Personal

Adventures In Furniture

~ Cheryl ~ 8 Comments

As it looks like I’m going to be staying in The Cottage for the foreseeable future (any spare money I have is likely to have to go into Wizard’s Tower for a year or so, I suspect) I need to make it a little more comfortable. Top of the priority list has to be getting rid of the piles of books on the floor. I have identified a few areas of wall where a small bookcase could be installed without affecting the effective living space. All I needed to do was buy some.

I was reasonably happy with the bookcases that Kevin and I got from IKEA a few years back. They still make them. But in California we had the advantage of a large minivan to transport things in. Here I have no transport, and I remember from the adventure of the bed that IKEA delivery charges are extortionate. So I decided to try Tesco. Their bookcase was cheaper, if a little smaller, and they only wanted £5 for delivery.

I have been very impressed with their delivery service. The online order form had a space for special instructions, and yesterday someone called me to check on the details. They also texted me, giving a three-hour window for the delivery. The men didn’t phone in advance as was promised, but they did turn up on time.

Having assembled both IKEA and Tesco bookcases, I am convinced that the IKEA furniture is better made, and I’d buy it for preference if I could. However, the Tesco bookcase is sufficiently robust to be fit for purpose, and might even be solid enough to take with me when I go.

Said bookcase is now assembled and in place. There are no more piles of books on the floor. There are also no empty shelves on the bookcase. That gives me a rough idea of how long I can stay here before the books force me to find somewhere bigger. Oh dear. I think I need to buy more ebooks.

Smoke Filled Rooms

~ Cheryl ~ 53 Comments

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 doing it.

Surprised? I was. Kevin and I spend a lot of time talking about how open and democratic WSFS is. Anyone who goes to Worldcon can attend the Business Meeting and have their say in how the Hugos are run. But there are still little committees where acts of political skulduggery can take place.

The Hugo Awards website, where Sunday’s coverage took place, is run by a body called the Hugo Awards Marketing Committee (HAMC). It is something that Kevin helped set up several years ago. I’ve done a lot of work behind the scenes, including creating and maintaining the website.

The HAMC is managed by another WSFS committee, the Mark Protection Committee (MPC). They are the people responsible for looking after the various service marks that WSFS owns, so it makes sense that they should also oversee how the Hugos are marketed. However, some members of the MPC have always been opposed to the existence of the HAMC, and they have a long track record of trying to obstruct what it does.

In 2008 I was all ready to start work on upgrading the Worldcon and WSFS web sites as I had done for the Hugos. I wasn’t able to attend the MPC meeting, and when Kevin got back from it I was surprised to discover that I had been relieved of responsibility for the job. Someone else had been taken on to do the work. As it happens, that someone is rather better qualified to build web sites than I am, and the lack of action over the past two years is mainly due to his life going through some major changes. But even so, had I been given the job it would have been done by Montreal.

In 2009 Kevin and I managed a contest to design a logo for the Hugos. I was delighted to see the logo being used all over this year’s award ceremony, and even in newspaper articles about the awards. But at the end of the Montreal Worldcon a meeting of the MPC effectively forbade us from attempting to register the logo as a service mark. Apparently it was not necessary, and would be a waste of the MPC’s money. This year Kevin (by way of the HAMC’s report to the MPC and thus to WSFS) put a motion before the Business Meeting suggesting that we register the logo. It passed easily, and none of the MPC members who spoke so forcefully against registering it in Montreal was prepared to put that position forward in a public meeting.

This year once again I missed the MPC meeting. (I was recording an interview for Salon Futura). When I finally caught up with Kevin I discovered that the MPC had adopted a new rule forbidding any member of the HAMC from being on the Hugo ballot. Any member who wanted to remain eligible for a Hugo next year had to resign immediately.

I thought about this for all of about two seconds. I have no idea what Neil plans to do with Clarkesworld from now on, and I certainly have enough Hugos. But I would love to see Salon Futura on the ballot. What’s more, I would love to see Kevin get a nomination. He’s my business manager, fulling the same role that Kirsten Gong-Wong has for Locus. But there’s no way he was going to abandon the HAMC, so if we do get a nomination next year his name won’t be included. I, on the other hand, am staying in the Hugo race, because I have other fine staff who also deserve nominations and I want to see that happen. Accordingly I have resigned from the HAMC and won’t be allowed access to the Hugo Awards website in the future.

The official reason for the new rule is that anyone who is on the HAMC could potentially abuse their position to campaign for a Hugo for themselves. I can see how one might do that, and I have made a point of trying to avoid it. If you look at the Hugo website you won’t see much mention of me there. I certainly don’t sign any posts I write. Kevin’s name is much more prominent than mine.

