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Archive for November, 2018

2018 Awards Eligibility Posts – Mine & All My Guests

Well, science fiction and fantasy friends, it’s that time again.

If you’re a Hugo Awards voter/nominator (which is true is you were a member of the 2018 Worldcon or are buying your 2019 Worldcon membership), you have the power to nominate people for both the Hugo awards and the John W. Campbell award for Best New Writer. If you’re a member of SFWA, you can nominate for the Nebula awards. It’s the most nominate-iful time of the year!

And that means it’s time to poke my head above the tide of NaNoWriMo and end of term grading to tell you about the awards I’m eligible for and why you should nominate me! (Or, why I hope you’ll consider it.)

Because The Fall is set to release in 2019, I’m sadly not Best Novel eligible this year, but I’ve been very productive in the Best Fan Writer Hugo category with my ongoing column “A Place Where It Rains,” which features monthly on Luna Station Quarterly‘s blog. “A Place Where It Rains” focuses on sff storytelling — whether at the level of an individual story or product or at the  level of craft — that really convinces the reader they’re in a place that’s “real” — a place where it could rain, as Italo Calvino said.

My next Luna Station Quarterly column will drop on Monday, December 3rd, if you’re eager to see the content I’ll be wrapping up 2018 with.

I’m also eligible for the John W. Campbell award for Best New Writer for The Nine, published in 2017.

Both Best Fan Writers and the John W. Campbell award appear on the Hugo nominations ballot. I’d be much obliged if you’d consider me for either, or both — especially the Campbell, as this is my final opportunity to be considered for that award, and I’m really curious how I’d look with that tiara on. 

If you’d like to get eligible for the Hugo nominations and voting process, you can get your supporting membership to the 2019 Worldcon here.

BONUS!

If YOU are eligible for a Nebula or Hugo award for work done in 2018, comment on this post with your name and links to your eligible works or your own eligibility post! Share this post with others in the sff community looking to broaden their signal and add themselves to reading lists at the end of this year!

Good luck, everyone. I’ve read some great things from pros and fans alike and know we’ll all have a tough and wonderful time making up our minds.

Fandom Doing Good: Thieves of Fate Tees Support the ACLU!

Anyone who goes to sff cons with any regularity knows that packing for such an outing is an exercise in choosing your plumage. Is it the sort of gathering where you cosplay, and if so, should you invent something new, or break out an old standard? If it’s professional, how many stealth geek things can you work into an ensemble — galaxy necklaces, and dresses or ties with double-helix patterns, or what-have-you. Or maybe you’ve just got a dozen different comic, book, and movie t-shirts to choose from, and not enough days to wear them all.

I’m here to say I’ve just complicated your lives more, con-goers.

You’re welcome.

Oh, and non-con goers? This might get you to rethink your wardrobe, too.

Custom Ink produces t-shirts for all kinds of events and groups, and now they make a Thieves of Fate character t-shirt, for a limited time, with an added feature of awesome: 100% of the proceeds from these shirts will be donated to the American Civil Liberties Union.

It’s been said that it’s a bad idea for artists and creatives to get political, but that claim rests on a blinkered understanding of what art is. Everything is political, in some sense. You can’t tell me that I’m writing a dark fantasy series featuring a hegemonic religious and technological authority that’s abdicated all interest in the moral consequences of its doctrine and it ISN’T political. You can’t tell me that the world hanging on the fate of nine unknown persons — people we might easily disregard or destroy without a second thought, because life is so common, so cheap, so expendable — isn’t an observation of something at least a smidge Kantian, a trifle humanistic.

My books are in the fight to make a better world, and so am I. So, I hope, is any reader who enjoys my writing and wants to share it with others. And I hope that’s the type of reader who would want to wear it, too.

Custom Ink’s Thieves of Fate character tees are pretty awesome, if I do say so myself, featuring the names of the principle characters of the series: Anselm, Rare, Chalmers, Gammon, Rowena, and the Alchemist, a rogue’s gallery up and down.

The shirts are available through November 29 in both women’s and unisex styles, with a handy size-checking tool that lets you actually see what the shirts look like on people of different sizes and body types! Each shirt costs $25, and each benefits the ACLU directly, down to the penny.

So: ready to flesh out your con wardrobe?

To buy someone a holiday gift to add to that pre-order of The Fall you’ve done?

To wear something fun to your book club, to the library, the grocery store, to school? On casual Friday?

Of course you do. Here’s how to get it done: order your Thieves of Fate character tee here!