I've just received word that my story Dragonfly Heights is being accepted for publication in Coyote Wild Magazine!

I am overjoyed. This story probably means more to me than anything else I've written, and I'm really glad it's found a great home.

Thanks to krylyr, aliettedb, prusik, sonofhephaestus, and avocadovpx  for helping to make it happen :)

ETA: It's currently scheduled to come out in the Summer 2007 issue.

The Spider's Lament, my first short story, is now live at Aoife's Kiss!

Go read it here!

I'm writing a story right now, about the fictional daughter of a historical pirate queen, most commonly known as Cheng I Sao. Probably the biggest problem I'm having is deciding on the romanisations.

Cheng I Sao is an archaic romanisation of 鄭一嫂, which in Hanyu Pinyin would be written Zheng Yisao. Okay, sounds quite simple. I believe in consistently using pinyin when writing stories with Mandarin names and terms. But the story takes place in Guangdong in the early 1830's, where most people at the time spoke only Cantonese, so Mandarin isn't really appropriate.

Romanisation in Cantonese has a few more problems (at least to me). There are numerous Cantonese romanisation methods, and unlike with Mandarin  there's not one that's considered the standard, at least not yet.

Generally I'll use Yale romanisation, because it tends to look best for my English-language purposes. Jyutping and Cantonese Pinyin are both becoming more popular these days, but tend to look a little stranger in English, and have one or two things I'd rather avoid. So for now Yale seems like the best balance for me. If I was using the romanisation to actually learn Cantonese, however, I might make a different choice.

Despite all this, I tend to use HK government romanisations for surnames. HK Government romanisation is not particularly good, but most people are familiar with its spellings of Cantonese surnames. For stories set in modern-day Hong Kong, it makes sense to do it this way. Using this method, she'd be called Cheng Yat Sou.

But the story I'm writing now takes place in a time before there was such a thing as a HK Government, so I'm thinking of using Yale for the surnames too. Which would make her name Jeng Yat Sou. Her significance will undoubtedly be lost on most people familiar with the historical figure, but I'm not sure that matters to the story.

A bigger problem is that I named the daughter quite a while ago, before really considering all this, and the name I wanted to use only exists under the Jyutping romanisation. It doesn't look particularly nice in Yale. So I can either be a little inconsistent, or I can think of a new name for her.

Unfortunately, I can be quite picky about these things (as a few of you already know), so I'm probably going to have to think of a new name.

I made an excel sheet for myself to track my novel's progress. Actually I found a ready-made sheet online and tweaked it to my purposes, but that's just as good.

Anyway, according to the chart, if I keep up my daily quotas, I will reach my goal of 80,000 words before March 31st. This may not mean reaching the end of the novel - I may discover at that point that I won't reach the end until 90,000 or 100,000, but even in that case, I can still hope to complete my first draft sometime in April, which definitely looks good to me.

The spotlight in these past few chapters has definitely been on Amanda (and on Elin to a slightly lesser extent). This is as it should be, but it's also making me realise that I'm going to have to go back and emphasise Amanda a lot more in the opening chapters, because as written, Sean may be a little over-emphasised. I will not be going back and changing this until the end, however (when I'm sure I'll have even more ideas about how the opening needs changed).

I've done my NaNo quota today, but I'm ready to do a bit more, so I'm not posting my daily results yet.

What I am posting is a little bit about the novel's next location.

I now have three of the four pilgrims in my story. Monkey and Xuanzang are more or less the same as in Journey to the West, though Monkey is distinctly less powerful in my version. Aunty Zhu is my story's version of Zhu Bajie, the pig, who is male in the original. (Zhu means Pig in Chinese).

The fourth pilgrim in the original is a river demon called Sha Wujing. Originally I was going to have him appear in Guilin, which is a nasty nasty city (but with one of the nicest surrounding countrysides in China). Then I remembered a place I'd read about called Fengdu, the City of Ghosts, somewhere along the Yangtze river. Fengdu is a Taoist necropolis modelled on the Chinese Hell, and thus seems like the perfect place to set a chapter. I read about this place years ago, and always wanted to visit. The only problem is, it was recently flooded permanently due to the Three Gorges Dam project, and now most of it is underwater (though parts of it on top of hills are still above the water)

I certainly can't think of a better place for them to find their river demon :)