Zen Cho

I’ve been meaning to make a blog post for a while and just not had the time to get around to it, so this’ll be a fairly variegated one, drawing on the stuff of the past few weeks.

Serendipity

A couple of weekends ago I was finishing up my line-edit of my Regency fantasy of manners, and I walked to Hampstead Heath with Cephas. It was a really pretty day — it’s a really pretty area, and it’s nice to be close enough to escape there when you spend the bulk of your days in the centre of town.

We visited Keats House, which we’d been meaning to do for a while. (It’s basically just a house, and they’ve filled the rooms with pictures of Keats while also trying to keep it authentic to the period, which makes everything a bit weird because you can’t imagine that he had loads of pictures of himself in his house when he still lived there. Maybe if it was Byron House!

Anyway, if you want to visit a famous person’s house in North London I’d recommend Freud House instead. Once in a while they have a Kaffee und Kuchen tour where they give you Austrian coffee and cake and a tour, and it is delicious. But also Improving!)

After our tour of the interior of Keats House I went to sit on the lawn to work on my book, and while wrangling a particularly knotty sentence I looked up and realised I was surrounded by Regency cosplayers, present for the Keats Festival.

Here they are demonstrating Georgian music to an interested audience. Being a Philistine in all matters musical, I quietly beredar-ed and spent the rest of the afternoon on the sunny lawn. The house is kind of boh tat, because you have to pay £5 to enter, but the gardens appear to be free and they are very pretty.

Baking triumphs

Today I applied myself to the challenge of making a green tea Swiss roll, and I am inordinately proud of the result. Behold!

I am a great big ball of vanity. The cake itself is not too difficult — it does involve working with peaky egg whites, but I always figure with this sort of thing that either it will go well and it will rise, or it won’t go that well but the cake will still taste good. (And you can see from the pockets of air in the cake that I mixed my egg whites in with no very skilful hand.) The whipped cream is also easy to do — the recipe tells you to put but 3/4 of a tablespoon of sugar in it, so you worry that it is not sweet enough, but actually the cake is pretty sweet so together they are perfect.

What is hard, and what I worried about when contemplating doing the cake, was the purely mechanical aspect of the roll — getting the cake into that shape without breaking it or turning into a cream monster. But Cooking With Dog helped me!

I don’t know if you know Cooking With Dog? I introduced Cephas to it today and he started LOLing, to my sister’s puzzlement.

“It’s just a normal cooking show,” she said. “I watch it to see the cooking. I wouldn’t link it to my friends, it’s not funny. The dog isn’t even doing anything.”

“How can you say he’s not doing anything?” I said severely. “The dog is hosting.”

Dog was very helpful with my Swiss roll mechanics today! Thank you, Francis.

Recommendations

I started following Singaporean writer Alfian Sa’at’s Facebook feed a couple of weeks ago and feel pretty good about that as a life decision. You can follow his updates even if you’re not friended (it does, alas, require you to have a Facebook account), and it is worth the price of entry if you are at all interested in local literature. His most recent status on pantun and peribahasa (Malay poetry and sayings) referencing apes, monkeys and slow lorises is a good example — my favourite of the ones he lists is:

Seutas rotan ditarik, bergegar hutan belukar, riuh bunyi kera dan lotong

‘A rattan stem is pulled, the forest underbrush shakes, the outburst from the macaques and langurs is deafening’. If someone is guilty of wrongdoing, he or she will receive an earful from friends and relatives.

If they taught Malay literature like this at school I think people would be a lot more interested lor. (Not that I didn’t enjoy Konserto Terakhir, mind you. Surprise almost-incest always jazzes up one’s school reading!)

And a final picture

Which requires no explanation.

Aliens: Recent Encounters has been sighted in bookshops! Editor Alex Dally MacFarlane reports. Aliens contains my story The Five Generations of Chang E, which — considering it also features Le Guin, Ken Liu, Yoon Ha Lee, Lavie Tidhar, Sofia Samatar, Nisi Shawl, etc etc etc — is the least of its attractions. Table of Contents here; info on how to get a copy in Alex’s post.

***

I’m delighted that my story Double-Blind will be appearing in Fixi Novo anthology Love in Penang, due out in November. This isn’t a SF or F story, but one of my occasional mundane ones. I secretly envision it as being part of a series of short stories I will do some day, which will be interlinked within a framing narrative about a KL dating agency run by a burnt out businesswoman under the name Janelle Looi (her real name is Janet, but Janet was insufficiently romantic). It would basically be a written romcom set in urban Malaysia! (My first, unlamented drawer-novel about the romance of a crossdressing academic who wins a reality TV beauty pageant was also supposed to be part of this series.)

