Sep. 22nd, 2014

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So we had not only Jean & Roger from England for Sunday hangin'-out yesterday, but also Mark from England too; and they all brought many wines, and we may have drunk them all, whoops. And a little bit extra. And I cooked a chicken with quince sauce, and quinces poached in rosewater syrup, and you will notice the common factor there; and the quinces were eaten all up, but a healthy wallop of syrup remained to me.

And this morning, after we had recaffeinated Jean & Roger and sent them up towards the Russian River (so named because of Russians, apparently, it's not a misattribution of the Rushin' River or anything like that), John bore me off in search of ghost pepper salami; and once we'd started it was quite hard to stop, so I came home with new herbs for the garden and new foods for the pantry and so on and so forth. But John also left me with a fresh supply of his home-grown ghost peppers. And Karen was out for lunch, so I had eggs-and-rice enlivened with a third of a ghost, and I am pleased to report that that much suits my tolerance very well, and I have not become a wimp after these years of less exposure.

And then I had to go out on various errands, but! I have had hot pepper jellies on my mind; and I looked at the quince/rosewater syrup, and I looked at the stub of a ghost pepper, and looking - as you know - can be a decisive action in itself. So I chopped the middle third of the pepper very finely, and mixed it into the syrup, and boiled that up and left it to cool. And now I am returned from my errands, and I dabbled a finger in the cooling syrup and sucked it thoughtfully.

And hoo, boy. What I have done here, it is a marvel of a thing. I could have a whole career as a maker of ghost pepper quince jellies, let me tell you, if I can only work out the best way to make it set. It is fiercely hot and very fruity and tolerably sweet and utterly delicious, and I could not be more pleased.

Also, I have a whole nother batch of quinces, so.
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Foxes have holes, the birds of the air have their nests; in anthologies and collections both, short stories get to snuggle up in a Table of Contents.

It's become quite a thing, to announce the ToC of an upcoming antho in one's blog, if one has a story in it. I'm not sure that the ToC of a single-author collection has quite the same impact, because you don't get that pleasure of running your eye down the list to see what other authors have reported in; but even so, I guess it's still a thing. So herebelow, please find the ToC of my collection, Bitter Waters, forthcoming from Lethe Press in earliest November. The cover's by Elizabeth Leggett, and the collection was edited by m'wife Karen Williams, with input from m'publisher Steve Berman. Geoff Ryman wrote the intro, and Publishers Weekly said some nice things about the book; everything else is my own responsibility.

The Book You Hold In Your Hands (even if it's on a screen): Introduction by Geoff Ryman
Another Chart of the Silences
Junk Male
The Pillow-Boy of General Shu
In The Night Street Baths
The Insolence of Candles Against the Night’s Dying
Parting Shots
Up The Airy Mountain
The Light of Other Eyes
Septicaemia
The Cupboard of Cold Things
True North
Hothouse Flowers: or The Discreet Boys of Dr Barnabus
One For Every Year He’s Away, She Said
Keep The Aspidochelone Floating
‘Tis Pity He’s Ashore
The Boat of Not Belonging
Villainelle


That's a mix of full-on fantasies and ghost stories, with a couple of real-world mysteries mixed in. Or if you count another way there's half a dozen Quin stories, all four (so far) of the Sailor Martin stories, another glimpse of Skip, a couple of stories that look to novels elsewhere and really not many stand-alones. I don't do much that honestly stands alone, though any of these can be read by themselves; all the oceans are the same damn ocean in the end, and everything's connected. If you want to count another way, this is a very queer collection indeed.

You could pre-order it here, if Amazon is your thing.

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