Oh my.

A rather fabulous review of Warring States has been published on the faction paradox ezboard. I am biting my fingernails to ensure I don't respond with a "you like me, you really really like me!" wobble. As always, since I keep writing novels about cultures and times which are not my native ones, I live in fear of knowledgeable people. Writing about Chinese culture without resorting to either "the mystic east" or "the yellow peril" (the latter especially worrying as WS is set at the height of the West's sinophobia) was one of the main aims I sat down with and hopefully I've managed it.

"lyrical weight". Oh my.

edited to add: Since the novel is now Out There being read by Real People (not that my beta readers Kelly and Naomi are not Real but...), I've added some pages to the general WS web thingy. Since the whole novel was written with the awareness of the web in mind, I tagged stuff as I went. You can now view some of the objects I used as source material via my flickr "warring states research" tag, or you can see websites I thought useful enough to bookmark via my "warring states" del.icio.us tag. Some of the latter were used once to find a key term, others were returned to time and again whenever I forgot something.