Alpha Centauri has a planet!

It’s all over the news this morning that a planet has been discovered orbiting Alpha Centauri, our nearest star. Okay, so it’s not an Earth-twin, it’s a tiny, superheated rock. But still, it’s an exoplanet orbiting our closest neighbour, and that’s pretty damn exciting. It’s particularly exciting for me, for the utterly solipsistic reason that […]

Another Fifty Shades Of Grey Post

Via Ebook Friendly I’ve had a go at understanding the appeal of Fifty Shades Of Grey before, and, for some reason, I’m back for more. There seems to be a lot of debate over why these books have such a breakout appeal when other books don’t. A lot of it is just the bog-standard unpleasant, […]

RIP Anne McCaffrey

Anne McCaffrey was the first woman to win a Hugo Award and the first woman to win a Nebula Award. She was influential, she was deservedly loved, and she wasn’t afraid to take risks: she leaves behind her a stack of books, some of which will go on to be enjoyed by future generations and […]

Requite, In Pie Charts

This is a comparison between what the heroine of my previous two books did with her time, and what the heroine of my present book does with hers. And one more: All pie charts from sporkforge.com.

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 […]

A sequel of unfortunate events

I always like it when books have authors’ notes reading ‘This book was a pain in the backside to write’ because it makes me feel like I’m not alone and it gives me hope that they managed to finish a book so there’s no reason why I can’t do the same. At present Heavy Ice […]

Caught in a non-romance

OK, so the first two books had a strong romantic thread running through them. Because I love romance novels and I’m not ashamed to admit it, and I wanted to write SF with the same kind of immersive attention to the characters’ feelings for each other – the same clause in the contract between writer […]

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 […]

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’ / […]