Aliette de Bodard at WOTF

Aliette de Bodard is blogging about her experiences at the Writers of the Future awards and workshop. Here's a picture of her looking radiant at the awards ceremony with Kevin J. Anderson.

Aliette's stories frequently appear in Shimmer, and we are not in the least surprised to see her doing well in major competitions. Congrats, Aliette!

Updated to add, courtesy of commenter John Goodwin: you can see more photos at http://wotfblog.galaxypress.com

Apex and a Coconut

In the mail today, a copy of Apex's Best of 2006 anthology. There's some good reading in there, including Mary's Cerbo en Vitra Ujo. I wrote an appreciation of Deb Taber's story, How to Raise a Human. I've even forgiven Jason Sizemore for getting my name wrong. :) It's a good book; grab yourself a copy.

Sean's been doing most of the grocery shopping lately, and he's under standing orders to bring home a variety of produce. "Get whatever looks interesting," I said, "and I'll figure out what to do with it.

Yesterday he brought home a whole coconut, and I must admit that I'm not sure what to do. The last time I had a whole coconut, I got a little tipsy and made a coconut meringue pie at 2 am (without implements of destruction to open the coconut, or anything more than a whisk to do the meringue - it was a hell of a lot more work than it neeeded to be). Clearly I can not be trusted with coconut-based decisions - so any suggestions about how to consume this coconut?

Insane, in a wonderful way

Michael Livingston Chaucers Scalzi. Check it out.

Momos

Inspired by the momos we had last night at House of Tibet, we set out to make our own today. We used Jay Lake's recipe. I've been reading about his momo adventures for a while now, but have never managed to get around to trying them.

So how did it go? Well, they're pretty yummy, but nowhere near the ones we had last night; I think we need to do this a few more times before we get really good at it. I wasn't quite sure how to shape them, but figured it didn't really matter; as long as the dough was even and the meat contained, it should be ok. We used ground turkey instead of beef: next time, beef. And we don't quite have the hang of cooking them. The first few got very brown but the meat was still raw on the inside - so for the rest, we treated them like pirougue and boiled them for a few minutes before finishing them off by frying. We also baked a bunch of them, just to see how that would turn out.

We liked the fried ones more than the baked, of course; next time, we'll get the hang of cooking them. I'm sure of it.

Served with an asian cabbage salad for dinner.

Pirate reading at Armadillocon!

If you're going to be at Armadillocon this weekend, stop by the Broad Universe Rapid-Fire Reading. Jeanette Cheney, one of our fine pirate authors, will be reading from her pirate issue story. That's this Friday, August 10, at 6:00. Don't miss it!

Getting to Know the Area

So today, we decided to start getting to know our neighborhood and the local businesses better - instead of just going to the same old restaurants and coffee shops and movie theaters, we're going to explore. I've arbitrarily declared a very wide area as being "our neighborhood" - east to the University, south to 1300 South, West to 300 West, and north to North Temple. If you're not in SLC, that won't mean much to you; but it's a huge area that includes most of downtown, as well as the University of Utah and several funky little neighborhoods, so there's lots of exploring to do.

We started today's adventure at the Utah Museum of Natural History; they have a special frog exhibit now. The fun part about exploring is that going to one place makes you want to check out other places: the paleontology hall makes me want to go see more dinosaur bones, the anthropology hall had us planning a trip to the Four Corners area and the Grand Canyon.

After that, we headed to House of Tibet for potato cutlets, momos, and chicken curry. Yum! It's been several years since I've been there; I forgot how good it is. I think I'll put that on my list of places to take my parents when they're here next week.

Finally, we stopped off at Caffe Niche for coffee. It's a new place, occupying a space that used to be a funky vintage clothing store. The staff was super-friendly, and the space was beautiful and hip. It didn't seem much like the kind of coffee shop where you'd bring your laptop and hang out, but the dinner menu looked too tiny to make it much of a dinner destination, which left me a little confused about its identity - what kind of place is it? They're usually open from 7 am to 4 pm, so I think I'll have to swing by there in the day sometime, and see what it's like in their core hours.

When we came home, I accidentally fell asleep, instead of doing a few hours of Shimmer work. Mmm, sleep.