2014 Hugo Noms!

written by David Steffen

It’s award season again! If you’re eligible to vote for the Hugos, you have until the end of March to decide on your picks. I wanted to share my picks, as I always do, in plenty of time so that if anyone wants to investigate my choices to see for themselves they’ll have plenty of time.

Quite a few of the categories I don’t have anything to nominate because I don’t seek out entries in them, so I left those out. And for any category that I have eligible work I mentioned them alongside my own picks.

The entries in each category are listed in no particular order.

Best Novel

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
Premier novel by Leckie. Great premise, difficult point of view, great space opera. I reviewed it here.

A Memory of Light by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson
The 14th and final book of Jordan’s epic Wheel of Time series.

Best Novelette

Monday’s Monk by Jason Sanford (Asimov’s)

Best Short Story

The Promise of Space by James Patrick Kelly (Clarkesworld)

The Murmurous Paleoscope by Dixon Chance (Three-Lobed Burning Eye)

HELP FUND MY ROBOT ARMY!!! by Keffy R.M. Kehrli (Lightspeed)

Hollow as the World by Ferrett Steinmetz (Drabblecast)

The Boy and the Box by Adam-Troy Castro (Lightspeed)

For Your Consideration:
I Will Remain in After Death Anthology
Could They But Speak at Perihelion
Reckoning at Stupefying Stories
Meat at Pseudopod
Coin Op at Daily Science Fiction
Escalation at Imaginaire

Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form)

Ender’s Game

Warm Bodies

Game of Thrones Season 3

Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form)

The Rains of Castamere (Game of Thrones)

And Now His Watch Has Ended (Game of Thrones)

Walk of Punishment (Game of Thrones)

Second Sons (Game of Thrones)

Valar Doheris (Game of Thrones)

Best Editor (Short Form)

Neil Clarke (of Clarkesworld)

John Joseph Adams (of Lightspeed, Nightmare, and anthologies)

Tina Connolly (of Toasted Cake)

Norm Sherman (of Drabblecast and Escape Pod)

Shawn Garrett (of Pseudopod)

Best Semiprozine

Beneath Ceaseless Skies

Daily Science Fiction

Lightspeed

Escape Pod

Drabblecast

Best Fanzine

SF Signal

My work for you to consider:
Diabolical PlotsI do consider Diabolical Plots a zine. Consider, too, that this was the first year Diabolical Plots also provide the Submission Grinder. The Submission Grinder itself doesn’t fit any of the categories, I think, but Diabolical Plots does.

Best Fancast

Best Fan Writer

Ken Liu

Ferrett Steinmetz

Juliette Wade

Cat Rambo

Anne Ivy

For your consideration:

David Steffen
Frank Dutkiewicz
Carl Slaughter

The State of the Grinder: Year One

written by David Steffen

Can you believe it’s been a whole year since we officially launched The Submission Grinder? At that time the Grinder only had its base functionality , the minimum required feature set to make it basically useful. We had just launched, so of course we didn’t have any submission data yet apart from the data of its founders. The Grinder site was pretty unreliable as well, down almost as often as not. And the choice of Courier font for everything on the site, while chosen with the intention of giving a nod to the typewriter-based standard manuscript format that is somehow still used today, managed to almost universally annoy everyone who visited the site.

These days the site is stable, we’ve changed the style to be more aesthetically pleasing, our user base is growing and with it our collection of data. We continue to hold to our commitment to never charge anyone for any feature. And our feature set is continually improving.

A concern oft-cited in the early days was that the site would be just a flash in the pan, here today gone tomorrow. To which we responded “The only thing that proves longevity is longevity”. So here we are a year later and still going strong, still improving. And we plan to stick around. So what’s gone on in the last year since the launch?

Statistics

Markets: 2642 (1165 open)

Users: 2033
Submissions: 34,403

Total site visits: 244,963

Unique visitors: 28,013

Pageviews: 1,444,035

Page per visit: 5.89

Largest contributors of site usage

1. Organic (Google)

2. DiabolicalPlots.com (Main Site)

3. Codex

4. AbsoluteWrite

5. Facebook

Shiny Features

We have implemented a wide variety of features that we feel are shiny and useful, too many to want to list them exhaustively here. But here are a few of the ones we are the proudest of.

1. Response Time Chart

A histogram on each market page of the response times for that market. The red bars represent rejections, the green are acceptances. The higher the bar, the more responses on that particular number of days wait. You can see in this example that this particular market has a nice bell curve of rejections centered at around 20 days, with a long tail and acceptances scattered all over. You can get a lot of information at a glance.

2. Response Recency Chart

GrinderFeature_ResponseRecencyChart

Another histogram, this one represents how long ago the responses were reported, with today being on the left side of the graph and one year ago being on the right. From this you can glean different kinds of information. For instance, you can discern an expected period of response,such as the Writers of the Future snapshot here where you can see their quarterly submission cycle pretty well. And you can also tell if a market just stops responding for some period of time, like you can see at intervals in the Analog snapshot.

3. My Market Response List

It’s common to want to look at the recently reported responses just for the markets where you have pending submissions, but before this feature you would have to visit each page manually and look at that list. This list provides a single list which lists out the recent responses that only includes those markets where you have pending submissions.

4. Post-Acceptance Tracking

Acceptance of a story is one of the goals of writing a story, but it’s not the ultimate goal. After the story’s accepted, you need to deal with the contract, payment, and publication of the work. That is all an important part of the process so we let you track that information as well.

Upcoming Shiny Features

And we have plenty more coming down the pipeline, including:

1. Newsletter
Among other things, you will be able to customize the newsletter to suit your exact interests. If you only want to hear about updates to pro-paying romance markets, that’s what you’ll get. This will also include other sections like a Fundraising callout which will provide links to newly announced publishing-related fundraising drives.

2. Poetry and Nonfiction Markets
We don’t yet have full support for these,you can track your submissions to them, but the full listing and search engine is being worked on.

3. Publication Brag.
Users who opt-in can already see their name on the site when they get that rare acceptance, but this will also help you spread the word when that story actually gets published.

4. Dean Wesley Smith Submission Score
The author Dean Wesley Smith has published a suggested system called the Race for encouraging writers to submit which has proven itself extremely useful. The Grinder will calculate this number for you, to help spur you on to send that story out.

Podcast Spotlight: Decoder Ring Theater

written by David Steffen

In my constant quest to find new sources of short audio fiction, I’ve listened to quite a few episodes of Decoder Ring Theater who describe themselves as the “home of all-new audio adventures in the tradition of the classic programs of Radio’s Golden Age. Here you will find full-length, full-cast tales of mystery and adventure to fire your imagination”. Their two main recurring features are The Red Panda and Black Jack Justice, but every summer they have different features that aren’t in those two main series.

