Books

This Week’s Women’s Outlook Show

~ Cheryl

Sorry this is a bit late. I’ve been rather busy with doing trans awareness training and various LGBT-related meetings in Bristol. Here’s what we had on Wednesday’s show.

The first hour was mainly my interview with Guy Gavriel Kay about Children of Earth and Sky. Guy and I talked for almost an hour, and I managed to boil that down to three 7-8 minute segments. I’ll post the whole thing on Salon Futura later. The discussion will be of particular interest to Croatian readers. There are brief mentions of Mihaela and Iggy.

After the second ad break I talked a bit about Prince, and other black musicians who died recently. Any recommendations as to what Papa Wemba songs I should play would be gratefully received. I also chatted brief with Olly Rose about musical heroes, “dad music” and the like. (Or in my case more like grandma music.)

You can listen to the first half of the show here. Thankfully it is audio only, so you can’t see me playing air guitar along with Nils Lofgren.

The second half of the show begins with me talking to Olly Rose about their fabulous sf audio comedy, Ray Gunn and Starburst. Series 1 is well worth a listen, and if you want to contribute to the crowdfunding campaign for series 2 you can do so here.

My final guest this week was Paul Cornell. We talked mainly about his new Shadow Police novel, Who Killed Sherlock Holmes? Because Paul and I know each other rather well the conversation went a bit off the rails in places and there was giggling. Paul will be reading from the book at BristolCon Fringe later this month, and at a book launches at Forbidden Planet London and Bristol a few days later.

You can listen to the second half of the show here.

The playlist for the show was as follows:

  • When Doves Cry – Prince
  • I Feel For You – Chaka Khan
  • Manic Monday – The Bangles
  • Purple Rain – Bruce Springsteen
  • Let’s Go Crazy – Prince
  • Little Red Corvette – Prince
  • How Come You Don’t Call Me? – Alicia Keys
  • 1999 – Prince

All of the songs were written by Prince.

I’ll be back on air on May 18th, with Mike Carey. Mike and I are doing two interviews that day: once on the radio and once at Waterstones in the evening. I’m currently reading Fellside and am very impressed.

Introducing SharkPunk

~ Cheryl

I have email from Jonathan Green asking me to promote the call of submissions for SharkPunk 2, an anthology of genre fiction featuring sharks. There has been a SharkPunk 1, which apparently featured:

space sharks, ghost sharks, Franken-sharks, psychological sharks, and “sharks with frikkin’ laser-beams attached to their heads”

The book will be financed through a Kickstarter campaign and published by SnowBooks. Payment will be £50, a copy of the book, and royalties if it earns out. Word count is 3,500 to 7,000. Further details here.

So: pirate sharks, zombie sharks, kick-ass woman warrior sharks… Or maybe alien shark people who decided that Earth has to be destroyed because the dominant indigenous species is too vicious and needs to be culled. It is entirely up to you. Good luck!

New From Aqueduct

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

I have email today from the very fine people at Aqueduct Press, informing me of new books that they have available. A couple of them look very interesting.

The first is a new novel from Andrea Hairston. Will Do Magic for Small Change is a follow-up of sorts (though a couple of generations later) to her Redwood and Wildfire, which won the Tiptree and Kindred awards. It looks like a really interesting book.

Of great interest to me, though possibly not to many of you, is The Merril Theory of Lit’ry Criticism, a collection of non-fiction writing by the legendary Judith Merril. Given that Samuel Delany describes Merril as, “perhaps the most important intra-genre critic the field has had”, she is someone that every aspiring SF critic needs to read.

Eastern Tide in Store

~ Cheryl

Eastern Tide - Juliet E McKenna
Copies of Eastern Tide, the final volume in Juliet McKenna’s Aldabreshin Compass series, is now available from Google, Kobo and Nook (the latter US only). Amazon are doing their usual thing of making me jump through hoops to prove that I have the right to sell the book, but they’ll probably be on board tomorrow sometime. Links to the purchase pages of the books are available here.

Update: Eastern Tide is now available from Amazon as well.

