Just found out that “Golden Lilies” was among the top five stories of Fantasy Magazine as voted by the readers–along with stories by Jessica Lee, Camille Alexa, Aidan Doyle, and Cate Gardner. My deepest thanks to everyone who voted for it!

In other news, I sold my Aztec steampunk story “Memories in Bronze, Feathers and Blood” to Beneath Ceaseless Skies, to appear in an upcoming issue. Many thanks to the Liberty Hall people who took a look at it, and to my WIBite pals for the help (including a new, catchier title and a better ending paragraph).

My SF dystopia “Father’s Flesh, Mother’s Blood” will be appearing in Jason Sizemore’s anthology Dark Futures. Many thanks to Jason for the invite and eventual acceptance, to Marshall Payne for helping me settle on a title, and to everyone who took a look at it on OWW: Colum Paget, Ilan Lerman, Mark Hunken, and Alter Reiss (special thanks to Alter for helping me see my original ending was rubbish). EDIT: and to Justin Pilon for the awesome crit, as usual.
It’s Chinese alt-history once again (I’m in this phase), the dark counterpart to my gender-change story Heaven Under Earth (which I love but haven’t managed to sell yet), featuring possibly one of my more unpleasant, bigoted set of characters. Also, changes of identity and invasive surgery. The usual unsettling stuff 🙂

You can check out the table of contents here, which includes Codexians Alethea Kontis and Geoffrey Girard as well as Paul Jessup and Ekaterina Sedia.

This is the bit where I’d go for a liedown were it not early morning here…

I’ve sold “The Jaguar House, in Shadow” to Asimov’s. It’s a novelette set in the Xuya universe (where China discovered America before Colombus, the same as “The Lost Xuyan Bride”, “Butterfly Falling at Dawn” and “Fleeing Tezcatlipoca”, not to mention novel Foreign Ghosts, currently with my agent). It focuses on the Aztecs in Greater Mexica, and the Jaguar Knights, elite spies and manipulators caught in the bloody aftermath of the civil war. Complete with blood sacrifices, crazy priests and hallucinogenic drugs.

The mind wanders, when one takes teonanácatl.

If she allowed herself to think, she’d smell bleach, mingling with the faint, rank smell of blood; she’d see the grooves of the cell, smeared with what might be blood or faeces.

She’d remember–the pain insinuating itself into the marrow of her bones, until it, too, becomes a dull thing, a matter of habit–she’d remember dragging herself upwards when dawn filters through the slit-windows: too tired and wan to offer her blood to Tonatiuh the sun, whispering a prayer that ends up sounding more and more like an apology.

Wrote the first draft of this in Brittany last summer (somewhat amusingly, the previous sale I made to Asimov’s, “The Wind-Blown Man”, was also written in Brittany, so there’s clearly something in the air here). I workshopped this on OWW, where it got very helpful crits from Christine Lucas (silverwerecat), Rachel Gold and Swapna Kishore.

If anyone wants me, I’ll be in the flat, jumping up and down and making incoherent noises.

I’ve been sitting on this one for a loooong while, but I’ve finally been allowed to make it public: the collaboration I wrote with Gareth L. Powell, “The Church of Accelerated Redemption”, has sold to Jetse de Vries’ Shine Anthology, due out 2010 from Solaris.

This one was one heck of a hard one. Many many thanks to Marshall Payne and the BF for reading it at least two or three times, and to Jetse for having such awesome rewrite suggestions. And to Gareth for being such fun to work with.

No snippet, as Jetse has a competition planned. Watch the Shine anthology blog on Monday, 30th November for more details 🙂

Meant to post about this earlier, and then it slipped clean out of my mind (July wasn’t a good month for my brain-alignment).

I’ve sold “As the Wheel Turns” to GUD for their issue 6 (Spring 2010), a short story of multiple lives in a Chinese universe (complete with karmic wheel of rebirth, psychopathic ancestor spirits, and random Barbarian invasions).

It was workshopped on OWW under the title “Dai-Yu’s Choice”, where it received feedback from the usual suspects: Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, Linda Steele (who was kind enough to crit it in tremendous detail), and Chris Kastensmidt (whose unshakable faith in that one proved right). Thanks everyone for helping me whip it into shape!

EDIT: posted this a little too quickly, and forgot about the uber-awesome Marshall Payne, whose line-edits were super-helpful, as usual.

Prologue: the Wheel
In the Tenth Court of Hell, stands the Wheel of Rebirth.

Its spokes are of red, lacquered wood; it creaks as demons pull it, dragging its load of souls back into the world.

And before the Wheel, stands the Lady.

Every soul who goes to the Wheel must endure her gaze. Every soul must stop by her, and take from her pale hands the celadon cup, and drink.

The drink is herbs gathered from the surfaces of ponds, tears taken from the eyes of children, scales from old, wise dragons. To drink is to forget; for no soul can come back into the world remembering past lives, or the punishments meted out to it within the other Courts of Hell.

No soul.

Save one.

So, remember last year, when I went to World Fantasy and got stuck in a dingy hotel because my flight had been cancelled?