Normally I would do a Best Of list, but the format of this show made the usual format a little bit awkward. Namely, that the vast majority of their shows are within two continuities, and so there aren’t a lot of distinct stories to pick out from the rest. So I decided I would just do a spotlight and talk briefly about the things I liked and things I didn’t like about the show.

What’s to like?

The folks at Decoder Ring Theater have succeeded in their mission statement of giving a feel of the Golden Age of radio. The voice actors are great, each one with a variety of voices, some of them over the top but always in the right way. The voice acting is the best part of the show.

Some of the segments of the show are great. The ones I liked the best were the humor series. My favorites were:

Before they launched The Red Panda Adventures, they ran six episodes of Red Panda. These episodes take place during WWII, following Red Panda, an agent of the Canadian government in the war. The people on all sides of the conflict are cartoonish, over the top. The Canadian Prime Minister, for instance, has been hit by an enemy weapon that turns him into simpleminded and the one who’s really running the war effort is the Prime Minister’s dog. Despite the wartime setting, I never really felt the stakes, but the humor made it well worth it.

Another great comedy series they ran was Slick Bracer, PI, a parody of classical noir tales. Slick isn’t shy about breaking the fourth wall at any point, talking to the audience, pointing out his own cliches. The mysteries didn’t get my mind racing by any means, but there were a lot of laugh out loud moments

They’ve run quite a few good one-off short stories that are well worth listening to, definitely worth digging through their backlog of summer stories.

What’s not to like?

The folks at Decoder Ring Theater have succeeded in their mission statement of giving a feel of the Golden Age of radio. But, well, Golden Age radio wasn’t without its flaws. The over-the-top acting and writing works well for comedy, but I find it hard to take seriously when it’s trying to be dramatic. The macho attitudes of the lead male characters and the generally short shrift most of the female characters get got on my nerves. I mean, yes both of the main shows have a female main character but at least in the episodes I listened to they’re both securely in the role of sidekick.

The two main series of the show are The Red Panda Adventures and Black Jack Justice. The Red Panda Adventures follows the Red Panda, who is kind of the same Red Panda as the one in the Red Panda series that I liked, but basically from a different continuity. This one takes place in 1930s Toronto where he is a masked (not-super) crime fighting hero accompanied by his sidekick the Flying Squirrel. Between the crimes and the mysteries that they pursure, most of the time is spent with her in her cover identity as his limo driver making advances on him at every opportunity to which he always responds with the phrase “Kit Baxter, behave.” I wanted to punch him right in the teeth and slap her upside the head every time I heard that phrase. It seemed to meant to be cute and endearing how he never quite rejected her straight out but never quite acknowledge her come-ons either. But she needs to get some self-respect and find a different employer rather than wasting her life chasing that un-super schmuck, and he needs to stop being such a jerk. I never felt the writing really respected her as a person, and turned me off. If the stories had been great, maybe I’d get over it, but I guess I don’t go for classical unpowered heroes nor the mystery stories they sometimes get into.

Black Jack Justice is their other main series with Jack Justice and Trixie Dixon girl detective (their words not mine). I at least didn’t want to hit either of them, and she wasn’t fawning after his every word like the Flying Squirrel was in the other series. But that’s about the best praise I can give it.

One of the side series was very hard to listen to: Deck Gibson. The title character is an earthling who survived a space wreck and was taken in by an alien civilization for whom he has worked ever since. This series is like a object lesson in most of the bad writing tropes you’ll ever come across. Especially “As you know, Bob” dialog. Deck has constant contact over radio with a maybe-AI (they never totally make it clear what she is) who provides the recipient for most of his dialog in the story. At times she seems able to use the sensors in his suit to tell what’s going on around him, and at other times he can. They take turns explaining to each other what they are seeing on his sensors as if only one of them can somehow use them at a time. Really it’s just a bad writing technique to get the information to the listener, but there are better ways to pull that off in an audio drama–at the very least if it were consistent about which way the information flowed it would do a lot to increase its credibility.

Overall

I’ve given up on the Red Panda Adventures and Black Jack Justice main series. Which is most of what they publish most of the year. I’ll check back in the summers to try out their summer showcase series since they have had some really fun ones there. I think this’ll be my last post about them, since the summer showcase stories only come out at a rate of six per year, that’s not enough to do regular Best Of lists.

If you like Golden Age radio, warts and all, tune in and give it a try. If you don’t, you still might want to check out the showcase series. Try the two main series while you’re at it too, just don’t feel like you have stick with them forever if you don’t care for them.

The Submissions Grinder Proto-Newsletter

written by David Steffen and Anthony Sullivan

This is a copy of the newsletter sent out to users of The (Submission) Grinder who have opted in for the newsletter as of Monday, November 10, 2013. We have included it here to let people who might be interested in hearing about the upcoming newsletter feature, but who are not users or who have not opted in.

Hello Grinder Users!

“What’s this in my inbox?” you might be asking yourself right now. Well, if you’re getting this email, your address is registered to a user of the (Submission) Grinder and in your profile you have opted in to the Grinder’s newsletter. If you don’t want to receive any more emails from us, all you have to do is uncheck the “Newsletter” box in your profile settings. If you believe you have received this email in error, let us know.

So, this is our first newsletter. More of a proto-newsletter, I suppose you could call it, to give you an idea what we have in mind for these newsletters and to give you an opportunity to give us some feedback about what kind of content you would like to see in these newsletters. This will probably be a weekly-ish newsletter once we have it off and running, though it might be a while before that happens–this is an early audience check.

So, here’s a list of subsections that we have in mind for Grinder Newsletter.

1. Greeting–A brief hello from us folks running the Grinder, might include a wish for happy holiday (for instance), a link to this week’s Diabolical Plots article, a link to newly published stories by the folks behind the Grinder. This will generally be quite brief, but is mostly a place to say “Hello” to all you fine users.

2. Grinder feature updates–When we have a shiny new feature we want to share with you, we’ll mention it here so that you can give it a try.

3. Market Updates Based on Custom Genre and Pay Interests–This is the core of the newsletter: market updates delivered right to your inbox, pointing out new market listings and market listings which have opened, temporarily closed, or permanently closed in the time since the last newsletter. But even better, this section of your newsletter will be tailored to your personal market interests of genre and minimum pay rate. If you want to get only updates about pro-paying fantasy/science fiction/horror markets, that’s what you will get. If you want to get only updates about any General genre markets, that’s what you will get.

4. A list of upcoming submission and theme deadlines

5. List of fundraising Calls–There will be a section of publishing related fundraising calls, be they Kickstarter, Indiegogo, or any other medium. A lot of anthologies, magazines, etc, do this kind of fundraiser from time to time, so it is our hope that we can help raise the visibility of their efforts. We will post the ones that we come across on our own, but we will also happily take suggestions (once the newsletter is running, that is)

For instance:

Escape Artists Fundraiser: Escape Artists, the audio production company that brings you the fiction podcasts Pseudopod, Podcastle, and Escape Pod, is running short on money to an extent that they won’t be able to continue much longer at the current funding. Follow this link to find a post with a brief summary, a link to the full metacast, and links to different donation options. There are also donation incentives (extra stories) if you chip in before the end of November.

