Annoying things, no.1

Annoying things: looking at an inoffensive little scene that gives an outsider’s view on your heroine and her views and has some nice description in it, and realising that the reader already knows about the heroine’s outlook on life by now and that there was a snippet of physical description of her only a couple […]

Madame Guillotine talks about why she’s publishing with Lulu

Madame Guillotine has a really interesting post up On Self Publishing With Lulu. (Also, you can see me failing at threaded comments. Oh, WordPress, I am still a bumbling newbie where you are concerned).

Read an excerpt from The Maker’s Mask!

The two halves of the Digital Doorstop are now to be The Maker’s Mask and The Hawkwood War, after much wailing, gnashing of teeth and failing to come up with alternate titles. I’ve never been more grateful that the project I’m working on at present turned up knowing what its title was from the start […]

Progress!

Well, things are progressing. The first book has been wrangled into Lulu’s 6 x 9 Word template, and I’m working on the second one now. Hopefully the conversion to PDF won’t make all the formatting go wrong, or there will be wailing and also gnashing of teeth.

Get ahead! Get a horse.

Things I never expected to find whilst searching stock photo archives for possible cover photos: A series of photos of cyborg girls kissing cyborg horses. Whatever the book is that that would make a good cover for, I think I’m fairly safe in saying that I haven’t written it. I’ve had a look at some […]

The ancestry of a novel

Novels, like people, have ancestors. Of course, they have ancestors in the ‘I would not be writing these precise books if I hadn’t read Pern and Darkover and the Vorkosiverse and Georgette Heyer’ sense, but I don’t quite mean that. I mean that anything from the sight of a stranger walking down the street to […]

Look at us, we’re cover plus

A friend of a friend has kindly offered to design covers for me, which is a weight off my mind, as my design training pretty much ended when I gave up technical drawing at sixteen. I’ve spent the afternoon happily fossicking about on istockphoto.com looking for inspiration for cover images, and am amused to have […]

Much ado about RSS

I’ve been trying to set up a syndicated feed on LiveJournal for people who prefer to read posts there, but unfortunately I accidentally set up the first attempt, at requitefeed, to pick up the comments RSS. I think I’ve got the actual blog syndicated at requiteblog, but please let me know if it’s not working. […]

It’s twins!

Decision made! The Digital Doorstop is going to be two books. Unexpected benefit: I can now say I’ve written two novels! Unexpected downside: I have to do two covers and two cover blurbs. Coming soon, an excerpt from the first book.

Books, mine and others

I write historical novels set in time periods that haven’t happened yet, featuring courtesans, programmers, revolutionaries, genderqueer bodyguards, technological tinkerers, assassins and eels. My books are more heirs to the old-fashioned planetary romance than they are to either hard SF (because if I had the brains to design a spacedrive I’d be doing that rather […]