Readings

Shadowboxer Launch in Bristol

~ Cheryl

Shadowboxer - Tricia SullivanTricia Sullivan’s Shadowboxer is now available in stores, but we’ll be doing a launch event for it on the Friday before BristolCon. This is part of our local outreach program. It is a free event in the Bristol Foyles (who have a lovely event space) with doors opening at 5:30pm for a 6:00pm start. You don’t need to be a BristolCon member to attend. We’ll be finished by 7:30pm because some of us need to be back in the Doubletree for the Fringe open mic session (which is also free and doesn’t require BristolCon membership).

Several of the other authors attending BristolCon are coming along to support Trish, and will doubtless also be willing to sign stuff while they are there. Thus far we have Jonathan L. Howard, Anne Lyle, and BristolCon GoH, Jon Courtenay Grimwood. If you hope to attend, please sign up here. It is free, buy Foyles need numbers to work out how many books to order.

PS – I have read the book. If you see anyone out there claiming that it is transphobic, send them to me.

Margaret Atwood in Bath

~ Cheryl

This evening I attended an event in Bath organized by Toppings. It was a reading by Margaret Atwood who is on tour promoting the paperback release of Madaddam and her new short story collection, The Stone Mattress.

Atwood began by reading from one of the stories in The Stone Mattress, which was hilarious. She said later on Twitter that she’d not read from that story before. If you go to one of her future events, ask her to read from it again.

The bits she read from Madaddam all involved Toby trying to communicate with the Crakers. Well, the Crakers might have rabbit genes, but I have cat genes and I’m always tempted to swat them about a bit. If the Crakers are the future of monkey-kind, I suspect I shall have no qualms about eating them.

Then again, they are very funny.

I had a brief chat with Atwood about the Cheltenham dystopias panel while I was getting my books signed. As it happens, she has an essay in In Other Worlds on the subject of utopian and dystopian fiction, which I had already read, so that’s her input to the panel sorted. (She is in Cheltenham on Saturday, but only very briefly for her own appearance.)

On learning that I blogged about books, Atwood recommend that I read Chuck Wendig (who of course I know of) and Titou Le Coq (who appears to blog only in French, but I can make an effort at understanding that).

If you happen to be reading this, Margaret, I recommend that you try Kameron Hurley, Aliette de Bodard, N.K. Jemisin and Madeline Ashby.

VanderMeers in Bristol

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Last night I got to interview two of my favorite people: Ann & Jeff VanderMeer. This was at an event at The Lansdown co-sponsored by BristolCon, Bristol Festival of Literature, Small Stories and Wizard’s Tower. I don’t think I was at my best, thanks to a case of con crud, but people seemed to enjoy the interview. They also had some other great things to see and hear.

This was mainly down to the Small Stories folks. Nat and Sian worked very hard, producing goodies bags for the attendees, and even posters. They also arranged for two additional forms of entertainment. Firstly there was a live reading of part of one of the stories from The Time Traveler’s Almanac. The reader was a professional actor, who did a great job. Hopefully someone can supply me with his name. (Update: Aaron Anthony, I’m told.)

The other piece of entertainment the live creation of a painting by local artist, Luke Sleven. This was inspired by a variety of VanderMeer productions, including The Time Traveler’s Almanac and Last Drink Bird Head. Here is a slightly askew photo of it taken on my cell phone. Hopefully someone has a better picture.

Time traveling bird head

In addition we had some fabulous squid cake, provided by Pat Hawkes-Reed.

Squid cake

Huge thanks to Nat, Sian, Pete Sutton and everyone else involved.

Tonight Jeff will be reading at Mr. B’s Emporium of Reading Delights in Bath. I’d encourage you to go, but it is sold out.

July Fringe Readings

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

The podcasts for the July BristolCon Fringe events are now available.

First up we have YA author, Andy Goodman. Andy writes mainly for boys, and we’ll come back to the issue of gendered marketing during the Q&A. His reading is from the start of his novel, Tiberius Found.

The second reader was Ken Shinn, whose only current publication is in Airship Shape & Bristol Fashion. You may remember that he read from that back in February. Ken’s story is about summoning demons, and Benny Hill, and a drunken otter. Ken was supposed to be on first, but he got stuck in traffic. Andy commented afterwards that he was very glad he didn’t have to follow Ken.

