A Weekend in Wales

~ Cheryl

Last weekend I finally managed to attend one of the writing retreats run by Jo Hall and Roz Clarke. It was held on what is basically a large farm near where Roz & Jo have their own farm. Details here.

The format of these retreats is very flexible, depending on who attends. Jo & Roz are very happy to do workshop type things if people want them, or they can do individual tuition, or they can just let us get on and write. This time turned out to be mostly the latter.

My own situation was that I had several story ideas that just needed time to turn into prose. I ended up writing two short stories, or at least producing first drafts thereof. Other attendees also seemed very busy and produced lots of words. I think we all went away happy.

I would have got more done had I not needed to spend part of Saturday in Carmarthen, but that was worthwhile too. That included a lovely run along the B4300 which follows the course of the River Tywi for much of its length. Sadly there are not many places to stop, and the one I did find had the view obscured by trees. (Sorry, Nicola).

The farm didn’t intrude much on us, though I will note that geese are indeed horrible (to everyone, but especially to large cats). Also the call of a peacock sounds very much like that of a cat in extreme pain.

Anyway, it was fun. Hopefully I can go again soon. Being away from the world for 4 days (wifi is very limited at the farm) was great.

Green Men Going Cheap

~ Cheryl


As I mentioned briefy yesterday, Amazon UK has decided to put The Green Man’s Heir on sale at £0.99 for the whole of March. Juliet and I are, of course, delighted to be able to bring the series to the attention of yet more readers. But equally we don’t see why people outside of the UK should miss out.

Ideally I’d simply match prices all over the world, but it isn’t quite that easy. Your best bet, wherever you live, is Kobo. The book is £0.99 in their UK store, and should be roughly the same price all over the world, subject to the whims of exchange rates.

Update: I’ve been informed by a friend in Europe that Kobo has not put the book on sale there. I’m guessing that’s because I’ve incorrectly understood the vague instructions on their store’s backend. I will try to fix it, but I may not be able to do that without cancelling the sale. Bah!

If you are in the USA you can get a copy from Barnes & Noble at $1.30.

Amazon is a bit weird. They wouldn’t let me reduce the price below $2.99 in the USA, but when I check the page it says the book is $1.33, so it looks like they have it on sale there too. In Europe the lowest I could set was €2.69, and that’s what I’m seeing in France. Amazon stores outside of Europe are probably basing their price on the $2.99 US price.

Sorry it is all so weird, but that’s the trouble with having to work through big, multi-national corporations. If it hadn’t been for Brexit, I would still be able to sell ebooks direct. Which is one of many reasons why I want to see Mr. Putin’s arse kicked.

The BSFA Awards

~ Cheryl

The finalists for this year’s BSFA Awards have been announced, and I am pleased to see that The Green Man’s Challenge is on the list for Best Novel. That’s the second time one of the Green Man books has had this honour. The Green Man’s Foe was also a finalist. And of course The Green Man’s Heir was a finalist for the Rob Holdstock Award from the British Fantasy Society. That’s award nominations for three out of the four books in the series, which is pretty spectacular. Go Juliet!

I’m also pleased to see Worlds Apart: Worldbuilding in Fantasy and Science Fiction on the short list for Non-Fiction. That’s the latest Academia Lunare book, and it contains my essay on worldbuilding with sex and gender, a.k.a. the queer animals essay.

It seems unlikley that either book will win, given the nature of the competition, but it always an honour to be on these short lists and it gives one an excuse to wear a pretty frock to an award ceremony, which I haven’t done in a while.

The full lists, which also include a fiction for younger readers category, and an artwork category, can be found here.

And talking of The Green Man’s Heir, Amazon UK has decided to put the Kindle edition on sale for the whole of March. That will hopefully net Juliet a nice chunk of cash. The book has already sold over 17,000 copies, which is absurdly successful for a small company like Wziard’s Tower. I have dreams of getting past 20,000. To help with that I will be reducing the ebook prices to match (as best I can) on other platforms and other Amazon sites. It takes a while for all of this to go live, and I can’t queue it up in advance because you never quite know whether Amazon will do what they say they will when it comes to special offers. But we have the whole month so hopefully tomorrow all will be in place. If you know of anyone who doesn’t yet have a copy of the book, do let them know.

