Retort-Made Food comes closer

NASA is funding a 3D food printer, and it will start with pizza. This is awesome. We may never get teleportation or FTL, but food replicators are over the horizon of the doable. One day we may indeed dine on what Kjarten described as ‘probably goat’ made from templates. (Do they have pizza on Requite? […]

Steampunk Tea Duellist Ankaret

I’m just back from a lovely weekend at The Frome Steampunk Extravaganza. It was amazing to see all the friendly people, from elegant old stagers to dapper urchins, dressing up in their often handmade, creatively accessorised best. I got to meet and talk to Andrew Beasley and Meg Kingston and buy their new books, I […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Nondescript

I have somehow managed so far to put in no physical description at all of one of the major characters of Heavy Ice, because every time he’s around we’re deep in his personal viewpoint and he’s got things on his mind besides stopping in front of a mirror. (Actually, that’s not totally true, I think […]

Today’s miniquote

‘Vane blinked at his wife, wondering how the most momentous decision of his life had somehow got mixed up with a discussion of socks.’

Save 20% with Lulu code

This is pretty much the face I made on hearing yesterday’s news about the Tiptree Honor List. Meanwhile, if you were thinking of ordering any of the books from Lulu, they’re offering a 20% discount from now until March 8th if you use coupon code SPARK at checkout.

Tiptree Honor List

So I woke up this morning to an email from a friend asking me if I’d noticed that Firebrand made the 2012 Tiptree Honor List. I am completely boggled to be mentioned in such amazing company. To be honest, since for reasons not worth going into here my husband has been going on all week […]

Balancing Cogs On The Cat

Heavy Ice continues to progress. I live in hope that it won’t outgrow the Lulu page limit, and also that the Hawkwood family tree that will need to go in the back will fit on a trade-paperback sized page. Meanwhile, the website continues to get visits from people with surprising search terms. Dear person searching […]