The Q&A turned out to be very interesting because we got into a conversation about gendered marketing of YA books. Andy assured us that publishers are moving away from this now, at least in part because they have discovered that the kids don’t like it. This is very good news.

Also in the Q&A, Pete Sutton and I talk about the fabulous Small Stories: Big Books event that we are curating with Ann & Jeff VanderMeer for the end of August. Last I looked there were only 5 places left (out of 50), which is really pleasing. I’ll be talking to Nat from the Small Stories group on Ujima on Wednesday, so expect more coverage of the event then.

Hopefully you’ll notice an improvement in the audio quality this month. We got to use the new amp that Jo bought, and a wired microphone. This cut out a lot of the crackle. We are still sorting out how to best record direct from the amp, which will hopefully improve things further. There was actually a lot of noise from the air conditioning that night, but because it was very predictable noise I was able to clean it out.

As Claire notes in the Q&A, the next Fringe event is on August 18th, when I’ll be in London at Worldcon. I’m not sure yet what is happening with recordings for that.

By the way, I’m pleased to see that listener figures for these podcasts continue to go up. That means that last month’s readers, Pete Sutton and David Rodger, have the biggest audiences, outstripping Gareth Powell and the Flash session with me in it. Gareth will be back with his new novel in a few months, so I’m sure he’ll get his crown back soon. We broke 900 listeners last month. I’m looking forward to hitting the thousand. FYI, around 32% of the audience is from the USA, and 28% from the UK. Finland is the next biggest market, followed by Sweden and Australia.

The Kids Are Revolting, In a Good Way

~ Cheryl

Last night’s BristolCon Fringe meeting was very interesting in two ways. Firstly, Ken Shinn had us agog with a tale about a demonic version of Benny Hill who has a drunken otter for a familiar. In addition our other guest, Andy Goodman, had some very interesting things to say in the Q&A.

Andy writes fiction primarily aimed at teenage boys. I asked him about that market, and was delighted to hear him say that there is now pressure from publishers for authors to move away from the “books for boys / books for girls” marketing philosophy, and instead to produce books that can be enjoyed by young people regardless of their gender.

It is not entirely clear why, and it may well be in part due to the pressure that parents have been putting on them. However, Andy’s anecdotal evidence suggests that practical experience has played a part. I’ve been saying for years that if you pinkify a book then boys are not going to read it. It appears that the message has got through to publishers that by packaging books by women as “for girls” they are cutting off half of their potential audience. Here’s hoping that this message spreads throughout the publishing industry.

The audio from the readings should be online early in August.

July Fringe

~ Cheryl

Since I have got back from Finland pretty much all I have wanted to do is sleep. However, it has just penetrating my fogged brain that there will be a BristolCon Fringe event on Monday, which I guess I must be hosting.

The two readers are Andy Goodman & Kenneth Peter Shin. Ken has a story in Airship Shape & Bristol Fashion, which he read at Fringe a while back. I’m looking forward to seeing what he comes up with next. I don’t know anything about Andy, so I guess I’d better do some sleuthing before Monday evening.

Anyway, I hope to see some of you there. Also we’ll be trialing the new amp that Jo has bought, which hopefully means much better quality recordings.

Update: via Pete Sutton on Twitter it appears that Andy Goodman is indeed this chap.

Fringe Special at Word of Mouth

~ Cheryl

Once a year the BristolCon crowd takes over Word of Mouth, a monthly reading series run by Tangent Books and hosted by the Thunderbolt pub. Normally we’d put these readings on the BristolCon Fringe podcast stream, but that has limited capacity and these readings turned out to be quite long, so they are being hosted by Salon Futura instead.

The three readers are Pete Sutton, Joanne Hall and Scott Lewis. In Part 1 Pete’s story is a rare (for him) science fiction piece. Jo reads from her latest novel, The Art of Forgetting: Nomad. And Scott reads the first part of a steampunk horror story that will conclude in Part 2.

In part 2 Joanne Hall reads from a currently unsold novel, The Summer Goddess. Pete Sutton reads a story from a collection he is writing in which each story is inspired by the counting magpies folk song. Scott Lewis reads the rest of the story that he started in Part 1. It goes on a little, but we were all on the edge of our seats and encouraged Scott to read the whole thing rather than leave us wondering.

My thanks to Richard Jones of Tangent for inviting us to read, and to Dave from the Thunderbolt for being a fine host.