Well, it turns out some clouds definitely have big silver linings, because among the people stuck with me in the hotel were John Berlyne and Marc Gascoigne. We started talking; nine months later, one of them is my agent, and one of them has offered me a deal for three books, starting with Servant of the Underworld, and going on to two sequels.

http://angryrobotbooks.com/2009/08/angry-robot-signs-aliette-de-bodard-lavie-tidhar/
http://angryrobotbooks.com/2009/08/an-author-a-publisher-and-an-agent-walk-into-a-bar/

Publication date is Spring 2010 by new HarperCollins imprint Angry Robot. The books are a mix of murder mystery and fantasy, set in Aztec times, featuring death-priest-cum-investigator Acatl (and fun stuff like ghostly jaguars, bloodthirsty gods, and fingernail-eating monsters). They’re in the same world as “Obsidian Shards”, “Beneath the Mask”, and “Safe, Child, Safe”, forthcoming in Talebones.

It’s been brewing for a while, so I’ve already exhausted most of my screaming and squeeing, but still… Wow, wow and wow.

My many many thanks to everyone who took a look at the manuscript and kicked it into shape (and it goes without saying, but thanks to Marc for the offer and to John for the negotiation).

I’d be off for a liedown except that I really, really have to pack.

PS1: there’ll be a more detailed thank-you post later. I want to make sure I don’t forget anyone who’s looked at it, and this probably means waiting after Worldcon when my head is back on my shoulders
PS2: you can also drop by fellow Zeno Agency authorLavie Tidhar’s blog and congratulate him on the sale to Angry Robot of what sounds like a fun series
PS3: maybe I should send British Airways a thank-you note 🙂

I’ve sold my Chinese alternate-history “In the Time of Transcendence” to Asimov’s (the title is going to change as soon as I can work out a decent one…). Featuring a space centre in a monastery, Daoist philosophy, and forbidden love.

Many thanks to those OWWers who took a look at it: Christine Lucas, Tom Crosshill, Ilan Leman and Owen Kerr; and to Chris Kastensmidt for his comments.

EDIT: the new title is now “The Wind-Blown Man”.

That sound you hear? It’s me hyperventilating. I’ve been dreaming of breaking into Asimov’s for a while, and I don’t think it quite feels real yet. I think I’ll go back for a liedown…

Woohoo, it’s finally here 🙂 I have a bad headache (mostly because I’ve been helping the BF fill in a form for a German firm that required such a high degree of detail that my eyes started to cross).

Books read:

–The Fade by Chris Wooding: on a planet where sunlight is deadly, the population has migrated underground, waging its bloody internecine war across huge caves and inner seas. Orna is one of the Cadre, bondsmen who serve their aristocrat masters by being bodyguards, assassins and spies. In a particularly disastrous battle, she loses her husband and is captured, taken to an impregnable stronghold of the enemy where she is only kept alive as long as she can give her captors information. Orna has every intention of escaping to find her son–but when she does so, she only finds herself swept back into the deadly power games of the aristocracy…
This is short and intense, more concerned by the delights of its baroque society than by any hard science (there’s hardly any description of the planet, and the societies have mostly regressed to feudal). The character of Orna, driven through the novel both by her despair and her growing awareness of her slavery, is a very powerful one with a potent voice. It moves at a fast clip and culminates in a neat twist ending that had me flipping back through the pages to see all the little clues I had missed.
If I had one quibble, it’s the backward narration interleaved between the book, taking up about a quarter of it. While it does make both for tragical ironies and nifty filling in, I felt that as we moved too far back in time, it began losing its interest, going over old ground, and failing to climax in anything intense enough to justify the backward arrow. The only book I can compare this with is Ian M. Bank’s superb Use of Weapons, where the backward narration culminates in a very nasty twist that echoes back into the present situation. Here, we just have scenes that feel extraneous because they only reveal what we have already inferred throughout the main story.
But still, it’s a pretty good book, well worth the read.

-Sold “In the Age of Iron and Ashes”, a pseudo-Hindu fantasy, to Beneath Ceaseless Skies. It was workshopped on Liberty Hall, so thanks to everyone who took a look!

They ran the girl down, in the grey light of dawn: a ring of copper-mailed horsemen, racing after her until her exhaustion finally felled her.
Yudhyana sat on his horse, shivering in the cold morning air, and thought of home–of the narrow, spice-filled streets of Rasamuri, and of his daughters shrieking with delight as he raced them in the courtyard. Anything to prevent him from focusing on what was happening.
Afterwards, they tied the girl’s unconscious body to the saddle of a white mare. Pakshman, Yudhyana’s second-in-command, nodded at him, waiting for orders.
“Back to the city,” Yudhyana said. His gaze was on the plains, sloping down to the river Kuni–and the cloud of dust that marked the advance of the Sharwah army.

-Sold “Safe, Child, Safe”, an Acalt short story (sequel to “Obsidian Shards”), to Talebones. Thanks to everyone who critted this: Marshall Payne, who does tremendously helpful line edits as usual, everyone who took a look at it on Liberty Hall (I haven’t saved the crits, but I remember tchernabyelo offered tremendous help on plot points), and the OWWers: the awesome Rochita Loenen-Ruiz and Linda Steele, and Tara Lynn McFadden. Extra special thanks for this one go to Ken Scholes, who badgered me into submitting to Talebones, and to Patrick Swenson for accepting this.

I knew something was wrong with the child as soon as his father brought him to me.
He was perhaps four, five years old, and everything about him was high-born Mexica: his tunic of cotton embroidered with leaping deer; his skin the colour of cacao bean; his hair as dark as congealed blood. He lay on the reed mat in my temple, shivering; his feverish eyes turned to me and yet did not see me.
That was not what made the hairs on my nape rise.
No, what made me pause was what I saw clinging to his hands and feet: a green, pulsing aura that brought with it the smell of rotting leaves and mouldy earth.