Category Archives: Fan Writers

Verse and Verse

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By John Hertz: Among the wonders of Loscon XLI (28-30 Nov 14) I saw a table in Ask Us Alley for next year’s Fandom Verse Expo, Lancaster. At that hour – 1 a.m. if I recall correctly – no one was staffing the table, but there was literature. Feeling I was surely in favor of fandom verse I left this sample, which Paige Willey later politely said the gang found acceptable.

I like fandom ’cos it’s strange.
It helps my mind get broader range.
The creatures I meet
May have seven feet
But there’s nothing I’d take in exchange.

Lovecraft Situation Gets Verse

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By Sam Long: Further to your recent File 770 item about the increase in Lovecraftiana….here’s my contribution to that increase, in the form of some verses I wrote a few years ago. I hope you enjoy them.

The Starship Lovecraft’s skipper
Was eldritch as his crew.
He sat upon the bridge and said,
“Warp factor one, Mr Chthulu!”

The chief cook of the Lovecraft
Would not serve corned beef hash.
Instead, to honor Yog Suthoth,
Served Yoghurt Succotash.

The Lovecraft’s skipper’s hobby
Was running model trains;
A suitcase in his cabin
Held a layout like Skylark DuQuesne’s.

The rolling stock was tiny,
And some was of great age.
When asked, “What scale’s your layout?”
He’d tersely say, “N-gauge.”

The Lovecraft’s lounge’s barkeep
Is really quite demonic.
He uses Miska fizz to make
A gin and Miska tonic.

The Lovecraft’s shuttle Arkham
Is piloted by an alien.
It uses long and ornate words
And terms sesquepedalian.

That Arkham pilot’s speech, some find,
Is barely comprehensible,
But to be skillful at its job
Is the Arkham E.T.’s principle.

It moves the Arkham’s flight controls
With movements smooth and subtle.
A better pilot you’ll not find
On any starship’s shuttle.

The Lovecraft‘s plumbing’s haunted:
That’s what crewbeings said.
They call the “Lurker in the Loo”
The “Haunter in the Head.”

NOTES

“N-gauge” is a model railroad gauge of about 1:144 or 1:156 — very small. An engine that is 70-80 feet long in real life is only about 6 inches long in N-gauge, and will fit in one hand.

Miska or Miska’s Liquors is a chain of liquor stores in the Chicago area.  They also sell mixers like soda water and–of course–tonic water.

Vibrating With Graham

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I nodded in agreement when I read Rich Coad say in a letter to Flag that most fanzine fans aren’t interested in awards anymore. (I mean besides you, Aidan, of course). Graham Charnock provides living proof (or maybe 100 proof) in Vibrator 2.0.4 [PDF file].

Frankly I have given up on this competitive stuff. No matter how much brilliant stuff I write for that seminal literary journal CHUNGA people (mostly Andy Hooper, which is strange because he is one of the editors) persist in ignoring me. Okay, once Marty Cantor proposed me for past fwa president at Corflu in Sunnyvale but he was soon shouted down and the anodyne Spike, who can’t even afford a last name and was on the organising committee, was elected in my place. Nowadays it seems Brits are elected every year without actually doing anything or displaying any talent. Even Roy Kettle. Bitter? Not me.

Having said that most of my impetus for writing comes from being drunk, I have to admit the flaw in my own argument. When I’m drunk I frequently just feel tired. I think of lots of stuff I could write, including long novels with vast starships (but also heart-searching poems dealing with death and mortality) but then I reach for another drink and turn on Bones.

The entire issue is filled with lightning wit — except for Graham’s article about death, I mean — and though I treasure the firecracker string of perfectly-placed in-jokes quoted above, most of it is far more accessible to the uninitiated. His readers add to the pandemonium, too. If only Graham charged for copies I would happily testify that Mark Plummer’s letter of comment is worth the price of admission by itself.

 

A LiveJournal Owner’s First Tweet

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“Whatever happened to Livejournal, anyway?” asks Caitlin Dewey of the Washington Post, who says that the only people who use LiveJournal these days are Russians and George R.R. Martin.

She made the comment after George R.R. Martin “belatedly joined Twitter” (@GRRMspeaking) on June 9 and initially used it to promote his LiveJournal —

I don’t tweet all that much, please check out my live journal page. 😉 #myfirstTweet

— George RR Martin (@GRRMspeaking) June 9, 2014

Dewey continues:

Livejournal, you’ll recall, was a popular blogging platform of the early-to-mid aughts, particularly beloved by teenage emos looking to spill their souls out to a sympathetic Web. At its peak, the platform had more than 2.5 million active accounts. But its peak was almost 10 years ago, in early 2005 — and since then, most of the English-speaking world, with the apparent exception of GRRM, forgot that it was there.

She reports an array of interesting statistics about LiveJournal, and explains why LJ is still beloved in Russia.

And, let it be said — in fandom too!

[Thanks to Martin Morse Wooster for the story.]

Fans Into Pros

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In response to a question from an academic, I spent an hour yesterday generating a list of pro writers who began in fanzines.

Within fandom the idea of what is a “pro” can be rather flexible. Very few people become full-time writers. And among friends, anybody who’s sold one sf/fantasy story might claim to be a “pro.” In the Sixties my local sf club, LASFS, held a Fanquet when a member sold his/her first story. That rite of passage transformed the person’s social identity from fan to writer.