6. List of recently accepted (and recently published) authors–A list of names of the authors who have logged acceptances since the last newsletter and who have selected to opt for the Brag feature. In the future this will also include those who’ve been recently published.

FEEDBACK

So, what do you think? Does the newsletter, as described, sound like a useful feature of the (Submission) Grinder? Are there other shiny ideas that you’d like to suggest to us? Just reply to this email or use the Grinder’s Contact Form to tell us what you think. I will also post this to Diabolical Plots so that other people who may not have signed up for the newsletter yet can see what we’re offering–feel free to comment on that post as well (or, again, use the Grinder’s contact form)

Thanks so much for using the Grinder.

best wishes to you and yours,

David Steffen and Anthony Sullivan, Grindmasters

Codex!

written by David Steffen

We’ve posted here from time to time to point out useful writing websites and tools, but it occurs to me that I have never posted about Codex, which I’ve found to be extremely enjoyable and useful in a variety of ways.

So what is Codex? It is a website founded by Luc Reid which serves as a resource and gathering place for neo-pro speculative fiction writers. The primary draw of the site is the forum.

A neo-pro writer, for the purposes of membership, is a writer who has had some measure of success: a professional sale, completion of an audition-only writing workshop, some amount of self-publishing sales, representation by a reputable agent, or nomination for an award. The purpose of the membership requirement is not to be elitist, but to try to gather writers who are at a similar stage in their writing careers. The membership requirement shows that the members have some experience, some skill, some measure of sucess. There are plenty of forums for beginning writers, and it seems like most of their threads end up covering the same questions that almost all beginners ask, so that any longstanding member will see many of the same questions over and over and over. So this helps avoid that.

And, although the site is focused on neo-pro writers, there are quite a few writers there who have made loads of sales and won awards who are active on the forum. You can see a list of some of the members here (I’m not sure it’s a complete list, but it’ll give you an idea). Ken Liu, Cat Rambo, Tom Crosshill, to name a few that were nominated for Nebula or Hugo awards this year.

There are many draws to using the forum, including:
1. A place to ask for advice on writing, legal matters, submission etiquette from people who have some history of writing success.
2. A place to just have fun with those some people, to get to know them. Codex contributed a great deal to my enjoyment of WorldCon in 2012. I’m not great at interacting with strangers, but Codexians aren’t strangers. I ran into Codexians everywhere I went, and so I’d always have somebody to say hi to, and then I could meet new people more easily then. One of the highlights of the weekend was the Codex breakfast, about 30 of us getting together at a restaurant on that Saturday.
3. There are threads where people share market response times and excerpts from rejection letters, which can be useful if you’re waiting for responses from the same markets or just to congraultation/commiserate.
4. It’s a great place to share news of story acceptance, and of publication, and to hear similar news from the other members.
5. There are writing challenges and contests to encourage you to write, and a critique forum to get feedback on your unpublished stories (I haven’t participated in these at this point, but I can see the appeal).
6. If you have a bad experience with an editor or a publisher, and you want to talk to others about it, but you’re not comfortable talking about it on a more public place, this is a reasonably good place to do it. I’d stick to the facts though, don’t go on a rant, because some members might be friends with the person, or if that editor is also a writer they might even be a member themselves. There’s also a thread where such things can be posted anonymously so that you can share news of bad behavior without worrying about backlash.

If you meet the membership criteria, I encourage you to join. It doesn’t cost anything to be a member, so you don’t lose anything by trying it out. Even if it didn’t have more tangible benefits to my writing, I find that it makes me feel like I’m part of the community. Really, the more the merrier! If you do join up, I’ll see you there!

If you don’t meet the membership criteria, I encourage you to make this one of your milestones to celebrate progress in your writing career (much like SFWA membership eligibilty is for a lot of writers). If you want to know more about Codex, they have a pretty thorough FAQ page.

Songs in the Key of Rejectomancy

introduced by David Steffen
songs written by Amadeus X. Machina

I had never heard of the musician who calls himself Amadeus X. Machina until I went to WorldCon in Chicago last year and stumbled across one of his performances. He is a musician of the most eccentric variety, eschewing the commonplace for his own forms of expression. He laughs at the traditional definitions of “audience” or “distribution”. If you so much as mention iTunes, he will slap you so hard your teeth will rattle (I learned this the hard way). He has an avid fanbase of people who devote large portions of their lives to figuring out where he will play next, and failing to do so. I have yet to speak to anyone who has seen him play twice, and the first time always seems to be a random coincidence, though he seems to appear at times of need.

I happened to come across one of his private performances in a ground floor men’s room bathroom at 5:30 in the morning on Saturday morning in the Chicago Hyatt. I was suffering a bout of insomnia, and found myself wandering the hotel to avoid waking my roommates. Somehow, from inside his bathroom stall, he was managing to sing, and to play an accordion an autoharp and a guitar simultaneously, and all in perfect pitch. The song was one about an epileptic monkey pirate who wished upon the morning star to be turned into a whale so he could forever cavort with his beloved Baluga mistress, Frita. It was a beautiful song that you should listen to if you ever have the opportunity. I could not do that beautiful song justice so I will not even try.

Mr. Machina and I got to talking at length about music, and art, and writing. Mr. Machina is a writer himself (under a pen name which he refused to divulge), and he sang me a few of his songs that he had composed while waiting for editors to respond to him. He was gracious enough to grant me permission to post these here on Diabolical Plots for all the writers out there to enjoy.

I asked Mr. Machina if I could give his email address for his fans to reach him. He said that he prefers to conduct all of his personal correspondence by Post-It notes left in hotel bathrooms (both men’s and women’s) where science fiction conventions are being held.

Twisting in the Wind
by Amadeus X. Machina (to the tune of Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind”)

How many reads must the slush reader do
Before my submission is read?
Yes, and how many times must I check my email
When I should be writing instead?
Yes, and how many sleepless nights have passed by
Since my Grinder has turned bloody red?
The author, my friend, is twisting in the wind
The author is twisting in the wind.

Dashing Through the Slush
by Amadeus X. Machina (to the tune of James Lord Pierpont’s “One Horse Open Sleigh”)

Dashing through the slush
In a one-horse open sleigh
Writer’s hopes I crush
Laughing all the way

Best of luck to you
Placing this one elsewhere
For Lightspeed it won’t do
And certainly not Nightmare

Chorus:
Jay Jay Ay, Jay Jay Ay,
Jay Jay all the way!
Oh what fun it is to read
And respond in just one day!
(repeat*)

* only after 7 days have elapsed

The Ballad of Shane
by Amadeus X. Machina (to the tune of Paul Henning’s “The Ballad of Jed Clampett”)

Come and listen to my story ’bout a man named Shane
Software engineer but he lived his life in pain
He wrote a little story just to buy his family food
But seventeen weeks later he got totally queued
(Slow queued, that is. Limbo. Cooling his heels.)

