And Niall’s got the skinny on the Hugo awards including the break-down of the results (be prepared if you look at these; shockingly few people vote — also Scalzi lost best fan writer by ONE VOTE!). Yay, Tim! And yay for other winners too, but especially for Tim!
Christopher won third last night in the latest Alleycat bike race, a superhero-themed scavenger hunt. His costume was Corvus Rex, Lord of All Crows, and involved a bike helmet impressively festooned with feathers and a beak, among other elements (the camera wasn’t working! but there might be pictures from somebody else later!). And now comes the news that his story "Another Word for Map is Faith" is up for a World Fantasy Award — yay! I say again: yay!
This is a fantastic ballot through and through. So many yays — for Mary, Susan, Susan (again!) and David, Jeff, Ben, Geoff, Ysa, Klima, and, well, seriously congratulations to everybody. It’s a great ballot. (Behind the cut, gacked from Locus.)
Oh and, yeah, now we’re strongly considering going to WFC. Although I’ve been told there are no hotel rooms to be had in Saratoga Springs? True? Untrue?
…
The Wall Street Journal has chosen to turn its attention to the legacy of Heinlein:
Robert A. Heinlein, who died in 1988, lived a life inspired by two great loves. One was America and its promise of freedom. As one of his characters put it: "Your country has a system free enough to let heroes work at their trade. It should last a long time — unless its looseness is destroyed from the inside." And he loved and admired women — not just his wife, Virginia, who provided the model for the many strong-minded and highly competent females who populate his stories, but all of womankind. "Some people disparage the female form divine, sex is too good for them; they should have been oysters."
Layers upon layers of meaning… (Thanks, Shana!)
Much belatedly, there’s finally an ordering and information page for Say… What’s the Combination? (It’s also linked over to the right under the Appendices heading.) It’s a fabulous issue, if I do say so myself.
(We have been lame and bad DIYers and haven’t gotten the last of the contributors their copies, not to mention subscribers and reviewers. BUT they’re going out tomorrow and should show up within the week. Mea culpa, etcetera.)
Say… What’s the Combination? Read More »
From JJA comes news that SciFiction will be removed from the Web forever on Friday, June 15. So, go read those stories you missed now. Here’s my own personal list of favorites, with links. (Or you can apparently copy it and keep it archived forever for your own personal use using this.)
I think zombies have nice breath and are very attractive. After all, who doesn’t want to eat brains?
Updated: E Bear totally got me; make sure to read the follow-ups.
Personally (Updated) Read More »
I must say that the weekend was so lovely it killed any lingering sadness over missing BEA; also, I’d be dead if I had to tromp around the floor of the Javits Center, so there. (I will not, however, refuse kind mailings of free books from those of you on the ground — especially YA stuff. Hint. Hint.) Too lazy to provide links, but y’all know where to find most of these folks anyway, I suspect.
1. I only made it to a few programming items and barely visited the party floor this year — which meant I didn’t get to spend nearly enough time with a bunch of you (I’m looking at you Barzak and Alan and Kristin and Steph and Patrick and Lawrence and Ysabeau, and, well, LOTS more of you — but at least some of you I should get more time with later on). It was ever thus and ever will be. On the other hand, I managed chats with Jenn Reese and Sarah Prineas as opposed to just passing you in elevators, and had much more satisfying chunks of time with Karen Meisner and Susan Groppi and Terri Windling and Midori Snyder. I also feel like I met slightly more new people this time, so that’s always good (hi Kameron and Chris). For whatever reason, I ended up hiding out in rooms a lot (could it be because Wiscon is so big now and I get cranky in crowds? not sure), but that meant decent quantities of quality time with Karen Fowler and Kelly Link and Ted Chiang, among others, so yay. And we had a lovely dinner with Meghan McCarron and the amazing Liz Gorinsky, which was, well, lovely and fun. Holly Black spent her usual most of the weekend convalescing in her room with a cold, but emerged to hang out Sunday night and Monday for hours at a stretch. There may be a few more names that slip into the rest of this, but I’m really unable to do the whole Name Everyone Thing, because there are too too many fine people I adore seeing at Wiscon now. This is a good thing, if somewhat overwhelming.
2. Oh, the happiness of finally convincing the Melissas to come to Wiscon and having it turn out well! I love it when we’re right and it results in the joy of others.
3. Thanks to everyone who came to our reading. I was, of course, way out of my league with Christopher and Richard and new friend Chris Nakashima-Brown (he of the controversial quip).
4. Apparently the penguins in Antarctica lay on the ice with their tongues hanging out because it’s so warm now. Also, I hear Molly Gloss’s new book is fabulous.