I prefer to reserve the word “pro” for those who have repeatedly sold sf/fantasy stories — who have demonstrated a journeyman level of craftsmanship. In that respect I find myself in company with Dr. Gafia (rich brown) —

PRO

In fandom, generally it means anyone who has been paid for a published sf story. Although, since it is in fact short for “professional,” it probably should only be applied only to those who have made a significant portion of their living by writing sf.

Surprisingly, there isn’t that great a difference between the minimum fannish definition – anyone who has sold a story – and the minimum professional qualification for a writer to join SFWA as an Active member, which is “Three Paid Sales of prose fiction (such as short stories) to Qualifying Professional Markets” for $250 in aggregate.

Incidentally, I am not including my list of pros-into-fans because I don’t want people who aren’t on it to feel bad. (I’ve made bloggers feel bad enough this week.) Besides, there are only so many Ray Bradburys who belong at the top of this pyramid, and while Mike Resnick has bought a story or two from an awful lot of fans over the years, there is no urgent reason to widen the bottom of the pyramid by adding our names.

Funding A Convention Odyssey

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Petréa Mitchell’s ambition is to spend a year video-blogging science fiction conventions throughout the world. That won’t be cheap. (Actually, it will be quite expensive.) Will fandom chip in and help realize her dream? It never hurts to ask. That’s why she’s launched an Indiegogo appeal for $191,000

Her fannish credentials cover a whole spectrum – including gaming, costuming, filking, huckstering and blogging (see her weekly streaming anime discussions at the Amazing Stories blog).

The Invisible Fanwriter Hugo

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The Hugo nominating deadline is March 31. And I was wondering if, on Easter weekend when the Best Fan Writer nominees are announced, there will be the usual cuckoo in the robin’s nest – an established pro novelist?

Over the past few years the category has been won by pro writers John Scalzi, Frederik Pohl, Jim C. Hines, and Tansy Rayner Roberts, with actual fans Cheryl Morgan and Claire Brialey breaking through, too.

Every time I approach this subject lots of you write to say, “Oh no, Mike, you’re crazy — pros can be fans too!”

This is such a very important ideological axiom – to fans. Those eager to win the argument that “pros can be fans too!” never seem to recognize that it isn’t fans who are stopping this from happening, rather, that they are trying to force a kind of egalitarianism on writers that never really takes, however interested or polite the writers may be while the award is on the table.

Because once everyone’s done marching around waving their hands as confetti falls from the rafters and the brass band blows like mad and the world has once again been made safe for fannish egalitarianism, nobody pays attention to the implicit message we get back from the pros that people were so hot to give a fan Hugo —

People who are building careers as writers do not want to identify their brands with anything that hints of the amateur.

And the Fan Writer Hugo that was a big deal for six months gets swept under the rug.

You look at their bios and here’s what you find.

The “Brief biography of John Scalzi” on Whatever has this to say about his awards:

Bibliography: It’s here. New York Times best seller in fiction. Awards won include the Hugo, the Locus, the Seiun and Kurd Lasswitz. Works translated into 20 languages.

Where is it?

The late Frederik Pohl had two online bios, one at his official website and the other on his blog, and neither acknowledges the Best Fan Writer Hugo. The pro site speaks generally of winning the Hugo “six times; he was the only person ever to have won the Hugo both as writer and as editor….” The blog says of his awards: “He has received six Hugos, three Nebulas and forty or fifty other awards, some of which he has given himself.”

Six Hugos. Did you know Pohl, in fact, won seven Hugos? The seventh was his Best Fan Writer Hugo.

Now at the time he was nominated Pohl was gracious about it, clearly understood the honor he was being paid, said “I couldn’t be more pleased,” and was unquestionably qualified to compete in the category. I still thought his response was pretty much along the lines of “if you insist” – rather like Robert Silverberg’s attitude toward winning the 1950 Retro Hugo for Best Fan Writer.

Silverberg also doesn’t list his Retro Hugo on his official page, but that comes as no surprise if you remember what he wrote to File 770 the time I left him off a list —

I take umbrage at your omitting Me from your list of winners of the Best Fan Writer Hugo who have also sold pro fiction. May I remind you that I was the (totally undeserved) winner of the 1950 Retro-Hugo in that category, beating out such people as [Walt] Willis and [Bob] Tucker? Of course I would not have won the award if I hadn’t had a few stories published professionally along the way.  But I did get the Hugo.

That’s the thing. A Best Fan Writer Hugo added nothing to the career Pohl already had, and made Silverberg feel fans must be completely clueless about what he truly values.

Then, last year’s winner, Tansy Rayner Roberts, has a lengthy bio on her website that mentions three awards won by her fiction but is silent about her Best Fan Writer Hugo. The site’s landing page does call out her involvement in “the Hugo-nominated Galactic Suburbia podcast.” Not said is that the nomination is in the Best Fancast category.

Surprisingly, Jim C. Hines bucks the trend. His bio says right in front of God and everybody —

Jim is an active blogger about topics ranging from sexism and harassment to zombie-themed Christmas carols, and won the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer in 2012.

Respect to you, Jim.

Invisible little men are one of science fiction’s motifs. Invisible Best Fan Writers we can do without. