Tired (everything was going fine until they stopped all traffic on the subway line I use to get home. There was a good reason–suicidee on the tracks–but still… kind of not fun when you’re the traveller stuck in an overcrowded train car).

For my next project, I am tackling the novella that wouldn’t die, using the supreme weapon of mindmaps–well, actually, I only learnt they were mindmaps after I started using them. I have downloaded Freemind on the computer (neat cross-platform tool), but for some reasons mindmaps work better for me on paper–one of the rare things that still does. So I take a huge A4, and draw little circles and little arrows, et voilà! Suddenly all my problems vanish. Ha, I wish. But what usually happens is that I get past whatever had me stumped (in this particular, a troublesome reveal halfway through the novella). Now I feel much better armed for tackling the rewrite. Mostly just pondering if I should edit, or just not bother with it and write clean scenes.

I owe a bunch of you on OWW reviews; those are coming, but probably tomorrow. Tonight I’m being first-drafty, and then domestic, alas (some jackets to clean, etc. etc.)

In other news, I have finally received season 6 of Doctor Who, yay!

So, the weekend… part of it was spent looking for a crockery dresser, not entirely successfully (the H loved the place we dropped by first, but the prices are about 75% above what we’d be ready to pay for such a piece of furniture). Part of it was spent sorting out papers, using ye old method of “trash most of them, they’re not useful anymore”. I hadn’t realised until I got rid of stuff from my old workplace how liberating the entire process was 🙂 (I loved my old workplace–it had a great atmosphere–; but moving on did me a world of good).

And part of it was spent revising a short story that I wrote over a year ago, “Starsong”. I think I’m done now, though I managed to crash Scrivener rather badly and had to reinstall from scratch. Currently brainstorming for a new project I pitched to my agent–urban fantasy set in Paris, but which has a gaping hole where the words “magic system” should be.

Oh, and we also got a headstart on Xmas shopping–ordered present for 3 people (out of the 7 we have to deal with), checked out stuff for a fourth, and I made my mind about a fifth (the H).

Recent reads: working my way through David Gemmell. I read those when I was a teenager in London, and I was rather afraid that they would not hold up to another reading. But actually, they’re pretty good. I’m really glad that although they feature strong stereotyping (Chiatze=China, Gothir=Persia, Drenai=Greece or somewhere thereabouts, Nadir=Mongols), the author never takes swipes at the various nations: people come in all colours and alignments, and we have as many Nadir madmen as Drenai ones. Also, they’re fairly gender-typed (though there are a few women fighters), but Gemmell never denigrates what women do, and indeed his fighters often find themselves envying women, knowing that the greater courage is on their side. And his heroes are just impressive and memorable, and he never hides that they have terrible flaws, but can rise above them (it’s been rather a lot of years, but I can remember Tenaka and Druss and Ananais quite clearly). All in all, very entertaining and satisfying, and I’m glad I had those around when I was ~16. I’m really sorry I never got to meet Gemmell in person, and tell him how much his books meant to me when I was growing up.

So, not much (other than yummy Bday dinner involving trout, which I can smell cooking). Battling with a short that refuses to lie down, and thinking on revisions to the horrendous novella after my crit group’s been there (and they are truly made of awesome).

And working on a short story that refuses to cooperate, but that’s as expected and should be solved soon.

As far as the Vietnamese goes, my mom finally figured out that I had issues with two tones (the neutral, and the huyền, which is one of the two descending ones. I do fine with the ascending tone if I pay attention, and the falling-ascending ones are pronounced the same way as the accent on “phở”, so I got a lot of practise with it. And the other descending one, for some reason, never really bothers me, at least comparatively). Damn, there goes my last refuge–I can foresee that I will get drilled extensively… On the plus side, I now know a lot of fruit names. Some nice ones are “apple” (“táo tây”, ie “Western jujube”), “asparagus” (“măng tây”, ie “Western bamboo shoot”), and my absolute favorite, “star-apple” (“vú sữa”, ie “mother’s breast milk”, because the fruit is sort of spherical, with a little stem that sort of looks like a nipple, and has a cloudy white juice. Pragmatic, if nothing else).

I also tested out my new-found vocabulary for fruit and various other edibles by translating a Vietnamese recipe into French (the one for bì cuốn, aka rolls with pork skin. I know how to make the rolls, but not the pork). More accurately, I relied on Google translate to do the bulk of the work once we got out of the ingredients stage, and then corrected the thing by hand with the missing vocabulary. But still–I’m irrationally proud. I wouldn’t have been able to do that a year ago.

Tomorrow, London!! Aka the city of perdition where I will spend my birthday allowance on too many books…

-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 🙂

Hit 3k on a sekrit project, and started planning another round of edits to Foreign Ghosts (following very perceptive comments from my agent). And got to the end of book 2 (out of 3) in the novella, which makes 22k words. Cool bits: inserted a school called “The Abode of Brush Saplings” (a reference to the Hanlin academy, aka Court of Brush Wood, the Chinese office reserved for the very highest-ranked scholars. My students aren’t there yet, so I needed a name for the incubator 🙂 ). Mixed up all my generation references when I attempted to get the name of a particular ancestor and their generation number–this baby is going to need a complete pass to clarify the family relationships and the generations when I’m done… And put in more nice food (more pittaya aka dragon fruit) and extra references to dragons and storms. Now I probably need more actual, you know, SF and techno-porn in there… *embarrassed shrug*

We are also very rich in fruit and veggies currently, following a weekend at the in-laws where we picked apples from a farm (and got 4 kg’s worth of sub-varieties I’d never heard of, an example of how sadly normative the high-street grocery market has become in France), and a weekend where my mom dropped off some more fruit and vegs (tomatoes, raspberries and potatoes). I’m planning Singaporean croquettes (a recipe I filched from Charmaine Solomon’s The Complete Asian Cookbook, which involves ground beef, cumin, potato purée and breadcrumbs. Yum yum).