The live reporting of the ceremony is a bit different. In previous years I have done that through my own websites because key staff on the current Worldcon have been actively hostile to the HAMC. This year was different, but even so we didn’t announce the coverage until we had been given express permission to do it by both Vincent Docherty, the Hugo Administrator, and Kathryn Daugherty, the ceremony director. Aussiecon 4 co-chair Perry Middlemiss came to see what we were up to during rehearsals, so he knew we were doing it too.

The thing about the live reporting is that it ought to be on the Hugo website, or that of the current Worldcon. The results should be presented to the world through official channels. It is actually of far more benefit to me to do it through my own websites, because then I get the traffic. If someone else wants to do it for the official Hugo website next year I’ll be delighted. After all, I won’t even be in Reno, so it will be hard for me. But that does mean someone else has to be prepared to do the work.

That, I suspect, is the main issue. Some of this is undoubtedly pure spite. One or two people on the MPC, having seen me win a third Hugo, will have been determined to do something to try to hurt me. But far more important than that, by removing me (and trying to remove Kevin as well), the MPC was trying to get rid of the people who actually do the work, and bring the process of marketing the Hugos to a grinding halt. They are doing this because they are strongly opposed to encouraging anyone other than Worldcon regulars from voting.

Personally I’m not too annoyed about this. I have Wizard’s Tower and Salon Futura to run. Having less WSFS work to do will be a good thing. As a WSFS member, however, I am furious. I want to see the process of marketing the Hugos go forward, not be hamstrung by a small group of selfish, elitist conservatives operating behind the scenes in little-known committees.

Kevin needs help. If you have experience in maintaining a WordPress web site and have no ambitions to win a Hugo he’d probably be delighted to hear from you. Ditto if you have experience of actual marketing. And if you can’t do any of these things, but think that what has been done here is wrong, please say so in the comments. If we want to convince people that WSFS is a fair and open organization, we have to put a stop to this sort of thing.

Kevin talks about another piece of skulduggery on his LJ.

Because People Are Asking…

~ Cheryl ~ 10 Comments

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 be more of the same.

Secondly, applying for the visa, with the attendant need to clear my name, would cost at least $7,000, possibly a lot more. Immigration lawyers do not work for free.

Finally, I have pretty much only one shot at this. If I apply again and get turned down again them I can probably kiss goodbye to any chance of getting back to the US. Therefore, even if you can find a lawyer who will work for free, or somehow raise the money, I would be unwilling to roll the dice at this point.

And you know, if people have that much money to throw around, I can think of much better causes than my travel budget.

The right thing to do — for me, for Reno and for other conventions — is to make better use of the Internet in doing online programming.

Asking The Right Questions

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

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 no problem. I could answer “No” very happily.

The New Zealand landing card’s question asks whether you have any criminal convictions, or have been deported from any country. That one I had to answer “Yes” to. (And for the benefit of those of you who said that being denied entry and being deported are not the same thing, I can assure from my conversation with the immigration people in New Zealand that for the purposes of that question they are.)

The important difference here is that Australia’s question applies only to events that require a decision of a court of law. The New Zealand question also includes events that can result from an arbitrary decision by a single border guard based solely on his hunch that you are lying about your purpose for visiting his country.

There are two points worth noting here. The first is that Australia has an electronic visa system that all potential visitors must use before they depart. This, in theory, screens out the people that New Zealand is trying to catch with the extra question. However, it doubtless cost a lot of money to establish. New Zealand is a much smaller country that may not be able to afford such a system.

The other point is that many of you are probably thinking, “well why should you worry, you are obviously not a threat to any country.” If you are white, middle-class and otherwise unremarkable you probably have an expectation of being treated fairly by those in authority. However, if you are, say, black, Muslim, a transsexual, or representative of any other group that is unpopular in Western society, you will have an expectation of being arbitrarily discriminated against by those in authority. That’s just the way the world is.

From my point of view I am perfectly happy to keep coming back to Australia. Once I have the necessary e-visa I can book my ticket with confidence that I will be let in. New Zealand is another matter. From now on every time I visit I will be subject to the same lottery with immigration officials. I can’t be sure until I get there whether I will be let in. That makes me very reluctant to try to go there, and I’m very sad about that.

A Close Run Thing

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

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 know what information might get shared between countries. So I spent a very nervous half hour or so being grilled by NZ immigration people. Thankfully they let me in. I’ll have more to say about this when I have had time to calm down and am less busy, but for now I’m just very happy to be here.

Iz Ded

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

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 and clear the inbox. Now I am going back to sleep.