So far I only have Double-Blind, though:

Swigging her seventh glass of orange vodka, Mei Yi climbed to her feet and announced:

“It is time!”

She was a woman with a flair for the dramatic, who could not ask someone to pass the toothpicks without imbuing her voice with tragedy. Bee had met her when they’d both joined an amateur theatre group. Bee had done so in the grip of a quarter-life crisis and had withdrawn shortly, reassured that the mundane corporate life had been the right choice. Mei Yi remained a leading lady and now did voice-overs for milk powder advertisements.

***

I tell you what is SF, though: Futura! This is a collab between indie pulp press Fixi Novo, online mag Poskod.my, and #Word: The Cooler Lumpur Festival, which is a terrible pun and also an arts/media festival taking place this summer. (The programme looks really cool! Sigh, wish I could go.)

Futura brings together six writers and illustrators to imagine Kuala Lumpur 50 years in the future. Two short stories have gone up so far, The Domed City by Angeline Woon (art by Yeoh Yi-Piao) and Lungs by Shivani Sivagurunathan (art by Shahril Nizam). Checks it out!

The Alchemy Press Book of Urban Mythic contributors line-up is out — in alphabetical order for now, though I gather this isn’t the final sequence!

James Brogden – The Smith of Hockley
Joyce Chng – Dragonform Witch
Zen Cho – Fish Bowl
Graham Edwards – A Night to Forget
Jaine Fenn – Not the Territory
Christopher Golden – Under Cover of Night
Kate Griffin – An Inspector Calls
Alison Littlewood – The Song of the City
Anne Nicholls – The Seeds of a Pomegranate
Jonathan Oliver – White Horse
Mike Resnick – Wizard of 34th street
Gaie Sebold – Underground
Adrian Tchaikovsky – Family Business
Ian Whates – Default Reactions

\o/

Things I did instead of writing or reading or replying to an email I should really reply to:

• Read Tumblr. Made breakfast galettes on a whim after seeing them on my dashboard. (I ate them with melted cheese and the egg yolk you don’t use for the batter, plus a mug of milky coffee.)
• Meandered down to library, stopping by the small market on the way to goggle at semi-precious jewellery. Mystic topazes are very pretty! They are like the fangirl red hair of gemstones.
• Took five books out of library: London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City by Sukhdev Sandhu, Ghosts of Empire by Kwasi Kwarteng, Captain Gronow’s Regency Recollections, Out in the Midday Sun: The British in Malaya 1880-1960 by Margaret Shennan, and Divine Endurance by Gwyneth Jones.
• Went into local grocery to stare wistfully at blackberries and raspberries. I have, relatively late in life, reconciled with blackberries and raspberries. Berries are now my favourite non-tropical fruit, but unfortunately they are more expensive than other fruit … I thought of buying some, but refrained out of a sense that it would be needlessly extravagant. We have some perfectly good oranges and apples here at home.
• Stopped by charity shop on the way home to try on a mustard dress and mint green lace cardigan. They would have made an attractive outfit together, but unfortunately neither was particularly flattering on me.
• Wrote this blog post!

What does a typical Saturday look like for you? You should tell me so I don’t have to write!

Coffeeandink very kindly sent me the link to this nice review of The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo by Aishwarya Subramaniam, and I wanted to say something about it. A bit awkward linking to reviews of your own things, but I wanted to flag it because it is such an enormous pleasure to — um — it is going to sound pompous to say “find readers who get what I am trying to do”, but I can’t think of a better way of saying it. It’s not like Jade is very hard to get like that, that’s not what I mean. It’s just that it’s nice when people who know and love exactly the sources you’re riffing off of — and who have similarly conflicted feelings about those sources — think you pulled it off.

For many of us who grew up on a steady diet of very light ‘English’ fluff, the lack of non-white people is something we very carefully do not think about — I’d rather not know what P.G. Wodehouse or Georgette Heyer would make of someone like me. But with this novella, Cho writes us into the period in ways that are politically astute, affirmative, and above all joyous.

*fists of determination* I shall keep trying my best!

It was my birthday yesterday! Some people wished me many cakey returns. It is for these people that I post the following pictures.

Cake #1: a Japanese strawberry green tea shortcake, made using this recipe + a healthy heaping of matcha. I made it myself! The advantages of this are a) you can make precisely the sort of cake you would want as a birthday cake and b) when Skyping with your parents you can lament that you are so badly off, so neglected by your spouse and all your loved ones, that it is necessary for you to make your OWN birthday cake. Alas! Alack!

[...]

Since I am going to Wiscon this year and do not know when I will ever be going again, I have signed up for panels! Apparently assignments are now final (I don’t know how people know this, or how they have figured out what other panels there are — most of the information I glean about Wiscon is from other people’s Dreamwidth posts).

