Steampunk Tea Set

I only went into Oxfam to get out of the rain!
And then I saw this wonderful tea set with the Hendrick's Gin design. It says "A most unusual gin that is almost certainly not for everyone."
The whole lot cost me £5.99!

A Pair of Gaiters

I saw a pair of gaiters on a market stall in the Buttermarket in Hay today. They were only £10, and nice leather, so I took them home with me. Sadly, they were made for skinny little legs, and the buckles were purely decorative over a solid seam.
Fortunately, I have a little craft knife, so I unpicked the seam, cut the lining, and buckled them on:

I have a pair of suitable shoes in almost the same colour, and they'll go well with my brown trousers for a Steampunk adventurer look!

Steampunk Accessories

A friend shared this picture with me on Facebook. It's made by Broadarrow Jack Leather, and it's a fan holster!
It's just perfect for Li Bic, the main character in my Steampunk stories, to keep her fighting fan!

Steampunk Costume Accessories

I have been creating! This is a prop for the Steampunk costume I'll be wearing at EasterCon this year - it's a cage for trapping fairies! It's only about 7 inches high. I painted it a coppery colour (technically Runelord Brass), and added the star necklace and the ribbon. I also have a Fairy Attractor (a garden ornament that glows in the dark) and a little wicker basket about the same size as the cage, to transfer the stupefied fairies into captivity. We will be harvesting the fairy dust, which they shed naturally anyway, and tagging the fairies to observe their migration patterns!

And this is the costume I'll be wearing, but with a straw boater instead of a solar topee! This photo was taken at the 2014 Hereford History Day, when the theme was the First World War.

The Secret of Saynshand

I've just been on Smashwords, uploading my new story.
It's a Steampunk adventure, featuring intrepid secret agents, Mongolian Book Bandits and a dastardly Russian plot involving the trans-Mongolian railway.
Li Bic, a Chinese-American young lady from San Francisco, and Amelia Harper, from England, are the heroines, and I had great fun researching their travels through China on the Grand Canal, and up into Mongolia and the town of Saynshand, on the edge of the Gobi desert.

My book covers are very basic, but there are websites full of the most appalling covers which were designed by professionals working for proper publishers. The title and author are the most important things - and the image is of Bic's fighting fan. It's now been added to the side bar, and there is a link to my Smashwords page at the bottom of the blog list.

Shanghai Steam

I've just finished this anthology of short stories. It was published by Hades Publications in Canada in 2012, and all the stories are about Chinese characters, mostly in a Steampunk China, but occasionally elsewhere - one is set in Tibet, and several are in the United States, with others on Mars or other extra terrestrial locations. The Boxer Rebellion is mentioned in several, and building the railroads of the United States, and there are clones, and steam powered robots, and drunken master swordsmen, and mechanical dragons.... It's all a lot of fun, and it shows that there's a lot more to Steampunk than just pseudo-Victorian London or the Wierd Wild West.
I don't usually buy (or read) books on Kindle, but it was the only way I could get hold of this one, and it was a good buy.

Victorian Ladies' Exercise

I've started writing a Steampunk adventure, during which my two heroines decide to take some healthy exercise while travelling on a barge up the Chinese Grand Canal.
Trouble was, I had no idea what they would be doing. I've never been a sporty person, apart from walking and archery - but Amelia and her Chinese friend Bic are definitely active, sporty types who are keen on keeping fit.
So I asked my Young Man, and instantly got the perfect response - club hurling, or Indian clubs. Even better, I found this picture:

My characters wouldn't be wearing a long skirt like that though - they'd be dressed more like these girls in a gym class in 1899:

That should scandalise the locals!

Divination with Sheep's Ankle Bones

I'm coming to the end of my first draft for my medieval fantasy (the dragon is slain, so it's all over bar the shouting), so I've been keeping an eye open for ideas to incorporate into my next story, which will be a Steampunk adventure set in China and Mongolia. I know the basic shape of that story, too - Miss Amelia Harper and her friend Li Bic are sent to discover the whereabouts of an expedition lost in Mongolia, and they come across a group of bandits who ambush pack trains loaded with romantic novels! This was a real thing - Chinese novels translated into Mongolian were fantastically popular, and the pack trains really did get raided by bandits. I read about it in a blog about Victorian life beyond London and the Empire, where most Steampunk stories seem to be set, and thought it was too good an idea to let go (possibly by Ayleen the Peace-Maker? I forget now). My bandits, though, are all going to be women, who want to read the romantic novels for themselves before they sell them on.
All of which is a pre-amble to a lovely snippet of information I found in a blog called woolwinding. The writer of the blog has been looking at the long co-existence of humans and sheep, and mentioned a method of divination using sheep's ankle bones which I must find a place for in my story. The bones are roughly cuboid, like dice, but with convex and concave sides, which stand for lucky and unlucky things (the horse is the most lucky roll). It's called shagai, and it all adds a bit of local colour to the narrative.

