SFAW

I Say, Back On Track!

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

As Kevin reported last night, a few additional memberships in the Steampunk Convention became available last night. We quickly bagged a couple. If you are going, you can expect to find us around on Saturday. Please note that while we will make an effort, we are unlikely to achieve anywhere near the level of sartorial elegance of Mr. Roche and Mr. Trembley. I will try to get Kevin to read some of George Mann’s The Affinity Bridge before we go so that we can both enthuse about it. The game’s afoot! Tally ho!

In other news, the very wonderful Gigi Gridley has offered to live-blog the World Fantasy Awards for SFAW. More on that later this week.

Heroic Fantasy Gets An Award

~ Cheryl

I’ve just done a post over at SFAW about the brand new David Gemmell Legend Award for Fantasy, an award for fantasy novels of truly heroic stature. I suspect that will make a whole bunch of people very happy. There are folks who are always moaning that heroic fantasy never gets a fair whack in the Hugos or World Fantasy Awards. Well this is an award for them.

The mechanism is also quite interesting. Essentially what they have done is take the structure of a juried award, but farm out the job of reading the long list and narrowing it down to a short list to the general public. A jury still gets to pick the winner, but a lot of the hard work for that jury (in reading a whole bunch of submitted works that are not up to scratch) is removed.

If you happen to be a fantasy novel editor and have not been asked to nominate works yet, I suggest you get in touch with Debbie Miller, the award administrator.

Worldcon Schedule

~ Cheryl ~ 7 Comments

It appears to be the fashion for people to post details of what panels they will be on at Worldcon. Goodness only knows why any of you would want to see me in person, except perhaps to confirm for yourselves that I should not be let out in public without a paper bag over my head, but I am involved in some interesting panels and I hope to be doing some interesting journalism during the convention. Here is a brief run down of the plans.
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Quick WFA Comment

~ Cheryl

I think this year’s WFA Awards were pretty much as expected. The only real question was how the short fiction awards were going to be divided up between Jeff Ford and Mary Rickert. Poor Mary was quite tearful, but she proved the value of winning two awards: having to come up a second time allows you to thank people that you embarrassingly forgot the first time.

Gene Wolfe’s book was on my Hugo list last year, so I’m delighted that it won. But the results that really make me happy are the wins for Shaun Tan and Gary Wolfe. Gary, sadly, missed out on a Hugo in LA, but he very much deserves his Howie. As for Shaun, next stop Best Related Book for The Arrival.

WFC Program

~ Cheryl

Thanks to John Picacio I learn that the World Fantasy Convention program is now online. The good news is that the IHG Awards presentation doesn’t start until 9:00pm, so Amtrak can be 2 hours late getting me there and I’ll still be in time. (Non-American readers who think that being 2 hours late on a 4-hour journey is a bit excessive need to try Amtrak sometime.) On the other hand, I’m getting a bit worried about what sort of Internet access I’ll have. My hotel looks distinctly antediluvian (confirmation letter printed by dot matrix!), and the major events are in a convention center of sorts. We shall see how we go.

As to the rest of the weekend, the big bonus as far as I’m concerned is that Michael Dirda will be there. Am I star struck or what? I just hope I can get to meet him. Programming is, as usual, pretty light. I’ll probably go to the “Survey of the Field” panel on Saturday afternoon for old times sake. Much of the rest of my time will probably be spent in the bar with other reprobates such as Chris Roberson, Lou Anders, John Picacio, the Solaris lads and a bunch of Australians.

Spook Country on SFAW

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Generating traffic for a web site is a fascinating problem. There are all sorts of quick fix ideas offered, but basically nothing beats having content than people will link to of their own free will. But what do you do if you have something you think is really good, but no one is linking to it? Well, obviously you might be wrong about it being good, but maybe no one knows it is there. So maybe a nudge or two is in order.

What has got me thinking about this most recently is that I finally got a good book discussion going on Science Fiction Awards Watch. It has a great panel: Ellen Datlow, Lou Anders, Mike Levy and Rick Kleffel. The actual discussion is very interesting. Yet Google Analytics tells me that to date a mere 22 people have bothered to take a look. That’s kind of disappointing.

Still, new venture and all that. Maybe I just need to spread the word. We shall see. Launching wouldn’t be interesting if it wasn’t a challenge.