Author: Cheryl

Day One at #MTHF16

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Day one of the conference proper saw Kevin and I taking an early morning bus for the University of Victoria. The more I see of this island, the more beautiful it seems, and the university campus did nothing to dispel that impression.

The day began with a paper from Parker Croshaw that was the closest to my interests all weekend. Linguistic theory and comparative mythology are possibly a bit esoteric for a non-specialist audience, but Parker had some very interesting things to say about Shiva. Also any presentation that features dragon-slaying and female Thor is OK by me.

One of my favorite papers from day one was Mary Ann Saunders looking at Ariel from The Tempest. There’s a very good case to be made for Ariel being genderqueer in some way, and I’m rather surprised that more hasn’t been made of this. Mary Ann focused on one such attempt, Julie Taymor’s 2010 film which features Helen Mirren as the mad scientist, Prospera.

Today’s keynote speech was from trans activist, Jamison Green, who is now President of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. Jamison is doing great work persuading the medical people to care more about their trans patients.

Despite there only being two streams of programming, I am often finding myself wanting to be in two places at once. That was certainly the case in the afternoon when my friends Jana Funke and Jen Grove were scheduled against presentations on Miss Major and trans pornography.

Not everything went well. The talks are taking place in a room divided by an airwall and there is a lot of sound bleed between the two sections. It isn’t as bad as the infamous 1995 Worldcon, but it is pretty bad at times. Also by no means all of the presenters are good at keeping to time, using a microphone or telling a coherent story. Overall, however, I am very pleased to be here. I have met some really interesting people.

My contribution to the weekend is a poster, which I cunningly had designed for me by the fabulous Ceri Jenkins, who also did all of my PR materials for the LGBT History Festival. I have by far the best looking poster on display. (And people, please, if every you are asked to do a poster, the objective is not to try to cram all of the text of a 20 minute paper onto the page.)

There is lots more good material coming up tomorrow. I suppose I should get some sleep before it starts.

Launching #MTHF16

~ Cheryl

Kevin and I spent most of today playing tourist around Victoria. The weather was beautiful again, and we are both very footsore as a result. Victoria is a beautiful city, and it has loads of bookstores.

Of course today is St. Patrick’s Day and, just like everywhere else in North America, Victoria goes a bit crazy. There appear to be more bookstores than Irish pubs in town, but only just. Faux Irishness was out in force today.

People keep telling me that Victoria is more British than Britain. This is patently not true, because I checked the local paper and there were no headlines screaming English Cricket In Crisis! In fact they didn’t cover the game at all. The paper did, however, preview the conference I am here for. They even mentioned me. Here’s the online version of the report.

Kevin and I spent the afternoon in the local museum, which has some absolutely amazing art done by the First Peoples of the region. There will be photos when I have time to process them.

First People’s art also featured in an exhibition at the art gallery where the launch event for the Moving Trans History Forward conference was held. Obviously for sheer numbers this didn’t match up to Brighton Trans Pride, but there were a lot of trans folk there, and they had come from all over the world.

We were officially welcomed to Victoria by Madison Thomas, a trans person from the Esquimalt Nation, and by Dr. Aaron Devor, who is the only Chair of Transgender Studies in the world. He’s why the conference is here (and I must say he has excellent taste in places to live and work).

There were two keynote speakers. The first was Shelagh Rogers, who is the Chancellor of the University. She’s also a well known radio host on CBC who specializes in talking about books. It turns out that we have a bunch of friends in common, most notably Guy Gavriel Kay. It was clear from Shelagh’s speech that the University of Victoria takes diversity issues very seriously.

The other keynote was by Randall Garrison who is a local MP, openly gay, and a keen supporter of trans rights. I have been following the saga of trans rights legislation thanks to Merecedes Allen. Things looked pretty dire last year, but the federal election seems to have changed all that. Garrison’s bill looks set to be taken up by the Government, which gives it a much higher chance of actually passing.

