Emma Newman's Blog, page 6

An announcement for fans of the Split Worlds!

Would you like to come into the Split Worlds?

If you’re a fan of the Split Worlds and want to get a taste of what it would be like to be one of the fae-touched in Aquae Sulis, read on!

Save the date!

In Bath (UK) on Saturday May 7th 2016 the very fabulous Katie Logan (amazing LARP ubergoddess and founder of the Ladies Who LARP Tumblr) and I will be running a live roleplaying event set in the Split Worlds at the wonderful Guildhall. It is the most beautiful venue with the perfect sumptuous Georgian splendour that is perfect for the Split Worlds.

In game, you will be in Aquae Sulis, the secret magical reflection of the city of Bath, one of the most prestigious courts in the Nether. The event will centre around a Masked Ball and will involve courtly intrigue, mystery, drama and politics, all involving the Fae-touched families of Albion you know and love and hate from the Split Worlds series.

There will be lots of juicy plot for experienced LARPers to sink their hungry teeth into (I have LARPed and GMed a huge amount and know how much is needed to keep players satisfied!). There will also be opportunities for Split Worlds fans to come and enjoy a ball with music and canapés and only a tiny amount of roleplaying, just in case you’re a fan of the books but not an experienced live action roleplayer.

More details will be released soon, but for now we just wanted to let you know the date so you can plan ahead – I advise that you block the whole day and evening in your diary if you are interested in coming as we are currently finalising plans for activities leading up to the ball in the evening.

But Em, what is LARPing?

LARP stands for ‘Live Action Role Playing’, as distinct from ‘tabletop’ roleplaying where you and your mates roll dice and eat far too many biscuits. In tabletop you describe what actions your character is taking and have lots of in character conversation and a bit of out of character conversation (it is wonderful). In LARP, you wear a costume and you physically move, talk and act just like the character you are playing – the nearest equivalent activity is improvisational drama (it too is wonderful, but more intense as an experience). In LARP, there are GMs (Games Masters) who manage plot, answer questions, make rulings and manage NPCs (non-player characters).

That sounds scary. I’ve never done it before, does that mean I can’t come?

If you’ve never done it before, I can imagine it might be intimidating. When you sign up, there’ll be the opportunity to let us know how much RP experience you already have, from ‘lots’ to ‘absolutely none’. If you tell us you have none, it means we can give you extra help in the lead up to the game and not overwhelm you with plot and complex social tasks/challenges on the night itself.

Katie will be making sure the game is as accessible to newbies as possible – she has run LARPs designed with first-timers in mind in the past – but we will also ensure there is enough depth for every level of experience.

What if I just want to come and watch?

I won’t lie to you – I am a hard core role player and I’m aiming for an event which is an immersive as possible. I want people to come and play and feel like they are one of the Fae-touched. Obviously there has to be an element of suspension of disbelief, but I want to keep the real, modern world at bay for as long as possible. That means staying ‘in character’ unless you’re in an area designed to be ‘out of game’.

If you want to come and enjoy the spectacle and not be involved in the plot, we can totally cater for that; you can watch and dance and enjoy it without any pressure to ‘perform’ or actively handle any plot. You will need to be in costume and at least look like you are at a ball in the Nether – i.e. not taking selfies or tweeting with a phone in the corner!

In all honesty, I think role players will enjoy this event the most – if you are keen to role play it doesn’t matter if you don’t have experience as we can help you. In short, if you want to come and pretend to be people who don’t age, have the Fae as evil, manipulative patrons and live in a misty magical world that resembles Regency England with magic, this is for you.

What will happen next?

There is a Facebook group where announcements will be posted and where you can ask Katie and I questions as well as other players once sign-up is open.

Katie and I will finalise some last details and then we’ll release all the information about the daytime and evening events. The tickets will go on sale then and they will be limited in number due to the nature of the event and the venue. I will release that information on here and I’ll send it out to my newsletter subscribers too (in fact, they will get it first, because they are especially splendid). If you are keen and don’t want to miss an announcement, it’s best to subscribe to the newsletter.

Join ussss….

The fear of being seen

When I first started my life online – and by that I mean blogging and having actual conversations using Twitter instead of just staring at it, confused – I had a stormy sky and a single lightning bolt as my avatar. It was a miniature version of the big stormy sky and single bolt that was at the top of my website for quite some time.

I was hiding.

