Admin

I’ve been using this free WordPress site for a while and have been wondering about self-hosting, but to be honest I don’t have the energy to deal with moving to a new site and learning how to configure the WordPress engine there, and the resident technical advisor is busy teaching himself Catalyst and has no […]

New covers, and recommend me romantic SF

Here are the old and new front covers for The Maker’s Mask and The Hawkwood War and the new back covers for both. Click to embiggen or view as a gallery. I wanted the new blue covers to give a clearer ‘this is SF’ message, and also to have a fighting chance of being comprehensible […]

Dear Amazon

This is an open letter to Amazon, with regard to their UK Kindle Store. Dear Amazon: I love the Kindle. I love the convenience of being able to buy books and have them delivered immediately. I love being able to read three-volume Victorian novels without also getting an arm and shoulder workout. But the experience […]

Plot early, plot often

In the ‘good news’ category: the steampunk thing, now tentatively entitled ‘Firebrand’, is chugging closer to being finished in first draft. So then it’ll be time for the second draft and then to send it off to the various people who have very kindly offered (and in Jasmine’s case, been begged) to beta-read it, and […]

Random assortment

I like websites that log you in and keep you logged in. I get mildly annoyed about websites that expect you to log in every day, but I realise they’re doing it for security reasons. But websites that keep you logged in for a long but unspecified length of time and then randomly log you […]

Good Thing, Bad Thing

Bad thing: realising that the plot took a wrong turn about sixty pages back. Good thing: at least now I can fix it, rather than staring at the book thinking ‘This is crap! I can’t get on with this book because something’s wrong with it, and I can’t start a different book because my brain […]

Good news, bad news

Good news: barring any more unexpected hiccups in the process, the books are now on their way to the Kindle Store! I turned out to have misread the form on the Amazon site – it looked as if you had to provide US tax information wherever in the world you were, but it turns out […]

Ecostressed

I’m sorry about the unpleasant little ‘Ecopressed’ ads that are appearing in single post view between the post and the comments: these aren’t my doing, they’re WordPress inserting content, and I’m trying to decide whether to pay for the ‘no ads’ option to get rid of them or just migrate the blog to my own […]

Stepdaughter Of I Get Searches

WordPress helpfully tells me what people have searched on to find my site, and sometimes I can’t help but respond: find books to sell on amazon That sounds like one of those careers you see advertisements for in the back of old-fashioned comics, like ‘Make a good living selling scrap metal!’ and ‘Become a commercial […]

Baby, it’s cold outside

Today I bought various books from Lulu for Christmas presents to take advantage of the 25% offer they’ve got going… and then forgot to put the code in at the checkout. I’d previously tried to cancel Lulu orders due to similar misfortunes and had no joy, so I thought ‘Ugh, that’s done, I can’t cancel […]