All in all, it was a very promising start to the event. I was also pleased to catch up with a couple of UK-based friends (hi Jana & Lauren). Tomorrow we get down to serious business. Expect tweetage (because I have been promised wifi.)

Thanks, Sylvia

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Atlanta ShoreWhile I have been traveling, the news broke that Sylvia Anderson had died. Always glossed over in her partnership with husband Gerry, Sylvia was a key part of the team that made all of those great puppet shows. She also outlived Gerry and had a lengthy career as a TV executive after Supermarionation became a thing of the past.

Sylvia was responsible for all of the key female characters in the puppet series. That included Lady Penelope, Venus from Fireball XL5, the Angels from Captain Scarlet, and my personal favorite, Atlanta Shore from Stingray. Atlanta was a redhead, she had a responsible job in the World Aquanaut Security Patrol, she was also a pretty good pianist, and her name reflected that of one of my heroines from Greek mythology. The fact that Troy Tempest appeared to prefer to blonde fish girl merely served to confirm my suspicion that boys were pretty daft.

Thanks, Sylvia, you made girls part of the Supermarionation world. That was an amazing thing for kids like me.

In the Great North West

~ Cheryl

Early this morning I got on a plane from Toronto heading west. A few hours later I was in Vancouver, a new destination for me. But this was only the start of the journey.

The first job was to head over to the international terminal to find Kevin who had flown up from San Francisco. We then headed by train and bus to the ferry terminal and took ship for Victoria. All of the transit connections worked perfectly so we got the 13:00 sailing.

It is a beautiful day here in the Pacific North West. The sky is blue, the sun is shining and the Puget Sound was like a mill pond as we crossed. The landscape here is a lot like Ã…land, but bumpier. The rocks are the same, the trees are pretty much the same, there’s a shallow sea; all that is different is that the landscape has more elevation.

Kevin and I are now safely settled into a palatial suite in the local Doubletree. Goodness only knows how I ended up with this room. Sometimes devotion to the Hilton frequent stay program bears dividends. The conference doesn’t start until tomorrow, so we have plenty of time to get our bearings. And to catch up after over a year apart.

An Illegal Book

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

The past two days in Toronto have been taken up largely by work. However, this morning I did get out to Bakka-Phoenix Books to see what I could pick up. These days, of course, even small presses like mine can get international distribution of a sort. Certainly I have no trouble getting books by the major American publishers in the UK. But there is always something from a Canadian small press that is worth taking a look at.

In all I picked up three anthologies: The Humanity of Monsters from ChiZine (because it has some really great writers in it); Playground of Lost Toys from Exile (because it is a cool concept and it has a Candas Jane Dorsey story in it); and License Expired from ChiDunnit, the crime & thriller imprint of ChiZine (because it is illegal to sell it in the UK).

Wait, what…???

Once upon a time, dear readers, there was a thing called the Berne Convention. Under it, all of the countries of the world agreed that copyright had a term of 50 years, and all was right in publishing. Then a wicked witch called Disney and her evil buddies whispered in the ear of various governments as said, “sirs, this cannot stand. If copyright is limited to 50 years then everyone will be able to make Mickey Mouse cartoons and poor Disney will grow old and starve.” Some governments were taken in by this pleading, and extended the term of copyright to 75 years. Others laughed it off and said that Disney should agree to grow old just like every other person that is really a corporation.

And so it was that in the snowy land of Canada authors long dead found their work going out of copyright. Doubtless they are spinning in their graves right now at the thought. One such writer is a British chap called Flemming who wrote a bunch of novels about a spy called Bond, James Bond. As of 2015, anyone in Canada could write a James Bond story and sell it; but only in Canada.

Consequently I am now the proud possessor of a book, edited by the fabulous team of Madeline Ashby & David Nickle, that cannot be sold in the UK because it is in breach of copyright. I feel properly piratical. Aarrrhhh!