Oh, don’t get me wrong, I loved that picture and it really spoke to me back then. But it wasn’t my face. No-one online that I chatted with knew what I looked like. And that was just the way I liked it.

Then things started to change. I was commissioned to write a short story for an anthology that led to another and then I had a short story collection published. I got my debut book deal and all of a sudden people asked for a picture of me.

I was mystified and horrified in equal measure. Why would anyone want a picture of me? I was there, right there, in the gaps between those words. Wasn’t that enough?

My first photo shoot

You have to understand, I was recovering from pretty severe post-natal depression and trying to carve a new space for myself in the world. I was heavier than I’d ever been in my life and my body was stretched and distressed in ways that I still can’t bear to think about. It no longer felt my own. It just felt like a flesh bag in which a terrible car crash had happened.

I didn’t want anyone to see me, but there was a pressure to be seen. I went for my first photo shoot and the best picture that came out of it – and was my avatar for at least a couple of years afterwards – was one of me peeping over the top of a copy of The Kraken Wakes (my favourite John Wyndham novel).

 

 

 

 

I was still hiding.

Time ticked by. I landed a proper book deal for the Split Worlds series and then something happened that I never thought would: SFX wanted to do a two-page featured author spread about me.

Oh shit. That meant another picture had to be taken.

My second photo shoot

By that point I’d figured out that going to conventions was about three million times easier when I dressed up in fancy outfits of my own making. What better way to hide in plain sight than making a grand coat for everyone to look at instead of me?

I had discovered armour. I couldn’t remain unseen any more, not now I needed to be on panels and do launch events and all that stuff. So I donned said armour and went to Bath for the SFX shoot by Joby Sessions.

After about an hour and a half (I think, I was mostly traumatised by the whole pictures being taken for SFX magazine thing), poor Joby was faced with an author who just froze up every time the camera was pointed at her. We tried all sorts of poses in the fantastic Mr B’s bookshop. None were any good. So we went outside.

Taken by Joby Sessions for SFX magazine

We took shot after shot. Time wore on. A man walked past us in a back street with the most beautiful huge velvety grey dog and we took a few shots with me and said dog which Joby liked more, but it wasn’t quite right. Then he said something along the lines of “come close to the camera and imagine there’s something inside it that you’re trying to touch” and that shot to the left was taken. I, of course, imagined there was an evil little faerie inside the camera that I had to get. He smiled straight away and said “That’s it. That’s the one.” I was relief incarnate. I bet he was too, poor chap.

It was the first photo taken since my wedding day that I actually don’t mind looking at. It’s still my Twitter avatar and I love the dramatic Doctor Who feel of it.

Then I got a book deal with Ace/Roc for two sci-fi novels and an email arrived from my (fabulous) editor, asking if I’d like to have my photo in the book.

Not again

My first response was, obviously: NO! Why on earth would I want that? Isn’t the book enough? Isn’t that the best part of me, right there, pressed between the covers? Why spoil it with my face?

But there’s more than that. I’m a woman who writes science-fiction. That is a massive negative modifier, despite the fact that it’s the 21st century. Because of my gender, my book is less likely to be reviewed, less likely to be displayed in book shops, more likely to be overlooked in general, and more likely to be left out of lists that fly around the internet. Just because I’m a woman. Did I want to put my face in there too?

Because when you’re a woman, you are judged by the way you look. I know everyone is, to some extent, but for women it’s taken to a whole new level of value judgements. I didn’t want people to make a judgement based on the way I look. I didn’t want my face to pollute my work.

But I also know I am screwed up about this

So I asked some friends who are professional authors what they think. They pretty much said “put a photo in, it shows you’re a real person and helps readers connect with you” and that’s a good thing, right? My editor wasn’t putting the pressure on at all, but I felt that if I didn’t put a picture forward I would be hiding again. I couldn’t win. And I couldn’t use my fantastical SFX picture because that belongs to them and it’s only because they are super lovely that I can use it informally online. Having it printed in thousands of books is different matter altogether.

And I didn’t want to end up going to conventions and having people do that “Oh wow you’re actually so much older than you look in your picture” face at me. It was time for a new one.

My third photo shoot

My husband had his first proper author pictures taken by Lou Abercrombie, as did several other author pals – and all were brilliant – so she was my first choice. I freaked out at the prospect of just booking it. I talked on Twitter about it and people gave great advice. So I put on my brave trousers and booked a shoot to be done at home, in the hope it would minimise the anxiety.