Introducing Outremer

~ Cheryl

It is late in 2003 and I am in Stafford in Middle England for FantasyCon. It is an up and down event. On the downside, it takes place on the same weekend as the final of the Rugby World Cup. The English win. That chap Wilkinson. I am unhappy. But I am at the convention, at least in part, for the awards. China Miéville is busy finishing writing The Iron Council and has asked me if I will stand in for him at the award ceremony where The Scar is up for Best Novel. So I get to make a speech on China’s behalf, and I get given an ugly little Cthuloid statue to take back to him. Ah well, at least it wasn’t a bust of Lovecraft.

At the banquet I am sat next to a lad from Newcastle called Chaz. We bond over a number of things, including a shared devotion to the San Francisco 49ers. “What have you written?” I ask. “Well,” says Chaz, “I have this fantasy series set in an alternate version of the Crusades, and it has just started to come out in America…”

It is 2003, two years since 9/11 and two years into George W Bush’s quest for vengeance. Crusader rhetoric is the order of the day. The West is cast as Christian, Iran and Iraq are obviously Muslim. Tony Blair has recently deployed the Dodgy Dossier; David Kelly is dead; and the invasion of Iraq is well underway. This man wants me to read a fantasy series based on the Crusades? It had better be bloody good.

Of course it was.

Outremer is the collective name given to the four Crusader kingdoms founded after the First Crusade. Their actual history is deeply fascinating, and some great historical novels could doubtless be set in them. Brenchley, however, is doing that fantasy thing where a thinly disguised version of real history, with added magical seasoning, allows him to talk about the real world without the associated baggage that readers are likely to bring to it. He can’t have known, when he started writing the books, how appropriate they would become. The first one was published in the UK in 1998. But sometimes we luck into things.

What Chaz didn’t luck into was recognition for what he had created. I did my best with reviews in Emerald City, but the books didn’t capture the imagination in the way I’d hoped. Maybe they were too timely. Maybe there was too much queer stuff for the audience of 20 years ago. Regardless, I am absolutely delighted to have been given the opportunity to bring them to a new audience.

I’m particularly pleased to have the first book nearing completion during LGBT+ History Month. The mediaeval world has been presented to us as relentlessly heterosexual for decades, but we now know that was far from the truth. Human beings have always been queer, and a lot of what actually happened in those days has been carefully excised from history. Slowly modern historians are undoing that erasure. There have even been questions asked of that most macho of men, Richard Couer de Lion. Brenchley is not writing about real people, so there can be no one to say that there is no proof they were queer. Having them in the book is simply portraying the period as it existed, which is a good thing to be doing.

There will be more publicity for Outremer in the coming weeks. I very much hope that the books manage to find a new audience.

One Night in Stratford #LGBTHM22

~ Cheryl

On Thursday evening I will once again be participating in the LGBT+ History Month event at the Shakepspeare’s Birthplace Trust in Stratford-on-Avon. Sadly I won’t be in Shakepeare’s birthplace this time, but a virtual event means that you folks can get to see me in action from all over the world.

The talk I’m doing for them is a short version of my “Girls on Stage” talk, focusing solely on the theatre of 16th and 17th Century England. So no Greeks or Kabuki in this one, but there is so much batshit genderqueer stuff in the plays of the period that there will be no trouble filling the time.

To give folks a flavour of what I’ll be talking about, I have done a blog post for the SBT website. You can find it here.

To book a free place for the entire programme, go here.

Girls On Stage: A Trailer #LGBTHM22

~ Cheryl

The fabulous Gigi from A New Normal asked me if I would mind doing a little chat for LGBT+ History Month. I suggested maybe a bit of a teaser to encourage people to attend my M Shed talk on cross-dressing in the theatre. So we did. Now it is online and you can watch it below.

And if that sparked your interest you can catch the whole talk here. It is on February 24th, and it starts at 7:00pm so it is convenient for some of you folks across the Pond too.

