Personal

May Day, May Day

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

Pagan Festival, international day of workers’ solidarity, distress call – the first of May means many things to many people. And consequently it gets picked for other things as well.

Overnight some folks in New Zealand were writing for Blog Against Disablism Day – an effort to get folks to treat disabled (or handicapped) people with more respect. I have a lot of sympathy here. Disabled people face many of the same issues that trans people do – that is they have been defined by society as being somehow medically inferior to the rest of humanity. As a consequence they get condescended to a lot. It can’t be much fun.

Elsewhere May 1st has been declared Buy Indie Day – a day on which you are supposed to buy a book from an independent book store. Which reminds me that I still need to look into the Indie Bound affiliate scheme.

Book Nerds Fight Malaria

~ Cheryl

Over the weekend one of the more constructive uses of Twitter was to scare up donations for the Madness Against Malaria charity. This is an online contest for teams to see how much they can raise. The team I’m rooting for is the Twitter Tornadoes, which includes the very wonderful Juliet Ulman, editor extraordinaire and all round wonderful person.

The contest is basically a knock-out. In each round you need to raise more money than the opposing team to progress. Juliet’s team has won 2 rounds so far, and is in the last 16. More sponsors are needed to make it through to the quarter-finals.

Colleen Lindsay explains moree of the process here (post written prior to the end of Round 2), and you can see the contest web site here.

I do have one small complaint – the stupid web site would not let me pay in US$ because it detected that I was logging on from the UK. As most of my income is in US$ I’d prefer not to have to pay two lots of exchange fees just to make a donation. So I have been waiting until I can bug Kevin to make a payment for me. Having done this post, I shall go and do so. Hopefully some of you will contribute too.

Process, Process

~ Cheryl

The trouble with spending time away is that I get hopelessly behind on everything else. I think I’m now up to date on the really urgent stuff, so I can head out to the London Book Fair again. Profuse apologies if anyone is waiting for something from me and I haven’t done it yet.

I Can Haz Hugo?

~ Cheryl ~ 5 Comments

Well, thank you once again, everyone, both for your nominations, and for all the messages of good will that have been coming my way. It is always a great honor to be nominated (and a great relief to discover that I’m not yet a has been).

Thank you also to John Scalzi for standing aside this year, and for encouraging people to take an interest in the fan categories.

Congratulations, obviously to all of my fellow nominees. I’ll be having more thoughts on the ballot later, but one thing that is obvious is that Best Novel is going to be one heck of a fight this year.

But talking of fellow nominees, despite John’s exhortations to people to get some new names into the fan categories, the ballot has a very familiar look to it. I’m now part of that “same old, same old” thing. People are going to start asking, why don’t I step aside? Well, there’s a very simple reason for that.

I want to beat Dave.

Look, he’s a wonderful writer, and a good friend. I really admire his work. But, dammit, I keep finishing second to him. Even the Hugo I did win probably wouldn’t have happened if Dave hadn’t chosen to move Ansible into the semiprozine category. Often I haven’t lost by much – sometimes fewer than a dozen votes – but I’ve always lost. If this were boxing people would be shaking their heads and wondering about my sanity.

So, probably I will get beaten again. But it is always a huge honor to be nominated. And while Dave is still there as a target, I’ll keep trying.

More later. In the meantime I’m going shopping. I need a new dress…

Worth Staying Up For

~ Cheryl ~ 7 Comments

I have been propping my eyes open with matchsticks for the past hour or so, but I was determined not to go to sleep because I was expecting a certain important announcement to go live. And it has.

Thank you, everyone. I shall be more coherent tomorrow when I’m awake. Thankfully Kevin is handling the official Hugo site and SFAW updates. I’m just watching Twitter. And reading the list to find out who else got one.

The Moore Philosophy

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Everyone in the media is trying to get a piece of Alan Moore at the moment, and The Guardian actually succeeded. You can find the interview here. One of the things that everyone is mystified about, of course, is why Moore is willing to give away potentially huge sums of money by not taking the credit for movie versions of his work. He says:

“To me, all creativity is magic,” he says. “Ideas start out in the empty void of your head – and they end up as a material thing, like a book you can hold in your hand. That is the magical process. It’s an alchemical thing. Yes, we do get the gold out of it but that’s not the most important thing. It’s the work itself. That’s the reward. That’s better than money.”

