la_marquise

OMG look at this! Living With Ghosts made the Tiptree Honours' List this year. And they say such nice thinks about it... Am all teary now.
Many congratulations to the winner, Dubravka Ugresic, and to all the other honours' listers, (which includes the wonderful stillsostrange.
I am stunned. And honoured. And stunned.

I shall be out and about in London next week. On Wednesday 21st April, I'm being interviewed by Chaz Brenchley for the British SF Association at their monthly London meeting. It takes place in the Upstairs Room in the Antelope Tavern, 22 Eaton Terrace, Belgravia, London SW1W 8EZ. It starts at 7 pm, and the nearest underground station is Sloane Square.

Then on Thursday 22nd April, I'm signing at Forbidden Planet London (Shaftesbury Avenue) along with Chaz, Ian Whates, Sarah Singleton, Ian Watson and other lovely people, to launch the new NewCon Press anthology The Bitten Word, which includes my vampire space beetle story 'COld Rush.' Further details here: http://forbiddenplanet.com/events/2010/04/22/get-your-teth-bitten-word/

Living With Ghosts has made the Locus Recommended Reading List in the first novel section, alongside seananmcguire's wonderful Rosemary and Rue. And moshui is in the fantasy novel list with Dragon In Chains.
We rock, clearly.

I've just realised that a key theme in my writing -- apart from water, which literally gets everywhere -- is rationalists and non-believers discovering that the irrational and the weird are real and can affect them.
I have no idea why. I'm not particularly religious/spiritual in the formal sense (though I may be superstitious and I do talk to saints and trees on occasion. Also to the late and loved Caspian cat). I wasn't brought up with any kind of faith. But it's there in Living with Ghosts, particularly through the characters of Thiercelin and Joyain. It's in quite a few of my short stories ('The Whale's Daughter, certainly; 'Coldrush'; 'Clocks'; to some extent in 'Seabourne') and in the various sections of the ongoing, unfinished Gaheris saga.
What's this about? Should I be worried? Is this a sign of Dangerous Fluffiness or WooWoo, a weake girly non-science-yness? Or is it an artefact of a background in, amongst the history, social anthropology, which leads me always to look at the stories cultures tell about themselves, their origins and their environment. I tend to find fantasy novels which either lack reference to beliefs of any kind, or import default cardboard ones, very unsatisfactory. (And somewhere someone must have written a story about J******h's W******s in their mission starship, banging on the doors of new colony worlds.) I tend to be much more convinced by books where the author has clearly thought through how and what peoples believe -- Violette Malan's The Sleeping God, glass_mountain's Children of the Shaman, freda_writes's Dark Cathedral, to list a few. It's about world-building and depth and texture.
And yet, none of that explains this writing tic I seem to have, this 'more things in heaven and earth' -ishness that I seem to be returning to, over and over.

It has come to my attention that LX Con will be my very first convention as a Real Pro with the book out there and all. I am therefore in need, dear f'list, of your collective wisdom. How, in your opinion, should I conduct myself?


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Lovely Editor read me the Locus review on the phone last night. They' like the book. Flashes of The Three Musketeers, but a lot darker, they say. Which means they got it and that is wonderful. Now I need to lay hands on a hard copy: anyone out there know where I can find the latest issue of Locus without being in the US or without having to take out a subscription on line, please?

Things I need to get on with:
Proof reading Living With Ghosts
Reading for talk on Arthurian magic
Finish reading and write review of The Queen of K'n Yan
Cleaning
Writing
Ironing.

Things I want to be doing:
Reading justinar's new book Going Under which is sitting on my desk looking all alluring and desirable....