… Remember what I said about my pronunciation sucking?), and that was what we gave taxis as we zoomed around Saigon. It puzzled them no end that two very obvious tourists (one White guy, and one vaguely Vietnamese-looking gal who obviously couldn’t speak very well) would ask to be dropped in what seemed to them the back end of nowhere. Mostly it was fine, but we did have one taxi driver who kept circling the house, looking for a hotel where we could be staying… (when this was explained to Grandma, she laughed very hard and said she was the cheap variety of hotel). In the end, I gave up the pronunciation game–it’s just too frustrating to argue with a cab while the meter is running–and copied down street names on a bit of paper. (I think the only two places that I said out loud that didn’t suffer from a pronunciation problem were the Bến Thành market, which is a touristy destination, and the word “crossroads”, but it was accompanied by a list of two street names, and a rather graphic gesture of a cross made with my hands).

3. Tourists vs. locals: the H and I spent a most profitable afternoon in Hội An [2] observing an ever-increasing flow of local tourists vs Westerners, and we’ve come to the conclusion that the one difference between the “locals” and the Westerners is–guess who’s wearing the T-shirts and shorts and getting sunburnt? (getting dark skin is considered a bad thing in Vietnam, so a lot of people dress with long-sleeved shirts, trousers, and sometimes even gloves and facemasks. And I shudder for the poor kids decked out in thick winter clothes, because it’s colder in the Centre, but most certainly not *that* cold).

[1] I didn’t escape the ritual bout of food poisoning in Hội An–two days out, and I basically couldn’t keep anything down. Thankfully it didn’t last long, because it was a bit stressful to be rushing about in a temple complex trying to explain with gestures that I was going to be sick and needed to get away from the sanctuaries before it got messy. Also, explaining in a restaurant that I was sick and needed cháo (rice porridge) was worth a laugh or two (I mangled the pronunciation completely, but enough of it got across that I basically got a custom dish made up for me).
[2] Incidentally, if anyone knows of a festival that happens to fall on Feb 8th/the 17th day of the First Lunar Month, we’d be interested. We were mildly curious at the queue of pilgrims outside the Quan Vũ/Guan Yu temple in Hội An, and we couldn’t figure out why they’d be there (I know Guan Yu’s death anniversary is on the 13th day of the First Lunar month or something, but the date doesn’t coincide).

“Có công mài sắt, có ngày nên kim”: “If you work hard enough at sharpening iron, one day you’ll have a needle” (literally “Put effort [into] sharpen[ing] iron, have one day in the end [a] needle”). Basically, insofar as I can tell, the closest equivalent would be that nothing is obtained without hard work. Again, I’m pretty sure of my translation, a lot less sure about my reading of the proverb.

Progress continues apace; I’m turning to vocabulary words that might actually be useful out there, namely: “nhà băng” (bank), “thông hành” (passport), and “khách sạn” (hotel). My vocabulary continues to be overwhelmingly focused on food, though: at the very least, menu-reading isn’t going to be a problem (nor is ordering, at least if they don’t answer back…).

Had last lesson before leaving; if nothing else, it confirmed that boy, I need to work on my neutral and short-descending accent (and my diphtongs and my “th”, and so on, and so forth). Should be fun…

That’s it from me. Don’t know how much internet I’m going to have over there (it’s not that there isn’t any, but rather that we might be busy). See you in two weeks?

-Two Dudes in an Attic reviews Harbinger of the Storm–with snarks, but without harming any owls
-Blue Tyson’s capsule review of Master of the House of Darts
-Martin McGrath on “Why does SF hate Ordinary People?”. Fair point about the elitism of SF, though I wonder how much of it is already present in literature (I can’t remember who, but someone pointed out that recent literature, especially the source literature of SF, was the province of the bourgeoisie; while the older texts were the province of nobility)

In other news, busy weekend ahead: friends coming over on Saturday, and we’re probably headed into the 13e Sunday to see the New Year’s procession.

Not much to report… It’s become a tradition that whenever I sell something big, the H and I will go to a restaurant and have a nice meal, so we went to the 13e and had a nice phở to celebrate the Clarkesworld sale (the owner knew what I was going to order when I walked in, too–drawbacks of eating at a restaurant which accommodates Mum and Grandma on a regular basis 🙂 ). The couple next to us was a bit lost, I think–they started off by ordering a chè ba màu (three-colour chè, which I’ve always seen eaten as a dessert when it’s part of a meal), and they were desperately looking for a “light” soup without noodles on the menu (they don’t really exist: you do have broth, but it’s thin and not nourishing at all…). In cases like those, I always hesitate to butt in and offer unwanted advice: they could have had one of the various gỏi, the cold “salads” that include green mango/green papaya/grapefruit, which are full of vegetables (and nước mắm), if not very nourishing. But I would have felt really out of place making a suggestion to two total strangers, so I didn’t say anything (though, amusingly, I would have done it were we speaking English–I really think my English-speaking persona is more outgoing than my French).

And finally steeled myself and said “bye” in Vietnamese, and nobody looked vexed, so at least it worked (though I think I shouldn’t have said “Madam” to the waitress, who looked to be firmly from my generation, but hey, better be safe than sorry…).

Right. To bed, and then to work on that short story that threatens to morph into a novella all over again. Sigh. I really need to stop worldbuilding and start writing.

So… I’ve fallen in love with a particular tea (it was a gift). Insofar as I can tell (remember I can’t read Japanese, and it’s a direct import), the brand is Harada, and it’s their Yabukita blend of green tea–you can see the box here. It’s got a light, refreshing taste, and it quenches thirst quite effectively. So far, so good. Trouble is… I haven’t been able to find this particular tea here.
I’m therefore hunting for a substitute.

Am I right in thinking a good grade of Sencha tea from Japan would taste about the same, or am I completely off-base? I haven’t been very impressed with the one variety of Sencha that I bought, but it was definitely the cheap kind (google tells me that Yabukita is a particular category of sencha, but I haven’t been able to find Yabukita either).

Aka, the nativity scene and the Christmas tree. I never feel this is official until the actual Christmas tree is put up, even though we’ve been in the Advent for a while.

(pictures behind the cut, including my rather unorthodox nativity scene…)
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