In which I get to the point eventually, I promise.

I have not been well. This means this post is kind of blithery, and contains footnotes. So, I have been Not Well, in ways which I am not going to share with the Internet, don’t worry. This means I have been doing a lot of lying in bed listening to podcasts. [1] Most recently I’ve […]

The draft goes ever on and on

I do not love being in the late stages of a book. But one of the things I do love is seeing my characters do things on page 650 that they couldn’t have done, or wouldn’t have thought to have done, on page twelve. Also, I realised last night that Kallisty uses ‘sorcery’ to mean […]

Retort-Made Food comes closer

NASA is funding a 3D food printer, and it will start with pizza. This is awesome. We may never get teleportation or FTL, but food replicators are over the horizon of the doable. One day we may indeed dine on what Kjarten described as ‘probably goat’ made from templates. (Do they have pizza on Requite? […]

Steampunk Tea Duellist Ankaret

I’m just back from a lovely weekend at The Frome Steampunk Extravaganza. It was amazing to see all the friendly people, from elegant old stagers to dapper urchins, dressing up in their often handmade, creatively accessorised best. I got to meet and talk to Andrew Beasley and Meg Kingston and buy their new books, I […]

Today’s snippet from Heavy Ice: Vane looked around. The balcony was not precisely full of people. It was more that a crowd was pressed out around its back edges, like a nervous pie-crust. The front of the balcony was conspicuously free. He searched for faces he could put a name to, among the blur of […]