Coronavirus – Day #642

~ Cheryl

Hello again from Plague Island. This is your latest report on the campaign of the Tory Party kill off all of the poor, unfit, brown, queer, old and otherwise undesirable elements of the population. How are they doing?

Well, the infection rate has taken a sharp tumble from the dizzy heights of early January, but it appears to have stabilised at around 1% of the population being infected at any one time, which would have been a record at any time prior to the arrival of Omicron.

Meanwhile the government has been busy. Yesterday four of Bozo’s senior aides resigned. One more followed this morning. Also yesterday the First Minister for Northern Ireland announced his resignation in despair at the mess Brexit has made of his country. Bozo announced that he had actually fired all of these people and that he was “taking back control”.

Also today there was a report that staff are leaving the UK’s Equality and Human Rights Commission in significant numbers. “It was as if Baroness Falkner and the Board wanted people who actually cared about human rights to leave,” said one ex-staff member. Falkner was appointed to head the organisation by Liz Truss, apparently with a specific mission to take away trans people’s civil rights, and to rubbish the idea that things such as racism and Islamophobia could exist.

Truss, when she is not busy campaigning to take over Bozo’s job while professing total loyalty to him, is planning to host a major LGBT+ Rights conference in London this summer. Business leaders believe that she is hoping to close some major trade deals for exporting the majority of the UK’s LGBT+ population to other countries.

Fear not, though, dear readers, all is not lost. Bozo has come up with a brilliant plan for defeating the Coronavirus. He is going to stop publishing data on cases. That way no one will ever contract the disease in the UK again, let alone die of it. He is understandably proud of his genius.

LGBT+ History Month is here

~ Cheryl

Yes, it is February again, which means I am going to be busy doing talks. There will be only two public ones this year, and both will feature my new theme for this year: crossdressing in the theatre. This was inspired by reading some great research on the boys who actually played women in Shakespeare’s plays. I hope that the Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust would pick up on it, and they did. I will be part of an Outing the Past event on February 17th. See here for details.

One of the things that delighted me about this is that, in researching the talk, I discovered that our Will was really quite conservative. Other plays written by his contemporaries were much more queer, including some actual trans material.

I’m doing a related talk for my friends at M Shed Museum in Bristol. It turns out that they have a fine collection of Japanese prints, including a number of portraits of kabuki actors. Also they wanted a much longer talk, so this one will visit ancient Greece, mediaeval China and Japan as well as Elizabethan/Victorian England. It is on February 24th, and you can book here.

M Shed also has a bunch of other talks that I have helped curate, including ones by my friends Andrew Foyle and Norena Shopland, and one by a Chinese queer activist, Qiuyan Chen. Check out the What’s On listing for details.

There are, of course, talks happening all over the country. This year some of the hubs are doing in person events again, but I suspect that quite a few will be virtual still. You can find a list of all the events here.

I’m doing a bunch of talks for private clients too. That doesn’t mean I’m getting big bucks, it means it is for a local or company LGBT+ group and they want to restrict access to members. This is mainly repeats, but I’ll possibly be doing one for Trans Day of Visibility in March that might turn into next year’s public talk.

New Locus – Contains Me

~ Cheryl

A new issue of Locus was published yesterday, and it is probably the one that people most look forward to each year because it is the one that contains the Recommended Reading List. As usual, I had a part in choosing the books in some of the categories. There are a lot of other people involved, and nothing gets on the list just because I say so. Equally there are books I recommended that didn’t make it. No one is going to think the final list is perfect, but it contains a lot of very good books and stories. You can find the full list here.

This issue also contains an article by me. This coincidence is an artefact of the December Worldcon. I generally write them something about the WSFS Business Meeting, so if you have the magazine you can read that too. Liza and the team have my deepest sympathy for having to do a Worldcon report and the Recommended Reading List in the same issue.

