Placeholding Cephalopod

Placeholder post so that a picture of me with bits of ironmongery on my head isn’t grinning out from my blog where it’s syndicated on Goodreads. I’d been noticing links coming in to the blog from a Goodreads page for a while, and finally followed the link and discovered that someone had set up an […]

Other things I Learned From The Goth Scene

Because I’ve been thinking of these all day. – Any scene that’s been around for more than five years or so is liable to get into a sine-wave state of oscillation between ‘The scene is dying! We must recruit new people!’ and ‘New people are coming into the scene! I liked it better without them!’ […]

It’s Business Time

I decided to order business cards to take to Asylum, so that when interesting steampunk people give me their cards I can offer them mine in return, and so that in everyday life when people ask me what I do I don’t have to scribble the name of the website on the back of a […]

Sounds Of Steam: Let’s Get This Show On The Road

The excellent people at Sounds Of Steam are running an Indiegogo campaign to raise money for outside broadcasting equipment. If you don’t know them, they’re a steampunk radio show bringing music, interviews and discussion of what they’re drinking to the world. All of the archived shows are available as podcasts and they’re well worth a […]

Je Ne Regrette Rien

I do not regret a single damn moment of the time I’ve spent self-publishing. I don’t regret the time I was trying to turn The Maker’s Mask into something that Smashwords’ Meatgrinder software would work with, which involved me nuking the thing back to plain text, sitting there for an afternoon with the paperback open […]

Things I Already Know People Won’t Like About Heavy Ice

My characters aren’t speaking English and yet they sometimes make puns or mishearings that rely on English to work. I realise that a lot of people find this annoying, and all I can do is follow in the hallowed footsteps of Tolkien and say think of it as a free translation from the original. Requite […]

I Continue To Get Searches

Sometimes search engine queries bring people to my site, and I try to help them out. Dear person who asked ‘how many novels are named firebrand?’ According to Amazon, at least twenty-five. Also a comic and several biographies. I probably could have come up with something better, but it had been ‘The Kadia And John […]

Here we go again!

Today’s quote from the Heavy Ice rewrites: ‘Most of us get one try or less at founding a civilisation’ I know it should be one try or fewer, but Facade Blue doesn’t care.