You have to understand, this was agonisingly hard. So hard, in fact, that I broke out into the most awful rash all over my face (of course it was my face) that very morning. But Lou was brilliant. She calmed me (and my stupid scaredy skin) down. She reassured me. She told me what to do and I laughed at myself and my ineptitude. I wore my armour, but I didn’t feel I was hiding so much.

Here are the new photos.

Picture by Lou Abercrombie

Picture by Lou Abercrombie

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I know I have my hands over my face in both, but they were just my favourites. I feel like they are actually showing… me. And that’s why it’s taken me weeks to write this damn post. Because I was afraid of showing them. Of showing me.

I don’t know if that will ever stop being frightening. But the day I don’t do something because it scares me is the day the Fear has won. So if nothing else, that picture in the back of Planetfall this November will be a tiny personal victory over the fear of being seen.

Tea and Jeopardy t-shirts for the Worldbuilders Fundraiser!

In case you haven’t listened to the new Patrick Rothfuss Tea and Jeopardy episode, I wanted to let you know about the Tea and Jeopardy t-shirt you can buy as part of the Worldbuilders Fundraiser that is happening 1st-8th June 2015.This post contains all you need to know (hopefully).

It’s the one on the right!

The fundraiser is being run through IndieGoGo and I want to say straight away that I have nothing to do with the logistics – it’s Pat’s wonderful team who are handling everything. But there are a few details I wanted to highlight here for any of you lovely Tea and Jeopardy fans who want to buy a t-shirt and raise money for charity at the same time. A great big plump and squidgy thanks to the wonderful Dom Camus for making the gorgeous t-shirt version of the Tea and Jeopardy logo.

Wait – what is Worldbuilders?

Worldbuilders is a nonprofit organization founded by New York Times bestselling author Patrick Rothfuss to raise money for Heifer International. Every year, a small team of Worldbuilders employees and Rothfuss himself gather collectibles and coolness that focus on the “geek community”–fans of fantasy, science fiction, art, and games. They run two fundraisers each year, one in summer and one at the end of the year, presenting their fans with chances to win or buy cool geeky items. Proceeds from the fundraisers are then donated to Heifer International. In the past seven years, Worldbuilders has raised over $3.5 million for Heifer International.

How do I get a Tea and Jeopardy t-shirt?

Go to the fundraiser page on IndieGoGo and scroll down until you see the ‘perk’ at the $25 level which is titled ‘Tea and Jeopardy podcast t-shirt’ and click on it.

What about shipping/ postage and packaging?

If you live in the States, the postage is included in the perk, so you don’t need to worry. If, like me, you live in the UK, or anywhere else in the world, it would be splendid if you added $15 to your contribution when you make your pledge (you get the option to do that on the first page you get after clicking on the perk and it’s called ‘Additional gift’ – click on the far right of that bar on “custom” and enter the amount).

What if I want to order more than one t-shirt?

This is the situation in our household! On IndieGoGo there is no shopping cart system, you have to choose and pay for each order separately – even if you are just getting multiples of the same perk. The way I am handling it is this:

I’ll choose the t-shirt perk and add $20 as an additional gift to comfortably cover postage for two t-shirts. Then I’ll pay.

Then I will go back and choose the same t-shirt perk again and just pay without adding the additional gift.

Is it only available in powder blue?

Yes. It keeps costs down so more money can go to the charity. We chose blue because it looks nice with the logo. It has nothing to do with the fact that blue is my favourite colour. Nothing. At. All. (Well, maybe a tiny bit.)

But what about sizing?!

That freaked me out too, but don’t worry. At this stage it’s all about the pledge. Once the fundraiser is over the lovely Worldbuilders team will email you to get your sizing details, so make sure you use an email address you have easy access to when you make your order.

When the email goes out, I’ll also tweet about it to remind people to check their junk folders.

Please note this from the Worldbuilders team:

“There are a lot of pre-orders involved here, and we’ll be sending things out after the campaign as they come back from production, or arrive in the office from the awesome people who are donating them. If we need to collect information from you (like your t-shirt size), we’ll contact you for it once the campaign has ended. We’ll keep you updated with the progress of things as the fundraiser goes on, and afterward.

We’re confident that all perks will be delivered before our annual fundraiser in November, and definitely in time for the holidays.”

But Em, IndieGoGo only lets you pay by credit card and I don’t have one.

