Chapter One

Anthropological observations of the curious habits of personages native to Barker Street

Hopefully there would be dead people next door. That would liven things up tremendously. Ever since the new tenant was first mentioned, Temperance had been trying to imagine what an archaeologist would look like, and had become stuck somewhere between the beard and the muddy boots. Granny said an archaeologist dug things up, which had formed most of her impression. Temperance had never encountered an actual archaeologist before, and until recently, hadn’t even met the word in person. It was one of those large, pleasing, hard to spell words that she liked to roll around in her mouth. There were others. Obsequious. Crepuscular. Epigrammatic. Meanings did not always excite her young mind, but a word that came with a person had more appeal. Granny told her something about digging up iniquities, or possibly aunties. Antimacassars? Digging up definitely suggested mud, and led Temperance to think from there about the likelihood of dead people. Dead people went into the ground, so it stood to reason they could come out of it again. What else was there to unearth aside from coal and ore?

“Nothing at all like a body snatcher,” Granny had insisted, when the subject came up at breakfast, but Temperance wasn’t sure. What else would anyone want to dig up, really? Treasure might be nice, she supposed, but that seemed more like pirate business.

Still, having a new neighbor would cheer the whole street up. The bigger, separate house next to their little terrace had been empty all winter. Seeing the dark windows at night always inclined her to feel sad.

“How’s that sweeping going, then?” Granny demanded from inside the house.

The sweeping had not, in fact, started, the girl having entirely forgotten about the broom in her hand. Pushing curls of escaping brown hair out of her face, Temperance surveyed the twig strewn path to her grandmother’s door. Sweeping seemed so pointless. The wind would bring it all right back in no time. She sighed heavily, feeling very sorry for herself.

Before she could start on the job, the sound of hooves and wheels drew her attention to the street again. All of the delivery people had already done their rounds for the day. Horse-drawn vehicles were otherwise unusual here. The inhabitants of Barker Street were all very decent people, but not equal to carriages, excepting for weddings and funerals. Temperance loved funerals, but the approaching wagon lacked the plumes and splendid display of misery. Instead she saw a neat little trap, followed by a heavily loaded cart where a great many things were piled up behind the driver and passengers.

With a little squeak, she dropped the broom and ran to the garden gate. Then, because she did not want the archaeologist to think her childish, she slowed down. Walking in what she hoped was a dignified way, she soon reached the next property just as the tired horse came to a halt.

The person inside the trap was carefully helped down, and then approached the front door. There was no beard whatsoever, and no obvious signs of mud. Perhaps there had been a mistake? The trap itself took off at a jaunty speed. Temperance wondered if this was the archaeologist’s wife, come on ahead to make their new home nice. The man himself would probably be in a hole full of bones at this very moment, Temperance reasoned.

One of the men got off the cart. He had wild hair and a big coat. On the whole he seemed a better candidate for the adventurous life, and Temperance watched him expectantly.

“All to be unloaded here?” he asked the woman.

“If you please.” She nodded to the girl who was sitting on the cart. “I assume you can find the kitchen, Mary?”

The girl nodded and hurried inside. The two men set about unloading items of furniture from the cart and taking them into the house. Temperance felt rather puzzled by all of this. There weren’t any bones being unloaded just usual, household things. Unless the bones were in one of the tea chests. She supposed that would make sense, even if it was a disappointment.

“Hello girl,” said the tall woman, with an accent that clearly came from another place.

Temperance had spent hours planning how to make her introductions to the new neighbor. She had already established herself as being absolutely essential to Charlie Rowcroft, Barker Street’s resident inventor. Now, she meant to impress the archaeologist, or for that matter his wife, with her clever, useful nature. Thus, she would gain free access to their home as well. Staring up at the new arrival’s face, she couldn’t remember any of the planned speech and found herself instead saying, “Have you got any dead people?”

Now available for pre-order here -

http://www.amazon.com/Intelligent-Designing-Amateurs-Nimue-Brown/dp/1780999526/ref=sr_1_1_title_1_pap?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1368608170&sr=1-1&keywords=Intelligent+Designing+for+amateurs and no doubt other places as well.

So, here’s the planned silliness. Reblog the post, or post the pre-order link and let me know. I can spot a reblog pretty easily, otherwise tag  or message me on facebook, @brynneth_nimue on twitter, or drop an email to brynnethnimue at gmail dot com. I will then write a limerick or silly verse about you, and post it wherever the link went. That could be slow and messy with Twitter, but we’ll do what we can…

The Clemency Slaughter Kickstarter has begun!! http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1412864360/clemency-slaughter-and-the-legacy-of-death

Clemency Slaughter and the Legacy of D’Eath

A Grim Gothic Tale without a Happy Ending, written by steampunk author Jonathan Green and illustrated by gothic artist Tom Brown.

We’re looking for crowd-sourcing to get this glorious and eccentric little book out into the world. Lots of Victoriana, lots of funereal gear, some wicked little verses of murderous intent… if you enjoy Hopeless we are confident that you’ll love this one.

