Technical Difficulties

Congratulations to the 2015 Hugo winners!

I'm very pleased that Liu Cixin and Ken Liu won. All of the fiction awards that were given this year went to translated works (that is, Short Story & Novel, the only two which did not end up No Award), which has never happened before and which I think is a wonderful thing. So if I'm gonna lose, I'm glad I lost to The Three-Body Problem.

And extra special congratulations to Wes Chu, this year's Campbell winner!

The Goblin Emperor is a Locus Awards finalist in the Fantasy Novel category. (!)

In other news, I will be attending part of Sasquan (Friday through Sunday--I just don't have the stamina for the whole thing.)

I will also be part of a thing at ALAAC: RUSA's Literary Tastes Breakfast. The program description tells me that I will see papersky there, WHICH IS AWESOME.

Further bulletins as events warrant.

So, yes, I will be attending the Nebula Awards Weekend this year. I will be attending as Katherine Addison, given that Katherine Addison is the one nominated for the award, not Sarah Monette.

As you might expect, this is a rather peculiar feeling.

The Goblin Emperor is the ALA's best Fantasy for Adult Readers on their 2015 genre fiction reading list.

This seems like a good time to link back (once again) to my Buy, Read, Talk post, because it bears repeating: if you want to support an author whose work you love, buy the book--or ask your library to buy the book, that's equally awesome--and tell people about it. I'm not talking specifically about me here (though obviously I'm not gonna say no), but about any author; this is the most widely applicable piece of advice I think I've ever given.

The Table of Contents for The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2014 has been announced, and "To Die for Moonlight" made the list.

Since it is the only thing I published last year, I am obviously EXTREMELY HAPPY about this. Many thanks to Lynne and Michael and Apex Magazine for giving my werewolves a home.

1. You know the faces people make when they're about to sneeze? Horses do that, too.

2. Sold "Coyote Gets His Own Back" to Apex Magazine & reprint rights for "The Watcher in the Corners" to Ghosts: Recent Hauntings, edited by Paula Guran.

3. Also, because I failed abysmally to blog on the actual launch day, Chicks Dig Comics is out! I contributed an essay on revenge tragedy and Sandman.

4. If arthropods give you a wiggins, DO NOT CLICK THROUGH to the story about the Cincinnati Zoo's Emperor Scorpion and her twenty-five babies. Seriously. Don't. Instead, may I suggest Point Defiance Zoo's unbelievably charming clouded leopard cubs?

5. Speaking of things I failed abysmally to mention, congratulations to all the 2012 Hugo nominees!

1. Ten months and two days out, I have had my last orthopedist appointment. (This is the ten-month anniversary of my ankle surgery, which was two days after I broke it.) The orthopedist is very very pleased. There's no sign of the fracture, the joint is symmetrical, the talus is nicely contained by the tibia and fibula. (He pulled up the original ER X-rays, in which, yeah, the tibia has ceased to contain anything and the talus is kind of drifting off out of the joint in a way I find even more horrifying now than I did at the time. In some circumstances, opiates really ARE your friends.) Unless the metal in my ankle starts to cause me pain, they don't need to see me again. Three loud cheers.

2. kate_nepveu pointed me to this lovely review by rushthatspeaks of The Singing Creek Where the Willows Grow (written by Opal Whiteley, edited by Benjamin Hoff). Reading the review is its own reward, but I need to quote the first paragraph, which is what made Kate think of me:

The best way to describe the reading experience I had with this book is to say that it resembled what might happen to a perfectly innocent person who does not know much about history while looking up newspaper headlines from 1880s London. Which is to say, there you are researching away, doing nothing particularly ominous, and suddenly all of the scholarship on Jack the Ripper lurches out of its cabinet and starts gnawing on your leg. Up becomes down, dogs and cats start living together, the definitive works on the subject are written by people who do not have a personal interest so much as a personal ideological obsession, and otherwise perfectly rational researchers start yelling at one another "WHAT PART OF PH'NGLUI MGLW'NAFH WGAH'NAGHL CTHULHU FHTAGN DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND?"

Of course, what it says about me that this paragraph evokes me to my friends is . . . perfectly deserved.

3. The Lindorm is still at the Saab place, but they promise I will be able to pick it up today.

4. Menstrual cramps continue to blow dead bears.

5. The Drabblecast has sent me an engraved brandy snifter and a murder weapon blunt instrument MASSIVE PLAQUE to commemorate "Mongoose" (written by matociquala and me) being their Story of the Year for 2010. (matociquala will be getting her own PLAQUE and snifter because The Drabblecast is a class act like that.) I love only slightly more than the fact that this plaque looks like it belongs in a Clue-for-Writers game (Miss Scarlet*, in the Conservatory, WITH THE PLAQUE!) the fact that both snifter and PLAQUE are engraved with a tentacle not unlike this one:

Honestly, I think sffh has the best awards: rocket ships, tentacles, H. P. Lovecrafts, the Jackson Awards' rocks . . .

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*Did anyone else, as a child, suspect a secret affinity between Miss Scarlet and Scarlett O'Hara?

jimhines's Hugo and Nebula eligibility post is a lot funnier than mine. I'm just saying.

Back from WFC. With con crud. Bleah.

Otherwise I had a lovely time, talked to many people I don't get to see nearly often enough, got some business done, ate excellent food, and kind of had a vacation, including dragging poor mirrorthaw all over the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium on Sunday (Gorillas! Manatees! Echindas!). I was yawned at by a tiger quoll, a ginormous porcupine, a male lion among his wives, and a flying fox. Also, I preserved my geek cred by insisting on riding on the gorgeous (and gorgeously restored) 1914 carousel.

And I came home to the news that Corambis has been nominated for the 2010 Gaylactic Spectrum Award for Best Novel, so yay! Also, congratulations to all the other nominees!

This year's Hugo ballot has been announced. Congratulations to all the nominees!

ETA: Also, the nominees for the David Gemmell Morningstar Award for Best Fantasy Newcomer/Debut. Congratulations there, too--especially though not exclusively to stillsostrange!