On Award Pimpage

Jeff VanderMeer mentioned this on Facebook and it got me thinking about it. This is the season when speculative fiction writers (and other genres as well, I believe) start thinking about awards. Nominations for the Hugo and Nebula Awards are coming up. There will be others, such as the Locus and World Fantasy Awards, but for most it’s the Hugo and Nebula, with a small group thinking about the Campbell Best New Writer Award and trying to figure out how to make the most of their two year period of eligibility for it.

Complicating this is the fact that neither award is really very democratic. You can only make Hugo nominations if you’re a member of either last year’s WorldCon or this one. Nebula nominations are made by members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, many of whom are hoping to make it onto the nomination ballot itself. In either case you could love the book and want to vote for it, but unless you’ve paid the dough for either a WorldCon or SFWA membership, you’re not going to be able to.

One of the words that gets mentioned around this time is “log-rolling,” the act of exchanging favors, along the lines of “You nominate my novella for a Hugo and I’ll nominate your short story for a Nebula.” Recent changes, such as no longer being able to see who nominated something for a Nebula, are encouraging, but the awards still sometimes seem less about the merit of the work than about the popularity of their author.

Beyond that, people use the power of the Internet as much as possible: blog posts, Facebook mentions, tweets, and so forth, sometimes gracefully, sometimes not so much. Why? Because it works. If it didn’t work, there’d be a lot fewer people doing it, and (imo) the award lists from the past decade would be significantly different. Does that make the award process something you should just opt out of and hope for the best? Well, certainly people have done that in the past (and saved themselves some work in the process), but I’d rather have as a take-away the idea that one shouldn’t despair if you don’t win.

Awards are shiny. Most of us like shiny things. And more importantly, they’re testimony to what we really want: affirmation that someone read and liked our work. That’s the real pellet that keeps us pressing the button marked “Pimp my work”.

It’s hard to know where to draw the line. Factor in, also, that what one person considers acceptable, the next may perceive as a gross breach of etiquette. I like the approach the Codex writers have taken: there’s a discussion thread where people can opt in and say they’re willing to read for the awards as well as a place where people can post pieces for consideration. I appreciate this because it helps me discover some writing that I might not otherwise have found. Here’s what I said on Codex in a discussion about it:

I think it’s certainly possible to go too far in pimping your work, but in my experience, that line is farther out than one might think. This is an area where the bolder people have a definite advantage, and sometimes you have to force yourself to be bold about it. You are the best champion your work has, and you might as well do your duty by it.

It would be lovely if all one had to do was write a good story, but the nature of things is that those who are good about promoting their work go farther than those who aren’t. Promotion’s not a substitute for good writing (in most cases), but it sure helps. My collection wouldn’t have gotten nominated for the Endeavor Award if I hadn’t sent them copies of the book, for example, and while I thought at the time it was a pretty long shot, it ended up being quite worthwhile.

To me the most important point is this – don’t just throw your work out there. If you’re going to be sending people your stuff to read, then do some reading and recommending yourself, and do it based on what you like, what you think is good, or ground-breaking, or worthy of recommendation. In that spirit, I’ll be posting some recommendations in the next few weeks, and hopefully guiding y’all to some excellent fiction that you might not have read otherwise. Please feel free to make recommendations to me in return, either on this post or upcoming ones!

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The Most Recent SFWA Kerfuffle

June 4, 2013

“Hey, how about that SFWA mess?” my brother asked in an e-mail.

I winced, because I knew exactly what he meant. In my capacity as the lead of the moderating team on the SFWA internal forums, I’d been reading about it for the past few days – and working to keep the discussion — on those boards, at least — somewhat sane. There was a whole lot of shouting going on. And some of it, I think, could be avoided if some of the shouters had actually taken the time to listen to (by which I mean read) what was being said.

That’s a problem happening on both sides (and honestly, there aren’t really “two sides”. There’s a lot of possible takes on this and part of the problem is this idea of “us vs. them”.) “OMG they are attacking Mike Resnick!” screams one group. “OMG old white dudes telling us what to do!” shouts another.* There’s assumptions being made that’s there’s no room for the organization for both sides and that each is trying to somehow oust the other.

