All quiet in France

Today's rant...

2008-05-14T18:29:57Z

So this year, as so often in May, you get to pay your taxes. I'm not yet listed on any registers, so I have to go get a form from a Tax Center. Those tend to have...rather special opening hours (they open late and close very early, and they're clogged with people at this time of the year, obviousy).
But the French civil service thought about people who don't want to walk to a Tax Center: you can order an online form from their website.
That would be cool... if only the "name" field of their order form wasn't so ridiculously short. My full surname (which is long, but not horrendously so), barely fits into it--and leaves no space whatsoever for me to enter my first name. That means that if you have a compound first or last name, or anything out of the ordinary, you're screwed.

Gotta love this.

Mahabharata update: finished book 1, which leaves me with the sinking feeling that books 4 through 12 are going to be all battle-scenes...
Favourite moment: the hero Arjuna falls in love with his friend Krishna's sister. He asks Krishna what he should do. Krishna's answer: "well, she's going to have a bridegroom-choosing ceremony. I could introduce you, but you know women can be so unreliable when it comes to choosing things. I think you'd better abduct her".
Which he does.
And which she likes.
*headdesk*

Er...

2008-05-13T21:23:45Z

Ok, since this appears to be public...

Shawna McCarthy wants to purchase "Desaparecidos" for Realms of Fantasy--my short story featuring angels, a military dictatorship, and tourist travel tips. Many, many thanks to slushmaster for fishing this one out of the slush pile, and making me join the ranks of his slush survivors.

I now officially have three SFWA-qualifying sales under my belt.

*goes for a liedown*

(Matthieu, always keen to take advantage, points out that I owe him a restaurant dinner to celebrate...*g*)

EDIT: I'm breaking out the congratulatory icon:

Uck

2008-05-13T19:58:49Z

Work has officially destroyed me (ok, mainly because I didn't manage to sleep a whole lot last night, but still...).

Managed a few words on another Aztec story. Also made breakthrough on the plot of the Rahani novel (finally working out why all my characters are converging on a gods-forsaken place :-) ).

Mahabharata report: 75% of the way through Book 1. I got to the section that describes the birth of the Pandavas, the heroes (after going through the whole genealogy of their ancestors and of most of the fantastical creatures, in a delightful romp that had little to do with the main plot but was loads and loads of fun). It's a fascinating look at the culture of those days, with a completely different system of values.
I particularly like the 12 ways of getting sons, and the 8 different weddings (those aren't explained per se in the text, but I gawked them from my copy of the Laws of Manu):

1. The son begotten by one's own self upon his wedded wife
2. The son begotten upon one's wife by an accomplished person from motives of kindness
3. The son begotten upon one's wife by a person for pecuniary consideration
4. The son begotten upon the wife after the husband's death
5. The maiden-born son
6. The son born of an unchaste wife
7. The son given
8. The son bought for a consideration
9. The son self-given
10. The son received with a pregnant bride
11. The brother's son
12. The son begotten upon a wife of lower caste.

Marriages
1. The gift of a daughter, after decking her (with costly garments) and honouring (her by presents of jewels), to a man learned in the Veda and of good conduct, whom (the father) himself invites, is called the Brahma rite.

2. The gift of a daughter who has been decked with ornaments, to a priest who duly officiates at a sacrifice, during the course of its performance, they call the Daiva rite.

3. When (the father) gives away his daughter according to the rule, after receiving from the bridegroom, for (the fulfilment of) the sacred law, a cow and a bull or two pairs, that is named the Arsha rite.

4. The gift of a daughter (by her father) after he has addressed (the couple) with the text, 'May both of you perform together your duties,' and has shown honour (to the bridegroom), is called in the Smriti the Pragapatya rite.

5. When (the bridegroom) receives a maiden, after having given as much wealth as he can afford, to the kinsmen and to the bride herself, according to his own will, that is called the Asura rite.

6. The voluntary union of a maiden and her lover one must know (to be) the Gandharva rite, which springs from desire and has sexual intercourse for its purpose.

7. The forcible abduction of a maiden from her home, while she cries out and weeps, after (her kinsmen) have been slain or wounded and (their houses) broken open, is called the Rakshasa rite.

