Cheryl's Mewsings

Many thanks to all of you who joined us for the live blogging of the Hugo ceremony on Sunday night. It was a blast to do. Kevin, Mur and Mary were fabulous. We all had a lot of fun. Sadly it won’t happen again, at least not in that form. I have been banned from [...]

Firstly, it is highly unlikely that putting me on program, or even another Hugo nomination, would be sufficient to get me a visa to the USA for Reno. The State Department has already made it very clear that they see no value in the (non-profit) work I do for the SF community, and this would [...]

New Zealand based writer, Helen Lowe, did a great interview with me prior to Au Contraire. My apologies to Helen for only now getting around to mentioning it here. You can read the whole thing at Helen’s blog.

As those of you on Twitter will have seen, I made it safely into Melbourne yesterday. There were no hassles getting into the country. This was all down to very slight differences in wording on the landing cards. The Australian landing card has a question that asks whether you have any criminal convictions. That was [...]

So, here I am in Wellington, by the skin of my teeth. When I got on the plane from Sydney I discovered, to my horror, that the NZ landing form asks you if you have ever been denied entry to any other country. You can’t lie when answering such questions there days — you never [...]

I think I hit a wall today. I managed to drag myself through the day until about 4:00pm, including recording a podcast (of which you will hear more in due course), and then collapsed in front of the TV and promptly went to sleep for a few hours. I surfaced long enough to eat dinner [...]

You may have noticed a certain lack of activity around here of late. There’s a good reason for that. I don’t get vacations with my day job. It isn’t full time, but I’m contracted to provide a certain amount of work every month. That means that if I go gallivanting off around the world I [...]

Cue Tony Bennett.

A few people have been asking me when I will be where on my tour of the South Pacific. I don’t have final panel schedules as yet, but here is a rough guide. From August 27th-29th I will be in Wellington at Au Contraire, the New Zealand NatCon. The preliminary program schedule is available, but [...]

I have been interviewed for the Outer Alliance blog.

For those of you who still wonder why I kept referring to my former home as being in “Darkest Somerset”, Liz Williams has what will pass for an explanation.

As you may remember, in order to get back to the US (go to conventions, see Kevin, etc.) I need to be able to get a visa. The only way this is ever likely to happen (short of miracles) is if I have a business that requires me to go to science fiction conventions. So [...]

While I was out having meetings yesterday evening people were talking about me. More specifically they were walking about Emerald City. I tracked this down to Paul C. Smith, who was talking mainly about Paul Jessup’s plans for a new online magazine about weird fiction. For what it’s worth, I never saw Emerald City as [...]

Here in Britain we tend to recognize summer on the basis of astronomy. June 21st is the longest day of the year, so it must be mid-summer’s day. That means summer is half over already, and a pretty rotten summer it has been. Americans, on the other hand, at least those I have talked to [...]

Today has been busy. Looks like I have an article for the July Clarkesworld. Also I appear to have spent money on domain names and web hosting. Obviously I must be serious about this business plan stuff. Gulp! Meanwhile, in the “no good deed goes unpunished” department, my Google Alerts brought up someone complaining that [...]

There is an interview with me up on the SFX blog. It is about the Hugo Awards. Lee Harris and I did this interview over breakfast (bacon rolls, if you must know) on Oxford railway station on our respective ways home from a party at Paul Cornell’s house. If I come over a little incoherent [...]

It is about time I updated you all on my ongoing life complications. Apologies to everyone who finds me insufferably boring. Firstly I’m now more or less settled in to The Cottage. I’ll try to find time to do a little photo tour of the neighborhood because, like much of the UK, Trowbridge is a [...]

Last night on Twitter various people starting linking to a “periodic table” of women in SF (PDF). Apparently it had been circulated at WisCon. That seemed a nice thing to do, but being on the iPhone I thought no more of it. Then I discovered I was on it! (Thanks Susan!) Let me put that [...]

Now that I am finally moved into the cottage I can start thinking about getting my own life sorted out. One of the main outstanding issues is that I still have a lot of stuff in California. Kevin wants to move into somewhere smaller, and I’d rather not lose a pile of favorite clothes, so [...]

I spend yesterday evening over near Oxford at Paul Cornell’s housewarming party. There was an interesting mix of people: some fans, some folks from nearby Farringdon where Paul used to live, and some proto-vicars who are at college in Oxford with Caroline. I should note that the latter group were lovely people and not at [...]