Licence Expired includes stories by Charlie Stross, Jeff Ford, Laird Barron, Claude Lalumière, Karl Schroeder, AM Dellamonica and several others. The Stross story does not feature Bob Howard or tentacled monsters. I guess I’d better get on and read it, in case it vanishes in a puff of legal fairy dust on entering UK airspace.

Hello Again Toronto

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

I am safely arrived in Canada. It has been a fairly painless trip, thanks in no small part to great friends in London and the excellent staff on the Heathrow Express.

The movie selection on Air Canada was not great, but they did have some good documentaries. First up there was a biography of Mary Tyler Moore which I loved. Obviously back in the 70s I would have settled for just being a woman, any woman, but Mary’s TV show was still a shining beacon of possibility for me. I loved the fact that Oprah shot a version of the opening credits with herself as Mary. And yeah, I have been to Minneapolis and seen the statue.

I also managed to catch a food show about artisanal cheeses in British Columbia. It featured Little Qualicum, Moonstruck and Salt Spring Island. So when I get to Victoria I want to check out this place and see what I can buy.

Oh, and I set the high score on the entertainment system’s trivia game. I have no idea how often the scores are re-set, but it you happen to be flying Air Canada do take a look and see if you have the same aircraft as I had.

Intersex Activists Speak Out

~ Cheryl

You wouldn’t know it from the mainstream media, but intersex activists have been having a major publicity push this past week. There has been a demonstration outside Parliament, people going on hunger strike and so on. I have been getting press releases from Jane Fae. Even the LGBT media appears to have ignored them. The only place I have seen the story covered is in Gay Star News, for whom Jane happens to be a regular columnist. See her piece here for more coverage.

Basically what the activists want is for the government to take a look at intersex equality in the same way they did for trans equality. I suspect that the members of the Transgender Equality Inquiry would be very sympathetic to this. They rather backed off on intersex issues when they found out that there was a lot more to those questions than simply lumping them in with trans. While most of the prejudice we face stems from the same mad adherence to the gender binary, the issues and solutions can be very different, and indeed can be very different between different intersex conditions.

Here’s hoping that someone other than Jane is listening to all of this. I at least have a few rights in this country. According to UK law, intersex people don’t even exist.

Bath Ruby, A Very Different Software Conference

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

I spent today in the Assembly Rooms at Bath. There was a definite air of eccentricity in having a software conference in such a stately, Georgian venue, but if you are going to hold a conference in Bath, why not?

I was at Bath Ruby because I had been asked to present a talk on Trans*Code. It was only going to be a 5-minute lightning talk. I expected most of the day to be given over to tech stuff. I was very wrong. My how software conferences have changed.

It didn’t seem that way at the start. There were around 500 people at the conference. The vast majority were young, white and male. I think the women marginally outnumbered the people of color (though of course some were in both categories), but if you removed the sponsor representatives, who were probably not tech staff, the numbers might have tipped the other way. I may well have been the oldest person there.

Then the conference started, and the very first piece of admin mentioned in the welcome session was the Code of Conduct, which mentions Gender Identity. That set the tone for the rest of the day. Now sure there were technical talks, but there were other things too. There was a talk about how to get involved in open source projects. There was a talk about getting fired — how employees can cope with it, how employers can do it better. And there was a talk about unconscious gender bias. A longer version of this talk.

Which was awesome. (And there’s lots more good stuff from Janet Crawford here.)

I don’t suppose that all tech conferences are like this these days. However, the Python community and the Ruby community seem to be very progressive. It is very heartwarming.

My talk seemed to go down well. People listened respectfully, and applauded when I was done. A few people came and thanked me afterwards. Job well done, I think.

And the tech stuff? I got to see the best tech presentation I have ever seen in my life (except possibly the one where Kevin Roche had us moving individual atoms with his software). Sonic Pi is a seriously cool thing. And it is bundled free with every Raspberry Pi computer.

Richard O’Brien, meet Lilly Wachowski

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Over the past couple of days my Twitter feed has been full of people getting angry about Richard O’Brien. He was interviewed by a tabloid newspaper and asked to give his opinion on Germaine Greer. Regrettably he agreed with her that trans women can never really be women.

