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? If they do, they probably put eels on it)

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Image from The Graphics Fairy

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.

I’m particularly honoured because James Tiptree Jr.’s books were enormously important to me when I was growing up and still are. I can still remember the sense of ‘You can do that in a book? Wow!’ that I felt while reading Up The Walls Of The World for the first time while I was listening to Tanita Tikaram on the radio and my parents were building a conservatory outside my bedroom window, which dates it to the summer of 1988 when I was sixteen.

Huge congratulations to the winners, Caitlin R. Kiernan for The Drowning Girl and Kiini Ibura Salaam for Ancient, Ancient – I have read one and loved it and look forward very much to reading the other as soon as possible.

The Tiptree website says about Firebrand ‘Set in the steampunk era, this fun read shows women dealing with the restrictions of society on their way to gaining political and economic power and considers how definitions of “proper” behavior worked across cultural, class, and species’ boundaries.’ Which… yeah, it does. Part of the reason I wrote Firebrand was that I was sick and tired of books where the heroine couldn’t stand any of the women she associated with, so I wanted to write a heroine who generally liked and respected the women around her, unless of course they were her awful stepdaughters.

Also, to be cheeky, if you came here via the Tiptree site and you like books exploring culture and gender, you might like my Requite duology, which has a major character of a third gender and an alien race who don’t so much do gender as life stages, and yet more fun with the rules of proper behaviour. Also swordfights, jewel theft, weirdly back-engineered ancient tech, people being grown-ups about polyamory, people not being grown-ups about polyamory, and a battle scene involving xenoraptors and what’s basically a swarm of giant steampunk bees. Links to various buying options in the sidebar.

[1] He is 42 and is making a Hitch-Hikers Guide To The Galaxy themed birthday cake for himself, and wants to flavour it with ginger jam. I told you it wasn’t worth going into.

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 for ‘steampunk kittens’: I would also be interested to know about steampunk kittens! I could try balancing cogs on the head of my very laid-back Maine Coon if anyone thought there was enough interest.

Dear person searching for ‘who is ankaret wells’: Alas, I think I am unlikely to be tapped to succeed Matt Smith as the Twelfth Doctor. However, if I am, I promise to wear a fez.

Dear person searching for ‘ankaret wells firebrain’: I think you may have given me the title for my next book.

Image from The Graphics Fairy