8. When (a man) by stealth seduces a girl who is sleeping, intoxicated, or disordered in intellect, that is the eighth, the most base and sinful rite of the Pisakas.

I'll freely admit that I ranted a bit about those wedding rites, especially the last four (which are said to be unlawful for certain castes). But Matthieu pointed out to me (quite rightly, I think), that those were probably meant to protect women: if someone was raped (and her prospects of marriage completely ruined), she could at least claim some compensation. Same for men who slept with women and left without feeling any obligation...

Gankutsuou (review)

2008-05-12T11:07:26Z

WARNING: this is going to be a long review/discussion, because I'm such a fanatic about the Dumas novel :)

I started watching Gantkutsuou (aka The Count of Monte Cristo) without really knowing what I was getting into, which is probably a good idea. If someone had told me that the Japanese had made an anime version of The Count of Monte Cristo set in the 51st century, complete with spaceships, giant mecha-armours and various aliens, I'd probably have given this a wide berth.

As it is, I'm glad I didn't. For all its pseudo-SF trappings, Gantkutsuou is probably one of the most faithful renditions of the Count of Monte Cristo that I have seen. Over its 24 episodes, it manages both to hit most of Dumas' subplots (more on Dumas vs anime in a couple of paragraphs), and to transcend it into something that's pretty darn good. The basic story, unlike the book, is told from the point of view of Albert, Viscount of Morcerf, who on a holiday in Luna meets a mysterious stranger, the Count of Monte Cristo. It's not long before Monte Cristo is introduced to everyone in Albert's circle of friends--and not long either before disaster strikes. Because Monte Cristo has been waiting 25 years to have his revenge--and this means, among other things, completely destroying Albert's family...

As I said before: I really like Gankutsuou. The production is dazzling, unlike any other anime I have seen (a mix of visibly computer-generated images and very good character work); the music is very appropriate, and I loved the effort that was made to include the French setting in the anime (the newspapers etc. are all in reasonably good French, and there's a voiceover at the beginning of each episode in French, too).

It does depart from Dumas in several ways, though.

Some of those I don't mind: having the Count become visibly more vampiric in aspect is not at odds with the man in Dumas' book (whose face is pale, who seldom eats, and who seldom seems to display any emotions either).

Some of those, however, bothered me a little more. I liked the idea of having Monte Cristo make a bargain with the titular demon (Gankutsuou means "Ruler of the Cave", and it's a demon to whom Monte Cristo has sold his soul for revenge); however, I didn't much care for the treatment of it. From the beginning to the end, you get the feeling that Monte Cristo has zero human feelings, which makes it really, really hard to understand why other characters (Albert, his slave Haydée, his household) would like him so much. The ending is supposed to take him deeper into darkness and to hinge on his redemption from the demon--however, such an ending can only work if the posssibility of redemption has actually been raised. I have no problem in believing in redemption; but not in the redemption of something completely inhuman. I.e., I would have preferred to see Monte Cristo display some human traits at the very beginning, before being swept up in his revenge.

The seeds of this are actually in the anime, in one of the subplots that Gonzo elected to remove almost entirely when they made Gankutsuou: the Morrel/Valentine relationship. In the book, Maximilien Morrel is one of Monte Cristo's only friends (Morrel's father once tried to save Monte Cristo, and Monte Cristo hasn't forgotten). When Monte Cristo sets in motion his revenge against the Villefort family, he condemns Valentine de Villefort, this "scion of a cursed family", to death by her stepmother's poisons--but even the proud Monte Cristo has to relent when Maximilien admits his love for Valentine.

In the anime, the same external events happen: Morrel falls in love with Valentine, Valentine is poisoned, Valentine survives. However, nowhere do we see the hand of the Count in this--except for setting the poisoning in motion, of course. It could be sort of implied that he did something for Morrel by letting him and Valentine escape, but it's really too tenuous to make a difference (and, seeing how the whole relationship between Monte Cristo and Morrel's father gets completely glossed over, I don't think Gonzo meant the events around Valentine to be read this way).