Well the next thing you know old Shane tried agin
“Write another story” said his pals and all his kin
He knew that selling fiction is a long hard slog
But he never reckoned on being bludgeoned by a log.
(Analog, that is. Trevor’s tar pit. The black hole of Quachri).

Well now it’s time to say goodbye to Shane and all his kin
They would like to thank you folks for kindly dropping in
You’re all invited back again if you’ve written a story
And join us in this lovely place that we call purgatory
(Y’all come back now, ya hear?)

Slush Little Story
by Amadeus X. Machina (to the tune of traditional song “Hush Little Baby”)

Slush little story, don’t say a word
Papa’s gonna send you to Clarkesworld
And if Neil gives you the brush off
Papa’s gonna send you to Asimov
And if Sheila won’t buy you
Papa’s gonna send you to Trevor Q
If you don’t meet his current need
Papa’s gonna send you to Lightspeed
If Jay Jay Ay says that you’re junk
There’s room for one more in my trunk

Check, Check, Check Your Mail
by Amadeus X. Machina (to the tune of traditional song “Row, Row, Row Your Boat”)

Check, check, check your mail
As often as you can.
Primarily, primarily, primarily, primarily,
Your inbox just has spam.

When not checking his email, Mr. Machina enjoys spelunking and recreational trepanation. His autobiography, Wake Me If There’s Sex, is eagerly anticipated by his many fans.

My Hugo Ballot 2013

written by David Steffen

I’ve spent the last several months reviewing award nominees. I decided to take it one step further and post the final decisions that I plan to post to my Hugo ballot with explanations (where I deem them necessary) about why I voted the way I did. I encourage anyone reading this to post discussion in the comments about how they voted, why I am wrong in my choices, etc.

What makes this more interesting is that the Hugo Awards use an instant runoff voting system. You rank your changes from 1-x, and can also set a number to the “No Award” category. You can find all the nitty gritty details at the Hugo Page explaining votes. I like the system a lot, much more than just a simple single-cast vote, because if your primary vote is for the least popular story, your other preferences still count for something.

If you are a nominee, keep in mind that I am just judging these based on my own preferences and, though I aim to not make my reviews mean, if you don’t want to hear my honest opinion of your work than you might want to skip this article.

For a full list of the nominees, see the original announcement on the Hugo site.

Best Novel

1. Redshirts, John Scalzi (Tor; Gollancz)
2. Throne of the Crescent Moon, Saladin Ahmed (DAW; Gollancz ’13)

Reasoning: I’ve only had time to read one book and a partial so far. I finished Redshirts and reviewed it here–I enjoyed it quite well, though there were some parts I didn’t like it was huge amounts of fun. I’ve started Throne of the Crescent Moon but haven’t finished it yet. Throne of the Crescent Moon is a solid book so far, but even though it has the strength of being set in a non-European based fantasy world, it still lacks the novelty that Redshirts has for me.

Best Novella

1. The Emperor’s Soul by Brandon Sanderson (Tachyon Publications)
2. After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall by Nancy Kress (Tachyon Publications)
3. San Diego 2014: The Last Stand of the California Browncoats by Mira Grant (Orbit)
4. The Stars Do Not Lie by Jay Lake (Asimov’s, Oct-Nov 2012)
5. No Award

Reasoning: The only story that I disliked enough to prefer no award was “On a Red Station, Drifting” by Aliette de Bodard. See my Novella Hugo 2013 Review for more detail.

Best Novelette

1. In Sea-Salt Tears by Seanan McGuire (Self-published)
2. The Boy Who Cast No Shadow by Thomas Olde Heuvelt (Postscripts: Unfit For Eden, PS Publications)
3. Rat-Catcher by Seanan McGuire (A Fantasy Medley 2, Subterranean)
4. The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi by Pat Cadigan (Edge of Infinity, Solaris)
5. No Award

Reasoning: The only story that I disliked enough to prefer no award was “Fade to White” by Catherynne M. Valente. See my Novelette Hugo 2013 Review for more detail.

Best Short Story

1. Immersion by Aliette de Bodard (Clarkesworld, June 2012)

2. Mono No Aware by Ken Liu (The Future is Japanese, VIZ Media LLC)

3. No Award

Reasoning: The only story that I disliked enough to prefer no award was “Mantis Wives” by Kij Johnson. See my Short Story Hugo 2013 Review for more detail.

Best Graphic Story

1. Locke & Key, Vol. 5: Clockworks, Joe Hill, art by Gabriel Rodriguez (IDW)

2. Schlock Mercenary: Random Access Memorabilia Howard Tayler, colors by Travis Walton (Hypernode Media)

3. Saga, Volume One, Brian K. Vaughn, art by Fiona Staples (Image)

4. No Award

Reasoning: See my Graphic Story Hugo 2013 Review for more detail.

Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form

1. The Cabin in the Woods
2. The Avengers
3. The Hunger Games
4. Looper
5. The Hobbit

Reasoning: See my Dramatic Presentation, Long Form Hugo 2013 Review for more detail. I didn’t regret the time spent on any of the movies, so I gave them all a rank.

Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form

1. Game of Thrones, “Blackwater”, Written by George R.R. Martin, Directed by Neil Marshall. Created by David Benioff and D.B. Weiss (HBO)

Reasoning: I’ve never seen an episode of Dr. Who (gasp!), so I can’t comment on the show in any way. I’ve only ever seen the pilot episode of Fringe, which did not inspire me to watch further even though I was excited about the show from the trailers. But my wife and I are avid watchers of the Game of Thrones series. The show is really solid throughout, great writing, casting, special effects, set design, costume design, everything is really stellar. And this episode was an especially awesome episode of a major battle, with great tension and great action all around. Even if I had been familiar with any of the other nominees, it likely would’ve come on top.

I don’t have anything against any of the other four winning the award, so I’m not casting a “No Award” vote for this category. I’m sure that one of the Dr. Who episodes will win anyway.

Best Editor, Short Form

1. Neil Clarke
Neil does great work at Clarkesworld, and I look forward to every episode of Clarkesworld. I tend to have a bit of a polar reaction to Clarkesworld stories. I either love them or don’t get them at all. But when I love them, the stories are well worth listening to the others to get to. Also, as a writer, I appreciate Clarkesworld’s lightning-fast response times.

