Squid

Goddammit, I just wanted to write about my exiled prince's mysterious abilities and his hot steampunk assassin boyfriend!

Why can't I eat my waffle?

As for China Mieville, who you seem to have left out your initial reference to, leaving only a lonely footnote hanging there like a haunting, no.

Oops. Apparently the reason I felt like there was more to say that I just couldn't locate was that I deleted a phrase that was making this sentence awkward, and then forgot to put it back in somewhere else:

I have the problem of making sure there's enough weird shit in the world for the conceit of the setting to feel sufficiently explored, without looking like I'm trying to be China Mieville.

I'm so amused by this that I'm going to leave it the way it is.

The vampire/mirror-people one, you had to wade entirely through in order to discover that it had no ending.

Oh, my god. I try hard to separate my opinions of people other than Frank Quitely from my opinions of their work, but fuck it: anyone who does that is a bad person.