Set your calendar for TOMORROW – Speak Its Name by Kathleen Jowitt

I am excited to announce that I am going to be spending tomorrow reading Kathleen Jowitt‘s debut novel, Speak Its Name. I love Kathleen’s writing and am excited that this book is seeing the light of day at last. A new year at the University of Stancester, and Lydia Hawkins is trying to balance the […]

Steampunk for Simpletons

This is the ad for my work which is going to run in the announcements section of the upcoming book Steampunk for Simpletons. There’s still time to contribute to their Kickstarter and help them make their stretch goals! I got the clip art from the wonderful Graphics Fairy website, who provide clip art for personal […]

House hunting, review, and thoughts on new trends in publishing

Well, I’m back from looking for a new house, and we now at least have somewhere to rent while we look for somewhere more permanent to house two people, one cat (hopefully rising to more than one cat when we’re properly settled), a huge number of books and fewer old computers than we owned last […]

Lovely Review, Also, Clockwork Tea

Kimberly Chapman (author of Finding Gaia, which you really should give a shot if you like (a) immortals who come over as genuine, complex products of a past era finding their way in the present day, (b) sidekick characters with their own strong opinions, (c) lots of intrigue and action, or (d) a killer ‘wow, […]

Romance, SF, Hybrids And Newcomers

I’ve been following with interest the discussion that started with Stuart Sharp’s piece about SF romance, and continued in various places that are mostly explained and collated in this Dear Author roundup. To declare my allegiances up front: I love romance and I love SF, and people who diss either genre around me do not […]

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 […]

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 […]

Minette by Melanie Clegg is out now

My lovely friend Melanie Clegg’s new novel Minette is out today! Read all about it here! It’s on my Kindle now and I’m really looking forward to reading it – I love how Melanie writes with a vivid, irreverent, punky sensibility yet always keeps a sense of historical place and… historical otherness, I suppose, in […]

Help out some friends of a friend publish steampunk pirate Western erotica

My lovely friend Ashbet, who beta-read Firebrand, put me on to this Indiegogo campaign from friends of hers who are raising money to write ‘a steampunky western erotic adventure serial full of sex, violence, pirates, airships, Experimentals, and maybe even some dinosaurs.’ Now, I have no empirical evidence that some of the people who enjoyed […]

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 […]