Bluejo's Journal

Chinese dragons
This is so cool.

I've just heard from my foreign rights agent that the Chinese offer for Tooth and Claw which we've been negotiating about for a while, is now an actual firm official offer. It's not much money, but who cares.

My first translation, and it's Chinese -- and not only that, but for some reason I find the idea of Tooth and Claw in China hilarious. This is because Chinese dragons don't have wings and also I wonder if communists would see the class thing in the book rather differently from most of my readers?

For no very good reason, several of

rysmiel's co-workers are Chinese -- and not Chinese like

thomasyan and all the Chinese people I know in Britain, whose ancestors left China a long time ago and who grew up in Westernized countries, these co-workers were born in China and emigrated to Montreal themselves, within the last ten years or so. While I was writing Tooth and Claw I happened to have them round for dinner, and we had a conversation about dragons in which I had to get out the Time Life Enchanted World Book of Dragons to show them the differences between Western dragons and Chinese dragons, and attempt to explain to them what I was writing about. Their cultural problems with it were so different from everyone else's -- they didn't have the slightest issue with the fact that I was writing entirely within dragon POV or that the dragons eat each other, they were more anxious about the thought of baby dragons and dragons flying. They're not fantasy readers, presumably there's a Chinese fantasy market out there -- though wondering what it's like seems rather science-fictional.

But anyway, I now have a pile of Chinese friends who are very invested in the dragon thing, and who were very interested in looking at the cover when it came out in English. Finally, there's going to be an edition for them! And they can translate the blurb and everything for me!