Dysprosium EasterCon

Dysprosium is the 66th element in the Periodic Table, and 2015 is the 66th EasterCon.
It's also going to be the first EasterCon I've ever attended - I had such a brilliant time at LonCon3 that I want to experience more of the same, and EasterCon seems to be the nearest thing on British soil.
It's going to be held over the Easter weekend of 3 - 6 April at the Park Inn at Heathrow (I've already checked the buses from Hereford, and I can get right to the front door!).
There are four guests of honour - Jim Butcher, who is best known for the Dresden Files and is now writing a steampunk series; Seanan McGuire, who has been nominated for Hugo awards several times over the last couple of years (why have I never heard of her? I must find out more!); Herr Doktor, who was involved in the recent Longitude Punk'd exhibition at the Greenwich Observatory along with the lovely Dr Geof - my Young Man knows his work; and Caroline Mullan, who is Famous in Fandom, and was the guest liason for Robin Hobb at LonCon this year. And of course there will be panels and all sorts of other good things and this time we're going to be in the hotel so we don't have to go home early (we may possibly forget to sleep!).
We met some lovely gentlemen with a small steampunk Dalek at LonCon, who were advertising EasterCon - their efforts certainly paid off with us. I might not have known about EasterCon otherwise.

Steampunk at WorldCon

Those goggles get everywhere!
There were quite a few well turned out gentlemen in waistcoats and top hats wandering the halls - and Dr Geof was in the dealers' hall, with his amusing patches. He specialises in tea related ephemera, which is why he is exhibiting underneath the Cutty Sark at the moment. The last day is Sept 30th. He's also involved in Longitude Punk'd at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, until January 4th, 2015. On the hand bills (illustrated by Dr Geof) it says "Discover a fascinating world of Steampunk creations, inspired by the quest for longitude". We didn't have time to visit the exhibitions while I was in London, but we did stop to chat with Dr Geof in the dealers' hall when we passed by.
And there were panels, too. Steampunk is also a literary phenomenon, and comes under the umbrella of SF. We got to Beyond Blighty: world steampunk, where the panel was made up of one Venezuelan and three Germans, to represent writers beyond the Anglo-sphere. Joseph Remesar sets his work in London, all the same, though he has a Latino Scotland Yard detective, who is assigned to a difficult case because he can speak Spanish, so it's a different look at the greatest Steampunk city in the world. There was some artwork associated with this series in the art show, too, which looked intriguing.
One of the German ladies on the panel, Romy Wolf, has set her Steampunk series in Edinburgh. It's called Die Spione von Edinburgh, and is only available in German. This led to a discussion of other towns and cities that could easily be used as a setting for steampunk stories, rather than going back to London all the time.
One of the questions that was asked was why there was so little German steampunk, when Germany had been a great 19thC industrial area - I can't really say "nation" until 1870, and that's really one of the problems. German history is fragmented into the different principalities and electorates and so on. One lady on the panel was writing about the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and we learned some interesting German history on the way, like the importance of the date 1866 - the Austro-Prussian war, which threw up some interesting possibilities for alternate histories. One Dane in the audience suggested that for him, 1864 was more important, as Denmark had been invaded by the Germans - for which the panel apologised.
Sadly, the Germans considered that there was too small an audience for Steampunk literature to support them at the moment. I just wish I could read German better - the glimpse of the stories that the panel were telling was fascinating.

Steampunk Superheroes

A few more pictures from Asylum last weekend:

Superwoman outside the Victoria pub

Catwoman, Robin and Batman at the Castle

and Captain America, who makes the patchwork corsets - that's her stall in the Westgate hall.

Lincoln Steampunk Asylum

I've just come back from a wonderful weekend in the city of Lincoln, which was hosting the fifth Steampunk Asylum (so called because the first events were based around the city's old mental asylum). It's the first big Steampunk event I've been to, and I had the most enormous amount of fun! It kind of reminded me of the early days of Star Trek conventions, when there was a great outpouring of fan creativity (this was before any of the films were made, and well before The Next Generation), and it was all so relaxed, and friendly.