That's a pity, because I think they missed on a chance here to show us that the Count had some compassion, at least at the beginning--and that, as as the anime progresses, the Count sinks deeper and deeper into darkness. As it is, I remain unconvinced that the Count was getting worse as the series progressed; for me, he remained the same from beginning to end.

The end, in fact, is where Gonzo completely departs from the book, and some cracks start showing in the characters' motivations: Fernand de Morcerf turns from a homicidal, power-crazed maniac who shoots his wife and son to someone begging Monte Cristo for the life of his family; Baptistin, one of Monte Cristo's servants, suddenly elects to take a bullet for Albert with only the most tenuous of motivations; and Albert does a stirring speech to convince Haydée not to remain in the crumbling ruins of Monte Cristo's mansion--only to coldly leave his own father behind in the exact same situation.

I have nothing against reimaginings, and I really liked some of the events of the new version. In particular, I loved the way the Albert/Franz/Eugenie relationship ended as a mirror of the Edmond/Fernand/Mercedes triangle, twenty-five years ago. I also thought the yaoi relationship between Albert and the Count replaced the Haydée/Count dynamic of the book quite effectively. And I absolutely loved the relationship within Albert's circle of friends (my hat off to Lucien Dupré, who starts out as a bit of a bastard but ends up with more complexity than that). But I think that some of the internal logics didn't quite fall through by the time we got to the ending.

All right, now that I've finished quibbling...

It's still a darn good anime. For all its (minor) faults, it's much closer to the book than, say, the disastrous TF1 version with Depardieu, or the Jim Caviezel movie. The way in which it chooses to center its narration on the people whom Monte Cristo is destroying, rather than on Monte Cristo himself, is actually a pretty clever move that highlights just how inhuman Monte Cristo's revenge is (though, as said above, I think Gonzo went a little too far in that direction).

Life's ironies...

2008-05-10T19:52:32Z

So I make a point of detouring by my bank to drop a foreign check (specifically, payment for issue #5 of Fictitious Force), and then what do I find in my mailbox?
Yep, another check (from IGMS, for "Horus Ascending").
Had I been smart, I'd have waited until I had both checks to drop them at the bank (since they're in foreign currencies, I do have to jump through a few loops to cash them). Now, of course, I have to do the loops thing all over again...

(but I like receiving checks. Makes me feel all writerly inside *g*)

Misc.

2008-05-09T17:49:48Z

Second-draft status achieved on "In the Age of Iron and Ashes", my dancer story:

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 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," 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.

This is what comes of reading too much Mahabharata, I guess. I need to do some research on some Aztec stuff for another short I'm working on, which needs some more plot incidents...

In non-writing news, I found out there was an anime that was based on the Count of Monte Cristo, one of my all-time favourite novels. So obviously I had to watch that :-) (pretty good so far, from the 3 episodes I've watched). I like the voiceover in French at the beginning of each episode, which is pretty entertaining when you're a native speaker. The art is sometimes weird and not very easy on my eyes, which means I can't really watch more than one or two episodes before fatigue settles in.

To my f-list: any other anime I'm missing out on? I've watched (and liked) Utena, Mai Hime and Full Metal Alchemist. I've watched (and didn't like quite so much) Trigun and Cowboy Bebop--I found both of those slick, but the characters just didn't click with me. I've tried watching Gundam Wing, but I got bored.
Somebody recommended Avatar, and I can't really bring myself to watch it either, not for more than a few episodes at a time. I guess it's a combination of the Asian stuff being subtly off-base (starting with the elements system, which is just so not Chinese), and of the strong emphasis on martial arts and fight scenes (which I skip because I get bored by them).

Thanks!

Fun stuff, and IZ readers' poll

2008-05-08T19:07:15Z

Gawked from stephanieburgis:

Never knew it was so difficult to get a good breakfast...