June Fringe Podcasts

~ Cheryl

The audio from the June Fringe meeting is now online. I continue to cringe about the sound quality, but Jo has recently invested in a new amp, so hopefully the next set of readings will be much better.

David J. Rodger was our first reader. He presented a Cthulhu Mythos tale set in Nazi-occupied Norway during WWII. David is clearly aware that all Finns are evil witches.

Pete Sutton gave us a quick peek at a novel he is writing, featuring seven Crusader knights. He followed that by another of his magpie stories.

Finally we have the traditional Q&A.

There are lots of things arising from that which require notes.

When Pete mentions that Jo writes Grimdark he is, of course, referring to our own Joanne Hall, not that Abercrombie fellow who doesn’t have nearly the same body count.

We mention that Pete read another magpie story at something called Word of Mouth. I do have the audio from that, but it turned out to be too long for the BristolCon podbean account (without upgrading) so I’m going to run it on Salon Futura.

David makes mention of something called BRP. That’s Chaosium’s Basic Role Playing system, which formed the core of all of the rule sets they produced back in the day.

If you’d like to know more about David’s work with the Cthulhu Mythos, he has a guest post about it on Pete’s blog. I’d like to have a much longer chat with him about how you use the Mythos these days. A pub event after he’d had a few beers was not the right time to do it.

The deadly Call of Cthulhu scenario that David refers to is “Roots” by Simon Brake which appears in the collection, Things We Leave Behind from Stygian Fox.

And finally, Wikipedia has little to say about alternative versions of the magpie song, other than to confirm Pete’s assertion that the version he is using is older than the one used by the TV programme.

VanderMeers in Bristol

~ Cheryl

Ann & Jeff VanderMeer will be over this side of the pond for Worldcon, the Edinburgh Festival and Eurocon. Before they go home they have kindly agreed to do a couple of events in the South West. One is at Mr B’s on August 26th, but before that they are stopping off in Bristol to talk to me about short fiction.

This event is being put on in conjunction with the Bristol Festival of Literature, and with Small Stories, a local group of writers. Most of the work putting this together has been done by Pete Sutton, for which I am very grateful. Wizard’s Tower is on board as a co-sponsor, as is BristolCon.

If you are in the Bristol area and have any interest at all in writing short fiction you should attend this event. I note that Jeff’s Wonderbook has won the BSFA and Locus Awards for non-fiction (and is getting my vote for the Hugo). Also Ann, as well as being a Hugo-winning editor, is currently an acquiring editor for Tor.com, which I believe is the best-paying SF&F market around right now. Please book up, I expect this to be very popular and I want to know well in advance if we look like having space problems. It is free, and therefore very well worth it.

Nick Harkaway at Mr. B’s

~ Cheryl

Yesterday evening in stopped off in Bath to visit Mr. B’s Emporium of Reading Delights, where Nick Harkaway was due to talk about his latest novel, Tigerman. Those of you who have read the book will know what I mean when I say that it is “roarsome”.

Nick very kindly agreed to do an interview with me before the event. That will be broadcast on Ujima next Wednesday. Nick, as always, was charming, erudite, and full of interesting ideas.

My thanks as always to Mr. B’s for being a fabulous venue. They also excelled themselves with the food last night.

BristolCon Fringe – June Meeting

~ Cheryl

Next Monday (June 16th) I’ll be hosting this month’s BristolCon Fringe event. The readers for June are as follows:

David J. Rodger is a Bristol based author of science fiction dark fantasy with eight novels under his belt. Themes include thrillers, horror and action adventure. He is also the creator of Yellow Dawn – The Age of Hastur, an RPG that blends Cthulhu Mythos and Cyberpunk themes into a post-apocalyptic setting. His books cross many boundaries to deliver a new and exciting fusion of ideas and genres. Each book is stand-alone and can be read in any order, but occupy a shared universe allowing you to build a deeper knowledge with every story. He has written for SFX and had short stories published in the UK, US and Canada. Find him online here.

Pete Sutton works for a French company and once wrote a play — but asks that you don’t hold that against him. He sits in his not so secret lair in the wilds of Fishponds, Bristol and dreams up stories, many of which are about magpies. He’s had some stuff published, although he’s convinced that was by mistake, and currently has a pile of words that one day may possibly be a novel, or at least an approximation of one. You can find him all over social media, sometimes even as himself. He can be found on Twitter as @suttope and his Bristol Book Blog is here & he’s one of the editors of Far Horizons e-magazine which can be found here.