And this is made of awesome: the newest edition of the Czech magazine XB-1, which contains “Stavitelka korábů”, the translation of “The Shipmaker” (with thanks to Martin Šust and my nameless translator–I’m pretty sure they’re not nameless, but I can’t navigate the Czech website well enough to find out their name…).

(and yes, before you ask, quite obviously “-ard” is a masculine name ending in Czech, therefore I get to be known as “Aliette de Bodardová”, which is pretty darn cool)

So, tonight I was rereading the French translation of Harbinger and finishing up with a few troublesome notes. Here’s a sample scene from that endeavour: I’m sitting in the sofa with the French translation on my knees, and going through my own notes. From time to time, I’ll ask a question to my husband that goes something like this:

Me: “Here, listen to this. Do you think there’s something wrong with it?”
The H, frowning: “Er. No. Quite honestly no. It’s just you trying to apply English grammar to the text.”
Me: “What about this? Don’t you think it’s too modern for the time period?”
The H, still frowning: “Hum… Probably.”
Me: “What would you replace it with? I’m coming up blank…”
[The H rolls his eyes upwards, but agrees to brainstorm suggestions with me for a bit]

And this, right here, is why I would make such a bad translator from English to French…

(let me reassure you that it’s nowhere as catastrophic as it seems, and that I manage most of the edits on my own, especially the translations of technical terms my wonderful translator–Laurent Philibert-Caillat–wasn’t entirely sure on. But about a fourth to a fifth of my edits have to go through my husband, to make sure that I’m not inserting random anglicisms into the text…)

In other news, the H forcibly put me in front of my computer Saturday morning, and insisted that I write something and stop moping on the internet. Whad’ya know, it actually worked. I broke 20k on the novella today–hit the first climax scene and the start of the spiral towards the end.
(one of the many, many reasons I’m happy to be married to the H)

In other news:

Heaven and Earth, Overturned

14k words, and I think I’ve sorted out the ending. Now to lay the groundwork for it…

I spent a fascinating afternoon looking up the history of the Nguyễn dynasty–which went downhill pretty fast (for those who don’t know, the Nguyễn are the last ruling dynasty of Việt Nam, with a significant portion of their reigns happening under French protectorate and over reduced territory). Of particular interest, the posthumous names of the Emperors–especially the gaps, which correspond to Emperors who were forced to abdicate (Hiệp Hòa, who signed the infamous treaty of Huế, which basically handed Việt Nam over to the French, said treaty being so restrictive even the French Metropole refused to ratify it; a bunch of Emperors who were deposed and/or exiled by the French for refusing to collaborate, and the last Emperor, who abdicated). It tells… a story that is very much not pretty (not that I’m surprised, I knew about this in a large sense, but not the precise details).

Also, Dục Đức. Shortest posthumous name ever (Lily Emperor, if my Vietnamese dictionary didn’t screw up the translation). It probably doesn’t help he ruled for only 3 days, but still, what a way to signal a total lack of achievements…

(in case you were wondering, none of this is actually useful for the story, except in the sense of improving my Vietnamese history and making me realise I really should have kept up with my Vietnamese lessons–yup, once again Mom and Grandma are absolutely correct, I’ve forgotten pretty much everything except basic pronunciation…)

In more personal notes, I think we’re almost done with the packing of the boxes. All but the essential necessities have been boxed, and we’re looking at a particularly balanced diet this week (ie takeaway, ’cause most of the kitchen stuff is in the boxes)

6600 words total. It’s mostly going very fast because I’m combining existing sections rather than writing them from scratch.
(also, yes, if I keep this up, I should exceed my target of 30k by a large margin–prov. total is in the high 40ies. However, I probably have tons of things to prune from the worldbuilding, which should help)

To tide you over: Gareth L. Powell has just released his SF novel The Recollection with Solaris:

(and if that cover doesn’t convince you to check out the book, try this handy summary over at the Solaris website)

The blurb is bittersweet, though, and reminds me that today is the day of Colin Harvey’s funeral–my thoughts go out to his family and friends. Still angry, and very sad at the hole he leaves behind him.

Right…
Let’s see if we can do this again. The novella failed to work out the first time (and I was very stressed with RL stuff), so this time I laid the entire plot of it into Scrivener, handily spread into scenes. It will have several parts (! never done this before in a story, let’s see how it turns out), which gives me an ossature to work around. Book 2’s a little flabby, but I have the basis right, I think. Now it’s only a matter of completing the research–which I’ve largely done–and applying butt to chair.

Onwards.

A longish, crucial scene wrapped up.
Things included: dragon fruit. Longans. References to the Oath of the Peach Garden, and the poetry club in Dream of Red Mansions (which I think translates to Crab Flower Club, but I’m not too sure. My version has “Crab Apple Club”. I hope they’re the same plant or at least the same reference…). And another unwitting reference to Dream of Red Mansions.
Also, I might have been rather mean with a particular character. Ah well. Such is life. She’ll recover 🙂