I know what he means. Most of what I do I very much enjoy. There’s nothing quite like the satisfaction of creating something that lots of other people enjoy too. On the other hand, when you are stuck 5,000 miles away from your home and your partner, primarily because you can’t earn any money out of what you do, there is a temptation to wish that you were good enough that someone would actually want to pay you.

Not Dead

~ Cheryl

Some days there just isn’t a lot to write about. Besides, I have been busy on work stuff, and on a Sekrit Projekt, and tonight there’s the France-Wales game. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

Shopping and Twitter

~ Cheryl ~ 11 Comments

I spent a few hours today in Taunton shopping and looking at apartment rental prices (which are finally starting to come down). Much of this has been chronicled on my Twitter feed. I’m finding Twitter very useful for this sort of thing, because it is so easy with the iPhone to take pictures and tweet about them. In particular I have been cheesetweeting. I’ve also reported on the books I have purchased.

On the subject of Twitter, I do now have the technology to create a daily Twitter digest here. I’m holding fire on this because I gather that this really annoys some people. I can’t see why (though I do ignore Twitter digest posts myself), but I’m willing to entertain explanations.

Finance/Housing Crisis Update

~ Cheryl ~ 9 Comments

Just in case any of you were wondering, this is the current state of the fallout from my not being able to travel to the USA.

Kevin is OK for now. A combination of cost cutting on our part, negotiation with the landlord and continued support from me should ensure that he can continue to afford to stay in our apartment, which I very much hope to be able to return to one day.

My situation is more difficult. Kevin has a good full-time job. I don’t. I also have a lot of expenses. By the time I have paid things I am legally required to pay, things that I need for work (e.g. Internet access) and helped Kevin with the rent I have about $1000 a month, and that can be rather variable, especially with exchange rate risk. That’s actually a very good income if you don’t have to pay rent from it, but even a studio apartment will set me back around $650/mo, and with council tax, utility bills and the like on top that doesn’t leave much for food, let alone books or going to cons or whatever.

So what I’m trying to do is avoid having to pay rent so that I have money available to help Kevin and do interesting things. One possibility is flat shares, but I’ve been looking at web sites and most of the ads tend to include the words “young” and “fun loving”, so I suspect I have difficulty finding anywhere. The good thing is that I can go pretty much anywhere there is a high speed Internet connection (which my business will pay for), though I have no transport which rules out some cheaper locations. The bad thing is that I’m so busy that I don’t have a lot of time to look.

Anyway, concentrating my mind is that I need somewhere to live for a few weeks in April/May. If I can’t find somewhere I’ll need a short term rent or a hotel, and that will be very expensive indeed, so I need to get my act together. In the meantime, if anyone knows of someone needing a quiet older lady (who spends most of her days glued to a computer) as a lodger, please let me know.

In Which I Am Brave and Adventurous

~ Cheryl

As per the Twitter comments, I have been outside. And returned safely with all of my limbs intact. There are parts of the sidewalks that are really treacherous underfoot, but for the most part I was able to avoid them (sometimes by walking in the road). There’s still a lot of snow on grassy areas such as the cricket ground, but otherwise it is clearing up nicely. I’m starting to feel a bit more confident about next week.

Meanwhile, I have rugby to watch. It is time to dig out the inflatable sheep leek and settle in to cheer on Ryan and the boys. Here’s hoping that they manage to avoid slipping up too.

Working on a Dream

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Herewith are my thoughts on the new Springsteen album, Working on a Dream. Please bear in mind that I’m not a musician, just someone who loves listening to music, and I am definitely not calling this “a review”. Again this is quite long so I’ve hidden most of it behind a cut.
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Visa: The Last Word

~ Cheryl

Kevin and I had a long conference call with the immigration lawyer last night, and the upshot of it was that there really is no visa that it is sensible for me to apply for. There are always options, but they would be very expensive and by no means guaranteed to succeed. As we have spent a lot of money already and got nowhere, we are not inclined to pour good money after bad.

This does not mean that I am banned from the US. It just means that I have to be a lot more careful how I come and go. If I can steal a phrase from Douglas Adams, I am going to be spending a year or two dead for immigration purposes. Fortunately Worldcon will be outside the US for the next two years, so finances permitting I will still be able to go, and by 2011 I’m hoping I’ll be allowed to make short trips to the USA again.
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Belated Thanks

~ Cheryl

I’ve not been exactly on the ball over the past few days, but it occurs to me that I ought to thank Ellen Datlow, Pat Cadigan, Kim Newman and Paul McAuley, and also Teddy and Tom, for providing good company and a distraction on Wednesday when I was trying hard not to fall apart. Thanks folks, it was much appreciated.