In other, non-LOL news, the results of the Interzone Readers' poll are in: (thanks to snickelish for the tip)

STORY:

1 Ack-Ack Macaque
Gareth Lyn Powell

2 Knowledge
Grace Dugan

3 The Sledge-maker’s Daughter
Alastair Reynolds

4 Tearing Down Tuesday
Steven Francis Murphy

5 Molly and the Red Hat
Benjamin Rosenbaum

6 The Lost Xuyan Bride
Aliette de Bodard

7 Deer Flight
Aliette de Bodard

8 Exvisible
Carlos Hernandez

9 Metal Dragon Year
Chris Roberson

10 Toke
Tim Akers

ART:

1 Metal Dragon Year (213 cover)
Kenn Brown

2 Sphaira (209 cover)
Jim Burns

3 Lunar Flare (211 cover)
Richard Marchand

4 Green Man (210 cover)
Douglas Sirois

5 Light in the Dark (212 cover)
Osvaldo Gonzalez

6 A Handful of Pearls
illustration by Jesse Speak

7 Deer Flight
illustration by Stefan Olsen

Wow. I like placing in the top 10 twice. Mega congrats to Gareth L. Powell (whose story was a lot of fun to read), to Grace Dugan (who had the same totals as Gareth but fewer positive votes), and to Kenn Brown (who illustrated the cover of IZ 213 with maestria). And to the IZ readers for their good taste, obviously ;-)

Villa Diodati Report

2008-05-07T22:22:53Z

So, I did promise (well, imply at least) that there would be a Villa Diodati report at some point.

Villa Diodati is a workshop for English-language writers of speculative fiction who live in Europe. We rented a gîte (a country house) in the north of Paris, near Compiègne, which was very picturesque:

The gîte

There were 8 of us, coming from France, Spain, Germany, the UK, the Netherlands: Ruth Nestvold (specficrider), Floris Kleijne (florismk), Nancy Fulda (nancy_fulda), John Olsen (jpolsen), Sara Genge (artemisin), Jeff Spock (jeffspock), Stephen Gaskell (stvgskll), and me.

It was Spring, and everything around us was in flower (including a rather awesome cherry tree), so this was really nice. The gîte had a chimney, which provided us with a fire in the evening), a backyard (where we did lunches and brainstorming sessions, sitting lazily in the sun), and a number of rooms (unfortunately, not enough...).

Ah, the rooms... Better get the negatives out of the way first. The gîte was, as I had feared, a bit small for a concerted invasion of 8 people. We ended up sleeping all over the place: Steve in a very uncomfortable position on the gîte's sofa, Ruth under a well of light that obviously got a bit bothersome when the sun rose, Jeff on an air mattress in the living room, and I right under the edge of the roof, in a sort of large corridor that had the floor's only bathroom and restroom. (well, ok, I'm a heavy sleeper, and I never really woke up for the people who kept passing through my "room").

Also, the kitchen was what we French call American-style, which means it wasn't a separate room, but simply set in the living room behind a counter. Which means that there wasn't really any way to stay up late if the people in the living room had already gone to sleep.

Aside from that, it was just great. I knew mostly everyone, either from the last workshop or from online, and meeting (again) them was awesome. There's a sort of communion of minds going on there, which means I immediately felt at ease with everyone (which is SO not the case when I meet random people). It must be the writer's gene or something, but you just can't beat writerly talks around the chimney :-)

First Breakfast: Steve, Jeff, Ruth and Floris (behind Ruth)

What we actually did, apart from socialise and cooking (more on the cooking later), was a couple of activities carried over from the previous workshop: we had the critiquing of participants' stories, of course, but also less obvious activities such as collective brainstorming to help people write stories they were stuck on, and write-a-thon (which is exactly what it sounds like: we toss out ideas on the table, and everyone takes the ideas and writes as much as they can around them--in 3 hours). There was also much writing, much talking, and much fiddling around with the Internet router: we're all Internet addicts, but unfortunately the modem's wifi didn't work (it got renamed the "wiless" at some point), and everyone took turns plugging in a cable.

The crits were very good, giving me ideas on how to fix a story I had had lying in my trunk for the better part of the year; the discussions were fun and informative and just awesomely pleasant to be part of. As usual, this sort of thing always recharges my writing batteries (which have been severely depleted of late), and I came back from this with renewed determination. I didn't actually write a whole lot (wait, I'm sort of lying. I edited a lot, since I was going through the novel one final time before submitting, and I took lots of notes for short stories that I ought to write. I didn't actually start and finish anything, as I did last year at Diodati, but obviously that can't happen every time). Anyway, I can write anytime at home; the whole interest of this was the socialising with some great people.