I have no idea what O’Brien was thinking here, but he won’t be the first non-binary person to hold such opinions and he won’t be the last. Some silly transsexuals look down on people who opt not to have medical treatment, and some silly non-binary people look down on anyone who does. A plague on both their houses.

However, I’d like to look a bit more closely at what being “really” a woman means. The USA had (and still has in some cases) a legal concept known as the One Drop Rule, by which if a person has the slightest trace of non-white African ancestry then that person is considered to be black. Germaine Greer’s definition of a woman is a bit like that. The slightest infraction can disqualify you. Assigned male at birth? Then you are “really” a man, no matter when you transitioned, or how long you have lived as a woman. Have a Y chromosome? Then you are “really” a man even if you were assigned female at birth, have lived as a woman all of your life and have borne children (and yes that is possible).

Greer aside, there are obviously ways in which I can be considered not as fully female as other people. I don’t have periods, which I gather is a very good thing. Well there are intersex women who don’t have periods, and indeed don’t have ovaries or wombs, but they still live as women all of their lives and absolutely deserve to be considered as women if they wish to be as far as I am concerned. I can’t give birth, but there are many cis women who can’t conceive but who adopt and become wonderful mothers. I know of at least one trans woman who is a single mother. So motherhood is not that simple either.

And this brings me back to Lilly Wachowski’s press release from yesterday. She says:

To be transgender is something largely understood as existing within the dogmatic terminus of male or female. And to “transition” imparts a sense of immediacy, a before and after from one terminus to another. But the reality, my reality is that I’ve been transitioning and will continue to transition all of my life, through the infinite that exists between male and female as it does in the infinite between the binary of zero and one. We need to elevate the dialogue beyond the simplicity of binary. Binary is a false idol.

We’ll all be better off when the media, and those who have access to it, let that sink in.

Lammy Finalists – Congratulations Roz!

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

The finalists for this year’s Lambda Literary Awards have been announced, and I am delighted to see Roz Kaveney’s Tiny Pieces of Skull listed in the Transgender Fiction category. There are only three finalists listed, which is a bit worrying, but statistically it makes Roz’s chances better.

Elsewhere I see there is a new Transgender Poetry category, which is encouraging. Notorious transphobe, Alice Dreger, has a book in the LGBT Non-Fiction category, which shows that the Lammys still have a way to go in dealing with inter-community strife.

The SF/F/H category is mostly a mystery to me. The only book I have heard of on this list is The Gracekeepers by Kirsty Logan, which people have been saying really good things about. Frankly the idea of an LGBT SF short list that doesn’t have Luna on it is absurd, but the Lammys are a submission-based award and if a book’s publisher doesn’t think it worth submitting then their books cannot be considered. I’d put Radiance on the list too. It has much less specific LGBT content, but what is there is crucial to the plot. And the central character of Planetfall is a lesbian, though that’s one of the less significant aspects of her character. Then there’s The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps and The Traitor Baru Cormorant. That’s one kickass Lammy shortlist right there. I’m sure there is stuff I have forgotten.

Of course there is always the question as to whether the jury are looking for good SF/F/H books that happen to include LGBT characters, or good stories about LGBT characters/issues that happen to be SF/F/H. That may be down to the make-up of each individual year’s jury.

New From Wesleyan – Morrow Short Fiction

~ Cheryl

Reality by Other Means - James MorrowAn interesting new book dropped through my letterbox last week. Reality by Other Means is a collection of short fiction by James Morrow. That’s a name that may not be well known to you, but Jim has won Nebula, World Fantasy and Sturgeon awards. He’s one of those people who fiction is always full of interesting and challenging ideas. I can’t do much better than quote from Wesleyan University Press’s publicity for the book.

