Or at least this person thinks so. An anonymous book collector turned blogger is writing posts about titles from their (apparently quite capacious and varied) library, which includes a copy of Fables from the Fountain from Newcon Press, which just so happens to contain my first properly published short story. Quoth said blogger:

One of my favourites is ‘On the Messdecks of Madness’ by Raven about which I can say almost nothing without spoiling the enjoyment except it’s the only fantasy story I can recall that uses the great diarist Samuel Pepys’s admiralty career as a basis of the plot.

I’m almost certain that there are other sf/f stories in which randy ol’ Samuel is a character and/or plot-point (though I’ll admit I’m unable to recall any right now; answers on a postcard, and all that). “Messdecks” was first drafted circa 2009, not long after I’d left my part-time day-job at at the Royal Naval Museum Library in Portsmouth — though it was actually published some time later, in 2011, because [early days of a small press] — and I have no shame in admitting that I responded to my first commission by resorting to the oldest writing adage of them all, recommended by some and deplored by others: write what you know.

And what I knew then was just how many crackpot conspiracy theorists with a naval history obsession there are… because the bulk of my job at the RNML was to answer their (often rather accusatory and poorly spelled) emails as diplomatically as possible. I think I lost them all to an old hard drive’s dying, but I used to have a pretty good collection of stock debunking essays on everything from Nelson’s supposed satanism to the voyages of HMS Habbakuk, the aircraft carrier made of ice. (A scale-model experimental version of the latter actually existed, but never saw action, and was anyway too small to carry any aircraft; Nelson had manifold flaws as both human being and national hero, but as far as I was able to discern, worshipping the Lord of Lies was not one of them. He was way too much of a priggish wanker for that sort of gig, anyway.)

I left that job to go full-time freelance, just as the post-crash recession was really starting to dig in. A massive mistake in many ways — but hey, I wouldn’t be here today if I hadn’t. (Wherever “here” is.) Regardless, it was nice to be reminded of that daft but fun-to-write story, and nicer still to find that some random someone thinks quite well of it, seven years after it was published.