This Be The ‘Verse

One of the things I really should have done when I started all this is come up with a name for the future universe that Requite exists in, which also contains the FSSI and KinSpace and the Bind and other remnants of the Solannan Imperity and pre-Solannan colonisation. I can’t keep saying ‘A Requite Novel’ […]

Today’s snippet

Today’s snippet, from a steampunk time travel novella that is one of the many projects squabbling for my attention: ‘The ibis is a bird that makes its living by poking around in mud and converses in quarrelsome honks; which is, one must presume, why the dynastic Egyptians chose to graft its head onto the god […]

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 […]

No megafauna were harmed in the making of this post.

I’m a little over three-quarters of the way through editing the second draft of Heavy Ice, and… somewhat less than that… of the way through breaking in a pair of lace-up boots that were originally a pair of ice skates. The two processes aren’t that dissimilar, though those of you who have been there all […]

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 […]

Point of View

So, today I’m thinking about point of view. I’ve noticed that my natural inclination when beginning books is to start off writing in omniscient POV and then drop into third person when the person whose viewpoint the first scene is in shows up. I did it with Heavy Ice, and I’ve found myself doing it […]

First Contact

So, Heavy Ice is lying fallow until I’ve got enough perspective to see the shape of it and turn it into a second draft, and I’m busy with research for the new thing. Well, I say ‘research’ – for every hour of’Exactly what shape was this particular building, and where can I find an etching […]

The draft goes ever on and on

I do not love being in the late stages of a book. But one of the things I do love is seeing my characters do things on page 650 that they couldn’t have done, or wouldn’t have thought to have done, on page twelve. Also, I realised last night that Kallisty uses ‘sorcery’ to mean […]

Flowery

As the first draft of Heavy Ice lumbers towards completion, there are things I begin to realise. One of them is that I could write flowery declarations of love when I was fourteen; but now I am forty-one (or at least, I will be tomorrow) and I have a ton more experience and yet writing […]