Join the Abominable Snowman as, determined to transcend his cannibalistic past, he studies Tibetan Buddhism under the Dalai Lama. Pace the walls of Ilium with fair Helen as she tries to convince both sides to abandon their absurd Trojan War. Visit the nursery of Zenobia Garber, born to a Pennsylvania farm couple that accept her for the uncanny little biosphere she is. Scramble aboard the raft built by the passengers and crew of the sinking Titanic—and don’t be surprised when the vessel transmutes into a world even more astonishing than the original Ship of Dreams.

Yeah, interesting stuff. I am looking forward to it.

Well, Hello Lilly!

~ Cheryl

Lilly Wachowski

Most of you will have seen this already as the mainstream media has picked it up, but now we have two Wachowski sisters. Awesomesauce, as my young friends are fond of saying.

Lilly’s official press release is well worth reading in full.

So that’s that sorted. Can we have the next season of Sense 8 now, please?

Also does anyone know if Lana and Lilly have a lot of maternal aunts?

Women Do Math (in the movies)

~ Cheryl

Now here’s a heartwarming story for International Women’s Day. Back in the 1960s, three brilliant African-American mathematicians — Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughn and Mary Jackson — were the brains behind NASA’s Friendship 7 program that launched John Glenn into space. Their story is told in the book, Hidden Figures, by Margot Lee Shetterly (due out in September). And recently casting has been announced for a 2017 movie based on the book. Taraji P. Henson was already on board to play Johnson. She has now been joined by Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monáe.

Yep, that’s the Archandroid, in the movies, in a story about the early days of the space program. Awesome.

Kudos as well to Kathryn Peddrew, Sue Wilder, Eunice Smith and Barbara Holley who are apparently in Shetterly’s book but not yet in the movie, probably because Hollywood likes to combine people into single roles for easy of story-telling.

Seriously, go read Shetterly’s website. It is great. Also, while you are about it, get Hannu Rajaniemi’s Collected Fiction and read “The Haunting of Apollo A7LB”.

Women in Broadcasting on Bristol 24/7

~ Cheryl

The nice people at Bristol 24/7 (in particular Pamela Parkes) have done an article on, and I quote, “Bristol’s brilliant women broadcasters”. Naturally it doesn’t include all of us: no Paulette, no Mary Milton, no Claire Cavanagh, Laura Rawlings or Alex Lovell. However, it does include a bunch of my colleagues from Ujima, and it includes me. If you want to have a read, and see me having a pop at a BBC institution, you can find the article here.

Social Constructivism and Trans History

~ Cheryl ~ 10 Comments

My apologies for delving into theory here, but this is rather important and something I need to think through. Writing blog posts helps.

When you do LGBT history you hear a lot about how we must never impose modern ideas of sexual and gender identity on people from the past. A man in ancient Greece did not see himself as “gay” in the same way that a modern man might see himself as gay, despite the fact that both of them have sex with men. Same-sex relations had a very different place in Classical Greek culture than they do in our own.

The same is true of trans people. We might say that a person from the past identified as a kurgarra, a kinaidos, a gallus, a hijra, a mukhannath, a ninauposkitzipxpe, a quariwarmi, a brother-boy or any of a range of other identities, but they would not identify as a transsexual because the word didn’t exist.

That’s fair enough, but inevitably where trans people are concerned the argument gets taken further and starts to be used as an excuse for invalidation of modern identities.

To start with, just because the word transsexual didn’t exist in ancient times that doesn’t mean that trans people didn’t exist. As the above (very incomplete) list of identities shows, people lived lives outside of the gender binary in most (if not all) cultures throughout history. Where we have no evidence it is probably because such people had to stay under the radar for fear of their lives.

A more subtle argument is that because the word transsexual didn’t exist then trans women from ancient times would not have identified as women, they would always have used a local identity that was some form of third gender.

