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July 26, 2005

Road to Los Angeles--Steps 1-2

Today Michelle and I had to front up to the US Consulate here in Perth to see about getting Non-Immigrant Visas so we can visit the US next year for LA Con IV.

Australia is part of the Visa Waiver Program, so ordinarily, in a universe in which I'm not an idiot, we wouldn't need to get visas to go there. However, when we transited through the US in 2003, on our way to Torcon 3 in Toronto, we had these little green bits of paper concerning the Visa Waiver Program stapled into our passports by US Immigration officials. The deal with these things is that when you leave the US to come home again (as we did about a week later) you have to remove those bits of paper.

Guess what? We didn't remove our Visa Waiver forms from our passports. We didn't even know we had to, and we were both so jetlagged out of our tiny minds--even after a week--that we just didn't think about it. Certainly no US Immigration officials reminded us about it as we were leaving.

Flashforward to last year, as we arrived in New York, as part of the Great Big Trip. We go through Immigration. Immigration guy checks our passports, and discovers our Visa Waiver forms. "Oh, now this might be a problem for you," he says. Your humble correspondent feels his bowels turn to water at this remark. It's not something you want to hear.

Instead of frogmarching us off to be strip-searched, detained and interrogated, he told us that next time we wanted to visit the US, we would probably need to apply for a visa, regardless of our country being part of the Visa Waiver Program. The problem is that US Immigration needs to receive that slip of green paper when you leave, so they have records of you leaving. If you don't give them the paper, their records indicate that you never left, and you've somehow been living there illegally for a year.

Applying for a Non-Immigrant US Visa is expensive and fiddly. You have to fill in forms, organise fresh passport photos that must be exactly 5cm square, actually pay for the visas themselves at the Post Office (not refundable) and take the receipts with you to the interview at the Consulate, and supply a registered mail satchel or Express Post satchel so they can post your passports back to you after the interview. It's a whole lot of stuff.

Today we had our interview, explained about science fiction conventions, explained about how I write books, and about the whole hassle we inadvertently brought upon ourselves, and much else. All our paperwork was in order. It turns out they no longer use those bits of green paper--now it's all done with biometric scanning: they take your fingerprints when you arrive in the US, and when you leave. It's painless and quick, if a little disquieting.

Upshot: they approved our application! Yay! [chair dances]

We've also now bought attending memberships in the Worldcon itself. So that's two big steps taken care of in a couple of days. We're pretty pleased.

* * *

In other news: yesterday Publisher Brian sent me the latest version of the ECLIPSE galleys for me to have a squizz at. It turns out he needs to send the whole thing to the printers this Friday. So I have to read through the book again--again! looking for blunders and glitches and the like. And I'm finding them, too, even though I went through the whole thing pretty carefully before. It's getting better, though. Currently I think it's my best work, at least up to that point. I'm really looking forward to seeing it in print, and selling it to folks next year.

* * *

And: ow. And I do mean that. Ow. Proofreading while headachy? Not fun. Bugger.

Posted by adrian at July 26, 2005 09:12 PM

Comments

Posted by: Charlie at August 3, 2005 01:54 AM

Posted by: river selkie at July 27, 2005 03:32 PM

Posted by: Cheyenne at July 27, 2005 07:51 AM

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