2. John Joseph Adams
I enjoy listening to the Lightspeed podcast as well. I tend to have a polar reaction to Lightspeed stories as well, and a similar appreciation for lightning-fast response times, and it was hard to decide which to rank higher. He and Neil are ranked close enough in my mind that it’s almost a toss-up between the two and I just gave Neil the edge because he’s been a head editor longer. It’s for cases like this that I really appreciate the instant runoff voting.

3. Stanley Schmidt
I am often not a huge fan of Analog stories, often too nuts-and-bolts for me. But they’ve published some really great ones. I will immediately buy any issue with Juliette Wade in the pages, because her linguistics-based SF stories that have run there are among my favorites. There was a Wade story last year, too, a definite bonus. This was Stanley’s last year as editor so it would be neat to see him win, but I’d rather vote based on who I thought was the best rather than nominating for warm fuzzies about the guy who retired.

4. Sheila Williams
I don’t read Asimov’s very regularly, simply because they don’t have a podcast. I have read good stories in the issues that I’ve bought, so I’d have no complaints about her winning.

Reasoning: I’m not familiar with Jonathan Strahan one way or the other. I’m not going to cast a vote for him, but I’m also not casting a “No Award” either.

Best Professional Artist

1. Dan Dos Santos
Dan Dos Santos is awesome. I have a print of his depiction of Moiraine Damodred on my office wall. I love his other art as well, such as his Warbreaker cover. He just has a very skilled hand and great eye. I rarely enjoy others’ cover art as much as his. His character art in particular is really great–the examples in the Hugo packet are good ones, especially the baby-toting warrior woman, and the punk woman in the bathroom.

2. John Picacio
I picked for a large part because of the Hyperion cover with the elaborate mechanical monstrosity holding a human infant. His other covers are really good too.

3. Julie Dillon
I LOVE the “Afternoon Walk” image, with all the monsters being walked like dogs in the park.

4. Chris McGrath
I like the gritty style of these, almost like found photos of fantastical places.

5. Vincent Chong

Reasoning: They always say not to judge a book by its cover, but in this case I had to judge the artist by his cover. The only one I’m very familiar with is Dos Santos, so I had to judge based only on the samples. This was a hard category to pick favorites. I would not be disappointed for any of these five who won the award. But, I’ve gotta pick someone.

Best Semiprozine

1. Beneath Ceaseless Skies
2. Clarkesworld
3. Lightspeed
4. Apex
5. Strange Horizons

Reasoning: See my Semiprozine Hugo 2013 Review for more detail.

Best Fanzine

1. SF Signal

Reasoning: I’ve enjoyed going to SF Signal for various content for years, so I’ll happily give them my vote. The other four I am aware of, but have never read. I’m not using the “No Award” vote, because I don’t have anything against the other four.

Best Fancast

1. No Award
2. SF Squeecast
3. SF Signal Podcast
4. Galactic Suburbia Podcast
5. The Coode Street Podcast

Reasoning: This is the second year that the Best Fancast category has been running, and all five of last years nominees are nominated again. This makes me think that no one is actually listening to them and is just nominating past nominees as a habit. I think this may also have to do with confusion over the classification of podcasts who pay their authors, like Escape Pod, Pseudopod, Escape Pod, Drabblecast, and so on. By the word of the rules, these would all be considered Fancasts but many people might guess that they would be classified as Semiprozines. I asked the question of the Hugo committee long before the nomination period ended to clarify publicly the classification of these, but they never responded to me. This is hurting my favorite magazine’s chances of getting award nominations because anyone who wants to nominate them may be splitting across categories. I was very disappointed that the Hugo Committee didn’t respond to my question.

In large part to raise my small voice of protest about the Hugo Committee’s lack of clarification, I am choosing No Award as my primary vote. I would love to see a quality fiction podcast get award nominations, and maybe even win. No offense to the nonfiction podcasters who do good work, but if I wanted to listen to a conversation about SF I would just talk to someone about SF. It’s the stories that I’m here for. And if my favorite fiction podcasts aren’t allowed into the category, then I’m not interested in the category.

It also bothers me that StarShipSofa is the lone fiction podcast representative, because their constant over-self-promotion, Hugo vote begging, unfiltered content , lack of payment is just too many factors that bother me about them. And that’s even not including the aborted nonfiction project they had planned some years ago to supporting a plagiaristic audio adaptation–it was aborted when the moral problems were pointed out to Tony, but I felt that an editor shouldn’t need to have this pointed out to him. It may seem wrong to criticize a “fancast” nominee for unprofessional policies, but venues like Escape Pod and Toasted Cake have shown me that just because a podcast is staffed by volunteers in their spare time doesn’t mean that there have to be no standards.

So I’ve ranked the four nonfiction podcasts about StarShipSofa so that even if “No Award” gets eliminated as a possibility, I’ll be encouraging one of the others to get the award rather than StarShipSofa.

Best Fan Artist

1. Spring Schoenhuth
I love the jewelry designs of Schoenhuth, particularly the Robot Transformation, and the Four Electron Atoms designs. I don’t generally wear jewelry other than my wedding ring but those make me want to start.

2. Galen Dara
a really neat dreamlike style. I particularly like the Ghost River Red image. It feels like a story, and the vivid reds of the hero and the shadowy adversary are very eye catching and intriguing.

3. Brad W. Foster

4. Maurine Starkey

5. Steve Stiles

Reasoning: As with the Professional Artist category, I had to judge these by their samples and would not be disappointed if any particular one of these won, but again i have to choose.

The John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer (Not a Hugo)

1. Mur Lafferty

Reasoning: I confess that Mur is the only one whose stories I am familiar with, and I ran out of time to read the contributed works of the other authors. So, certainly no reason to use the No Award, but my lone vote is cast for Mur.

Conclusion

And that’s my take and my voting strategy on all of the categories where I picked up enough of the material to be able to cast votes. There are three categories that I didn’t touch at all: Best Fan Writer, Best Editor Long Form, and Best Related Work. In the In the Related Work category, I did not have time to read any of the nominees. In the Fan Writer and Editor Long Form, I am unfamiliar with these people’s work.

How did you vote? Care to share, drop a comment. I’ve enjoyed putting this together, and I think I’ll try to do the same series of articles again next year. Let me know if you enjoyed it, folks! Do you find it appealing to see how someone else spent his votes?

SFWA: To Join Or Not To Join

written by David Steffen

NOTE: Coincidentally, there is a row going on right now about SFWA and things that Mike Resnick and Barry Maltzberg have said in their editorials in the SFWA Bulletin publication. I’m not here to comment on that argument one way or the other, and I haven’t taken great pains to follow it, but I have seen uncivil responses on both sides. I wrote this article several months ago and have only altered it to add this note at the beginning. I scheduled it to coincide with my SFWA membership renewal month, but that just happened to be about the time of this argument. If you want to know more about that argument, Google for it and I’m sure you’ll find plenty to chew on. But that’s not what I’m commenting on here.