The most obvious point to make here is that gender identity is not a set of discrete boxes you can pigeonhole people into. Take a look at any group of trans people today and you will find a wide range of identities. Many people change how they identify as they experiment with their lives in search of something that they are comfortable with. Even within my lifetime, non-binary was not a socially accepted identity, and gender clinics used to pressure non-binary patients to either leave or adopt a transsexual identity. The fact that non-binary didn’t exist as an acceptable identity didn’t stop non-binary people from feeling non-binary, any more than the fact that the word homosexual didn’t exist didn’t stop men from having sex with each other.

It therefore seems reasonable to me that if you were to be able to examine a group of trans people from the past — say a group of galli from ancient Rome — you would find a whole range of identities among them. That might include people who have become galli against their will, people who seem to us more like effeminate gay men, people whose gender is non-binary, and people who identify strongly as women.

However, there is a deeper and more insidious danger here. If you argue that trans women from the past could not identify as women because the word transsexual didn’t exist, then you are arguing that if you create a society in which the idea of a transsexual doesn’t exist then you can stop trans people from identifying as women — you are postulating a “cure”. And you are claiming that the whole idea of being trans is socially constructed.

Please, cis academic friends, stop doing this.

Last Sunday in Manchester

~ Cheryl

Dubya as cheerleader

It occurs to me that I haven’t yet blogged about the Sunday of the LGBT History Academic Conference. That’s remiss of me, because it means that only people on Twitter and Facebook will have seen the above photo. It is from Susan Stryker’s presentation about the Bohemian Club of San Francisco, and yes it does show Dubya dressed as a cheerleader.

Interestingly, Susan’s presentation wasn’t really about trans history. It was about something that looks like it might have a trans element, but is in fact far more about upholding existing social structures, with a bit of hazing ritual thrown in. What cross-dressing there is generally has about as much to do with being a woman as blacking up has to do with actually being black. This is an area where you can make this point clearly, as opposed to the minefield of drag which is much more complicated.

One of the most interesting papers on Sunday was one by Gavin Brown about the Gay Rural Aid & Information Network (GRAIN), which provided assistance and networking to gay men in rural communities in the UK during the 1970s. This being the post-Hippy era, there was good deal of what we would now call Hipsterism going on in addition to actual country-based gay people.

I was very disappointed that the Canadian academic who was due to give a paper on trans life in Trinidad didn’t turn up. Maybe I’ll see if he’s in when I’m in Toronto next week.

I did get to hear a paper by Jane Traies from Sussex University based on her forthcoming book about older lesbians. Kudos to Jane for being open to the idea that some of her subjects might have identified as trans men, had they been born a few generations later. Of interest to me was the fact that around 60% of the women interviewed had been married and many said that they had loved their husbands dearly, but they still identified as lesbians.

After the paper I asked Jane about her lack of use of the word “bisexual”. She said that her subjects almost all insisted that they were not bi, often because of a misunderstanding of what it meant. Apparently some of them thought it meant having sex with a man and a woman at the same time. Then again, I have been reading history textbooks whose authors think that “bisexual” and “hermaphrodite” mean the same thing. *sigh*

Finally thanks again to my pal Catherine Baker for her great paper about how history departments, and indeed universities as a whole, continue to marginalize trans students by never mentioning trans issues in classes or, if they do, doing so in a negative way.

There were some things about the weekend that were less good, which basically boiled down to the fact that running events like this is a learning process, especially for cis people. I have had words. As long as people keep trying to learn and do better I am OK with that.

Juliet Is Busy

~ Cheryl

Some of you will doubtless be wondering where the final book in the Aldabreshin Compass series is. Well, it is on the way. Having been ambushed by Chirstmas and not got Western Shore out until January, there’s no way Eastern Tide was going to be out before March because of the LGBT History Month madness. Things are calming down a bit now, and I can get back to work on the book.

Meanwhile Juliet, bless her, has been busy. Firstly she has published a new short story set in the Aldabreshin Archipelago. It is called “Distant Thunder”, and it is available free at Juliet’s website. The story is set at the same time as the events of Northern Storm.

