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Posts Tagged ‘awards’

Things I did not know (before tonight)

You know how I said that A Natural History of Dragons was in the semifinal round for the Goodreads Choice Awards?

Apparently it wasn’t in the first round. It was, instead, one of the top five write-in candidates during the first round, and thus got added for the semifinal.

That? Is really cool. I don’t know how the write-in votes stacked up against the ones cast for first-round nominees, but the fact that people remembered it well enough to vote for it off their own bat is very flattering.

I think voting ends tomorrow, so if you want to cast your vote, you still can.

In other news, I was trying to make a paper shell for my inflatable globe so that I could finally work out where all the continents are in Isabella’s world, when it occurred to me that what I really needed was a spherical whiteboard. So there’s a white beachball that should be arriving here in the next few days, and I’ll be putting the water-soluble markers we bought for drawing on the D&D battle map to an exciting new use. 🙂

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/602445.html. Comment here or there.

catching up on the (fiction-related) news

It’s taken me about a week to regenerate much brain, with most of what I could spare going to working on the next of the Memoirs. But I have some now, and so you get a news batch!

First of all, A Natural History of Dragons is in the semifinal round for Best Fantasy of 2013 over on Goodreads. I’m not saying you should go vote for it or anything. I’m just, y’know, mentioning.

you should totally go vote for it

Next up, Book View Café has a fun new anthology out: Mad Science Café. This debuted while I was out of the country, so I’m a bit behind the curve in announcing it, but it’s pretty much what the title would lead you to expect, i.e. lots of stories about Science Gone Wrong (Or Very, Very Right). It reprints my story “Comparison of Efficacy Rates for Seven Antipathetics As Employed Against Lycanthropes,” aka the Werewolf Fake Academic Paper story, so if you missed it when it first came out in Ekaterina Sedia’s Running with the Pack, here’s your chance!

I’m also in another anthology! Apex Magazine has put out The Book of Apex: Volume 4, which collects fifteen issues’ worth of the magazine, including my own “Waiting for Beauty.” That one’s available in print as well as electronic formats.

Speaking of anthologies (no, we’re not done yet), there’s an excerpt from “Centuries of Kings” up at Bookworm Blues. Because I was out of the country when that went up, the Kickstarter linked is over and done with (after successfully raising its target and more). But still, you can get a taster of the story, which will be in Neverland’s Library.

And finally, not about me: Mike Allen ([profile] time_shark), editor, poet, and fiction writer, has a novel out! The Black Fire Concerto, about which people have said many good things. It has a blurb from Tanith Lee! “A prize for the multitude of fans who relish strong Grand Guignol with their sword and sorcery.” Mike is, of course, the fellow who has brought you all four Clockwork Phoenix anthologies, not to mention Mythic Delirium and other such projects. If you dig horror, you should definitely check this out.

. . . did I mention that A Natural History of Dragons is up for a vote? ^_^

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/601529.html. Comment here or there.

Award nomination!

I was supposed to sit on this a while longer, but somebody apparently jumped the gun, so now I’m allowed to tell.

Romantic Times (which covers a great many things besides romance) is holding its Reviewers’ Choice Awards, and With Fate Conspire has been nominated! In, er, the “Epic Fantasy” category, which is not what I would have expected — but hey, I’m in good company:

THE WISE MAN’S FEAR Patrick Rothfuss, DAW, (March 2011)
WITH FATE CONSPIRE Marie Brennan, TOR, (September 2011)
THE COLD COMMANDS Richard K. Morgan, DEL REY, (October 2011)
THE KINGDOM OF GODS N.K. Jemisin, ORBIT, (November 2011)
STANDS A SHADOW Col Buchanan, TOR, (November 2011)

I won’t know the results until April. In the meantime, congrats to my fellow nominees, and to all the other nominated authors.

obligatory awards pimpage

If you’re a Hugo or Nebula voter, here’s what I published in 2010:

Novel
A Star Shall Fall

Novelette
“And Blow Them at the Moon,” Beneath Ceaseless Skies #50

Short stories
“Comparison of Efficacy Rates for Seven Antipathetics as Employed Against Lycanthropes,” Running With the Pack, ed. Ekaterina Sedia
“Remembering Light,” Beneath Ceaseless Skies #44
“The Gospel of Nachash,” Clockwork Phoenix 3, ed. Mike Allen
“The Last Wendy,” On Spec #81
“Footprints,” Shroud Magazine #9

. . . I need to get back on the short story wagon, or I’ll have very little to list for 2011.