Yeah, that’s something beyond anyone’s control here. If you are in this situation and really want a Tea and Jeopardy t-shirt, drop me a line to that fact in the comments below, including your country of residence. I can’t promise anything, but if there are lots of you, I may be able to work something out with the Worldbuilders team.

Any other questions?

There’s an FAQ on the Worldbuilders website. You can also follow Worldbuilders on Twitter (@worldbuilders_)as they may well tweet updates. It’s best to get in touch with either them or IndieGoGo if you have any issues other than the lack of credit card one, as I am very unlikely to be able to solve it myself.

Now go! Go and get a Tea and Jeopardy t-shirt and raise money for charity and be splendid! You’ve only got until June 8th 2015 to do it!

Tea and Jeopardy 36 – Peter Newman visits the tea lair

The thirty-sixth episode of Tea and Jeopardy is now live and you can find it here.

In this episode of Tea and Jeopardy, the very lovely Peter Newman takes tea at home. We discuss why Latimer seems to disapprove of him, the merits and pitfalls of living with a writer, and the sheer joy of Spartacus: Blood and Sand. We also brush lightly against Netflix’s Daredevil (yes please) and the horrors of waiting.

If you love Tea and Jeopardy and want to join the Order of the Sacred Tea Cup, our Patreon page is here.

Credits for sound effects can be found here.

An index of all previous episodes can be found here.

Tea and Jeopardy 35 – Sarah McIntyre visits the tea lair

The thirty-fifth episode of Tea and Jeopardy is now live and you can find it here.

In this episode, the eminently fabulous illustrator and writer Sarah McIntyre, visits the tea lair. We talk about Sarah’s Pictures Mean Business campaign, the psychological and professional benefits of wearing unusual clothes for public events and we meet Kevin the Dartmoor Pegasus (you can read Sarah’s gorgeous comic about him here).. Sarah also drew an amazing picture for her Tea and Jeopardy episode which made me very happy.

If you love Tea and Jeopardy and want to join the Order of the Sacred Tea Cup, our Patreon page is here.

Credits for sound effects can be found here.

An index of all previous episodes can be found here.

Tea and Jeopardy 34 – The blooper reel of gratitude + 5

Ooops! I forgot to post the last couple of Tea and Jeopardy episodes here. After a long and annoying convalescence from the second round of surgery (all is well now) I’ve been elbow deep in my new book (the second one for Ace/Roc) and so filled with the joy of being able to work again that things got dusty here. Apologies.

The thirty-fourth episode of Tea and Jeopardy is now live and you can find it here.

This is a very silly blooper reel episode that I made to celebrate the return to Tea and Jeopardy after my enforced break.

If you love Tea and Jeopardy and want to join the Order of the Sacred Tea Cup, our Patreon page is here.

Credits for sound effects can be found here.

An index of all previous episodes can be found here.

Tea and Jeopardy 33 – Alan Baxter visits the tea lair

The thirty-third episode of Tea and Jeopardy is now live and you can find it here.

In this episode, the remarkable author and martial artist Alan Baxter, visits the tea lair. We talk about martial arts in films and books, the Australian SFF scene and how his life is like a film.

If you love Tea and Jeopardy and want to join the Order of the Sacred Tea Cup, our Patreon page is here.

Credits for sound effects can be found here.

An index of all previous episodes can be found here.

The good, the bad and the scary

A week today I will be in hospital, hopefully floating on the best post-operative drugs, with the surgery behind me. Yeah. More surgery. Last year’s hellish events weren’t satisfied with a standalone, they wanted a sequel. I just hope this medical crap isn’t going to go in for a trilogy.

I’m scared. No getting away from that. I’m a needle phobic at the best of times, have been for many years, and some terrible things happened regarding needles during one of my hospital stays last year that I still haven’t fully got over. So… yeah. Fun times.

But anyway, a few things have been happening that are much more interesting and happy than the impending doom, and seeing as I may just be too anxious to even string a sentence together for the rest of the hospital countdown, I thought I should write up some stuff.

Okay… first things first, there are only a handful of days left to submit your Hugo nominations and I’m going to come right out and say that Tea and Jeopardy is eligible for the Best Fancast category and we would of course be over the moon to be shortlisted again. You can find an index of previous episodes here.

Bestseller for a weekend!