Fantastically Horny: Final Reminder

~ Cheryl

The crowdfunding effort for the Far Horizons Press anthologies has just a few days to run. It is a flexible funding thing, so the books are going to happen even though it is a long way from the target. I would, of course, like to be paid for my story, but more importantly I’d like the other contributors to get paid. Every little helps.

By the way, thanks to the BristolCon Foundation for contributing to the fund drive. Part of their purpose is to support local writers and publishers, and while I have an obvious vested interest this is clearly well within their remit.

Tide Coming In

~ Cheryl

Eastern Tide - Juliet E McKenna, art by Ben Baldwin
Eastern Tide, the final volume in Juliet E McKenna’s Aldabreshin Compass series, will be available in the usual ebook stores later this week. Once again we have some magnificent cover art by Ben Baldwin. Juliet has various guest posts planned for this week, and the first one is up already. It is part of the “Nobody Knew She Was There” series on Sarah Ash’s blog.

More news later this week.

And with the Aldabreshin Compass series finished, I need to find something for Wizard’s Tower to do next. Expect news.

Mike Carey and Me in Bristol

~ Cheryl

As many of you will know, Mike Carey has a new book out: Fellside. Mike is doing a promotional event at Waterstones in Bristol on the evening of May 18th. I am delighted to have been asked to interview him. The event is free, but the store would like people to sign up on EventBrite so that they have some idea of numbers. It will be awesome.

And with any luck, as it is a Wednesday, I will have Mike on Ujima as well. That’s dependent on his travel arrangements, but hopefully we can make it work.

By the way, I’ve just bagged a great interview with Guy Gavriel Kay for the May 4th episode of Women’s Outlook.

Fight Like A Girl – The Audio

~ Cheryl

I have the Fight Like A Girl audio online now. First up are the three readings, which are by Lou Morgan, Sophie E. Tallis and Danie Ware. They only got five minutes each. If you want to know what happens next, you’ll have to buy the book.

In addition there is the discussion panel, which I moderated. The panelists are Joanne Hall, K.T. Davies, Gaie Sebold and Dolly Garland.

You may have noticed that I was particularly brainless that day. The Indian queen whose name I was trying to remember was Rudhramadevi. Gaie Sebold and Gail Simone are two separate people (and both awesome). The frequent references to boxing were because Marc Aplin of Fantasy Faction, who is a boxer, was in the audience.

If you want to see the video of girls doing fighting demos you need to check out yesterday’s post.

My apologies for the occasional bits of background noise on both podcasts.

You can find a review of the book, and full contents list, here.

And finally, here is the awesome cover by Sarah Anne Langton which, we discovered at the launch, glows under black light.

Fight Like A Girl - Roz Clarke & Joanne Hall (eds)

Fight Like A Girl On Film

~ Cheryl

The fabulous Roz Clarke has made a movie of the Fight Like A Girl launch event. You can watch it below. It does of course include the notorious pirate, Captain Morgan. I took the hat off for the panel so that everyone could see the other panelists.

I have been working on editing the audio. The full versions of all three readings are ready to be posted. Hopefully I’ll get the panel discussion done soon. I won’t be posting audio of the fighting demonstrations, partly because the presenters were not mic’ed so the audio quality is poor, and partly because what they say makes no sense without the pictures.

Sarah Hilary Book Launch

~ Cheryl

Sarah Hilary book covers
I love seeing my writer friends doing well, and few local writers have done as well as Sarah Hilary. Her sales have been so good that her publisher has repackaged her first two books to match the new one and issued all three in hardcover. Don’t they look lovely?

Of course I wouldn’t miss one of Sarah’s book launches anyway, because they always feature fabulous food from her friend Lydia Downey. Lydia doesn’t just do Chinese food (as per that link). For last night’s launch she provided salted caramel chocolate brownies. Yum!

Anyway, thanks to Toppings for a great event. And Sarah, I am looking forward to being scared stupid by Tastes Like Fear, and to having you on my radio show sometime soon.

This Week on Ujima: Cavan Scott, Suffragettes & Art

~ Cheryl

My first guest on this week’s Women’s Outlook was Cavan Scott. Cav is a very busy boy. We first talked about his Star Wars tie-in novels, one of which was chosen for World Book Day and went on to become the best selling book in the UK for a while. We talked about his forthcoming Sherlock Holmes novel, The Patchwork Devil. We talked about his comics and radio play work on Doctor Who. And of course we talked about The Beano, for which he writes Mini the Minx and several other strips.

For Bristol people, Cav’s book launch for The Patchwork Devil is on April 30th at Forbidden Planet. It is a lunchtime event.

You can listen to the first hour of the show here.

Next up on the show was our expert on suffragettes, Lucienne Boyce. She was in to tell us all about a local screening of Make More Noise, a compilation of silent film coverage of actual suffragettes from the first two decades of the 20th Century.

Finally I welcomed Ruth Kapadia from the local office of The Arts Council. We talked about the sort of work that The Arts Council does, and how people can apply for grants.

You can listen to the second hour of the show here.

Of course I also talked quite a bit about the cricket. West Indies are currently world champions for the Twenty20 format at under 19 level, in the women’s game, and in the men’s game. The entire Caribbean is celebrating, and we celebrated with them. All of the music was related to the cricket in some way. Here’s the playlist:

  • We are the Champions – Queen
  • Dreadlock Holiday – Boney M
  • Champion – DJ Bravo
  • Da Cricket Loba Gatama – Latif Nangarhari
  • Cloth – Bullets
  • Come Rise with Me – Machal Montano & Claudette Peters
  • Gavaskar – Andy Narell & Lord Relator
  • David Rudder – Rally Round the West Indies

Fighting Like A Girl

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Today I took myself off to Bristol (by road because the train line between Bath and Bristol is closed for engineering works). I was taking part in the launch event for Fight Like a Girl, the latest anthology from by good friends Jo Hall and Roz Clarke. It was held in The Hatchet, one of Bristol’s older eating establishments (it dates from 1606), which was entirely appropriate for a bunch of fantasy writers.

The entertainment for the day included readings from Lou Morgan, Sophie Tallis and Danie Ware. There was also a discussion panel, chaired by me and featuring Dolly Garland, Gaie Sebold, KT Davies and Jo Hall. And there was the thing everyone had come to see: martial arts demonstrations from Juliet McKenna and Fran Terminiello.

Juliet, of course, did Aikido. Using Fran as a partner, she demonstrated a variety of ways of dealing with an armed attacker, most of which were shockingly swift and looked like with a bit more force they could easily result in a broken wrist, elbow or knee. Just for good measure, Juliet also demonstrated how you can get an opponent armed with a knife to cut his own throat without having to get your fingerprints on the weapon.

Fran, together with colleague Lizzie, demonstrated a variety of sword fighting techniques from the Renaissance period onward. They made a good team. Fran has a dancer’s body and is great with a rapier. Lizzie is taller and more muscular, and looks really good with a landsknecht greatsword.

Assuming all of the tech worked, I have audio of everything. The audio of the fight demos probably won’t work as the participants were not miked up and sound alone won’t make much sense, but hopefully I have the readings and panel for you. Roz was taking video on her phone. Hopefully that will come out.

It was an excellent day, very well attended, including by a bunch of local writers such as Gareth Powell, Liz Williams and Jonathan Howard. We do really good book launches in Bristol.

Time to Fight Like a Girl

~ Cheryl

My good friends Jo Hall and Roz Clarke have a new book due out soon. It is called Fight Like a Girl, and it features women SF&F authors writing about woman warriors. Here’s the blub:

What do you get when some of the best women writers of genre fiction come together to tell tales of female strength? A powerful collection of science fiction and fantasy ranging from space operas and near-future factional conflict to medieval warfare and urban fantasy. These are not pinup girls fighting in heels; these warriors mean business. Whether keen combatants or reluctant fighters, each and every one of these characters was born and bred to Fight Like A Girl.

