This post has a lot of irony*…

So yesterday on Twitter, @kazmahoney posted this:

http://twitpic.com/2c5szo – For @meljean – dude, I have found your new book’s spiritual home in London.

The picture, if you don’t want to click, is this:

a pub in Victoria Station -- where are the bars on the windows?

Which is, of course, really in reference to this guy:

The Duke of Wellington

and not this one:

But I realized that I should probably mention, at some point, that YES — my guy is called the Iron Duke (partly) as a deliberate nod to the real one. Wellington had Waterloo; Trahaearn had the Horde tower. I gave Trahaearn a statue and iron bars for the same reason — and don’t forget the title, of course. (The real equivalent of Trahaearn’s square, however, is named after another battle — which doesn’t exist in Iron Seas history — and has Nelson’s statue, not Wellington’s, so the parallel isn’t slavish. Their political leanings aren’t really the same, either.)

Of course, the “Iron Duke” name fits him in other ways, but you’ll have to read the book to know that one.

Then I had a total WHOA moment. Because @kazmahoney is also Karen Mahoney, who has a YA novel coming out next year called:

The Iron Witch by Karen Mahoney

Twilight Zone music began to play in the background. And I realized…

It’s a total convergence of IRON!

What does it mean? What does it mean?! Oh my god. Double iron all the way across the pond!

*Okay, not really. Just a terrible pun.