Last weekend something kind of crazy happened: my short story collection From Dark Places went to the number one spot on Amazon in a couple of categories, including SFF anthologies and collections, all because the lovely Mr Paul Cornell tweeted about my upcoming surgery and invited lovelies online to buy the ebook version to help with lost earning time (I’m a freelancing writer and audio book narrator, so whilst I am lucky enough to benefit from our amazing NHS, these ongoing medical shenanigans do have a serious financial impact on our household). I was absolutely blown away by the love and best wishes, and wanted to thank everyone who bought the collection.

A new audio book

I had the pleasure of narrating an audiobook for Ghostwoods Books which has recently gone on sale, called Those Rosy Hours at Mazandaran. I loved this book. It was the most challenging I’ve ever narrated – there is even a bit where I have to sing a little bit in two different languages – but it was worth the hard work. It’s the first time I’ve worked with Ghostwoods Books and I have to say that it was an absolute joy. I am very impressed with how well they looked after me.

I found the prose evocative and sensual and the characters absolutely fascinating. It was so refreshing having a female protagonist who isn’t necessarily likeable but fully understandable. It’s hard to place in a pure genre category (like so many of the books I write and love to read too!) so I would call it historical fantasy with very dark romance and elements of horror (though more of the horrific rather than creepy or scary). I cannot recommend it highly enough, though I would like to warn you that there are some very dark themes and a scene containing sexual assault.

This is the blurb:

It begins with a rumor, an exciting whisper. Anything to break the tedium of the harem for the shah’s eldest daughter. People speak of a man with a face so vile, it would make a hangman faint, but a voice as sweet as an angel’s kiss. A master of illusion and stealth. A masked performer known only as Vachon. For once the truth will outshine the tales. On her birthday the shah gifts his eldest daughter, Afsar, a circus. With the circus comes a man who will change everything.

It’s available on Audible here and Amazon here.

Great things other people are doing

I gushed about this on Twitter and Facebook at the time, but I feel I should say it here too. I recently finished reading Guns of the Dawn by Adrian Tchaikovsky and you need to buy and read this book immediately. It is amazingly good. Like Sharpe but with a female lead and with sorcerers too. Cannot recommend it highly enough.

If you haven’t heard of Sarah McIntyre, there is a gap in your life. She is fabulous. She’s an illustrator (my son is a massive fan of her artwork in Oliver and the Seawigs and Cakes in Space, collaborations between Sarah and Philip Reeve (who wrote the incredible Mortal Engines books that you also must buy and read immediately if you haven’t already). Anyway, aside from phenomenal artistic talent and the most splendid hats in the northern hemisphere, Sarah is campaigning for better recognition for illustrators. I feel this is very important, and so this is a little signal boost for her campaign #picturesmeanbusiness on Twitter.

Oh, and that lovely Cornell chap has The Severed Streets out in paperback now and one of my favourite writerly friends, Adam Christopher, has just had an Elementary tie-in novel released called The Ghost Line.

Last, but by no means least, my husband Peter (AKA Latimer) had a nice package in the post yesterday: the gorgeous hardback of his debut novel The Vagrant, being published by Harper Voyager in April. Doesn’t it look wonderful? You can pre-order it, by the way, and it makes him bounce up and down and go all smiley which is a lovely thing to see. Book and pre-order details can be found here.

Well, I think that’s all for now. I’m hoping to get another Tea and Jeopardy made live before I go into hospital with another lined up for when I am laid up. In the meantime, sweetlings, stay frosty.

Tea and Jeopardy 32 – Catherynne Valente visits the tea lair

The thirty-second episode of Tea and Jeopardy is now live and you can find it here.

In this episode, the fabulous Catherynne M. Valente, NY Times bestselling author and poet, visits the tea lair. We talk about living on islands, siblings and find out which word Cat would remove from the English language.

If you love Tea and Jeopardy and want to join the Order of the Sacred Tea Cup, our Patreon page is here.

Credits for sound effects can be found here.

An index of all previous episodes can be found here.

Puzzles

In the first week of January it seemed like eleventy billion posts went up about the year that had just passed and what was ahead for people.

I couldn’t bring myself to write one.

Then over the past couple of weeks there have been eligibility posts popping up all over the place. “I should write one of those,” I thought.

But I couldn’t bring myself to write one.

I looked at the blog and realised that, for really quite a long time now, most of the posts have been Tea and Jeopardy episodes. I posted other things very sporadically last year. The reason why is tangled up with the inability to write the posts above.

Last year was the worst year of my life to date. And believe me, I’ve had some really bad years. And the thing is, when a year is that bad, it doesn’t do the decent thing and keep itself confined to quarters once the new year comes. No, it leeches into the next.