We now return you to a more interesting corner of the Internet.

short story news, not all of it mine

I’ve done another reading for Podcastle: “Väinämöinen and the Singing Fish,” by Marissa Lingen (mrissa). My apologies to both Marissa and my erstwhile Finnish teacher for any mispronunciations I may have committed in the course of recording that story.

(This is what I get for telling the Podcastle editors what foreign languages I’d studied. Though in checking that e-mail, I see I didn’t even mention the Finnish, because I only studied it for only two weeks. I hope they never find out about my two weeks of Navajo . . . .)

Also, it turns out that both “Once a Goddess” and “Letter Found in a Chest Belonging to the Marquis de Montseraille Following the Death of That Worthy Individual” got Honorable Mentions from Gardner Dozois in the most recent Year’s Best Science Fiction. Given that I only had seven stories out last year, I’m pretty pleased with that average.

Nebula update

I didn’t realize the transition to the new Nebula rules means stuff published after July 1st of last year is still eligible, so my list also includes “Kingspeaker” and “A Heretic by Degrees.” (Possibly also “A Mask of Flesh,” but it’s right on the borderline, so I’m thinking no.) You can read or hear the first, and hear the second, in their entirety; details at those links.

on the topic of Nebulas

If you’re eligible to nominate for the Nebulas, you might be interested in an offer from Mike Allen, editor of Clockwork Phoenix 2: he’ll provide a PDF review copy to any SFWA member who wants to give the anthology a look. (Details about halfway through that entry.)

That antho, of course, has my story “Once a Goddess,” which has been getting some very pleasing attention in reviews. Other stories of mine out this year are:

Those first two and “Waking” are free to read in their entirety online; click through to find the links on their respective pages. Also, of course, I had a novel on the shelves this year.

Here endeth the obligatory Nebula-eligibility post.

a few bits of linky

The Mermaid’s Madness is out! This is the sequel to The Stepsister Scheme, which was a fun, Charlie’s Angels-ish take on the world of fairy tales, with Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Snow White teaming up to save the kingdom. I’ve been looking forward to seeing the story go on, since I’m a big sucker for that kind of thing. But I’m not allowed to buy the book until I finish my own revisions (which I hope to do before I leave for India next week), so you all should go buy it now to make up for my own delay.

***

I posted a while back about Save the Dragons, a crowdfunded novel whose proceeds are going toward paying the quarantine costs for the author’s pets, a group of rescue cats and dogs he does not want to abandon when his family emigrates to Australia. That’s made good progress so far, but he needs to pull together the remaining money by Christmas, so if you can spare him a few bucks, please do.

***

Looks like the Dell Award has a spiffy new webpage! This was the Isaac Asimov Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing back when I won it; the name has changed, but the mission has not. If you’re an undergraduate, or a recent graduate (i.e. you left college last spring), you’re eligible to submit short stories. If you’re neither of these, but you know some college-age SF/F short story writers, pass the word along. It’s a great award, and I would recommend it even if I hadn’t won.

***

A review of the second issue of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly. In discussing “The Waking of Angantyr,” the reviewer says “A piece of heroic fantasy starring a woman is a nice surprise.” Even after twenty-some-odd Sword and Sorceress anthologies, heroines are still enough of a rarity in that subgenre that they’re worthy of comment. I bring this up because it would warm the cockles of my heart to see HFQ get a slew of good stories with female protagonists, so that we can take another little step towards a world where characters like Hervor aren’t unexpected.

minor neatness

The small neatness is that “A Mask of Flesh has apparently earned an Honorable Mention in the twenty-sixth Year’s Best Science Fiction, edited by Gardner Dozois. (I had no idea he also recced fantasy; that story is definitely not science-y in its speculation.)