I shall be on the following panels:

[...]

I sold a couple of short stories!

Balik Kampung will be appearing in Solaris Books’ End of the Road, edited by Jonathan Oliver. It’s a New Weird road trip anthology, and (I gather from Twitter) will feature stories by Lavie Tidhar, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz and Benjanun Sriduangkaew, among others. My story is about a ghost who, while heading home during the Hungry Ghost Festival, a) discovers things she didn’t know about her life, and b) eats Kampar curry chicken bread.

(I haven’t had Kampar curry chicken bread — I put it in just because it sounded intriguing. Nice ah?)

And The Fish Bowl will be in The Alchemy Press Book of  Urban Mythic, edited by Jan Edwards and Jenny Barber — an urban fantasy anthology “blending modern life with the traditions of folklore from around the world”. The Fish Bowl is a grim story about maths tuition and being sixteen.

I think both anthologies are due out in autumn 2013. I will post when they are available for purchase!

About half a week ago I was happily outlining revisions to my novel when I realised that I had failed to make any reference to the European medieval witch trials … in a book where restrictions on women’s practice of magic is a major strand. (It lets me write about earnest educational reformer characters. You know how much I like earnest reformers!) So off I rushed to the library to find some books about the witch trials.

Unsurprisingly there is a vast amount of writing on the topic, and I had to be quite strict about how many books I took out. Anyway, this explains why my reading has suddenly gone off in another direction.

What are you reading now?

Wizards: A History by P. G. Maxwell-Stuart. This is not relevant to the subject of witch trials; it was just on the same shelf at the library, and seemed interesting. (Deceptively so! >:( ) It’s a fairly short historical account of “ritual magicians” in the European tradition – particularly the kind that attempted to communicate with spirits – and given its subject matter it is surprisingly boring. I think the author and I are just interested in different things? I also think it is a little odd how he doesn’t quite make it clear whether he believes in magic or not, but perhaps I am just being narrow-minded here. (I am mostly a skeptic, but my attitude towards magic and ghosts and that sort of thing is that I don’t believe in them but am a little worried that they believe in me. I am also like my mom’s Malay ex-coworker who was really superstitious but went to UK and happily visited a graveyard there, and when questioned about this said, “Oh, the Mat Salleh ghosts won’t be interested in me.”)

What did you just finish reading?

Witch, Wicce, Mother Goose by Robert Thurston. A compact academic review of the European and American witch trials. Again, it wasn’t quite what I wanted, as the author and I have different concerns — basically this guy is making an argument in response to all the other academic writing about the witch trials. (He argues that the trials weren’t primarily motivated by misogyny, but resulted from the circumstances of the specific locations where the trials arose and, in particular, the pressures and fears to which these communities were subject — though I don’t think he denies that the deeply embedded misogyny of the culture affected who got persecuted as witches.) But it was useful to give an idea of what went on.

Interesting factoids:

Both this book and the boring wizards book distinguish between sorcerers or magicians or cunning folk and witches. The former might not be wholly approved of, but they weren’t straight-out evil, and in any case their practices were viewed as being distinct from witchcraft.

Witches were people (mostly but not exclusively female) who made a pact with the Devil, but as Thurston points out, the pact kind of sucked for the witch. You had to have sex with the Devil and his demons, and the sex was not enjoyable; he might pay you, but the gold usually turned out to be leaves or poop; the rewards were usually something like the ability to kill and eat babies. Also to show your allegiance you had to kiss the Devil’s butt. Altogether kind of a crappy job lor!

What do you expect to read next?

Another of the witch trial books I got out of the library, I guess, though I might just skim and return. I don’t think I’ll make more than a passing reference to them, after all.

Ooh, I should also read The Complete Servant by Samuel and Sarah Adams – oyceter kindly pointed out a rec for this to me, and it is a handbook for servants by a servant that also looks like a useful guide to Regency period details. It’s free on Google Books, but as my main options for reading it on Google Books are a) my phone and b) my computer screen, I’m trying to decide whether it’s worth paying 82p to call the hard copy up from the public library reserves. Banyaknya buku, singkatnya masa.

Just a brief note that my historical romance novella The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo is now available again on my website, and can be read for free online at the following link: The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo. I private-locked the posts on my website and took the ebook off Smashwords while Jade was enrolled in the KDP Select programme (I enrolled it so I could make it free on Amazon, as I explained in this post).

I have no complaint with KDP Select in respect of sales (one person borrowed the ebook! That was exciting). But it was always my intention that the story should be free to read online as well as available for purchase as an ebook, and the KDP Select terms don’t allow for that. Also I am opposed to monopolies and like myself to be able to buy EPUBs of ebooks I want to read, so here we are again.