Lee Moan's Steam-Powered Typewriter

It's here...

I use this title for my forum page at Whispers and just figured that as my longer works are all firmly embedded in the steampunk/dieselpunk/alternate history genres, it would be a wise move to give my blog that title too. I love the entire steampunk universe, both aesthetically (all those cogs and wheels and dials and valves!) and dramatically, too. My completed short novel The Hotel Galileo is set in alternate version of the Roaring Twenties, one in which humanity has branched out into space. The novel I am currently working on, The Silver Sea , is a crime novel set in a much darker universe, an alternate earth circa 1898, with airships and steam-powered automatons, and many other retro-sf ideas, all observed by a detective from our own reality lost at sea in this grim dystopia. I'm very excited to have found (possibly) the perfect publisher for The Hotel Galileo. Right now I am doing one final sweep of the novel before it goes out into the big wide world. Watch this space.

GUD (Greatest Uncommon Denominator) has just launched a pre-buzz contest to promote the release of their third issue. You can check out the details out here . GUD is published twice a year and chief editor Kaolin Fire has already implemented many good ideas which are innovative and realistic for the publishing world of today (such as being able to download individual stories for a small price and promotional contests like the one mentioned above). They seem to be going places. Good luck to them, or should that be GUD luck?

Things are moving steadily in all areas at the moment. In Short Story Land I've just done a "final edit" on The Transmuted Engine before sending it to my first reader for a serious critique. I'm looking at entering this one for the Aeon Award this year. I made the long-list with Juju in 2005 (see here ) which made me very proud. ( Juju went on to appear in the second print issue of Hub Magazine ). I've also been working on a dark fiction piece called The Postal Worker , which is delving into some creepy new territory for me. It's very much in the tradition of "weird" fiction. Spiders of Suburbia has a strong start but I'm putting it on the shelf for the time being as I'm not too happy with the way the story's heading. In Novel-Land I'm steaming across The Silver Sea , which is demanding mosty of my time right now (I'm actually thinking about it the moment I wake up, which is disturbing!) I'm bracing myself for a final- fin...

I went off the series last year. There was something missing from the show that I couldn't put my finger on, and even now, a year later, I'm still not exactly sure what it was that 'stuck in me clack'. I know for certain that I disliked the Daleks in Manhattan episodes without apology, and the series finale was ruined for me by the way the Doctor got out of the (almost) impossible situation. It was a nice idea in theory, but dramatically it was only one step away from a deus ex machina resolution. Then again, maybe I was just in a bad mood. I would love to watch the series again, just to see if the problem lay with me or the series itself. Anyway, that lengthy preamble brings me to the current series which finished last Saturday with a bang (lots of them actually), a screaming Davros, and a plethora of guest characters all getting their moment to shine in the biggest series finale yet. And I enjoyed every minute of it. In fact, the series as a whole was, for me, the mo...