Originally published at Cheryl's Mewsings. Please leave any comments there.

I have received notification of a new speculative fiction magazine that will be launching soon. Titled Persistent Visions, it will be edited by Heather Shaw who has an excellent track record in both short fiction and editing. They plan to pay 7c a word, and their submission ( Read more... )

Originally published at Cheryl's Mewsings. Please leave any comments there.

Some excellent news for fellow fans of the Serbian writer, Zoran Živković. A company called Cadmus Press will be publishing his entire back catalog in English. Zoran has an announcement here.

Naturally I Googled Cadmus to see who they were. I found this:

Cadmus Press was ( Read more... )

Originally published at Cheryl's Mewsings. Please leave any comments there.

The good folks at Pembroke College videoed the whole of Terri Windling’s Tolkien Lecture, so you will be able to enjoy it yourselves soon. However, while you are waiting, here are a few thoughts from me. I should make clear at the start that I’m pulling a couple of key ( Read more... )

Originally published at Cheryl's Mewsings. Please leave any comments there.

Last night’s BristolCon Fringe was really good. The podcasts will be available in due course, but you can hear Paul Cornell read from Who Killed Sherlock Holmes? at his previous Fringe appearance in March last year.



Martyn Waites chose to read from one of the stories he had ( Read more... )

Originally published at Cheryl's Mewsings. Please leave any comments there.

VIDA’s survey of gender bias in literary reviewing was published last week. You can find piles of infographics and some analysis here.

The basic message is “more of the same”. A few magazines - notably Harper’s and The New Republic - have made significant improvements. ( Read more... )

Originally published at Cheryl's Mewsings. Please leave any comments there.

I was talking the other day about how one of the barriers to getting published for people from diverse backgrounds is the agent system, whereby you can’t get your book in front of a publisher unless you have an agent, and agents often assume that publishers won’t buy from ( Read more... )

Originally published at Cheryl's Mewsings. Please leave any comments there.

Yes, yes, I know. Diversity in Bath generally means something like whether you would allow people to have Merlot with Sunday lunch rather than the more traditional Claret. However, yesterday the Bath Children’s Literature Festival ran a “Daily Telegraph Debate” on the ( Read more... )

Originally published at Cheryl's Mewsings. Please leave any comments there.

You’ve probably already seen this on Twitter, but Angry Robot announced today that they have been bought out by an American entrepreneur (and science fiction fan) who is setting up a new publishing company. It all sounds very promising. Obviously I’m delighted that the likes ( Read more... )

Originally published at Cheryl's Mewsings. Please leave any comments there.

I have said many times that the only way to put an end to the under-appreciation of female writers is to start in school. If children are brought up to believe that only male writers are important, and in particular that boys do not need to read books by women, they will ( Read more... )

Originally published at Cheryl's Mewsings. Please leave any comments there.

Yesterday Juliet McKenna put up a long post looking at the issue of how SF&F books are promoted by Waterstones. She has had some friends doing a survey of stores around the country. It looks like there is some pretty good evidence that the feature tables for SF&F are biased ( Read more... )