Lunch in the backyard

Also, it's become obvious that Diodati is an excuse for people to show off their cooking abilities: on Saturday we had John's stupendous French dinner (soup, duck with calvados, and cake); on Sunday Ruth's wonderful chili; on Monday Jeff's tasty tajine (which was so big and so tasty it got recycled for the rest of the week); and on Tuesday Stephen cooked very good Thai green curry. We should totally do a Diodati cookbook :)

Ruth, Floris and Nancy left on Tuesday afternoon; John and Steve on Wednesday morning, leaving me and Sara alone with our computers. Upon which we wrote, of course :) Sara worked a bit on her short stories; I mostly shouldered novel revisions out of the way.

We did get to watch "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen", which we mostly regretted, since the movie didn't really make any sense, and Sara and I spent time discussing how we would have shot it to make it better (and I bitched about the way the Hindu goddess Kali was represented in the movie, but that's because I'm a contrarian).

We had a very pleasant last few days, enriched by the arrival of the boyfriend, who helped us with brainstorming SF ideas (that's where being a physicist comes in handy...), and with finishing the huge pile of leftovers.

Finally, we dropped Sara off at Orly, and went home, concluding this iteration of Villa Diodati.

As an aside, there's obviously a curse on leaving the workshop, because Sara got stuck for 2 hours in Orly because of a strike, and Floris barely made it home after an encounter with a burning tyre... (oh, and Air France managed to lose Nancy's suitcase on the way from Germany to France, and to break it when shipping it back to her).

This was just awesome--many many thanks to everyone involved for making it such a pleasant time (and special thanks to jpolsen for managing the supplies). I'm signing up for workshop #3 :)

PS:more pictures on my flickr account, here

Misc. stuff

2008-05-06T18:02:49Z

A whole afternoon of debugging to find the one *** variable I had forgotten to assign a new value to. Makes me feel all warm and frustrated inside...

In other news: outlining continues apace on the Rahani novel (still not managing to get everything as I want it. I suspect I have too much material to work from). I'm currently making my way through an old history of India, published in Mumbai a while back (big, thick books full of interesting tidbits). And I've taken my good resolution of the month: I'll read the entire Mahabharata. At 18 books, with an average of 200-300 pages per book, this should keep me busy for a while (we're talking singled-spaced, Times New Roman here...). But it's cool to read something close to the original text, even if it's Sanskrit filtered into English.

I can has first draft?

2008-05-05T20:36:01Z

About 5k words of a short story set in my pseudo-Hindu universe. Featuring a doomed city, a dancer, and lots of other weird stuff. It sucks. But hey, I have something to fix ;-)

The joys of mindmapping

2008-05-04T19:39:20Z

artemisin introduced me to Freemind, a great little mindmapping software (although I do have some suspicions that it's interfering with Britannica to disastrous effects).

I had no idea this existed. It's just great for plotting out the Rahani novel.

*happy writer*

Also, that "Handbook to Life" series I was raving about? They're putting out a volume called "Handbook to Life in Ancient India and Other South Asia Civilizations".
I. Want. Badly.

Uneventful weekend

2008-05-04T18:02:59Z

We left the gîte of Villa Diodati with the BF and artemisin, and dropped artemisin in Orly to wait for her plane. She was 3 hours early, and the plane left 2 hours late due to a tank-refuellers' strike. Sigh. This is how you know we're in France...

Worked on a short story set in my Lansara universe for Liberty Hall's Short Story Challenge, and finally finished it.

Also finished Mai-Hime, which was an awesome anime (if sometimes slightly too over-the-top for me in part, though the last episode was definitely worth all the build-up). Setting Utena and Mai-Hime side by side, it's weird seeing how big a part incest plays in the overall storyline (I suspect the Izanagi/Izanami myth to be responsible for part of that).
Also, why does the urbane, mature guy who makes all the girls fall for him always end up being the ultimate baddy? (Akio and Touga in Utena, Reito in Mai-Hime).

Grr...

2008-05-03T18:32:31Z

Ten hours of fiddling with my email account to discover why mails were being "eaten", and all that to discover that my provider suppressed some "highly likely spams" by default.