New in the Sidebar

~ Cheryl

The eagle-eyed among you (assuming that anyone actually still reads this) may have noticed something new in the sidebar of this site. It is a little badge saying that I am a member of the Society of Authors. This is a UK organisation, and unlike SFWA it caters to authors of all sorts. I note that Joanne Harris and Juliet McKenna are both members of the elected Management Committee, and Joanne is currently the chair of that group, so I’m well connected.

Some of you are doubtless scratching your heads and wondering why a professional association of writers would let in someone whose fiction is as poor as mine, but that’s not why I joined, and presumably not why I was accepted. I’m doing a lot of history writing these days, some of it for books from mainstream publishers. The academic stuff tends to be unpaid, but it does lead to speaking gigs and those are often paid. Talks have to be written.

The main reason I wanted to join is because the Society provides good value professional indemnity insurance which is geared specifically towards writers, and writers who do public appearances. Given that some of the people I do talks for now have contracts asking me to indemnify them against a whole range of risks, and given the ever increasing litigious nature of the anti-trans lobby, insurance is essential.

Anyway, I now a professional writer of a sort. Which is nice. Even if it doesn’t make me a lot of money.

Dydd Santes Dwynwen Happus!

~ Cheryl

Or Happy Saint Dwynwen’s Day to you English speakers.

But who is Saint Dwynwen, and why should we be happy on her day? Well, she is the Welsh patron saint of lovers, so today is the Welsh version of Valentine’s Day. These days it is associated with almost as much ritual consumerism as the better known love festival.

Valentine was an early Christian martyr, executed for trying to convert the Emperor to his beliefs. He died on February 14th, 269 (according to Catholic Online). It is unclear how he came to be associated with being in love. Dwynwen has a much better claim to the job.

Dwynwen was one of the 24 daughters of King Brychan Brycheiniog, whose territory is the region we now call the Brecon Beacons. She was, naturally, the prettiest of them, and there was competition for her hand. A young man called Maelon Dafodrill was particularly smitten with her. What happened next varies a lot from one story to the next.

Some say that Dwynwen rejected Maelon’s advances and he became furious with her, perhaps even raped her. Others say that she loved him in return but she had been promised to someone else by her father. Whatever happened, she prayed to God for help and he proved remarkably willing to get involved.

There may have been a potion of forgetfulness, provided by an angel, which either erased the pain of the rape, or the pain of losing her love. Also the unfortunate Maelon was turned into a pillar of ice. And finally God granted Dwynwen three wishes.

For the first wish she asked that Maelon be unfrozen forthwith, which shows that she had a rather better understanding of compassion and forgiveness than God.

For the second wish she asked that God take good care of all true lovers, that their lives might prove happier than hers, which is where she got the patron saint job from.

And finally she asked that she be allowed to never marry. She lived out her life in a nunnery, and founded a small church on a little island near Anglesey.

So what are we to make of all this? Was Dwynwen a broken-hearted lover? If so, why did she not just ask God to allow her to marry Maelon? Was she put off men by Maelon’s bad behaviour? Perhaps, but she seemed willig to forgive him. Or maybe she just wasn’t interested in men at all.

What we do know is that she was a kind-hearted girl who wanted the best for others. (She is also the patron saint of sick animals.) And I rather like the idea that the Welsh patron saint of lovers might be lesbian or asexual.

Hugo Nominating Period Opens

~ Cheryl

We are barely a month since the last lot of Hugo Awards were handed out, and it is nominating time again already. Hopefully we are back to the traditional calendar for Worldcon now, and that sort of thing won’t happen again for a while.

Anyway, you can now nominate. If you are not yet a WSFS member for 2022, you have until the end of January to buy at least a Supporting Membership to Chicon 8.

And if you are a WSFS member, voting details can be found here.

As with last year, Salon Futura is eligible in the Fanzine category, and I’m eligible in Fan Writer. Rather more importantly, Salon Futura contains lots of reviews of wonderful stuff that you might want to consider when it comes to filling in your nominating ballot. The nominating stage of the process will end on March 15th, and Finalists are likely to be announced sometime in April.

If y’all don’t get Ryka Aoki on the ballot this year I shall be deeply disappointed in you.