As usual the event takes place at the Shakespeare Tavern from 7:30pm. Full details can be found here. And I’ll podcast the readings some time in July via the BristolCon podbean account.

May Fringe Readings

~ Cheryl

Yesterday’s main task (other than watching the Grand Prix) was editing the audio from the May BristolCon Fringe event. Once again I need to apologize about the quality. With the level of background noise we have, and the poor quality equipment, there’s not a lot I can do.

However, I don’t need to apologize for the readers who were, as usual, highly entertaining.

First up we have Justin Newland, who provided us with three very different short pieces. The first is a fantasy story about desert tribesmen; the second a historical piece about Sir Walter Raleigh, and the third an extract from a novel about Atlantis. The latter is from the first volume of the trilogy, The Genes of Isis, that Justin is writing.

The other reader for May was Cavan Scott. Although most of his work is comics and scripts for franchises, he chose to read us some of his own creations. I’m delighted he did. First up we have an extract from a superhero novel that he is writing. It is set in Bristol and there was considerable excitement about the destruction of the Cabot Circus shopping center. You may recall that Tim Maughan chose the same setting for the climax of his story, “Flight Path Estate”, from Adventure Rocketship. The second story was an extract from a book Cavan is writing as part of a series of short novels aimed at teenage boys who don’t like to read.

I note that the superhero novel is, as yet, unsold. If there are any agents or editors out there who are looking for this sort of thing, I recommend you listen in. Cavan is very good.

Finally we have our traditional Q&A, which is essentially me babling fangirly questions about superheroes. Jo, Roz and Pete manage to bring some order to proceedings by asking intelligent questions about writing.

I do have audio from last week’s Word of Mouth event, but I haven’t had a chance to look at that yet. Next off the rank will be some of the Karen Lord material from Ã…con. I’ve got the interview done, but in doing it I realized that I needed to publish the Post-Colonial SF panel first. And I have the Folklore & SF panel, and the panel game, lined up. Oh, and I still need to write a con report. Back to the grindstone.

Word of Mouth at the Thunderbolt

~ Cheryl

I’ll be in Bristol all day tomorrow. There are no author interviews on the Ujima show, though I will be quite busy on it, I think. In the evening I’ll be at The Thunderbolt pub for Word of Mouth, a monthly readings series curated by Richard Jones of Tangent Books. This month the event has been turned over to BristolCon. The readers will be Pete Sutton, Scott Lewis and Joanne Hall. I will be hosting the event. Hopefully I’ll get recordings.

Murder, Magic & Cake

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

I was in Bristol yesterday evening. I should, perhaps, have been at the County Ground to watch Somerset crush Gloucestershire in the first T20 match of the season, but instead I spent my time at Waterstones in the company of Ben Aaronovitch, Paul Cornell and Jasper Fforde.

Thanks to David Barnett’s fine Guardian article, we had an excellent crowd. At least 80 tickets were sold in advance, and there may have been more on the night. What’s more, lots of people bought books. Copies of The Severed Streets sold out. More of that later.

I know Paul very well, so I knew we’d be fine together. I’d not met Ben or Jasper before, though Paul knew Ben well from Doctor Who. (This is the first time I’d ever done a panel with two Doctor Who writers.) As it turned out, everyone got on very well, and we had a great panel. That is, the authors were all happy afterwards, and we’ve been getting some very positive feedback on Twitter. The store staff were very happy too.

I’m really pleased we got to do this, because for a long time I have been irritated by the way that conventions bring a host of big name writers into a city and then sequester them away in a hotel all weekend. The main reason for that, of course, is that convention staff are too busy with their own event to do outreach. Kudos to Crimefest for allowing BristolCon to do their outreach for them.

Thanks are also due to Pat Hawkes-Reed who provided some lovely cake for the evening.

I did record the event but I don’t know yet whether the audio will be usable. Fingers crossed. In the meantime here are a couple of bits of what may be news to most of you.

Firstly Ben will be writing some Rivers of London comics. As I understand it, the idea is to fill in some background around the series, rather than do adaptations of the novels, or new Peter Grant adventures. Ben and Paul, knowing each other from old, occasionally had a friendly dig at each other, the most obvious of which was when Ben declared that writing comics was easy. We shall see.