Guess what... Among those "highly likely spams" was my copy of a novel query (the one I sent to myself, to retain in my files). Apparently, putting too much text in the body of a mail can be interpreted as spam...

*goes bang her head against a wall*

Progress

2008-05-01T17:19:26Z

Still at Villa Diodati and having lots of fun. Matthieu arrived today, and we spent a pleasant afternoon walking in the beautiful French countryside.

Did a revision pass on the contemporary fantasy story that was critted at Villa Diodati, "A Bitter Taste". I think it's now ready for public consumption. It's totally a Strange Horizons kind of story, except of course, now SH has closed to subs for months (trust me to get the timing just right ;-) ).

Wow, this is cool...

2008-04-30T18:18:48Z

My short story "Sea Child" is one of the Notable Stories of 2007 for the Million Writers Awards.

I'm in good company: other nominees include wistling's "Metamorphoses in Amber", catrambo "I'll Gnaw Your Bones, the Manticore Said" and "The Surgeon's Tale" (cowritten with Jeff Vandermeer), kenscholes's "Summer in Paris, Light from the Sky", cybermonklives's "Elspeth Rose", carolineyoachim's "Time to Say Goodnight", Margit Elland Smith's "Under Janey's Garden" (a terrific story which was written at my 2006 OSC's Bootcamp), and ericjamesstone's "Tabloid Reporter to the Stars".

Wow.

Thanks to marshall_payne for pointing this out to me, and to slushmaster for offering the original rewrite suggestions on this one--and, of course, to the fine folks at Coyote Wild for accepting this one :)

More about Villa Diodati later. The workshop has disbanded, but I and artemisin are still staying at the place, in a writing marathon.

Darkness Notice

2008-04-25T19:18:45Z

Blog's going dark.
I'm off to Villa Diodati Workshop, Mk II.
I'll probably have intermittent Internet access over next week.

Have fun while I'm not here :)

Misc.

2008-04-24T19:45:46Z

Receiving awesome feedback from my crit group on the novel--thanks, guys! Now I have a much clearer idea of what I need to do.

In other news, I'm getting addicted to Mai Hime, which is a bad idea. I have enough time-drains with a new anime series to compulsively watch...

Polished "In the House of Learning", which should be my next shot at Sword and Sorceress 23. As usual, it's gotten a lot fatter than it was. Grr.

FTP

2008-04-22T19:20:36Z

Grr. I had posted a question on FTP transfers, but I found the answer on my own.
I hate my webserver. Its only advantage is that it comes free with my email account, but it's severely limited, and it's starting to really annoy me.

Grr...

2008-04-21T19:02:05Z

Spent all day debugging code, only to discover I had
a. transposed an array by accident, so was doing rather unexpected calculations on it
b. filled the array leaving one hole, which was initialised to a random value. Rather unfunny results ensued.
(if you're not a geek, what it boils down to is: I made two silly mistakes that are damn hard to find and fix...)

Received awesome crit of the novel by tlmorganfield, which gave me nifty ideas for tackling the revisions--thanks a lot! I have to force myself NOT to do it right now, as I still have a handful of those crits coming in, and I'd rather not do 15 revision passes.

Tagged myself in a book meme, courtesy of stephanieburgis:
1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people and post a comment to whoever tagged you once you've posted your three sentences.

Ok, so the nearest book is, rather unsurprisingly, my copy of "Handbook to life in the Aztec world".
p. 123 is "warfare":
This kind of formation was especially effective against similar infantry styles; however, once this battle plan faced the horses of the Spaniards, Aztec troops were unequipped to withstand a cavalry charge.
To make battle formations effective, individuals have to be very conscious of their own physical stances within the formation. Soldiers kept their weight balanced between their left, forward foot and their right foot, which would advance the body as the warrior threw a weapon of any kind.
Boy, taken out of context, this does make for dry reading...
I'm not tagging anyone, but feel free to tag yourself in the comments :)

*off to bake Matthieu a cake for his birthday*

Saturday laziness

2008-04-19T09:24:59Z

Reading a friend's book with a cup of tea. Not productive, but very pleasant :)

In other news, a review of the Shimmer art issue by Lois Tilton (she didn't like my story, but I did know beforehand it wasn't going to be to her taste).