The much bigger neatness is that I’m one of NINE Clockwork Phoenix authors so honored — which, for an anthology with eighteen stories in it, is a damned impressive success rate. Congrats not only to my fellow authors, but most especially to Mike, for putting together such a great volume!

(Now might be a good time to mention that you can buy the second volume in the series . . . or the first, if you haven’t already. I’ve got stories in both.)

What do I have to lose?

I wasn’t going to do this because my odds of ending up on the Hugo list are vanishingly small, but what the heck. If you’re eligible to nominate for the Hugos, here’s what I’ve published in 2008 that you might consider:

Novel
Midnight Never Come

Short stories
“Lost Soul” — Intergalactic Medicine Show #7, January 2008
“Kiss of Life” — Beneath the Surface, ed. Tim Deal, 2008
“The Deaths of Christopher Marlowe” — Paradox #12, April 2008
“Beggar’s Blessing” — Shroud Magazine #2, 2008
“A Mask of Flesh” — Clockwork Phoenix, ed. Mike Allen, July 2008
“Kingspeaker” — Beneath Ceaseless Skies #3, November 2008
“A Heretic by Degrees” — Intergalactic Medicine Show #10, November 2008

Relevant links for all of the above can be found here.

a question for the SFWA types

As you know, Bob, the Nebula rules are a hair on the arcane side. So if somebody familiar with the process could pipe up in the comments and let me know if I’ve got this right, it would be much appreciated.

According to this Nebula report, Midnight Never Come is on the list of “recommended works.” My understanding is that this doesn’t just mean it’s eligible; it means at least one SFWA member has nominated it for the ballot. Am I correct so far?

And then it takes ten nominations to get on the Preliminary Ballot, yes? So here’s where I get confused. The whole “rolling eligibility” thing means, if I understand it, that MNC could be on the ballot for either 2008 or 2009. Does it have to get those ten recommendations before June of 2009 (one year after first U.S. publication), or before December of 2009 (end of calendar year after end of first year of publication)? The former makes more sense, but also seems like a lot more bookkeeping work for the awards folks. Then again, that would be in line with the kind of complaints I’ve heard about Nebula rules, so I’m guessing that’s the right answer.

It’s likely to be an academic curiosity, since I don’t expect to end up on the Preliminary Ballot. But this is the first time I’ve had cause to look at the Nebula rules, and I want to make sure I understand them right.

close only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades, and honorable mentions

I have not yet achieved my ambition of getting a story into a year’s best anthology, but “Nine Sketches, in Charcoal and Blood” received an Honorable Mention in the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. It also got a nod in one of the introductions, during the discussion of On Spec. I had my fingers crossed for this one, I must admit; I love all my children equally, blah blah blah, but “Nine Sketches” is one of my favorites.

(It’s actually my second HM, though. “Shadows’ Bride” got one a couple of years ago — and I can’t remember if I mentioned this, but Pseudopod has picked up audio rights for it, so you’ll get a chance to hear it some day.)

Thanks to jimhines for letting me know I could search the HM list through Amazon, rather than having to get off my duff and go to the bookstore already. Yes, the post-novel ennui+cold continues, and I am a lazy slug.

And congrats to everyone else who got a nod! Share your good news here.

next!

Man, I miss the Zokutou word meter. I’ve embarked on my fifth attempt to write “Once a Goddess” and I’m 472 words in, but I don’t have a visual way to show it.

(Yes, I know there are other word meters. I don’t like them as much.)

Hey, if I do well enough with this story, do you think they’ll put me on the Nebula ballot like ksumnersmith?

Dude, how cool is it that a writer I know personally — not “hey, I’ve had conversations with her” but “hey, she’s about my age and we’ve been in an anthology together and shared a room at a con” — is on the freaking Nebula ballot? And not just on it; her story got the slot reserved for the Nebula jury’s hand-picked choice.

Go, Karina!!! When you’re a Big Name Author, I’ll be able to tell other people I once shared a migratory sun patch with you. 🙂