written by David Steffen
It’s time for that January tradition, the Award Eligibility post for Diabolical Plots.
This has been a year of change, as we’ve been trying a new publishing strategy; instead of publishing stories only on the Diabolical Plots website, we’ve been shifting toward publishing them in ebook. Since there was a backlog of several years of stories already published, this resulted in three anthologies of stories that were first published on Diabolical Plots:
- Diabolical Plots: The First Years in March 2018
- Diabolical Plots: Year Three in June 2018
- Diabolical Plots: Year Four in September 2018
Diabolical Plots: Year Four was particularly momentous, because it marked the point where the ebook publications have overtaken the website publications. And because of this change, as well as this being the first full calendar year with 2 stories per month, more DP stories are eligible than have ever been eligible before, because all of the stories that were scheduled on the site from January 2018 to March 2019 are eligible (January 2019 to March 2019 stories were all in Diabolical Plots: Year Four).
As ever, I’m not saying you should nominate these, but I do get questions about what is eligible, so here is a list of what is eligible, if nothing else it’s nice to look back at what was new this year.
Here are the stories, alphabetically by author, which are all eligible under the Short Story category (by Hugo or Nebula rules)
Short Story
“Brooklyn Fantasia” by Marcy Arlin
“The Fisher in the Yellow Afternoon” by Michael Anthony Ashley
“How Rigel Gained a Rabbi (Briefly)” by Benjamin Blattberg
“Giant Robot and the Infinite Sunset” by Derrick Boden
“Soft Clay” by Seth Chambers
“Local Senior Celebrates Milestone” by Matthew Claxton
“Withholding Judgment Day” by Ryan Dull
“Medium Matters” by R.K. Duncan
“Artful Intelligence” by G.H. Finn
“The Divided Island” by Rhys Hughes
“The Hammer’s Prayer” by Benjamin C. Kinney
“For the Last Time, It’s Not a Ray Gun” by Anaea Lay
“The Memory Cookbook” by Aaron Fox-Lerner
“The Vegan Apocalypse: 50 Years Later” by Benjamin A. Friedman
“The Last Death” by Sahara Frost
“The Coal Remembers What It Was” by Paul R. Hardy
“The Efficacy of Tyromancy Over Reflective Scrying Methods in Divining Colleagues’ Coming Misfortunes, A Study by Cresivar Ibraxson, Associate Magus, Wintervale University” by Amanda Helms
“Glass in Frozen Time” by M.K. Hutchins
“What Monsters Prowl Above the Waves” by Jo Miles
“Still Life With Grave Juice” by Jim Moss
“9 Things the Mainstream Media Got Wrong About the Ansaj Incident” by Willem Myra
“Six Hundred Universes of Jenny Zars” by Wendy Nikel
“Heaven For Everyone” by Aimee Ogden
“Graduation in the Time of Yog-Sothoth” by James Van Pelt
“Pumpkin and Glass” by Sean R. Robinson
“Jesus and Dave” by Jennifer Lee Rossman
“The Man Whose Left Arm Was a Cat” by Jennifer Lee Rossman
“The Dictionary For Dreamers” by Cislyn Smith
“Crimson Hour” by Jesse Sprague
“Tank!” by John Wiswell
“Her February Face” by Christie Yant
Semiprozine
Diabolical Plots is eligible for the Hugo Award for the Best Semiprozine.
Editor, Short Form
I am eligible for the Hugo Award for the Best Editor, Short Form, for both Diabolical Plots and the Long List Anthology.
Other
Around this time of year people occasionally ask what The Long List Anthology and The Submission Grinder are eligible for, award-wise, since these lists are always Diabolical Plots short stories.
The answer is: not really any categories for the Hugo or Nebula, but possibly for other awards which I don’t keep up with as much.
The Long List Anthology is fiction, but by its nature it is entirely reprinted fiction from previous years, so all of the stories within it are already past their period of eligibility by Hugo and Nebula rules, and there are no categories for anthologies specifically.
The Submission Grinder is an online tool, which there isn’t a particularly suitable category for in the Hugo and Nebulas.
In both of these cases there might be categories in other awards, such as anthology categories in the Locus awards for the Long List Anthology, or categories in Preditors and Editors poll about writing tools.
If one felt very determined and maybe more than a little bit silly, I suppose one could nominate the Mighty Samurai cross-stitch photo series on the DP twitter account for Best Related Work.