The danger and strength of narratives

I need to write a longer post about this, when I’m stronger, but for now I’ll just talk about one narrative. Back in April 2014 I had major surgery. I hoped it would take me a couple of months to recover fully.

It took four. And arguably, I’m still not fully recovered as something is wrong, it just hasn’t been diagnosed yet.

All through May, June, July and then into August, as the despair deepened and it felt that the world was passing me by, I kept telling myself that the second half of the year would be much better. I would recover, eventually, do ALL the conventions, get back to pre-op levels of productivity and kick the ass out of the last six months.

Then just as I was starting to do that, my poor Mum was diagnosed with cancer.

It’s treatable, thank goodness, but still a terrible blow. She’s now coming to the end of the chemo phase (which has been utterly hellish) and will soon have surgery, then maybe radiotherapy. Her prognosis is good, but it’s tough to go through.

Three weeks later, my best friend died at the age of 41. October disappeared down a well of all-encompassing grief. In November and December, something acutely stressful happened that I can’t talk about publicly and there was very little left in the tank to deal with that.

That narrative that I had kept myself buoyed up with fell apart. The second half of the year turned out to be so much worse. And it sounds silly, writing about it, but I clung to the idea that things would turn around in September. I really did. It kept me going. Then it twisted into the belief that 2014 was just a shitmonster and I was just going to have to battle it until one of us was left standing.

At one point I got so low I nearly gave up writing. I nearly gave up all together, but thinking of 2014 as that monster made me dig down into reserves I never realised I even had. Sheer bloody-mindedness made me get back to work.

Of course, I got a book deal during all this and I was so relieved there are not adequate words to express that. But the day I found out was the same day I learned about Mum’s cancer. The joy was hard to feel when set against that.

But this isn’t what I want to write about. I don’t want to because I am still living through the aftershocks caused by all those life earthquakes. 2015 has not had a great start, but I’m not going to write a narrative for it yet, other than “Holy shit, surely this has to get better at some point, surely?”

No. I want to talk about jigsaw puzzles.

Over Christmas, thanks to a gift for my son that was far too hard for him, I discovered I like doing jigsaw puzzles. So I got myself a 1000 piece one and thought it might be nice to have something to do whilst I couldn’t play Dragon Age Inquisition.

In fact, I had stumbled upon something that has kept me sane as that horrifically stressful thing rumbles on, as the grief deepens with the dark days and realisation that my best friend is gone forever, as my Mum suffers and I can’t do a thing about it.

They are simple things, jigsaw puzzles. There’s a picture on a box. Inside the box are a thousand pieces. Chaos.

Make the chaos into the beautiful picture on the front of the box.

Making order from that chaos is so soothing. Methodical progress and the knowledge that there is an absolutely, objectively, correct way for all those pieces to fit together. No pressure. Little bursts of pure satisfaction as a tricky bit is finished and the thrill of nearing the end. The feel of running your fingertips over the completed puzzle…

Seriously, take my word for it. If you suffer with an anxiety disorder, if you’re going through something horribly stressful or, as I am, both at the same time, try a jigsaw puzzle.

There’s a whole world of jigsaw geekery out there

The first 1000 piece one, and favourite so far.

I bought my first 1000 piece puzzle with a voucher I got for Christmas. I can’t afford to feed my new hobby at the rate it demands, so I go to charity shops and buy second hand puzzles for a fraction of the price. Invariably I have a nice conversation with the volunteer who is serving who seems delighted that someone as ‘young’ as me enjoys puzzles with the same passion.

And it is becoming a passion. I’m a geek, so it makes sense I’m developing the same intensity of pursuit for this as for Dragon Age or D&D 5th edition (ZOMG it’s so good!). Ravensburger is my favourite puzzle make so far. I like puzzles with lots of details rather than uniform sky or roof or fields or whatever. In the first phases I go by detail, then by colour, then by shape of the remaining pieces. I take a picture of each puzzle when it is completed before breaking it up. Why? I don’t take many pictures at all, but this has rapidly become a ritual.

I didn’t talk about it online. Admittedly I haven’t been as social lately for reasons previously mentioned, but I did talk about it for the first time yesterday. And, of course, others agreed and shared their love for puzzles too. I realised I wasn’t alone in this passion. Because they are my glorious, geeky, gentle tribe and I love them.

That probably includes you, if you’ve read this.