Cheryl's Mewsings

It has been one of those busy days online, and as I’m getting ready to head off to Finncon I am being lazy and just linking: – Jennifer Ouellette sums up a week of controversy in the science blogging field. While I share her dislike of “advertoiral”, I also agree wholeheartedly with her view that [...]

One of the things that irritates me most about newspapers and blogs is the seemingly endless stream of articles claiming the provide “rules” for good writing. At least the teachers who forced grammatical rules upon me at school had some semblance of consistency, even if it was only that we were not supposed to do [...]

I’m a little late on this, but Chris Fowler and Maura McHugh have launched a competition for horror stories of 500 words. Entry rules are available here. And the contest has its own, horror-related blog. The deadline for submissions is April 16th.

Guess who has spent most of today staring at code rather than blogging. – Alex C. Telander interviews AussieCon 4 GoH, Kim Stanley Robinson (podcast). – The Guardian puts the boot in to bad fantasy character names. – Mark Kelly starts gathering some interesting statistics about how SF&F books are published. – A Western Australia [...]

Should a writer use a pseudonym? It is a complex question – so much so that Glenda Noramly Larke has done a whole series of posts on it. The topics cover the pros and cons of being pseudonymous, how to choose a good pseudonym, and the legal issues that arise. Check it out here, here, [...]

I have it hand it to Andrew Brown, he does get me reading his blogs, even if I think they are very strange. Today’s piece is apparently an attempt to diss religion by “proving” that religious thought is encouraged by being exposed to nonsense. I’m not going to get into that. But the research he [...]

I’m busy catching up with all of the Google Reader entries I accumulated while I was traveling. Here are a few highlights. UK libel laws are so infamous that people with something to hide come here from all over the world to make money from suppressing free speech. Now at last there is a campaign [...]

Kevin and I are still struggling through the hamthrax infection. I’m now reasonably functional, but my head is still full of gunk and I’m finding it hard to concentrate on anything. In lieu of intelligent and incisive commentary, here are so links to people who are providing such so that I don’t have to. Mark [...]

Around this time last year I read Memoirs of a Master Forger by Graham Joyce (to be published soon in the US by Night Shade as How to Make Friends With Demons). It is the book that won this year’s British Fantasy Award for Best Novel (a.k.a. the August Derleth Award), beating Neil Gaiman’s Graveyard [...]

For those of you following the ongoing debate in places like this and this, I have a little note of my own to add. Believe it or not, people occasionally ask me to critique their novels. Obviously they haven’t read any of my fiction. But just in case you are thinking of doing so, here’s [...]

The Genre v Literary “discussion” has spilled over today into The Guardian’s book blog. The post derives from a new item a few days ago in which Scottish Booker-winning author, James Kelman, speaking at the Edinburgh Book Festival, lambasted his fellow Scots for writing “crap” about detectives and middle-class teenage magicians. Much local angst has [...]

My pals Gabriel Strange and Lydia Wood are doing a film studies course in Cardiff. They are putting together their final year project and the moment, and in film studies such things are serious business requiring fund raising and potentially catapulting the director to stardom. (The Wallace & Gromit film, A Grand Day Out, was [...]

Sorry about this folks, but I do need to get some paid work out of the way before the end of the month. This is in lieu of proper blogging. Jed Hartman pointed me at the Geek Feminism Blog, and in particular the Where are all the men bloggers? post, which is hilarious. Justine is [...]

Taking a leaf out of Eric Flint’s book, Angry Robot author Lauren Beukes has launched a competition for fan fiction set in the world of her novel, Moxyworld. The winning story will be published Beukes next novel, Zoo City, due out in May 2010. More details from Lauren’s web site.

More from today’s Guardian: Guy Gavriel Kay writes about the privacy threat inherent in using real people in your novels. He doesn’t go anywhere near the minefield of real-person slash, but he does make an eloquent argument for using fantasy as an alternative to claiming that your fictional character is an accurate portrayal of a [...]

OK, another silly headline. Let me explain. Bad Idea is a fiction magazine that also runs fun events in London. Future Human is their September 10th event at which they will be workshopping flash fiction on the theme of the future of humanity. The guest panel will be: Cory Doctorow, Gwyneth Jones and Ian Watson, [...]

Today brings the welcome news that my good friend Anne KG Murphy is to launch a new fanzine. It will be called Wellspring, and it will be available both on paper and electronically. I’m looking forward to it. I think that Anne will make a really great editor. (And yes, I do plan to submit [...]

Yep, crime writers get fed up of being treated like ignoramuses for writing “genre” fiction as well. (Hat tip to Juliet Ulman via Twitter)

One of the articles I flagged for follow-up over the weekend because I was too busy to read them was this one from The Guardian. It talks about how the literary establishment in the US not only routinely ignores women writers, but has actually developed a vision of the Great American Novel that more or [...]

Via GalleyCat I found the following video of Ursula K Le Guin talking about her most recent novel, Lavinia, and (amongst other things) about why science fiction isn’t necessarily about the future.