Ambushed. Again.

[desperance]

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.