Since I started writing SF, one of the long-term milestones I’d set for myself was to become eligible to join SFWA. SFWA keeps a list of markets that meet their criteria for professional markets, including pay rate, circulation level, regularity of publication, longevity, and variety of authors published. To become a SFWA member with short stories you have to sell three stories to qualifying markets.

In mid-2012, five years after I wrote my first word of fiction, I finally reached that goal, securing a sale to Escape Pod to add to my prior sales to Bull Spec and AE. I decided to go ahead and pay the $80 membership dues and find out what membership was all about.

Now my membership renewal is due this month, and the rates have gone up to $90. I am a pragmatic person and I don’t intend to pay that kind of money without considering the cost-benefit tradeoff. So, I’m trying to decide if it’s worth the money to renew my membership or whether I should just let it lapse. So I’m going to list out what I’ve seen as the benefits, to decide whether or not those are worth $90 to sign up again.

Note: This list is based only on my own experience of what I found to be potential benefits to being a member of the organization. Michael A Burstein mentions in the comments, for example, a print directory and the SFWA Handbook, neither of which I recall having seen.

Benefits

1. Support of SFWA
Before I get any further, let me make it clear that I’m not questioning that SFWA does work that is of value. They do a lot of great things, acting as a writers’ advocate to point out when a publisher is offering questionable contracts, keeps a list of professional markets that have to meet certain criteria, provide lists of information for beginning writers to get their start and many other things. They run the Nebulas, which are one of the two big awards of the SF community.

To do this, they need money. I understand that. I think it’s worthwhile to give them some money for the things that they do. Some smaller donation per year? Definitely. $90? Well that seems pretty steep to me. Although I’ve made more than that in writing income each of the last few years, I’m not guaranteed to make that, and it would be very frustrating to me if I spent more on writing organizations than I made in writing.

2. Nebula Voting
The Nebula awards are one of the two big awards in the SF community (the other being the Hugos). The Nebulas are voted by active members of SFWA, which means you need to make qualifying sales and pay that membership fee.

There’s some satisfaction to knowing that you’ve contributed toward the award that fandom watches, but I personally have little enough influence over the result and am often surprised at the stories that actually get nominated (though not always) that it’s not something worth paying anything for.

3. Nebula Award Packet
Related to the last one is something new provided in recent years–the Nebula Packet. It’s still in kind of an experimental state, but every Active SFWA member can download all nominated works as part of the Nebula packet. They provide it so that voters can be more informed about the works that they’re voting for, but you could see the membership fee as paying for a collection of published works, including half a dozen novels and as many young adult novels.

This is certainly something of value, and it can help keep a pulse on the Nebula community, seeing what kind of stories they nominate. It’s certainly worth something, but not the full membership by itself by any means. Especially since the Hugo awards provide a similar packet for their nominees, that award is more interesting to me, there tends to be overlap between the awards, and the Hugo membership costs less money.

4. Forum
SFWA has a members only forum. Various levels of SFWA membership have access, including associate members who are not writers but who have other involvement in the community like editors. There are several benefits to the forums.

a. Interacting with industry professionals
There are plenty of recognizable names about the SFWA forums, such as Jerry Pournelle and editor Gordon Van Gelder. If you want a place to interact with them, this isn’t a bad place to do it.

But I’ve been spoiled by Codex forum, which costs nothing, has interesting and active conversations, and has both rising stars and some very recognizable names. A lot of the big names that would be on the SFWA forum are already reachable in some other online presence, Codex or Facebook or Livejournal or elsewhere. And, well, the SFWA forum is not particularly well moderated–an argument can escalate into something very unpleasant and not much is done about it. If you come across one of those conversations it makes for a very unpleasant experience. So while these conversations are of some value, there are perhaps better and free places to get similar things.

Note: Cat Rambo pointed out in the comments below that there is a new moderation team in place led by Cat

b. venue for sharing your published stories for award consideration
There is a section of the forum specifically for sharing your stories with other members for them to consider for Nebula nominations. In theory this is a handy way to spread the word about your stories.

I say “in theory”, but since others only read what they feel like, work by a relative no-name like me is probably not going to be read by most people. Again Codex has spoiled me, because they have something similar on that forum, and when I participated in that on Codex I got feedback from many people who actually did read the story as a result. I expect this has to do with establishing rapport with the Codex people because I’ve been in closer contact with them.

c. free fiction from industry professionals
In the same forum where you can share your award-eligible work, of course others are sharing theirs. The work posted there varies from various levels of experience, but there is plenty of good work to be read there and from more renowned sources. For instance, Gordon Van Gelder seems to post most F&SF stories there, so if you like that magazine enough you might consider the SFWA fee more reasonable as providing something like a F&SF subscription.

This would be a perk if I had more time than I knew what to do with. But I already have way more fiction to read than time to read it, so adding more fiction posted by its writers isn’t a huge perk.

d. Nebula suggested reading list
This is definitely a neat feature, a list of stories sorted by the number of recommendations given for it. Unlike the self-posting of stories, the result is more meaningful (authors are not allowed to recommend their own stories). This is very neat because you can get an early pulse of what people like before the award results are out. If you care about such things it can guide your reading or just give you a list of well-liked fiction.

This is a neat feature, but essentially only because it gives you a peek at what the Nebula results might be before the Nebula nominations are announced. That’s not something worth money to me.

5. GriefCom
This is the grievance committee available only to SFWA members. If you have a problem with a contract they will help you sort it out. SFWA is a large enough and visible enough organization in the fandom community that they do have some clout to clear up contract conflicts when they arise.

I can see how this would be hugely beneficial for higher stakes contracts, like with novels. However, at this point I write short stories pretty much exclusively. Short story contracts are generally very straightforward, and most of those that I have managed are low enough yield that paying a membership fee to get help with potential problems would be counterproductive. If I did sell a novel I might consider starting a membership in case I needed help.

6. Emergency Medical Fund
This fund provides interest-free loans to Active members in emergency medical situations

This seems to be mostly beneficial to someone who doesn’t have health insurance. I do, so that’s not a draw.

7. The SFWA Bulletin
The SFWA bulletin is a quarterly nonfiction magazine that provides writing advice articles, reviews, market rundowns, and other information about the SF publishing field. You can subscribe to the Bulletin if you’re not a member, but it costs as little as $32 for a year in the US, to $90 a year for outside of North America, or $10 per single issue.

If you find this content valuable, this would be a big draw of membership, justifying a great deal of the cost since you don’t have to pay for the subscription then. But none of the information in the magazine issues that I’ve seen so far has struck me as anything that I couldn’t find elsewhere, and generally I don’t find writing advice all that helpful because each writer really has to find their own way in any case.

In addition, by what I’ve heard the production of this magazine takes up a large portion of the SFWA budget. Why, I’d like to know, is it deemed worth that kind of expenditure? If this magazine weren’t taking up a bunch of the budget, the money could be spent elsewhere and perhaps rates could lower.