5. Panels attended, three. One on feminism in YA, where smart people said smart things. Mely’s write-up tells you all you need to know. I also went to the judging the Tiptree panel, where I mostly tried to suck Midori’s wisdom in through osmosis — they read 100 books last year; eep. The third was the one I was on, about trends and YA. Someone asked that we post the list of books we recommended at the end (I should mention we also talked about middle grade and even some about picture books, so broad net), so here are the ones I mentioned: Cecil’s books but especially Beige, MT Anderson’s books but especially Octavian Nothing, Holly’s books but especially Valiant and Ironside, Ysabeau’s Flora Segunda (which had to be the most recommended book of the weekend), Elizabeth Knox’s Dreamhunter duet (also recommended by Kelly in the feminism panel), Laura Amy Schlitz’s A Drowned Maiden’s Hair, China’s Un Lun Dun, and Margaret Mahy (aka my new obsession). I think that was pretty much it. Sarah Prineas had a lengthy list that was wonderful and if she posts it, I’ll link it, along with Patrick Samphire’s ditto.
6. Readings attended, three-ish. I ducked in for the very end of Kat, Sarah and Jenn’s reading, only catching the final reader (whose name escapes me) — this is what happens when you don’t check your watch on the way to lunch. We also saw Meghan, Alice Kim, Rick Bowes and Barzak’s reading, which was fab, and Alan, Kristin, Lena, Dave and Haddayr’s, which was ditto fab. I missed a bunch of other readings I wanted to attend, including one with Holly and Ysabeau and Ellen Kushner and Greg Frost (much gnashing of teeth), but I sent Christopher with the video camera and he got snippets that may appear here later on in June as part of the Blog Blast Tour.
7. Madison is wonderful. Resolve to get out of hotel more next year.
8. I bet you didn’t know that Ted Chiang is constantly fighting to keep more towns from being named after fictional characters. It’s true.
9. Maureen McHugh is the best. And she has a total yoga glow.
10. I managed yoga only one morning and no real cardio. Someday, I really will figure out how to move at conventions. I have a feeling then I wouldn’t get half so exhausted and overstimulated all at once.
11. I actually did some revision though, so I’m cutting the slack on the work-out stuff. But my last packet of semester one is due at the end of next week and that means I should go do more. Like now. See you next year!
Wiscon post, the Last Read More »
And the evening’s crowd pleaser from dynamic bromantic duo Christopher Rowe and Richard Butner was “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”:
Why yes, that is Ellen Kushner and Haddayr Copley-Woods shaking their booties in the background. And who could have their hands in the air but karaoke master of ceremonies Chris Barzak?
That’s right. No one.
Dear cell phone-wielding business man: You are not important. STOP TALKING.
This is my message to all the people in airports everywhere.
But we made it, lalala, and although we missed the Room of One’s Own Reading yet again, we got in some quality Governor’s Club time with the likes of the one and only Karen Fowler, Ellen Klages, Kelley Eskridge and Nicola Griffith, Doselle and Janine Young, Jeremy Lassen, Susan Groppi and Matt Withers… The latter of whom whisked us off to a party across town, where we saw tons of other peeps like Ted Chiang and the wondrous Marcia Glover, Dave Schwartz, Karen Meisner, Haddayr Copley-Wood, Steph Burgis and Patrick Samphire, the late-breaking Meghan McCarron and Liz Gorinsky — geez, I’m starting to feel like a jerk. EVERYONE IS HERE.* Why aren’t you?
Then our cab driver totally backed into a car, got out and eyeballed the dent and drove off.
Ah, Madison in spring.
xox
G
p.s. Topics discussed included: feeling betrayed by the turn of a character in fiction, publicists, the history of bananas, filking, present tense, making cosmopolitans for one’s parents, the last season of Gilmore Girls, crying, infiltration of certain subcultures, cannons and canons
*And we haven’t even seen Chris Barzak yet! Or Kelly and Gavin, for that matter!
Since everyone else is doing it, and we’re only a week away (!), here’s my programming schedule at Wiscon:
GWENDA BOND, RICHARD BUTNER, CHRISTOPHER ROWE, CHRIS NAKASHIMA-BROWN LLC (Reading) Sunday, 10:00-11:15 a.m. in Conference Room 2
Yep, I’m reading with the boys this year.
These Kids Tomorrow (The Craft And Business of Writing SF&F) Sunday, 2:30-3:45 p.m.
With YA so popular in its many incarnations, just what are some of the youth trends going on today? What will be the trends for tomorrow? For fantasy settings? Come and speculate. Patrick Samphire, Sarah Prineas, M: Hilary Moon Murphy, Gwenda Bond
This one should be fun.
Otherwise, I’ll mostly be in the GC bar and environs.