Featuring stories by Roz Clarke, Kelda Crich, K T Davies, Dolly Garland, K R Green, Joanne Hall, Julia Knight, Kim Lakin-Smith, Juliet McKenna, Lou Morgan, Gaie Sebold, Sophie E Tallis, Fran Terminiello Danie Ware, Nadine West

The launch event is in Bristol on Saturday. It promises to be even more spectacular that the event we put on for the Spark & Carousel launch at BristolCon. It will, after all, have a live swordplay demonstration. It will also have a discussion panel chaired by moi.

If you are in the area and would like to attend, tickets are available here (and include food).

And if you can’t, the book will be available from the usual places very soon.

Two Interesting Blog LitCrit Essays

~ Cheryl

As someone who spends a lot of time doing literary criticism I spend a lot of time thinking about how different readers react differently to the same book. That is, after all, important if you are writing reviews. In the last couple of days I have noticed two very interesting blog essays which impinge on this issue.

The first essay is by Dimitra Fimi, and it talks about how authors such as Tolkien and Rowling have tried (largely in vain, I suspect) to control how their work is interpreted by the reader.

Fimi contrasts the control-freakery of these writers with the more relaxed approach of other fantasy writers such as Catherine Fisher (whose work I really need to read). Part of this, of course, will be a result of personality differences between authors. However, Fimi speculates that it is also a result of differences in the amount of worldbuilding done.

Fisher’s books are intrusion fantasies, and so are set in our world. Tolkien, on the other hand, is famous for obsessive subcreation (a term he coined) of a secondary world. Rowling is somewhere in between. Her books are ostensibly set in our world, but much of the action takes place away from the mundane, making the books something like an alternate history. Fimi suggests that the more work a writer has put into subcreation, the more likely they are to want to exert control over how their creation is understood by readers.

Of course worlds are not the only thing that writers create. They also create characters, and that too can result in conflict with readers. I was immediately reminded of the way that Neil Gaiman is often accused of transphobia over A Game of You. Neil, who is wonderfully supportive of trans people, is understandably upset about this. In the paper I wrote for Finncon last year I tried to explain how a certain type of reader (trans women) were much more likely to react badly to the book than other readers. Reader perspective is important, and authors can’t possibly control how every type of reader will see their work.

Which brings me to the other essay. Lucy Allen, whose blog is mainly about mediaeval books, has been musing about why queer readings of books tend to be dismissed as fanciful even when they have as much scholarship backing them up as other interpretations of the text.

I see very much the same sort of thing in reactions to attempts to do LGBT history. There is a common assumption that queer people didn’t exist in the past, and that any history of such people must be (to use an accusation often thrown at book reviews) “reading something into the text that simply isn’t there”.

The answer, I think, is that cis-het readers are primed to not see queer people. We are brought up to not talk about such things. Unless someone is specifically tuned to the sort of clues that queer people are used to seeing, they won’t see the queer aspects of the text, and will be surprised, even shocked, to see them highlighted. That’s especially so if the reader has been primed to regard queer people as disgusting.

All of this has implications for the campaign for diversity in books. As I have probably said here before, although publishers are now very keen to have books with trans content (because we are flavor of the month), what they want is books written for cis people about trans people. They want books that cis readers will find comfortable. I’m sure the same sort of problem applies books set in non-white cultures.

The point of diversity in books is to provide books that a wide variety of different readers can relate to. That means that the books have to appeal directly to those readers.

I guess my point is that authors can’t control how their books are read, because there will always be readers who have very different life experiences to their own. The more real diversity we get in publishing, the more obvious that will become.

Crowdfunder, Includes Me

~ Cheryl

The nice people at Far Horizons magazine are running a campaign on Indiegogo in aid of several of their ventures. One of the anthologies included in the campaign is Fantastically Horny, which will contain my story, “Camelot Girls Gone Wild”. For those who don’t remember, Fantastically Horny is a collection of erotic fantasy tales, and my story is the one that I read at the BristolCon flash slam last year. People there seemed to like it, and you can get the ebook for just £5. The Former Heroes anthology looks very interesting too. So why not pop over here and drop a little cash?

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.

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.

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