8. The SFWA Member Directory
Active members have access to a member directory in which each member can provide whatever contact information they want, addresses, phone numbers, emails or whatever.

While this is a convenience, I don’t see this as a big value. Most anyone who is a writer these days who would respond to contact from me is going to have an online presence anyway. It would make more sense, in general, for me to contact them via those publicly available routes than to cold-call them. Maybe there will come future work that I will be involved in for which this kind of contact information would be useful, at which point I may need to reconsider this opinion.

9. SFWA Convention Suites
SFWA hosts a convention suite at some convention. WorldCon for sure, I’m not sure what other ones. Members can come, as well as bringing a guest. There is food and drinks, sometimes meals or other times snacks. Other SFWA members come and go. Sometimes there might be specific events in the suite, like release parties or retirement parties.

So far I haven’t been very active on the SF convention circuit. I am very frugal by nature, and especially since I have a family to which I would need to justify the travel and the expense, I haven’t done it much. I did go to WorldCon 2012, however, which was a really great experience. Even once I decided to go I wanted to keep down my expenses as much as possible, sharing hotel room and other cost-saving measures. One of the things that I at first found was hard to be frugal on was food, since the hotel convenience store had the most expensive and most disgusting wrap that I’ve ever eaten, the cheapest thing they had available, and going out to restaurants always adds up quickly. Soon I realized, though, that I had access to (at least) three sources of free food: the convention suite (available to everyone but mostly only very simple cheap food like peanut butter, cereal, etc), the green room (available to program participants, somewhat nicer food), and the SFWA suit (pretty good spread, even with some meals). So the availability of very good spread at certain times was huge perk and a huge money-saving measure. Also, whenever I came to the suite I would scan the nametags for people I’d like to talk to or people I’d met online, and even if I didn’t recognize anyone I met some very cool people chatting with whoever was about.

10. The secret handshake that will make editors buy your stories. Joining SFWA will make editors buy your stories.

The last sentence was a lie, but it is the kind of thing that seems intuitive from many beginners’ point of view. You can put your membership in your cover letter if you want, but it’s not going to make a lick of difference. It might be a point of mild interest, but isn’t going to make a difference in your sales. Having a marketable name can influence a sale, but your SFWA membership has nothing to do with that. Some big names aren’t members, some no-names (like me) are. It doesn’t matter. If you don’t have a marketable name, your story just have to kick enough ass that the editor wants to buy it despite your lack of notoriety. In either case, your SFWA membership does not matter.

The Verdict

So, what does it all come down to? At this point, I am not going to renew my membership. I mightpay something like $40 a year for the Nebula packet alone. I would pay some larger amount (maybe a few hundred dollars) for a lifetime membership, but $90 a year (which will certainly go up periodically as it did this last year) is just too much for me at this point in my career.

I think that at this point I’ll renew my membership whenever I am planning to go to WorldCon that year, because it is such a good place to meet people and also to save money on food expenditures that it is well worth the membership fee to do it. In the years when I do that I’ll happily read the Nebula packet and actively participate. But otherwise I probably won’t unless something big changes to convince me of the worth of a membership. With a newborn at our house, I’ll be skipping WorldCon this year. Next year it’s in London, too far of a jaunt for me. So for at least the next couple years I am out.

For those who choose to maintain their SFWA membership, I am curious to hear other points of view on the subject. What is it worth to you? Why do you do it? Do you consider cost-benefit as I have? Is it more a point of pride than a monetary value? Please share!

The State of The Submissions Grinder (Week 3)

written by David Steffen

Almost three weeks have passed since Anthony Sullivan and I launched The Submissions Grinder, a web-based tool for writers to find markets, track submissions, and look at market response statistics. At the time of launch the site was very simple, with a limited set of features, and admittedly some stability issues.

Just because we are the only free option does not mean that we have been resting on our laurels. We have been working hard on the site. The site stability issues of those early days have been resolved. New features, enhancements of existing features, and bug fixes have been added steadily. We now have more than 900 approved market listings, and counting. We have hundreds of registered users who have logged almost 8000 submissions into the system.

We would like to extend a heartfelt thanks to everyone who has registered, logged submissions, spread the word about our site, reported bugs, suggested market listings, suggested features, volunteered to keep market listings up to date, donated money to us, or shared feedback. We are glad to know that our effort has not been in vain, and that our tool is serving as a resource for writers like us.

Now that the Grinder has been around for a while we just wanted to share some of our favorite features that are now in place, and some features that are in the works. The Submissions Grinder is worlds better than it was at its launch on January 7, but we’re not done yet. These are just a few of our current and future features in the works.

Please feel free to leave comments here or elsewhere about what features are important to you, what you think of our current and planned features, or anything else that you’d like to say.

The Present

The Core Functionality

These are the core functionalities that make the site a worthwhile tool.

Submissions Tracker

The Grinder keeps a list of your fiction pieces, and you can make entries for each submission of each story, keep track of which ones are pending. You can quickly filter your results down to show just the set you are interested in, such as all the submissions made to a particular market, or all the submissions of a particular story.

Market Search

You can search for new markets for your work, based on various parameters, including length, genre, pay rates, and many other factors that are important to us writers. If you’re a new writer, this kind of tool is essential to finding places to send your work. If you’re a veteran writer, you might still find something new from time to time.

Market Response Statistics

This is really the most valuable thing that this system provides. The data from every submission is combined to make anonymous statistics for all to view, so you can see the response times for different markets to decide where you want to submit or when to query an existing submission.

Revamped Appearance

For the initial release, we focused primarily on getting the core functionality working, and then on squashing bugs and improving the feature set. But we’ve gotten a lot of feedback that said that the Courier font used for the site was hard on the eyes. We want to make the site as friendly to you users as we can, so we listened to that feedback and changed the font of most of the site to make it more readable. We also added colored boxes and shadows to offset and emphasis certain areas of the screen and to add some variety. And we now have a logo. This has been a recent change, and we’d like to know what you think of the new look, so do give us comments.

Response Time Histograms

For each market, we provide numbers that show the minimum, average, median, and maximum response times. But we’ve also added a new feature that sets us apart–response time histograms. There’s only so much you can gather from looking at those four statistical numbers, but you can get a much better feel for a market’s response times by seeing a response time histogram, which are included with each of our market listings.

For instance, here is a snapshot of the histogram from Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show. You can see that there is a very strong peak of responses that take place at about 30 days. There are some that are shorter, even down to 1 day, and a smattering of longer ones. This is very representative of my experience with the magazine. They have a very steady slush response time at about 30 days, but stories that make it out of slush are much less predictable and longer, while the shorter response times can be the editor plucking stories from the slush directly or for writers that may have more history with the magazine and bypass the slush. With just a quick glance you can get a very good feel for these details by looking at this graph.

