Improbable Press Blog

A few years ago, I was bustling about the old homestead, being all domestic (making dinner I expect) while an old episode of Poirot played in the living room. And then I heard a voice speak. It was a warm voice. Kind, deep, caring. Whatever tension was in my body vanished in a rush of affection. I felt safe and infused with a sense of incredible wellbeing and the knowledge that whatever might be wrong in the world would be all right. Naturally, this also confused me. Who the hell was speaking that his voice should reach directly into my...

Aranel Parmadil has been part of the Sherlock Holmes fandom for years, and has recorded nearly one hundred podfics of all sorts of Sherlock fan fiction. Though she's a tremendously busy academic in Wales and England, she shared with Improbable Press how she got into recording the stories she loves, and how she feels about her newest venture: Recording audiobooks for Improbable Press, starting with our first book The Night They Met by Atlin Merrick. Aranel, you are so busy teaching full-time in Wales and short courses at Oxford, how on earth did you get into doing podfics? I needed...

Desire is a funny old thing. Especially women's desire. Wait? What? Women have…desire? Really? So. A couple years ago. In London. I went to the Wellcome Collection's exhibit on sex. The exhibit covered many things, including the Masters & Johnson and Kinsey studies on human sexuality. For this exhibit the Wellcome summarised some of the findings of that research and one of the key findings of both studies, one of the main touted revelatory findings was: Women have sexual desire. Holy god damned hell I flew so far off the handle after I read that that I may still be...

I don’t know who first said "A well-tailored suit is to women what lingerie is to men," but a lot of truth resides in that aphorism. On the other hand, don’t ever think that lingerie is not also to women what it is to men. Alluring and erotic. Delicious and sexy. Something flimsy, sheer and sleek to hide/display curves and hollows, to conceal and reveal delicate skin, growing heat. Sensuous fabrics to tease arousal and make pulse-racing promises of pleasure to come. Oh hell yeah, for a lot of people, lingerie is sexy as, on men as well as women....

All right, I was just on a Mary Morstan blog and got a nice eyeful of someone saying, "What? You like a psychotic assassin? Wow, you're bad and you should feel really guilty about that." Ha. Ha. Ha. Fuck. That. Noise. First, if that's happened to you, please understand you've been stupidly disrespected. That person's a stranger and doesn't know jack shit about you. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Second, you like a fictional character. That's all. A person who is not real. A person who has not actually assassinated anyone. So guess what? A miracle's occurred! You have not and do...