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 waltzed with my husband to Sunday Driver and I probably drank more tea than I have in the last five years.

The reason for this was the Tea Duelling. I gather there’s some kind of schism between American and British steampunks about what tea duelling entails (given what happened last time we had a disagreement about tea, I find this a bit ominous, but fortunately even the most bellicosely uniformed steampunks seem to be quite good-humoured) – with one faction insisting that the sport is mainly a test of nerve and manual dexterity in dunking a biscuit and conveying it to the mouth without undue crumbling or drips, whereas the Welsh Imperium rules value a clean cup, a neatly furled pinky finger and the ability to absorb multiple biscuits while making more or less sparkling conversation. We were playing by Welsh Imperium rules, which was handy, as manual dexterity is my dump stat.

Despite meeting many worthy opponents (including a charming and erudite urchin who I have cropped out of the top photo because posting pictures of other people’s children online is not really on) I somehow won through to the final against a redoubtable lady with some fine and very symbolic jewellery. I suspect she would have won the day if it hadn’t been that she earned an automatic disqualification by failing to eat her French Fancy.

These are my awesome winnings. I also scored some excellent loot in the raffle, including all the brown grosgrain ribbon I am ever going to need for the rest of my lifetime.

Incidentally, if you want to make friends at a gathering of interesting crafty people, I heartily recommend wearing necomimi with custom ear sleeves. I think the best result I got was ‘Hey, that lady’s half raccoon.’

The plethora of gorgeously designed business cards I came home with and the helpful advice Meg Kingston gave me about marketing made me think that I really should get my act together and sort some business cards out for myself. If you have any recommendations, shoot them my way in the comments.

So, anyway! Great weekend. Now to unpack and put more washing on and redecorate at least one Spire.

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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 lacy throats and nervous eyes. Eventually he saw some. His cousin Hugo, hiding among a group of friars with elaborately henna-tattooed hands. The Scholar-Courtesan who managed his libraries, sitting in an a-grav chair with a white cat draped over her lap like a scarf. His confessor, looking desperately worried. Cardinal Lasair was nowhere to be seen. He didn’t think that was a good sign.

His confessor hurried over to him, her robes fluttering around her tall solid body in a way that strongly suggested she was wearing Retort-made flexible body plate underneath. “It isn’t my Idrian.”

“What isn’t your idrian?” said Vane. He looked at the nearest bishop, in the hope of receiving a clue as to whether an idrian was something on the scale of a thurible or more like a baldaccino.

“Whatever’s going on at Rivantia,” she said on a hasty breath. “And if it is Idrian, I’m sure it’s just a weather balloon. He always said he wanted one.”

Vane stared at her blankly.

In other news, I’ve been reading Lois McMaster Bujold’s Sidelines: Talks and Essays and keeping up, more or less, with the discussion online about genre, gender and book reviews which starts here with this post from Radish Reviews. Both of these have a lot to say about romance, SF and the ways they do or don’t work together.

Which fascinates me, because I’ve noticed over the years that there something that’s almost an underground community of people who like some SF and some romance and some SF / romance crossovers and want to venture beyond their favourite authors, but feel at a loss because the characters’ names are too silly or the titles are embarrassing or they’re worried about encountering rape scenes or they just plain can’t tell the stuff they’d like from the stuff they wouldn’t because it all looks too similar. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve sat in a café feeling like a secret agent as I muttered out of the corner of my mouth ‘Try the Liaden books next’ or received an out-of-print Zenna Henderson in a plain envelope.

There is a subgenre of SF Romance that proudly wears its dual heritage on its sleeve. The Galaxy Express does a great job at getting its name out there. I’ve found a couple of SF romances that have really clicked with me, several through recommendations on this very blog, but a lot aren’t my kind of thing at all for the same thing that paranormal’s generally not my thing either – a book can be really well-written, but if it’s got fated mates in it, I’ll just be sitting there thinking ‘That’s not a romance, that’s a horror story’. Likewise, I’m not going to read a humorous book where I don’t like that particular style of humour, just because it’s set in an asteroid field.

But here I still am writing SF with strong romantic elements. Maybe I’m just too stubborn to quit.

Image from Wikimedia Commons

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 love scenes is much, much harder. It’s not fair that it’s this way, but at least it’s rewarding when it works.

Also, I am in a desperate state of wanting people to love my heroine, and yet knowing that when writers go on about how much they want people to love their characters it tends to make me take against that character out of sheer cussedness.

Image © FreeFoto.com

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 that it never feels like she’s writing about modern people playing dress-up.

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 his hair gets mentioned once). I will be interested to see what other people come away from the book thinking he looks like, because I know, but I have no idea how anyone else would.

Meanwhile, a snippet from today’s writing, concerning someone who definitely does get his share of description:

A fuzzy hologram appeared above the screen. A man’s head and shoulders became clear amid the white static. He had soft tousled pale hair, pale skin and pale eyes, and the look of maturity that the KinHarzin admired. Diaz Una made a cooing noise of approval as his image sharpened. Orde Beto, who was older and more sure of his attractions, merely rocked back and forth on his heels and gave a silent whistle.

The man in the hologram pushed his hair back with a hand, and smiled at them. He had a confidence that Zvia admired: so far, all the men she’d met here had been as uncertain as oblates in their first week at KinRaed Cadet, to the extent that she’d been actively surprised when Captain Hawkwood wasn’t a woman.

“My name is Indrago Lasair,” he said, “and I can assure you that I am not a Maker.”

Image from The Graphics Fairy

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.