Category: GENERAL

“The Peppers of GreenScallion,” and More

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This entry is part 68 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

Among the many wonderful things included in the June 2019 issue of Clarkesworld, you may find two things of interest to those following Korean SF, or my own work as a cotranslator with Jihyun Park. The first is a translation of Myung-Hoon Bae’s “The Peppers of GreenScallion,”translated through the efforts of Jihyun Park and myself. It’s a story about war, systemic failures, bureaucratic nonsense, food, and love. We’re very proud of it, especially given the fact that it turned out to be a lot more fiendishly subtle than we originally realized: little things throughout proved challenging to translate, including an …

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Readymade Bodhisattva, “The Flowering,” Los Angeles/Riverside, and More

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This entry is part 67 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything to the SF in South Korea series on this blog, but that doesn’t mean that nothing’s happened in the field. It’s just that:  My interests have broadened out from SF to other forms of speculative or “genre” narrative (and, in a big way, to include tabletop RPGs in general), and a lot has happened in many other narrative genres and different media within Korea.   I’ve been a little less involved in the informal Korean SF world since 2013. We were abroad for a while, and then we had a kid and moved …

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At Last, A Use for Scapple

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I’m not sure how I ended up with a license for Scapple: I think it was thrown in with my Scrivener license, though it may have been included in some bundle of Mac software. What I am sure of, though, is that I didn’t find a use for it until recently. That’s on me, of course: I probably could have used it while plotting out the novel I redrafted last year, but it never really occurred to me. However, that’s changed with a project I just finished working on, a freelance RPG-writing project. It’s one of those deals where there’s a clue …

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Johnny Appleseed, Apple Genetics, and Burnt Orchards

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One of the podcasts I listen to quite a bit is Stuff You Missed in History Class. They recently ran a “classic” episode demystifying the life of Johnny Appleseed, as John Chapman has become known.  Now, all I really knew about him was from the Disney cartoon and one volume about the man in the Value Tales books. (Remember those? The one about him was titled The Value of Love.) Given that, I found it surprisingly interesting, though it turns out it’s pretty hard to demystify the life of someone about whom a lot of stuff has been made up… and who …

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Perspective… and Pizza

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A while ago I mentioned being in the “home stretch” on the book I’m writing. A bunch of people were very encouraging when I said that, which, well, encouraged me. (Thanks, everyone.) Thing is, I still am in that home stretch, pretty close to where I was at the time I made that comment, in fact. I’m kind of stuck there. Not writing-stuck: I would be done the draft if it wasn’t for the exigencies of life. A recurrent, won’t-go-away ear infection has been gnawing on our son, and I developed bronchitis (seemingly the same damned bug), just as a …

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Website Update Ongoing

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Update (8/10/2017): Yeah, that template? It went bye-bye within an hour, when the site slowed to a crawl. Ugh. I’ll find something else. As I say: things are gonna be a mess for a few days.  Original post: If you’re dropping by my webpage, you’ll probably notice it’s a bit of a mess. A bunch of things need modifying or fixing. I’m trying to get this done so that I can reduce the load put on my server, since I got a notice today that I’m once again overloading the shared server. While I’m trying to weed out some unnecessary …

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More Early Modern Women Adventurers (… and others)

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You read my post about Mary Ambree and Dianne Dugaw’s scholarship on women warriors in popular 16th-18th century English culture, and now you want more, you say? You’re in luck: the excellent Stuff you Missed in History Class podcast (which I listen to a lot these days, while driving) has made a few pertinent episodes recently. Here they are: Catalina de Erauso, “the Lieutenant Nun.” Not English, in this case—she was what ended up being called Basque—but a fascinating figure all the same, she was a runaway from a convent (and not actually a nun) as well as a cross-dressing …

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Kaster, Master, and More

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So, a more general writing update: Once again: I’m doing that Clarion West Write-a-thon thing. I write a lot, and you donate money to a great fiction workshop for genre writers. (I attended in 2006 and it was invaluable to my growth and my starting to take my writing more seriously, especially in terms of sending things out.) If you’d like to sponsor me, please go here. If you’re my top sponsor, you’ll get a cameo in the book… probably being killed in a terrible way (though the book’s been pretty devoid of any killing so far… probably a good thing, …

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Il paese della giovinezza (The Country of the Young)

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Late last week, I got news that “Il paese della giovinezza” (The Country of the Young) was about to be published. It’s an ebook collection of some of my SF stories in Italian translation, which is very exciting! The collection, which was edited by Francesco Verso and published by Future Fiction, includes the following stories: “The Country of the Young” (Interzone 219, November 2008) “Sarging Rasmussen: A Report by Organic” (Shine: An Anthology of Optimistic Science Fiction, 2010) “The Bodhisattvas” (Subterranean Magazine, Spring 2010) “Alone with Gandhari” (Clarkesworld #42, March 2010.) The cover art shows the protagonist in the title story, and was created by Chiara Topo, of the Scuola Internazionale di …

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