So…I’d urge you to actually read what’s under discussion, as well as how it’s being discussed. The article in question was third in a series of what seem like bad moves on the SFWA Bulletin’s part. First there was a cover that many felt was inappropriate for a professional magazine. This was accompanied by an article in the same Bulletin written by Barry Malzberg and Mike Resnick that, while doing an admirable job of trying to document the role women have played in the early days of SF, also applied appearance standards to those women in a way that did not seem congruent with how they’re applied to men, as well as emphasizing how anomalous these creatures were by appending “lady” to editor, so we have editors and lady editors. Since very few of us lady editors actually manipulate the keyboard or pen with our vulvas**, the need to specify gender seems a little unnecessary, but okay. That was followed by an issue with a column in which the writer used Barbie as an example in what seems like a misguided rhetorical strategy. (I am trying to be somewhat neutral about all this, but you can no doubt tell that my sympathies do lie more on one side than another.)

And then came a third issue, containing a rebuttal to the criticisms by Malzberg and Resnick, which did exactly what I’m talking about. I’m forced to believe that since they identify the criticisms as “anonymous,” they didn’t bother to go read any of them, in which case they would have noticed that they weren’t anonymous but that people were quite willing to attach their names to them and had been doing so from the start. And the reply — well, go read it and decide for yourself whether or not you think of it a reasoned response to criticism.

Since then tempers have continued to flare, some people have resigned from SFWA while others decided to stay, a task force has been formed to try and figure out how to make the Bulletin more professional, and on and on, including lots of shouting about “PC” and censorship. So what I’d like to say is, if you decide to weigh in, exercise a little due diligence and do your homework beforehand. That means read the pieces as well as some of the discussion. Don’t rely on how someone else is interpreting or framing the debate, because that’s just lazy. Don’t rely on someone else’s summation of events (including this one!) but decide for yourself. Jim Hines has put together a list of some of the commentary. If you’re a SFWA member, come on over to the forums and take a look. If you don’t understand some of the objections, take the time to figure out what’s underlying them. Because ain’t nobody shouting just for shouting’s sake.

And remember – SFWA’s not a monolithic entity. There’s close to two thousand members, and that’s a whole lot of different points of view.

One of the great things about this is that there are useful, informative, and interesting discussions going on. There are changes being made, there’s awareness being raised. In the past I’ve sometimes ranted to my spouse about the odd forms of Luddism that sometimes appear on the part of some people writing about the future, and it seems to me this convulsion is helping drag SFWA into the 21st century as well as a more professional form. I look forward to seeing what’s to come.

* I should note that this is a rough paraphrase of a couple of the shouts and not an encapsulation of everything that’s been said.
** Feel free, fellow “lady editors,” to correct me on that if I’m wrong.

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Teaser: A Seed on the Wind

August 18, 2012

The Jelly Bean Tanker Explosion, drawn using Sketchpad Pro on the iPad, included here because a blog entry is so much more interesting looking when there's a visual element. Plus, I like this picture.

Should it be “on” or “upon” the wind? I’m torn. Either way, here’s a scrap to tantalize you a little.

He tried the drugs of Waterdeep.

He let himself be stung by wasps, each time burning like fire, melting like ice, evaporating into unconsciousness.

He chewed hallucinogenic onions and leaves so bitter he tasted them for days later.

He tried the flesh of an animate cactus and slept for three days in a dreamworld where he lived and died and rose into the form of a strange creature with ribbed horns on its head and hooves that struck fire from the rocks it ran over. It died to a wolf, and he rose that time as a vast flower, taking up a good third of the Abyss’s width, skirting the sunstrip and forcing travelers to bring him water and shit to pay passage. He lived for eons that way, then was vanquished by fungus and woke with his mouth tasting of licorice.

He listened to the dissonant orchestras whose intent was to derange the senses in tandem with a particular brew made from spit and a leafy green vegetable that had been shipped up from Ellsfall and followed it up with the discordant screeching of rodents.

He ate the eyeball-sized snails that thrifty city folk grow in barrels to sell at market, trying them raw, cooked in butter, and threaded on skewers to be marked with the grill’s deep black stripes.

He let parasites burrow into his skin and waited for the bliss of their hatching.
He huffed gritty crystals scraped from a cavern’s wall and scorpion venom.

He drank the blood of a mausel dog, although he let someone else wield the blade that killed it. He told himself it would have died with or without his intervention.

He smoked snakeskin and toadskin, and the dust of the yellow moths that come out only after a great wind.

He drifted from high to high, abandoning himself and becoming a new thing.

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