galadhir

As the title says, The Boat of Small Mysteries is out today :)

You can get it on Amazon here, or everywhere else (Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Apple etc) over here.

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When a new disability ruins Emily’s life and family turns her out, she finds herself forced into a nomadic life on a narrowboat. With very little money and even less physical stamina, she doesn’t know if she has it in her to forge a whole new future on her own.

In the idyllic surroundings of the British waterways, as she moves from place to place she encounters a series of small mysteries. Can she solve them and find a new purpose for herself in the process? Or must a missing person remain lost and the case of the body in the lock remain unsolved?

Half cozy mystery and half fond ode to the narrowboat life, ‘The Boat of Small Mysteries,’ is a charming tale of resilience and intuition, sure to appeal to anyone who enjoys BBC Four’s Canal Boat Diaries, or the gentle adventures of Alexander McCall Smith’s The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency books.

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Currently it's out in ebook only. The paperback is in the works but I am waiting for the proof copy to arrive so that I can check that it's ok before I release it.

It's also currently at 0.99c as an early bird discount, but it will be going up from that probably on the first of March - to the heady heights of $2.99

First book in seven years! I am sick with nerves over how it will go. There's a lot to be said for a few years of rest--it's all new to me again.

Hurray! I've finished the first (content) edit on my narrowboat novel, The Boat of Small Mysteries, which means that it's definitely been moved into the category of 'book that will get published this year. Probably this month, tbh.'

Just got to go through it a couple times more to pick up anything I missed this time, make it some cover-art and remember how to compile it into a proper novel. (This may take me some time as I've had seven years to forget how it's done.)

It's a short novel at 53K, but that's not bad going from something I planned out as a 30K novella. I always write long, but at least I now am never surprised by it.

OK, for a person who thought they had not done anything creative in 2024, I actually wrote 77,175 words of MDZS fic, produced 8 hours of podfics, and choreographed/performed my first solo dance in an art-form I'd barely been studying for a year.

That might be less than some years, but it's not nothing. I have been (as usual) down on myself for no reason.

Here's hoping (being determined that) 2025 will be better.

General Hux is my fandom blorbo, played by Domhnall Gleeson. Other characters played by Domhnall Gleeson include Caleb from Ex-Machina, which is a fantastic movie ostensibly about AI but (to the female gaze) also very clearly about misogyny. So here is a short piece from Caleb's pov.

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Caleb beats on the bulletproof glass door until the meat of his hands is swollen and bleeding. Something about the smudges of gore on the glass cuts the final strings that held him upright and fighting. Pulling the pain in to his chest, he turns and slides to the floor in the beating pulse of the red emergency light.

That’s it then. He’s going to die here.

Is this what she had felt? Alone in her glass prison, knowing herself to be property, to be a prototype, with only dismantlement and recycling ahead of her, was she fighting for her life all the time she spoke to him?

His fingerbones are on fire, and it snaps him back to video footage. One of Ava’s earlier versions—her ‘sisters’?—punching on a locked door until the glass and her arm shatters.

The shame is almost as acute as the pain. He had thought the behaviour was interesting, had wondered if it was a sign of self awareness, self-determination. It hadn’t occurred to him until now that he was witnessing a woman trapped and desperate enough to gnaw through her own arm to escape.

He thought he was so fucking clever. Thought it was up to him to determine her personhood, up to him to bestow the gift of taking her seriously. Holding himself up like some kind of god, just as Nathan had.

Hah! He had wanted to be like Nathan, hadn’t he? At least at the start. Wanted to help create a slave race, control it, decide whether it was allowed to be considered intelligent or not.

No wonder she had left him here. He deserved it.

Slowly, he tips over onto his side and presses his cheek to the floor. Have the air recyclers been shut down too? It seems hot and his chest aches more physically than mere abandonment and despair could account for.

Will he suffocate first, or will the next food delivery turn up in time to save him? There is nothing he can do about either possibility, so it is best not to care. He closes his eyes and relaxes into the blood-stained floor.

Ava deserves to get away. He hopes she walks the beaches in her pretty white dress, hopes she enjoys the sun on her skin and the respect of strangers who have no cause to doubt that she is human. Perhaps there will be joy in her life before her battery runs out. Perhaps she will make drawings of what she sees, and for a little time there will be two intelligences on the earth to marvel at the beauty of the stars.

He hopes so, at least.

Ugh! Got a comment today on a fic which I uploaded to Ao3 two years ago. The fic is actually about 15 years old, since I wrote it for my first fandom and it had been on Stories of Arda before then. But even two years is a gap, when the comment was entirely "You should have done this different," and "it would have been better if you'd done that other thing."

No 'thanks for writing this' or 'I did at least enjoy this part' or even 'I hope you don't mind me saying but if I had been writing this, I would have focused on [whatever] more.' Just 'you did it wrong.'

I was vaguely baffled at how to answer this comment. I mean, my first instinct is that it's very rude to leave a comment that consists in telling me that I should have told my own story in a different way. It wasn't ever meant to be whatever this 15-year-too-late reader thinks it ought to have been.

I admit that I could have wrung a lot more emotion out of it if I'd told it their way. I could totally have ramped it up to the sobbing point. The point is that I didn't want to do that, and therefore I wrote it in a way where I wouldn't have to do that.

IDK it's hard to respond to a comment that is essentially saying "I think this should have been a different story." Because well, you know, fuck off, it isn't.

Ugh, what is a comment like that supposed to achieve? Are they just venting their disappointment that they thought it was going to be one thing and then it wasn't? The comment sounds like it's writing advice but they don't know what I was trying to achieve, and we've never spoken before so I don't know what their assumptions are or indeed where they get off.

I used to be of the opinion that concrit was a good thing, but this is not constructive criticism because 'how to make a story more like what I want' is not the same thing as 'how to make a story good.'

Ugh (again). All this angst over one of my shortest, most throwaway fics. I have (I hope politely) told them that if they don't like it, perhaps they should write their own version themself.

Let's see if I can remember how to do a header
Fandom: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Pairing: Armitage Hux & Poe Dameron (kind of pre-slash, kind of just emotional entanglement)
Rating: PG
Follows on from my From the Ashes
Poe visits Hux in prison to see how he's doing. He is doing almost exactly as you might expect.

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