Okay, I need to get out of here

I caught myself on the very verge of asking the internet yet one more pedantic question - "Viceregal: to capitalise, or not to capitalise?" - and that is a step too far. Also our neighbour-whom-we-love is wandering around his front yard with a leaf blower, and there are no leaves in his front yard, and the noise is driving me crrrrazy. I think I need to be somewhere else for a while.

The morning's good news, though, is that as I was awake at 4am again, when I'd done fretting over all the dreadful possibilities that I can't do anything about now, I put in some serious thinktime on Steampunk!Mars; and not only do I know where my short story is going, I have also figured out the elusive third alternative for the YA novel, yay me. And I know what it's called, hooray! It's called Human Engines.

And really I should be hurrying to finish the short story, so that I can make a serious start on the novel; but I was in fact trying to do that, and all occasions do inform against me, so. I shall make a bid for freedom, soak up some rays, see what I can come up with for dinner tonight. And come home, of course, refreshed and ready to lay down all the words this story lacks. Because that's how it works. Oh, yes.

Draft!

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a draft. "The Burial of Sir John Mawe at Cassini", 5750 words, the first story of Steampunk!Mars. I have no idea - I may have mentioned? - how well it works as a story, as it serves largely as an infodump into my brain in advance of future writings; and also I have no idea what to do with it now; but hey. It exists.

If anyone ever reads it, I suspect people will grumble: "But Cassini Crater wasn't named till 1973! How can it have that name in whenever-this-is, Victoriana?" Which is an irritation I totally recognise - I have myself been going "But the Prince of Condé didn't assume that title till 1557, and Queen's Play is clearly set in 1549!" and like that, all through Dunnett - but, y'know. Fiction is an alternate world, by definition. And there's no reason on God's good Mars why they wouldn't name a crater after an eminent astronomer, even if he wasn't British. (Actually, on the well-known principle of turning a problem into a feature, I have decided that with all these craters to name, there's an ongoing feud between the loyalists who want to name everything Victoria all the time and the scientists who want to honour their forebears and those who want to go native and use local names, except that damn, the native population doesn't use speech in that way...)

And my wife is home, and now I get to open a bottle of wine...