Nimue has not been involved, she’s just helping with shoutouts, but she’s a big fan of Jonathan Green’s writing (his Pax Britania series rocks and she recently edited a horror anthology of his).

There will be more incentives added to the kickstarter as we go along, so do keep an eye on new developments. In the meantime, your support would be much appreciated, so please do help us spread the word and if you can, sign up for your copy right now.

Huge thanks to Archaia for making the book so lovely and for getting it out into the world, huge thanks everyone who has supported us and most of all today, thank you librarians!

Also, if you have a book store or comic shop in the UK and would like us to turn up at it, just let us know. If we can we will.

Finally, some of the pages here do not load well. I have no idea why. I am the techy, I am not technical enough, so I can only apologise and when I have proper electricity and internet ( we live on a boat, we have improper electricity and internet) I will try and get in here and make it work better, promise!

On my first panel, I found myself sat next to a chap called Paul Graham Raven, who writes more on the non-fic side and for New Scientist. He intrigued me, and I shall be following him round online as a consequence, so that’s a win for cross pollination, by the looks of it.

We found Jenny Gyllblad, a lovely artist, fey, bit Steampunk, crazy in all the right ways and James E Snelling, whose oil painting based graphic novel work blew us away.

My first panel was a breeze – thanks in no small part to Del, the moderator who had brilliant questions for us. We talked about collaboration and the different ways in which that works, and it was interesting to do. The whole panel had a nice flow to it, and we were diverse enough to have different things to say, but not so different as to get at cross purposes.

Tom was on a panel for art in the digital age, which was fairly well attended, no moderator so they just winged it, and talked about their relationship or lack thereof, with the digital options. From no digital component to serious use of technology – again a good mix of approaches.

I also did the panel on Steampunk, which was terrifying. I was the only person on the panel who said ‘yes, I am a steampunk’ which meant I got several of the questions about ‘why do steampunks…?’ but I’ve only been exploring this for a couple of years, so felt rather under qualified. As the setup had referred to innate colonialism I’d anticipated that it might be hostile. It went ok, and if I’ve done anything to express that most Steampunks do not want to bring back everything that was bad and wrong about Victorian England, that’s got to be something.

We got to meet Mark Lawrence, and Freda Warrington, we talked to a lot of really lovely people, I was able to sit in on Emma Newman’s lovely book reading. On the whole, a very good day. I will admit I was disappointed by the shortage of dressing up. I’d rather imagined that there would be more of that – we did get a handful of steampunks in nice jackets, but not one Klingon! No sci fi costumes, no furries, no anime gear. Rather a lot of jeans and t-shirts, really. I thought I’d be underdressed in my goth skirt and top hat. I wasn’t. Tom is never underdressed in the spoons jacket!

We need to get the word out.

In the same time frame, Nimue’s new non-fic, Druidry and the Ancestors is also coming out.

If you are willing to help spread the word (hello minions!) leave us a message or drop us a line. If there’s somewhere you can post a link or make encouraging noises… you will be doing us the most stupendous favour. The graphic novel is close enough to the webcomic that you can realistically post reviews of the one based on the other (with all due reference to goodreads, amazon and the like.)

If you have a blog, website, magazine, or anything else and you would like a thing from us, yell now. It doesn’t matter how small your readership is, we would be VERY glad to write you a piece if it gives us scope to mention the books. If you’d like something original from us for your site, please give us a shout.

We can do unique…

Articles

Flash fiction

Poetry

Pretty much to order. The art is slower, but reposting stuff that’s already out there is viable. If you’ve got a bigger site/publication and would like something from Tom, do, please, talk to us, we’ll see what we can do.

We’d like to take over the world with teacups and tentacles, and we need your help to do it.

The biggest requirement is that you like what we do, fancy hanging out with us at events and would love to be helpful in some way. Positions of indispensible minionhood are available. Otherwise…

1) Can you put us up at events?

2) Are you willing to help get us from train stations to venues (we don’t have a car)?

3) Would you like to come and help look after the stall to cover us while we’re doing talks/panels/loo breaks/unconsciousness etc.?

4) Are you overwhelmed by an urge to ply us with beer, coffee, or cake?

5) Do you have a really evil laugh?

6) Could you bring along a whole bunch of people with money if we were doing a book signing?

7) Would you talk to the person who runs things where you are, to get us booked, so that we can come and sleep on your sofa and eat your cake?

8) Did we mention cake?

9) Have you got some other really cool thing that you would like to embroil us in, where cake is likely to feature?

10) Also, we are quite partial to cake.

What we can offer minions is going to vary depending on where we are, what we’re doing… where possible and appropriate, we might for example be able to get you event tickets as an offset for minionwork. Obviously you get the pleasure of our frequently confused and eccentric company. We will probably give you stuff. Depending a lot on what stuff we actually have.