Travel Update

~ Cheryl

Due to being mired in a bureaucratic swamp, I am not going to be able to make it to the US for ICFA. My lawyer still sounds very hopeful about my getting a visa in the end, but because I am a very square peg who does not fit into any of the nice round holes for which most people get such things, it is going to take time. It would, of course, all be much easier if one could actually make money doing all of the things I go to the US for, but I don’t, so I’m stuck. More news as and when I have it.

But the good news is that this means I shall be in Europe in March and can go to P-Con VI! Dublin! Guinness!

Comments closed on this, because having people venting about such things does not help my cause.

Scalzi Declines

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

John Scalzi has just put up a post about this year’s Hugos. In it he says:

What about Best Fan Writer? I hear you ask. I’ll make it simple: don’t nominate me this year. There are lots of excellent writers out there deserving of this award who have not won it, and I think right now the best thing for this particular award is to have the love spread around for a while, and to have the science fiction community recognize both eligible newer writers and some writers for whom recognition in this category is long overdue. I’ve won it; I’m good, thanks. Give it to someone new.

So, presumably less controversy over that one this year.

I shall miss John’s presence in the race. I don’t think I have a hope in hell of beating him, but his presence gave the category a much higher profile. Also there’s not so much kudos in winning a prize for being the Best Fan Writer Who Isn’t John Scalzi. I guess I’ll just have to write a best selling novel so I can compete with him again.

There will, of course, be people asking why I don’t retire from the category as well. There’s not much that I can say in my defense because I would like to win it, but I can note that I bumped Emerald City out of Fanzine and into Semiprozine after I’d won Fanzine. And I haven’t yet won Fan Writer. Also if I did retire I’d get just as much flak from people saying “who does she think she is, that she assumes she’s bound to get nominated?” Which would be quite reasonable because there are a lot of good people out there. Hopefully, as John says, we’ll see some fresh faces.

New Job

~ Cheryl ~ 15 Comments

Now there’s a good way to start the new year.

As announced here, I have been asked to take over as non-fiction editor of Clarkesworld Magazine. As is the way of such things, this is yet another part time job I have added to my collection, but Clarkesworld is a paying venue (10c per word for non-fiction) and is serious about being a commercial operation. So while this is going to be a lot of fun, it is a real job too.

I’m currently working on a revised set of submission guidelines, but they are not going to be that different from the existing ones, which you are welcome peruse (and which I think were written by Nick Mamatas). Once I have got that sorted I shall be nudging various people that I’d like to see submissions from.

One thing that you should be aware of is that we do not publish book reviews. That’s not going to change just because I’m in charge. Critical essays are fine (as long as they are accessible), but please don’t send me reviews.

Also don’t expect any obvious changes in the near term. Articles get bought several months in advance and the previous editor (the very wonderful Ekaterina Sedia) has a few good ones in the pipeline.

I’m very grateful to Neil for giving me this opportunity. Here’s hoping that some good stuff comes from it. In the meantime, you can help by supporting the magazine. The more money that comes in, the more budget I’ll have to buy articles.

So, that was Sekrit Projekt #3, which came together very quickly this week. Here’s hoping that Sekrit Projekts #1 and #2 get to be official soon too.

Where Is Everyone?

~ Cheryl

I figured that today would be a pretty stupid day to go shopping, but I needed something for dinner and I had some free money from Borders that needed spending, so off I went. And lo, the shops were almost deserted.

I guess maybe everyone was sleeping in after the midnight revels. Maybe no one has any money left. Certainly all of the stores that were going to have sales had already started them, and the sale stock was already well picked over. On the other hand, the 30% off all CDs and DVDs at Borders was till in operation, and they had plenty of stock. For example I could, if I had wanted to, have bought the entire run of Babylon 5 at 30% off. But I’m trying not to be too extravagant at the moment.

Anyway, for whatever reason, January 1st is Not What It Was.

That Time of Year

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

My goodness, is it 2009 in Australia already. I must have overslept.

Well of course it is nearly 11:00am in California, but I’ve been reading stuff for a few hours before actually getting to post anything.

Anyway, here’s hoping that all of you folks out there have a very wonderful 2009. By the law of averages I guess some of you probably will. My apologies to those who end up on the down tail, but my nose wiggling isn’t up to affecting the entire world.