This is me, dressed as a Steampunk (and Whovian) Alice in Wonderland - on the same day that Robert Rankin was signing copies of his new book Alice on Mars! A little while after this picture was taken, I found the perfect hat to go with the outfit in one of the vintage clothes shops up the Steep Hill - it's a 1940s round cap with a cascade of blue feathers down the back.

The following day, I took part in the Wild West shoot out!

Here is El Guano/El Zombiro fearlessly facing his opponents in the Castle grounds, courtesy of Mr Eric, who is pictured at the far right of the line (his wife was taking the photo). The final show down involved about a dozen gunslingers with nerf guns, and started off like the gun fight in The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, with a musical box.

What is Steampunk For?

I was browsing through other blogs today and came upon M Harold Page, who is a writer of fantasy and SF, and he was musing about Steampunk as a literary genre on February 12th.
He compares it to SF and Fantasy, and concludes that Steampunk allows a writer to write about things that are difficult to do in either SF or Fantasy - a world of corporations and industrial development, but without the health and safety rules of the modern world (which would only become more restrictive in an imagined future), and where a writer can pick and mix Victorian elements with feminism, sky pirates and (obviously) dirigibles.

I can sympathise with this view (and it's a very enjoyable blog). I have an idea for a Steampunk story based on something I saw in another blog - Beyond Victoriana: a Multicultural Perspective on Steampunk. Ayleen the Peacemaker told the true story of Mongolian book-selling bandits that made me long to include them in a story. Apparently, in the 19th century, Chinese novels translated into Mongolian were wildly popular in Mongolia. Book sellers would take trains of pack horses through wild country to get the novels to their audience, and sometimes they were attacked by bandits, who would then sell the books themselves!
I am working on my own Steampunk persona, Miss Amelia Harper (named after my real great grandmother - though this Amelia is far more glamorous!) So I thought I'd send her to Mongolia, working undercover for a Victorian Torchwood type institute, with her Chinese friend Li Bic (based on the daughter of our local Chinese takeaway, who used to take my dog for walks), and get her mixed up with the Mongolian book bandits, an inter continental railway line, and mining engineers. In the modern world, and in a future world, my heroines would have to deal with annoying things like passport controls - and my science is definitely of the mad scientist/giant ray gun variety. Place the story in a pseudo-Victorian past, though, and a lady of the British Empire can get away with an awful lot when faced with foreign officialdom!

It's going to be a while before any of this is knocked into shape as a story - I'm stuck in the middle of Ytir for the foreseeable future. One of my characters has cursed the wrong person by mistake, and they're all at the "OMG what do we do now?" stage of dealing with it.

Starting out with Graphic Novels

It's an unfamiliar area for me - graphic novels. I know very little about Marvel or DC or the tangled continuities of the superheroes, and it's difficult to know where to start, with such a wide variety of graphic novels out there.
When I was an archaeologist, though, one of the diggers used to buy a 2000AD comic for everyone in the site hut to pass around (yes, we were that poor!), so I've known about Judge Dredd and Strontium Dog and Nemesis the Warlock and so on for a long time. My favourite, though, was Slaine, and as archaeologists with an interest in the Celtic Iron Age we were all impressed with the amount of research that had gone on to write that one.
So when I was in Manchester over the weekend, we stumbled across a Forbidden Planet - and kind of couldn't pass the door until we'd explored the SF and Fantasy goodness within. Down in the comic section, we came across Slaine, the Books of Invasions - wonderful artwork by Clint Langley, with the story by Pat Mills.
And then I went a little mad.
Another comic I had come across in my youth was Green Arrow - I used to get that from a little comic shop near Scotland Yard when I worked in London, and I'm aware of the new US TV series, though I haven't seen any episodes of it yet. There was The Longbow Hunters, with Oliver Queen looking just as I remember him, with the yellow beard and the Robin Hood hat. And the longbow, obviously.
Neil Gaiman is one of my favourite authors, and I knew he'd started off in comics. In fact, back when I was reading Green Arrow, I also picked up Black Orchid - I had no idea of who the writer was at the time, because I'd never heard the name before, and it didn't stick in my memory. Then I started reading books like Neverwhere and American Gods, and did some reading about Neil Gaiman's career - and remembered how much I'd enjoyed Black Orchid. I didn't find that this weekend, but I did find Marvel 1602 - in the hands of such a master, how can I go wrong?
And finally, I'm dabbling at the edges of Steampunk. I love the costumes, and the alternative realities, and I had heard of a character called Inspector LeBrock of Scotland Yard. Who is a badger. In an alternative 'Victorian' London. They had Grandville, the first in the series, in which the Inspector goes to Paris.

I have the feeling there is a whole new world opening up before me....