Paul’s announcement was that one of the characters in The Severed Streets is a writer of dark fictions called Neil Gaiman. I’ve just got to the point in the book where Neil is introduced, and I must say that Paul has got his speech patterns off pat. It remains to be seen what role he will play in the narrative, but those of you who have read Fallen London will understand what I mean that I say it is revealed that Neil moved to the US because he acquired the Sight. I understand that Amanda gets a mention in the book too, but doesn’t appear in person.

I should add that I was really impressed with Japser Fforde. Of course it helps that his books feature an independent Socialist Republic of Wales. Hopefully we’ll be able to lure him to BristolCon at some point.

My thanks once again to all involved, including the many people who came along to see the show. It was fun.

May Fringe: Cavan Scott & Justin Newland

~ Cheryl

The May BristolCon Fringe event takes place next Monday. Our two guests readers are as follows:

Justin Newland lives in Somerset with his girlfriend and writes historical, fantasy and speculative fiction with a supernatural bent. Excerpts of his work have entertained listeners at various events in the Bristol area. He published a short story in an anthology entitled Hidden Bristol and appeared as a panellist at last year’s Bristol Con.

Justin has been a member of writers’ groups in Bath and Bristol. He is currently, he is writing the first novel of his magnum opus, a pre-apocalyptic trilogy entitled The Genes of Isis.

Regular podcast listeners will know Justin as “the man who asks questions”. This month we get to turn the tables.

Sunday Times Bestselling Author Cavan Scott has written numerous books, audio dramas and comics based on popular cult series as Doctor Who, Blake ‘s 7, Highlander and The Tomorrow People.

He specialises in writing licenced fiction for children, and recently has been writing a line of horror stories for teenage reluctant readers. He’s edited magazines in many different markets from Countryfile to Disney Girl, and writes Roger the Dodger, Bananaman and Minnie the Minx for the Beano.

Yes folks, you read that correctly. We have a man who writes for the Beano! Be there, or be custard-pied.

As usual we will be at the Shakespeare Tavern from 7:00pm or so, with the readings due to start at 7:30pm. Full details here.

Magic Murder in The Guardian

~ Cheryl

Thanks to David Barnett, the Murder Most Magical event has got a nice preview in The Guardian. I guess it is online only, but it is nice to be able to get some good PR for the event. The article does contain a few quotes by me, but it also has Paul Cornell whose contributions are very sharp. My main priority was to get a wide variety of people mentioned. You can find the article here.

Several of the issues that David raises will doubtless get covered in the discussion tomorrow night. I have a few more up my sleeve to toss in as well. And yes, I do plan to record it.

Fringe in a Flash Podcasts

~ Cheryl

Girl at the end of the World: Vol 2Yes, it is podcast overload this week. But hey, we have some good writers; and me.

The April Fringe event was organized for us by the ever-busy Kevlin Henney, Bristol’s Mister Flash. It was devoted entirely to flash fiction, and as such had far more than the usual number of readers. In fact we had eight. The evening was split into three parts, the first two with four readers each, and the final section being the Q&A. That’s how I have edited the podcasts.

We did have a slight technical issue on the night, which resulted in my having to spend the first session stood in front of the readers with a recorder. Thankfully this does not seem to have put them off. Normal service was resumed for the rest of the event. The main consequence of this was that, in the absence of any amplification, we picked the people with the loudest voices to go first.

Pauline Masurel entertained us with a couple of cosmologically-themed stored, including one involving Professor Brian Cox doing something he has never done before: get pregnant.

Jonathan Pinnock has a very disturbing tale involving collecting an unusual order from a butcher.

Jonathan L. Howard read a story from his GOON SQUAD series of stories about a special operations police unit from Manchester who happen to be superheroes. You’ll never see werewolves in the same light again.

And finally Kevlin Henney treated us to the true story of Little Red Riding Hood.

At the start of part 2 Louise Gethin read us a story about the secret lives of garden gnomes.

