I’ve been amusing myself over the last couple of days with deciding on making myself a publishing company.

Between writing chapters of The Dog Who Ate Millions, and refining the final draft of the fourth Shield book (The Chains Of Their Sins), I’m trying to write one short story a month until I have enough for an anthology. I intend to wrap FlashWired up into it, as one of the stories is a semi-humorous account of how Cal and Jeeze finally get together, so is set a few months or a year before FlashWired itself. I have a lot of fun coming up with names for stories, by the way, so if I tell you that particularshort story is called Worm’s Eye View, then I’ll leave the reason for that to your fertile imaginations and say only that it involves wings, if not exactly beaks.

The other stories are sort-of set in the Shield Universe, and is a planned trio of shorts depicting the destruction of Earth some ten thousand years before Bennet’s adventures with Flynn and the Maess. Two are complete: Overthrown by Strangers and Habitation of Dragons, and to my immense surprise, turned out to be f/f. Which I’ve never written before. Not explicit, but still. A new departure for me. Different.

I’m most likely to self publish these, since I can’t imagine a publisher being interested in them, and since Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs insists on sending me emails as if I were a small business, why not *be* a small business? A small press. A very small press. With one author on the books.

As I mentioned in my last post, one of my great passions in life is haute joaillerie – exquisite, criminally expensive jewellery. I particularly love tiaras, which (as the great Geoffrey Munn has it) scintillate shamelessly. I also love my niece, who’s had a happy turn of phrase since childhood, and one of my abiding memories is her account of a school visit to the Tower of London where she saw “the Queen’s glass hats.” AKA, the Crown jewels.

So, in honour of tiaras, in honour of Sally’s felicity with words, I will publish my anthology later this year under the aegis of the Glass Hat Press.

And here’s where you come in.

A couple of years ago, in Houston, I had the great good fortune to drool over see Faberge’s Josephine (or Leuchtenberg) tiara for myself. It’s one of the world’s most famous tiaras, since the briolettes (the oval, hanging diamonds) were given to Napoleon’s Josephine after the divorce by the then Tsar of Russia, passed down through her family and returned to Russia and Faberge’s workshop when her grandson, of the ducal Leuchtenberg family, married one of the Tsar’s descendents. Using them, Faberge created a small, but devastating lovely tiara. Here it is, in either a negative image on a white background that has then been considerably tarted up in Photoshop , or the original on the black background:

Which one would you wear to the ball? Vote HERE!