In addition she has been guest-blogging over at Charlie Stross’s website. Her post there talks about some of the worldbuilding that went into creating the Aldabreshin Compass series. In particular Juliet talks about how she went about creating a lead character who is an autocratic ruler who keeps slaves and has absolute power over his people. If you are going to have a feudal society in your epic fantasy, the least you can do is examine how it works with a critical eye.

Hopefully all of this will encourage you to read the Aldabreshin Compass series. The books are well worth it.

Today on Ujima – Feminism!

~ Cheryl

With LGBT History Month over and International Women’s Day not far off we switched gears on Women’s Outlook today and went 100% with a feminist agenda.

First up I was delighted to welcome back Sian Webb from Bristol Womens’ Voice. Sian and her team are organizing a festival day at M Shed on March 12th to celebrate International Women’s Day. They have rather more resources than I did for the LGBT History Festival, and have a really spectacular event planned. It is only one day, but they have three streams of programme and some really cool stuff. Further information is available here.

For the next hour I was joined by Jess Read of the Women’s Equality Party. I must confess that I’d been a bit nervous of these folks in the past because they seemed to have a bit of an air of White Feminism about them. However, Jess was very firm on the need for intersectionality, including acceptance of trans women. The discussion ranged over a wide variety of issues including how WEP would manage its non-partisan stance. It was really refreshing to have a politician in the studio who a) said that she didn’t want to be a politician, and b) said that her party’s aim was to put itself out of business.

You can find the Bristol branch of the Women’s Equality Party on Facebook. There is also a Bath branch which is somewhat nearer to me. You can find your local branch here, and I do believe that’s Ceri in the picture at the head of that page so I’m guessing it is a Bath branch photo.

In the final half hour I was joined by my friends Jo Hall and Roz Clarke to talk about the fabulous Fight Like A Girl anthology. The link to book for the launch event is here. It will be awesome, especially Fran Terminiello’s demonstration of the use of sharp, pointy things. Hopefully the panel I am chairing will be good too.

We may have mentioned a whole bunch of amazing women writers in the process, including Juliet McKenna, Kameron Hurley, Tansy Rayner Roberts, NK Jemisin, Glenda Larke, Mary Gentle, Gaie Sebold, Foz Meadows, Danie Ware and many more.

You can listen to the first hour of the show here, and the second hour here.

Jo will be back in the studio tomorrow morning to talk to Paulette about World Book Day on the Education Show.

The playlist for the show was as follows:

  • Sisters are doing it for Themselves – Eurythmics
  • Why? – Tracy Chapman
  • Independent Woman – Destiny’s Child
  • Let’s Talk About Sex – Salt n Pepa
  • Unstoppable – Liane La Havas
  • Stone Cold Dead in the Market – Maya Angelou
  • Horse and I – Bat for Lashes
  • Ghetto Woman – Janelle Monáe

Jess chose the third and fourth tracks. She’s a big Beyoncé fan. We managed to avoid coming to blows over whether Bey is more or less awesome than Janelle Monáe

Strange Horizons Queers the Planet

~ Cheryl

Strange Horizons has announced a new project called Queer Planet. It will be a month-long celebration of queer SF from around the world. They are looking for fiction, poetry and non-fiction, and particularly welcome material from outside of the usual major Anglophone countries. Detailed submission guidelines are available here. The deadline is April 10th so you have a fair amount of time. Good luck!

Kickstarting Upside Down

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

There’s an interesting new anthology being Kickstarted at the moment. Titled, Upside Down: Inverted Tropes in Storytelling, it aims to present new twists on tired story tropes. The book is edited by Monica Valentinelli and Jaym Gates, and will include stories by Haralambi Markov, Nisi Shawl and Alyssa Wong, amongst others.

It is also very cheap — just a $5 pledge for the ebook. Though if you want paper and are outside of the USA the cost shoots up.

I really liked the idea of this one and actually sent them a story. It didn’t get in, which doesn’t surprise me because I don’t think I’m good enough for professional rates. But it was a lot of fun to do. If anyone out there is looking for a different take on the Wicked Stepmother meme, let me know.