Running two businesses and preparing for a 3-week tour of the South Pacific is hard. Can’t wait to be on my way. So much to do before I leave.

Stupidly Busy

~ Cheryl

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 have to do the same amount of work in less time. A three-week tour of the South Pacific is a major disruption to the work flow. And as well as trying to get all of August’s work done before I go, I have Salon Futura #1 to worry about. September is going to be even worse, because I won’t be back from Australia until half way through the month. I have reluctantly decided to skip FantasyCon because I simply can’t afford the time to dash off to another con just a few days after getting back into the country.

So, things will continue to be relatively quiet here on and off, though I hope to blog from the conventions while I’m away. In the meantime I’m learning a lot of interesting things about ebooks. Hopefully you’ll be pleasantly surprised in a few weeks time (especially those of you with iPads, though I promise to remember the rest of the world as well).

The South Pacific Tour

~ Cheryl

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 note the warnings about it being a draft. If all goes according to plan I shall be on a panel with Elizabeth Knox, which I am seriously jazzed about.

On August 30th I fly to Melbourne [fixed stupid typo here]. I’m spending a couple of days holed up in a hotel catching up on the day job and getting Salon Futura #1 ready for release. After that it is into the madness that is Worldcon. I have been asked to do a few things while I am there. Once again nothing is set in stone yet, though I am very pleased with the possibilities.

In the week after Worldcon Kevin and I fly off to Cairns and then Sydney. This is a vacation. Aside from a long weekend in Monterey for my birthday a few years back, it is the first vacation we have had together since the last Australian Worldcon in 1999. Don’t expect to hear much from me in that week.

One Giant Leap

~ Cheryl ~ 9 Comments

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 I have started one.

This is doubtless going to get me into all sorts of trouble, but hopefully it will also do a lot of good. Much of the thinking that went into it was along the lines of, “if I have to start a business, how can I do most good for the community with it.” Bearing in mind, of course, that I don’t have huge sums of money to invest and lose.

The thing that is likely to attract most comment is the magazine, Salon Futura, which is scheduled for launch at Worldcon. This is not a re-launch of Emerald City. It is very much a paying venue, despite being non-fiction. I have always believed that people who write non-fiction well deserve just as much payment and adulation as those who write fiction well. Also, if Wizard’s Tower is to be a credible business, it has to pay people good money.

Note that the payment rule doesn’t apply to me. I will be writing material for Salon Futura to begin with, but I don’t see it as an exercise in self-publishing and will happily step aside for others if what I do isn’t popular and we can afford someone better. I very much hope to make money from the business in the long term, and the UK tax authorities will be upset with me if I don’t, but the first priority will be to pay other people.

Talking of which, some of you very kindly offered to give me money to help pay for an immigration lawyer. I turned that down because the sums involved were way too large for that sort of appeal. It would be more than enough money to run Salon Futura for a whole year. On the other hand, having the money to pay for the first issue or two would be very handy. Also, while that money indirectly helps me because it helps establish the business, it doesn’t go directly to me. So if you do want to help, we have a startup finding appeal.

We are open to submissions, and I’ll write more later about the sort of thing I am looking for, but for now I have Finncon to attend to. I’m scheduled pretty much solidly today from noon until I get to bed.

Ears Burning & Business Plans

~ Cheryl

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 an exclusively weird fiction magazine. Obviously my fondness for the likes of China Miéville and Jeff VanderMeer meant that I wrote a lot about such work, but I did try to read fairly broadly, and will continue to do so. But best of luck to Paul in his new venture.

I have actually considered using Kickstarter for my own business plans, but I’m not sure I like it. To start with I’m going to do something regardless of whether I get some arbitrary level of start-up finding. Also if your project does reach the funding target they take 5% of the money. But it might be useful for some projects, and I do still have a US bank account.

Talking of fund raising, Liz Williams now has a PayPal button up for people to subscribe to her new short story series. Inspector Chen fans, you know what you need to do.

The Timing of Summer

~ Cheryl ~ 26 Comments

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 about such things, use a different system. When Kevin emailed me yesterday he talked about it being the “first day of summer”. Astronomically this is a bit daft, but practically it does make a bit of sense. The weather here in May can be pretty dodgy, but the weather in August is often very good and early September can be quite lovely. Counting “summer” as being mid-June to mid-September therefore makes quite a bit of sense.

What times do people in non-English-speaking countries count as “summer”? Is there an historical reason for the UK/US divergence?

Regardless, it is a gorgeous day here, and I’m getting some where out of my summer dresses at long last. Wimbledon has started. England are playing Australia at cricket. Stupid time for me to be so busy.