Personal Statistics

Another feature that sets us apart is that in your account you can view personal statistics that tell you what kind of responses you’ve gotten each year you’ve been submitting, with each market, and with each story. With these you can quickly answer questions like “Which of my stories has gotten the most personal rejections?” “How have my acceptances compared from year to year?”

The Future

Post-Acceptance Tracking

When your story gets rejected, that’s all there is to that submission. But when your story gets accepted, there’s more bookkeeping to do! Our system will be able to help you with that to keep track of things like:
–Dates that contract was received/returned
–Date and amount of payment
–Date of publication
–Length of exclusivity period specified in contract

With this information the system could provide powerful answers to certain questions like:
–“How much money was I paid in 2012?” (useful for taxes as well as personal goals)
–“Which stories have been accepted but not paid for?”
–“Which stories have been accepted but not published?”
–“Which stories are available to submit right now?” (would exclude stories that are accepted but unpublished, and stories which are published but within the exclusivity period)

Poetry/Nonfiction Market Listings

So far all of our listings and data fields are fiction based. We will add poetry and non-fiction listings to help writers keep track of those too.

Support for Listing Management by Editors

We intend to put a system in place to allow staff members of publications to participate in the upkeep of their page, such as opening and closing dates, changes in rates, adding in seasonal themes/guidelines, etc. This will help the markets keep their pages as accurate as possible which will help encourage a volume of quality submissions, and will help ease the load on us as we try to keep listings up to date.

Scheduled Openings/Closings

Right now, openings and closings of markets are manually entered by us. But there are many cases where markets schedule their opening and closing dates far in advance, so there will be support added to automate this process.

“Ignore Market” Setting

Writers may decide never to submit to particular markets, for editorial policy, personal feelings, or for whatever other reason. Each writer will be able to choose to ignore that market so that it will not come up in their searches anymore.

Customized RSS Feed of Responses

On the homepage of The Grinder website, you can see the 40 most recent responses across the whole site. We intend to provide something similar that shows you such recent responses but only for the markets where you have pending submissions, so that you can tell at a glance where the response activity is happening.

When you register for The Grinder, you check a box to indicate whether you want to receive the newsletter. We’ve been busy enough with other things that we haven’t implemented the newsletter yet. But we will! It will contain information such as:
–New markets added
–Opening/Closing of markets
–Users who have sold stories (only those that have chosen to have their names shared for their acceptances)
–Grinder features/bug fixes
–Other things that you might interested in (Leave comments if you have ideas!)

Personalized Histograms

Right now the histograms are shown for every market. But in the future, if you are a logged in user with pending submissions at that market, those pending submissions will be marked on the histogram with a line, so that you can see where you lie in the spectrum of response times so far, giving you a quick visual queue about how unusual your current wait time is.

What You Can Do

If you like what we’re doing, give us suggestions on how we can be better, suggest new market listings, report bugs, upload your data and use the submission tracker. We’ve added a Donate button as well–we appreciate anything you can give, and we maintain our commitment to not require any payment to use the site. Thanks!

My Hugo/Nebula Picks 2012

written by David Steffen

In the previous post I suggested my own Hugo/Nebula nominated work. This post has the purpose of sharing my picks for these categories other than our own work. I welcome any and all to post in the comments with their own suggestions.

I’m a bit of an odd duck in my reading habits, in that I ready only a small niche of the types of stuff out there, but I read that very deeply. Almost all of my fiction intake comes from fiction podcasts, which are all Short Story categories, but are often reprints from previous years which are not eligible. I do read novels, but have not read any written in 2012 yet, because I am a slow read and because I re-read the entire Wheel of Time series that pretty much took all year, in preparation for the 2013 release of the final book.

Which is to say, most of the categories that I’ve voted for I am very well read in, but I just left off those categories in which I have not read at all, or haven’t read enough to have some solid picks.

Best Short Story Hugo and Nebula

This is the category I’m most interested in, covering SF/Fantasy/Horror fiction of 7500 words or less.

1. The Three Feats of Agani by Christie Yant (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)

2. Five Ways to Fall in Love on Planet Porcelain by Cat Rambo (Near + Far)

3. All the Painted Stars by Gwendolyn Clare (Clarkesworld)

4. Devour by Ferrett Steinmetz (Escape Pod)

5. Worth of Crows by Seth Dickinson (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)

Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form) Hugo

Best dramatic presentation of 90 minutes or longer

1. The Hunger Games

2. Game of Thrones Season 2

3. True Blood Season 5

4. The Avengers

5. Wreck-It Ralph

Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) Hugo

Best dramatic presentation of less than 90 minutes.

1. “Digital Estate Planning” –episode of Community

2. Devour–Escape Pod

3. The Dead of Tetra Manna–Dunesteef

4. The Wreck of the Charles Dexter Ward–Drabblecast

5. The Music of Erich Zann–Drabblecast

Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation (Not a Nebula)

Related to the Nebulas, but not a Nebula itself, this seems to combine the long and short dramatic forms used in the Hugo.

1. The Hunger Games

2. Game of Thrones Season 2

3. True Blood Season 5

4. Wreck-It Ralph

5. “Digital Estate Planning” — Community

Best Editor (Short Form) Hugo

Editor of short fiction.

1. Norm Sherman (Drabblecast)

2. Scott H. Andrews (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)

3. Neil Clarke (Clarkesworld)

4. John Joseph Adams (Lightspeed, various anthologies)

5. Bruce Bethke (Stupefying Stories)

Best Profession Artist Hugo

1. Michael Whelan (especially this Analog cover)

Best Semiprozine Hugo

This is the most complicated category to define. It is not a professional market, which means that neither of the following are true: (1) provided at least a quarter the income of any one person or, (2) was owned or published by any entity which provided at least a quarter the income of any of its staff and/or owner. In addition, it generally has to pay contributors in something other than copies of the magazine, or only be available for paid purchase.

I’m not totally sure that all of the ones that I’ve picked here are eligible. There might be others that I’m ruling out as not being eligible that are. This category confuses me. but these are my best shot at nominations for it.

1. Drabblecast

2. Escape Pod

3. Beneath Ceaseless Skies

4. Pseudopod

5. Stupefying Stories

Best Fancast Hugo

This is a new experimental Hugo that might get voted in as a permanent one. It is split off from the Best Fanzine Hugo, but must be an audio or video presentation. I’m not totally sure that Toasted Cake qualifies, since they do pay a few dollars per story, but I thought it was low enough that it might be considered as more of an honorarium and let me nominate it.

1. Journey Into…
see my Best Of Journey Into… list for examples.

2. Toasted Cake

3. Beam Me Up
A science fiction radio show and podcast–how cool is that?

John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer (Not a Hugo)

1. Jake Kerr
I very much enjoyed his Old Equations on Lightspeed, for one.

2. Mur Lafferty