Cora is a 2020 GUFF Candidate

The ballot for the 2020 Going Under Fan Fund (GUFF) race has been announced and I am one of the candidates.

What is GUFF, you ask? The Going Under a.k.a. Get Up and Over Fan Fund is a great project which sends fans from Europe to Australia/New Zealand and vice versa. This year a European fan/fans gets to go to CoNZealand, the 2020 WorldCon in Wellington, New Zealand.

This year, we have six GUFF candidates and a total of eight people on the ballot, namely Hisham El-Far and Lee Fletcher from the UK, Hanna Hakkarainen from Finland, Elizabeth Jones and Claire Rousseau from the UK, Dave Lally from the UK, Alison Scott from the UK and of course yours truly. All of them are awesome people and I’m honoured to be in such company. You can find out more about the candidates at the GUFF site and at File 770.

I’d also like to thank my nominators, Jo Van Ekeren and Camestros Felapton from Australasia and Adrienne Joy, Kári Tulinius and Mark Yon from Europe as well as June Young and Hampus Eckerman, who were also willing to nominate me, but aren’t listed on the ballot.

So how does it work? Simple. You make a donation to GUFF and fill out the ballot, which may be found here. The votes are ranked, similar to Hugo voting, i.e. you rank your first choice first, your second choice second, etc… There also are the options “no preference”, which means that you want to support GUFF and want one of the candidates to go, but don’t particularly care who, and “hold over funds”, which is like “no award” at the Hugos. You can vote until April 13, 2020.

Who can vote? Anyone anywhere in the world who makes a donation to GUFF and has been active in SFF fandom (e.g. attending cons, running fanzines and fansites, reviewing books and movies, participating in online discussions or engaging in other fannish activities) since at least January 2018.

Let me also give a shout-out to DUFF, the Down Under Fan Fund, a similar project which sends fans from North America to Australasia and vice versa. The 2020 DUFF race is also currently open for voting with four great candidates. The official ballot is here.

What happens if I win? Well, first of all I get to attend WorldCon in New Zealand and meet fans from the other side of the world, which is pretty damn awesome in itself. And you get to vicariously participate in my adventures, because a GUFF winner is required to produce a trip report. So if you enjoyed my reports about WorldCon 75 in Helsinki, my two-part report about WorldCon 77 in Dublin or my report about the local Steampunk con Steamfest in Papenburg, you can expect something along those lines, only with more waterfalls.

And if someone else wins? Well, then you’ll also get a trip report, though one with a different protagonist. But most importantly, you’ll have supported a great fan-run project, which is entirely funded by donations.

So what are you waiting for? Donate and vote for me or one of the other great GUFF candidates.

This entry was posted in General, Personal and tagged , , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *