Heavy Weather

Aaaaand I’m still having trouble with the construction of Heavy Ice. Honestly, considering the heavy weather I’ve made of it so far, you’d be forgiven for thinking that I came from some kind of universe where novels had stalled out after Tristram Shandy and everyone took to reading epic poems instead, and now here I […]

And today we have management of infodumps

I am fiddling about with the most recent chapter of Heavy Ice, in which the characters finally have five minutes where they’re both conscious at the same time and no one’s trying to kill them, and are therefore sitting down and asking each other awkward questions. It’s not going well, because there are a lot […]

Cool

Quite a lot of self-published books are, y’know, cool. They’re set in post-apocalyptic Singapore, or their selling point is ‘Steampunk is sexually transmitted!’ [1] or they have their finger on the blue throb of the zeitgeist’s pulse in some other way. I admire that. The thing is, mine aren’t. The best I can really do […]

My books do more social networking than I do

I discovered yesterday that several people (or, as it may be, several robots) had found the blog by Googling ‘tzenni malabranca’, and this led me to discover that the books have shown up on a site called Shelfari. (Warning: it looks like Shelfari were putting up confusing pages that would spam everyone in your email […]

Slightly late end-of-year post

Looking back on 2010, the main event that stands out is that I published my books. (Well, all kinds of other stuff happened too. My husband crossed the country on a unicycle for charity, for example, and I got to get up at a ridiculous hour of the morning in February and walk around Stonehenge […]

Writing and Gaming: They’re Different

I write, and I also run games. [1] The writing came first, but only because up until I went to university a combination of geography and lack of social skills meant that I didn’t know anyone else who was interested in RPGs and wanted to do anything more complicated than ‘I hit the orc’ / […]

Britain After Rome

I am reading Robin Fleming’s Britain after Rome: The Fall and Rise, 400 – 1070 and really enjoying it. Part of this is because it’s full of descriptions of clothing. But most of it is that I am hugely attracted to reading about cobbled-together, makeshift societies, and to the details of trade webs and burial […]

I Get Searches, II

More Google searches that have caused people to find this blog: edward ii Were you looking for this band? Because they are awesome. I am not a reggae folk fusion band myself, though. Sorry. teacher big bust fiction I see how this happened. One of the earlier posts somehow turned into a discussion of games […]

Things people have been asking me

Is it better for you if I buy the book from Lulu, or from Amazon? If you’re buying an ebook, Lulu is the only game in town at present. If you’re buying a paperback, I honestly don’t mind – I get more money on the Lulu sales and more Amazon rankings on the Amazon sales, […]

Update

Today brought cheering and unexpected news: I’ve sold more books than I thought I had, because apparently the Amazon and Book Depository orders all come through in one lump at the beginning of the month. Who knew? Not me, because self-publishing is a continuing voyage of discovery. 🙂 The beginning of the week brought a […]