Out of the Debauched Sloth

Chaz Brenchley's occasionally fortnightly newsletter

Oh, whoops, I did it again. Wrote this damn thing, forgot to send it. And in a fortnight when there was actual news to celebrate, and everything…

So, from two weeks ago:

“We are the good news that we have been looking for” - Amanda Gorman

So here we are, people, at the start of another newsletter; and for once it really is a letter containing news, and the good stuff too.

You probably didn’t hear it here first, but nonetheless: I am delighted to announce that my novella ROWANY DE VERE AND A FAIR DEGREE OF FROST has been acquired by that charming Ian Whates fellow for NewCon Press, and will appear at some uncertain point in the future.

For the record, this is very much set on Mars, my Mars, with canals and atmosphere and aliens and the British Empire and so forth. It is Crater School-adjacent, without being actually about schoolgirls; Rowany is a former Head Girl of the school, now undertaking her first mission for an extremely discreet department of the Colonial Service. She likes to describe herself as a political agent; nowadays, we’d probably say spook.

I wrote this as a bonus story for my Patreon subscribers, because I like to do that sort of thing, and because I kind of want to portray every separate step of Rowany’s journey; she was very quietly cultivated for this role from her schooldays on, and I do find the process fascinating. (It is also possible that this is wish fulfilment, that I marginally resent the fact that I was never so cultivated; I’d have made a rotten spy, but some kind of intelligence operative at GCHQ, oh hell aye. Codes and ciphers, baby. They’re my thing.)

Anyway, it’s lovely to see the book emerging in actual print and public availability. Also, there may be more on the way.

In other news, I didn’t get to show you the cover for A DARK WAY TO GLORY last time, did I? Here it is; and to make up for that delay, it is extra-super glorious to behold. Lo:

Otherwise, what else? I am upping my sourdough game, which means baking a lot of bread, so that’s nice. Also checking final proofs on the aforementioned A DARK WAY TO GLORY, book three of the Outremer sequence, so that should be up for preorders soonishly; and of course continuing the saga of Christian Priest and Sherlock Holmes in their second Martian adventure, PAGE AND MONARCH, FORTH THEY WENT, over on Ko-fi. Buy me a coffee, I’ll post another page. Or sign up for my Patreon, and I’ll put the story up there in much more convenient chunks, for those who get seriously irritated by little-and-often reading, seeing a mosaic one tile at a time.

Meanwhile we’re about to record another episode for our podcast Writers Drinking Coffee (spoiler alert: I shall be drinking wine)