Drive By Posting

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

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 those cheapskates at the Hugo Awards have taken to giving out the nominees as ebooks these days rather than sending Worldcon members free physical books like they always used to. (No, I’m not going to link to it, I really don’t think a clue-by-four would help.)

Me in SFX

~ Cheryl

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 and hung over, I apologize. But I think it is mainly OK.

Looking Forward

~ Cheryl ~ 7 Comments

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 rather pretty little town. US persons, prepare to be dazzled by history. Of course The Cottage is too small. I don’t have room for bookcases or visitors here. But I can’t trade up until I’m sure I can afford to do so.

In addition I have been spending some time talking to immigration lawyers and appear to have found a very good one (thanks Dave!). However, it is pretty clear that there is not much that I can do in the short term. There isn’t much point in trying to take things forward unless I have a reasonable chance of getting a visa, and not just a tourist one. I’m pretty sure that even if I got a tourist visa the CBP would refuse me entry. I need better than that.

The one thing that is liable to help me is if I have an actual UK-based business that requires me to go to the US to attend science fiction conventions. It would be even better if it was something that put money into the pockets of US citizens. This is a very scary prospect, but as I have been self-employed for many years now I do at least have a vague idea of how to run a business. I also know the SF&F field very well. There are possibilities.

Nothing is actually firm as yet. I have been talking to a lot of people. Thankfully they have been very encouraging about my ideas. Some have even been enthusiastic. That makes me feel a lot better.

Of course if I do start a business of some sort it does mean that I will have much less time for fannish pursuits. This doesn’t mean I’ll be spending every hour grubbing for money for myself. Like many other people in the business, I’ll be relying on the Day Jobbe to bring in the bacon while hoping that I don’t lose too much money doing the thing that I love. The #1 priority will be to pay decent rates to the writers and artists who do work for me. Inevitably many of those people will be based in the US, and that should help me fulfill the requirements for the business visa. If, in the long term, I also manage to diversify my income stream, I shall be very happy, but I’ll settle for not bankrupting myself. I can’t afford to subsidize a business.

On the other hand, I may get to buy toys. I can see a definite advantage to having a business that requires me to buy an iPad on expenses. And now that Apple has announced they are adding exactly the features I want (bookmarks and annotations) to iBooks I’m actually keen to take the plunge. Like I said, I have no room for bookcases here.

In the meantime it is back to planning, talking to people, and pondering such things as names and web site design. If there is anyone out there who is good at logos I’d love to hear from you.

You can expect more announcements about this in the next few months. Some of you may even get phone calls and emails from me. The rest of you can sit back and tell me that I’m mad. I won’t listen; I don’t need to; I know you are right.

Elemental, My Dear Sandra

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

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 in context.

Firstly I am on a list of just over 100 people that also includes Ursula K. Le Guin, Angela Carter and Octavia Butler. I am staggered, and deeply honored.

Also, I am on it, while people like Liz Williams, Storm Constantine, Pamela Zoline, Kelley Eskridge, Helen Merrick and Timmi Duchamp (to name but a few) are not. Obviously Sandra had to make some choices, so I’m not complaining about people being left off. Also she did provide a few blank spaces for people to add their own favorites, which was a great idea. But that I got on and those I named above didn’t??? Wow.

(Having said that, this does highlight what I believe to be a particular blind spot that WisCon people have when it comes to Liz Williams. She has written some really good feminist SF and y’all ought to go and read it.)

I think, also, that I am the only person on the list who is there for what was basically fan activity. Everyone else on the list is a professional of some sort.

Those of us with chemistry degrees immediately started wondering which element we had been assigned. Last night I thought I had been given Lead, which I found amusing. However, on closer inspection on a full screen I see that Sandra’s table does not have the same number of columns as the periodic table of elements, so direct comparisons are difficult. Numerically I am #71, and the element with that number is Lutetium. That’s a rare earth element named after the Roman city of Lutetia, now Paris. As with many such things, there was some dispute over naming rights to begin with, and Wikipedia says that in Germany it was originally called Cassiopium, which is rather cool.

I note also that I have been positioned directly between Ellen Klages and Nicola Griffith. This could be interesting. 🙂

But by far the best thing about this is the awesome video that Sandra made to showcase the project. Watch, it is lovely.

And Sandra, THANK YOU!!!

Baggage Handling

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

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’d like to get some of it back here. I can’t go myself, and Kevin doesn’t have the time, so we’d appreciate some help.

If you happen to be traveling between San Francisco and London in the near future, and do not mind taking some extra baggage, please get in touch. We can arrange meeting people at airports, and can pay checked baggage fees within reason. I promise I won’t ask you to carry lots of heavy books. Any help would be much appreciated.