In California, dreams come with mouseover

No, it 's true. Sort of.

I dreamed that I had been Tuckerised, maybe, in a cartoon strip in the New Statesman. It was an auditorium, where a person was giving a lecture or a reading or whatever: and it was soooo boring, by the time he'd finished everybody had left, and the auditorium was strewn with their detritus. But because they were English, the detritus was picnic-hampers and tablecloths and ice-buckets [I think this was the joke] - and clearly emblazoned on one hamper was the name Brenchley. And we couldn't figure out - in the dream - whether this was because I was being deliberately Tuckerised, or whether my name was just so emblematically English it would naturally be used in such a context and everyone would understand why. The names of the cartoonists were not quite familiar, though I wondered if I might have come across one of them in a fannish context. Then someone pointed out that if you scratched the page beside my name, more text appeared, just like a physical iteration of mouseover. So we did that, and it was either random scribblings or very clever code, and we hadn't managed to figure out which before I woke. Sigh.

Ambushed. Again.

Marshall Payne has an interesting interview here with Marissa Lingen, mrissa on LiveJournal, where she speaks inter alia of being mugged by unexpected short stories. In her own link to the interview, she confirms that yup, that has indeed happened again, between interview and here.

Yup. I have, as we know, been thinking this last week or so about Steampunk Mars*. In the context of a novel, two novels, several novels. But sometimes an idea is just so much bigger than even a sequence of books can contain. The first thing I seem actually to have started writing is this morning's sideways notion, a short story that begins Never did a man hanged see such a funeral.

Perhaps I feel that gravediggers deserve a better press. There's more to it than that, though: something about the graveyards of empire, burial in exile, that's always intrigued me. I seem to be formulating a theory about the Church of England that wants to insist its character was formed more by the experience of empire than by centuries of practice at home. Something about pressure from outside and conformity within shaping the perfect bubble. *shrugs*

I really wasn't expecting this, when I woke this morning.


*Has anyone yet done a steampunk anthology called A is for Airship? If not, publishers dear, here I am and I will happily edit it for you.

This? Is getting ridiculous

So I have this scribbled opening in which our narratrix defines herself as an aerosmith, meaning an engineer who works on airships. Actually she's not, she's grandstanding, she's just a stoker on a steam-barge with dreams of grandeur, but hey. Thinking today about airships, I thought "Y'know what? You could call them aeroships, and they could be a little bit hybrid, like the airship the US Army tested yesterday: stubby wings and tubby bodies, fit for Martian atmosphere..."

Only of course no neologism has never been seen before, even if I haven't seen it; so I googled aeroship.

First link I followed?

"The concept of this hybrid flight vehicle is proposed for Mars flight..."

Aeroships it is, then.