Then there was me. The piece I read is called “The Dragon’s Maw”, and it will be appearing in The Girl at the End of the World: Vol. 2, forthcoming from Fox Spirit later this year (cover above). It is sort of a mash-up of Assyrian mythology and quantum physics. This is the first time I’ve ever read my own fiction in public, and I can see from the recording that I don’t have sufficient confidence in my voice to do dramatic readings. Anyway, as far as my fiction goes, this is not awful. On the way to Finland I showed it to Liz Hand and John Clute, and they did not laugh.

Next up is Justin Newland with a story about hell inspired by the card for The Devil in the tarot deck. Justin will be back for the May reading with something a little longer.

And finally we have Pete Sutton with a creepy story about having a little brother.

With so many readers the Q&A subjects varied far and wide, but we finally settled down to talk about writing; in particular how and why one would want to write flash in preference to any other length.

Hopefully you’ll enjoy it all. The next Fringe event is on Monday (May 19th), and I’ll do a post about that later in the week.

Airship Ball Recordings

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Queenie GreenThe recordings of the readings from the Airship Ball are now available on the BristolCon podbean account. This is the event that we ran to celebrate the launch of Airship Shape & Bristol Fashion.

It was a very fine event that featured music from Cauda Pavonis and a great number of fine costumes. The picture to the left shows Heike Harding-Reyland dressed as one of the fern people from Deborah Walker’s story, “The Lesser Men Have No Language”.

The recordings highlight three stories from the book.

First up John Hawkes-Reed talks about how to hack a steam-powered war elephant of the type featured in his story, “Miss Butler and the Handlander Process”. The sound quality is a bit poor, and John had a bunch of pictures on his laptop which obviously don’t come out very well in audio. However, the script for the whole presentation, including the pictures, is available to be read here (PDF).

Next up we have Deborah Walker’s dramatization of Jo Hall’s story, “Brass & Bone”. The cast is as follows:

  • The narrator: Joanne Hall
  • The Unfortunate Mrs. Angela Porter: Myfanwy Rodman
  • The Dastardly Mr. Howard Porter: Ken Shinn
  • Dr. Charles: Désirée Fischer

I must say that Ken is very good at being dastardly. 😉

The final recording is of Pete Sutton’s story, “Artifice Perdu”, which I believe Pete dramatized himself. The cast is as follows:

  • The narrator: Peter Sutton
  • Mr. John Loughborough Pearson: Duncan
  • Mr. George Merryweather: Scott Lewis
  • A sailor: Claire Hutt
  • A rude labourer: Ken Shinn

At the end there’s the embarrassing bit in which Jo & Roz present me with some lovely cheese as a thank you present for publishing the book. I have eaten the cheese. It was as good as I expected.

Tomorrow I’ll be uploading the readings from the last BristolCon Fringe, which is even more embarrassing because it includes a piece of flash fiction by me. Don’t say I don’t give you plenty to laugh at.

Murder Most Magical Reminder

~ Cheryl

The Severed Streets - Paul CornellThis is a reminder that on Friday I will be hosting a very special event at Waterstones Bristol. It is titled Murder Most Magical, and it will feature three very fine writers of fantastical mysteries: Ben Aaronovitch, Paul Cornell and Jasper Fforde. It will be the first place in the country that you can get your hands on Paul’s new novel, The Severed Streets.

Doors open at 7:00pm at Waterstones in The Galleries. The store tells me that they are expecting a big turnout, so we won’t start until around 7:30pm to give everyone time to get seated. Please don’t assume this means you can arrive at 7:45pm. We do need to get the authors out of there and fed. There may also be restrictions on the number of books each author will sign. Tickets are £3 and are only available from the store, but if you ask nicely someone in Bristol will pop in and buy some for you.

Talking of Paul, I saw him tweeting yesterday that he and Caroline had been in Bristol because Caroline had a job interview for a vicarship in the city. Are we excited? You bet!

Introducing Fringe St. Lucia

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

This information is mainly for people in the Caribbean, London and Brighton, but you never know who might find it useful.

Fringe St. Lucia is a series of events celebrating the 35th Anniversary of the island’s independence. It is already underway in St. Lucia, but as of the end of next week the action moves to Brighton where it will become part of the Brighton Festival. Finally in June some events are taking place elsewhere in the UK, primarily in London. Full details are available here.

The event I really want to get to is Pink Lime, which is in Brighton on May 29th. It features Adam Lowe, Dean Atta, Dorothea Smartt and Thomas Glave. That’s a full evening of Afro-Caribbean LGBT folks. Awesome.