Found the complete English translation of the Mahabharata. Still unsure how I'm going to go about reading it, because my eyes are going to give up on it if I do it on the computer screen. On the other hand, each of the 18 books is about 400 pages of dense text...

EDIT: my amazon order has arrived!!! Two books about daily life in the Aztec and the Maya World (Handbook to Life in the Aztec World, and Handbook to Life in the Ancient Maya World, both published by Oxford Press). After flipping through the Aztec one, I really, really wish I'd had it to hand when writing the Acatl novel. It has maps of everything (one of the valley of Mexico with a scale and the main routes, one of the city of Tenochtitlan, and one of the Sacred Precinct), reference charts on the calendar, the main gods...
*sigh* Where was this book when I was writing "Servant of the Underworld"? (on the plus side, if there's a book 2, I can add lots of nifty ideas).

Awesomeness

2008-04-17T17:58:38Z

I've learnt that I've sold my alt-history novelette "Butterfly, Falling at Dawn", to Interzone, which makes it my fourth sale to this awesome magazine. Featuring Aztec immigrants, holograms, and a corpse in the nude (when in doubt, always put a dead naked girl in the story *g*).

I'm psyched.

Going through the novel to catch the diction drops. This is not as awesome, but it has to be done :)

And I'm preparing for Villa Diodati, an English-language workshop for Continental Europeans, the second edition of which will take place in Ile-de-France next week. Much writing, cooking, and socialising will take place.

*happy writer*

Book recommendation...

2008-04-14T16:07:42Z

Can anyone on the f-list recommend a good novel that focuses on court intrigues? It doesn't have to be genre; a good historical will do as well.
(bonus points for Asian/Muslim court intrigues)

I'm trying to incorporate a court intrigue into the Rahani novel, but failing miserably--so I wanted an idea of how other writers had gone about it.

Thanks!

Weekend

2008-04-13T21:12:53Z

Moving stuff (amazing the number of books you can accumulate over your teenage + university years...). Writing a bit. Editing a bit.
I officially hate synopses, especially the one-page variety in Courier New.

I think I'm going to bed.

-a 40-day very nice rejection from SH on "They Come Bearing Gifts", basically saying that the story wasn't in the right tone for them (too melodramatic, a fact I suspected before sending it to them) but that it was still very engaging and one of their favourites they had seen from me.
-a 30-day rejection from Asimov's on "Tribe-Soul, God-Soul": the story was "sweet and very well-written, but not quite original enough for me". Fair enough.

My submissions stock is depleted; I need to send batches out, but the agent hunt is starting to be a bit time-consuming...

I has novelette (sigh)

2008-04-11T18:44:43Z

Why can't I write short?
Writing the novel has got me back in the "write long stories set in very complicated universes..."
Ah well. Anyway, I have a new Rahani novelette:

Rahani crouched behind a rise, watching the Freedomer camp. It was a large one: several silk tents surrounded a ring of covered fires, and the sharp smell of cooking spices wafted from several smaller fires on the edge of the camp. In the distance, horses neighed--from the noise, Rahani thought there were at least three dozens, if not more.

The Freedomers had obviously been here for some time: the fires were in deep pits, and the camp looked more like a small village than a hasty sleeping-site, with hard-faced women carrying bundles of laundry between the tents. Still--still, the perimeter was surrounded by sentinels, the cobra emblem on their breastplates marking them as elite Freedomer warriors, the same who had been giving the Pahate dynasty so much trouble in the ongoing civil war. This was a military camp, not an innocuous community.

Beside her, Padarshan shifted in the grass. "You've seen all you need?" he asked, clearly expecting her to withdraw.

More preparation for the novel, I guess (which is putting forth additional twists by the hour, even though I don't actually have a blasted idea of who's responsible for the trouble Rahani is going through).

Posted it at LH, over in the Polish Challenge. We shall see. It's a first draft and leaking water a bit, but at least I got the story done :)

It's up :)

2008-04-10T19:09:13Z

IGMS issue 8 is up, with my story "Horus Ascending".
Yay!