New Salon Futura

~ Cheryl


The December issue was a little late up due to the holidays, but it did go live on January 1st which is not too bad. In it you will find:

Book reviews

  • Beyond the Hallowed Sky by Ken MacLeod
  • The Anthropocene Unconscious by Mark Bould
  • The Memory Theater by Karin Tidbeck
  • The Necropolis Empire by Tim Pratt

TV and Movie reviews

  • The Green Knight
  • Supergirl Season 7
  • Hawkeye
  • Titans Season 3

And to cap it all off one of those very long Worldcon reviews. All the controversy, all the time. And just who was responsible for selling the Hugo Awards to Raytheon (if indeed that happened)?

You can read it all here.

Another Year, Eh?

~ Cheryl

Well, that was 2021. And from the look of things we can expect more of the same in 2022. A surprising amount of good things happened to me despite the pandemic. I’m not going to complain, but equally I’m not looking forward with any confidence. In the last 7 days over 1 million people in the UK have contracted COVID. That’s more than 1% of the population. Thankfully for a lot of people it will be very mild because they are vaccinated, but hospital admission rates are rising rapidly.

I should be going to get food some time next week, but actual shopping seems pretty dangerous so I have signed up for the “click and collect” service from Tesco, which means I just have to drive up to a collection point in the car park, grab my stuff, and leave again. I am fully vaccinated, but as a trans person in the UK I can’t trust the NHS to take care of me the way they would anyone else, so it is maximum isolation for me.

As far as 2022 goes, I’m just planning on doing the day jobs, and making books. Hopefully I will also get a chance to do some good trans history. Here’s hoping that you folks have things to do that make you happy as well.

If you were expecting a new Salon Futura, it is mostly done, and will be finished this evening, but there’s no point in putting it live then because you folks all have better things to be doing than reading my fanzine. It will appear tomorrow.

That Time of Year

~ Cheryl

Hunker down, little cultists, it is that time of year. In the dark of winter, all sorts of strange creatures are abroad. Some pull sleighs through the sky, others are, well, less wholesome. Here for your entertainment, from Mr Ogham Waite and his Amphibian Jazz Band, is that well loved seasonal ditty, “It’s beginning to look a lot like Fishmen.”

Happy Solstice!

~ Cheryl


As usual, my holiday card this year is by my talented friend, Dru Marland. This picture is titled, “Fox on Pickle Hill”, and Juliet McKenna fans will note that I picked it specifically because it features some of the chalk figures from the Wiltshire landscape. These also play a key role in The Green Man’s Challenge.

This particular image is currently unavailable as a card from Dru’s shop. I’m guessing that she has run out of stock. But it does feature in her 2022 Wildlife Calendar which looks an excellent thing to have.

May you all have a very happy holiday season, and in the Northern Hemisphere enjoy the return of shorter and warmer days. (Sorry Aussie pals, but you are thumping us at cricket so we need something to cheer us up.)

Those of you who celebrate the Solstice will be able to follow the sunset alignment at Maeshowe in Orkney via the broadcast below. It starts at 15:00 today.

Buy Me for Christmas

~ Cheryl


If you missed my HistFest talk on trans Romans first time around, you have a second chance. It will be available for a number of days over the holiday period. What’s more, for the ridiculously low sum of £8.68 (that’s £7.50 plus EventBrite fees) you get not just me, but five other great history talks by actual, genuine historians too. That has to be better than watching Christmas movies, right? If you would like to purchase access, you can do so here.

By the way, I don’t get a cut of this. I was paid a flat fee for creating the talk. But if you do watch my bit that will help encourage the lovely HistFest folks to commission more trans-related material, which would be a very good thing.

Hugos Happened

~ Cheryl

Last night, while I was asleep. There ceremony was delayed by a couple of hours, apparently due to an electrical fire in the hall where it was due to take place.

Anyway, the full results, including all of the usual statistics, are available here. Let’s take a quick tour through the numbers.

In Novel, Network Effect by led throughout, proving that Nora Jemisin is not invincible. I see the Mexican Gothic was only 8 nominations short of reaching the final ballot.

