…slowly recovering from post-novel ennui. Showed Matthieu one story I wrote back in April, and wrote a zillion addresses on wedding invitations (my hand, it hurts). Also made some nice spring rolls involving salad, coriander and a variant of a cha siu/xa xíu (aka reddish BBQed pork). I’m starting to get the hang of this cooking thing.

Also worked on a Sekrit Project, which I should be allowed to make public soon.

Finally, look at this: the TOC for the July 2010 issue of Asimov’s, which includes my Xuya novelette “The Jaguar House, in Shadow”. I can haz pretty cover (with my name on it, w00t).

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.

Just ordered Alastair Reynolds’ Revelation Space (since I read Chasm City a few months back and really liked it), Daniel Fox’s Dragon in Chains (which I’ve been meaning to read forever), and Daniel Abraham’s A Shadow in Summer (which I own an e-copy of, but no proper paper copy). And a second-hand copy of Tim Powers’ On Stranger Tides (which has been optioned for Pirates of the Caribbean 4 in a rather neat move).

In other news, finished importing Foreign Ghosts in Scrivener, and I’m taking a look at the various storylines to see what’s not working (I figure I know where the chronology problem is coming from, and I need to drastically re-think one character’s motivations).

So far, so good…

The BF has just finished reading Foreign Ghosts, aka the Xuya novel, in between two rounds of writing summaries for his PhD dissertation (it’s like synopses: no one agrees on what length they want).

Yay!

On the plus side, a lot of his comments are small, easy fixes; the book seems to hang together, and he loves the universe.

On the minus side, one of the characters made no sense to him, so I clearly need to do some motivation work. Also, he wants me to reorder scenes so that it’s a little less fragmented, ie one chapter per POV rather than 2-3 scenes per chapter in strict chronological order.

Hum, good thing I’ve got Scrivener if I decide to go down this road.

(I haven’t decided yet how I’m going to tackle his comments–still at the processing phase, plus at the “trying to finish short story draft” phase)

So, I’ve finished the editing pass on Foreign Ghosts, which took it from first draft with a beginning and an ending to first draft I could lob off to poor Matthieu. And I’ve been thinking a lot about Xuya, my alternate-history universe, and why I write alternate history.

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