Talented Friends

This post is a quick big-up to two of my very talented friends, Mirien and Emma Collingwood.

Mirien is an amazing silversmith, and is in the process of setting up her own jewellery making business, Sidhe Silver.  If you love all things elvish, historical, Celtic, mystic, with a flavour of ancient stones rising out of a sunlit morning mist, you’ll love her stuff.  Everything she makes is hand made, one of a kind and unique.  Check out her Livejournal for photos, and if you wanted to commission something specially made for you, that would be the place to go.

I was lucky enough to get this pendant as a Christmas present this year, and I’ve worn it ever since.  I think of it as a compass rose, which comforts me for the fact that I’ve decided not to get one tattooed on my arm after all.  (Because I’m getting a cross there instead.)

Emma Collingwood is a writer I’ve known of from my days in Tolkien fandom, where I admired her and she admired me, but for some reason we never dared to talk to each other and say so.  Fortunately that’s changed now.  About the same time I had Captain’s Surrender accepted for publication, she decided to go into professional fiction too, but as her own boss.  So she published the first of her Penny, Dreadful & Tarbottom Series – Lieutenant Samuel Blackwood (deceased).

Which I’ve reviewed here: http://alexbeecroftblog.wordpress.com/2007/12/18/lieutenant-samuel-blackwood-deceased/

Now the second in the series is out, The Radiant Boy: Four Ghost Stories from the Age of Sail

This one, unlike the last, is not a m/m romance, but it does do exactly what it says on the tin 🙂  It contains four charming and moving ghost stories set aboard ship in the Age of Sail.  Slightly creepy, but not the kind of scary that will keep you from sleeping at night, it’s illustrated with lots of  wonderful woodcut-style pictures by Amandine de Villeneuve, and is the sort of thing you might buy to give to your small relatives and then end up falling in love with and keeping for yourself.

Like Mirien’s silver, Emma’s writing is very distinctively the work of a unique voice.  It’s one that I will keep coming back to, whatever she writes, for the charm, good-humour and humanity of it.  However, pirates be warned, this book comes equipped with a curse on any thieving gits who try to take it without paying.

Now I badly want her to get her long novel, The Purser, The Surgeon, The Captain and his Lieutenant out, because I’ve had the chance to see the first half and I’m desperate to find out what happens next.