The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo eventually won after a titanic battle with Come Tumbling Down. I do love Seanan, but Empress was magnificent and I’m delighted to see it win. There were a whole bunch of great books in the also rans too. It was a very tough year.

In Novellette Isabel Fall’s “Helicopter Story” got the most first preferences but finished 5th, which is the sort of thing I had expected. I hope that Fall is hearted by seeing how many people loved her story. I liked Sarah Pinsker’s winning story, so I’m not unduly upset.

As usual, I found the short stories fairly forgettable.

Series was dominated by Murderbot.

I did not win Related Work. In fact CoNZealand Fringe came last. I am not surprised, though I am sad for my fellow finalists. We did manage to finish ahead of No Award, which I hope will upset Mike Glyer. I’m and surprised and delighted to see that we almost topped the nominations, losing out narrowly to FIYAHCON after the EPH thing, which is definitely worth celebrating. I’m also delighted that Beowulf won because it is an amazing piece of work.

I’m afraid I know almost nothing about graphic novels this year.

Dramatic Presentation: Long was won fairly easily by The Old Guard, so yay for Amazons. I see that Season 2 of The Mandalorian had enough nominations to make the ballot but, “As two episodes of The Mandalorian also qualified for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form, the administrators removed the full Season 2 from the ballot for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form.” Because you can’t be a finalist twice for the same piece of work.

Not that this helped the helmeted one, because The Good Place won DP: Short very easily. Those of you who failed to vote for She-Ra are terrible people and will doubtless suffer horribly in lives to come.

Ellen Datlow won Editor: Short (again), but it was a tough tussle with Lafferty & Divya. Lee Harris was unlucky not to make the final ballot.

Editor: Long was an exciting three-way fight between Navah Wolfe, Sheila E Gilbert and Diana M Pho, which Pho eventually won despite having finished 3rd in the first round. This is the voting system showing its power. Poor Lee Harris was the first runner-up in the nominations again. Vote for him next year, folks.

It has definitely been Rovina Cai’s year. She won the World Fantasy Award for Artist last month, and added the Hugo yesterday. I must say that I love the work she has done for Nicola Griffith’s Spear (out next April), but I really wanted Maurizio Manzieri to win. The work he has done for Aliette de Bodard is amazing.

Uncanny has finally been unseated in Semiprozine after four consecutive wins. Well done FIYAH, and hopefully this makes up for FIYAHCON not winning Related Work.

Fanzine was a close run thing between Journey Planet and nerds of a feather, which the latter finally won. I’m all in favour of seeing new names on the list of winners (and very happy for my pal Adri). I see that Salon Futura featured on the long list. 20 of you lovely people nominated me, though I seem to have lost a lot of votes in the EPH system, so next year please get your enemies to vote for me as well as your friends. Not that I actually need any more Hugos, but the SF Award Database people have decided that this year doesn’t count as a real finalist credit, so now I’m offically annoyed enough to want another one in my own name.

Gary and Jonathan have finally won Fancast for Coode Street. I’m delighted for them both, particularly Jonathan as he’s been a finalist 17 times before without a win.

Fan Writer was also very tight, with Elsa Sjunneson and Cora Buhlert being neck and neck through several rounds. I’m sure that Cora will win one day. She easily topped the nominations.

Fan Artist saw another first time winner in Sara Felix, who led throughout. The Long List notes that Tithi Luadthong was removed from the final ballot as he, “informed the Administrators that he had produced no eligible art in 2020.” Hopefully he’ll get another chance because honesty like that should be rewarded.

I know nothing about video games, but Hades seems to be a very popular winner having crushed the oppostion.

Ursula Vernon dominated the Lodestar, which is unsurprsing as she’s already a fan favourite.

And finally the Astounding was a close race between Micaiah Johnson and Eily Tesh, which Tesh finally won.

New Compass eBooks

~ Cheryl


Those of you who have ebook editions of Juliet McKenna’s Adabreshin Compass books should be getting notifications of new editions that are available. The main reason for this is to incorporate the fabulous new map of the Aldabreshin Archipelago that Oisín McGann did for us for the paper editions. Enjoy.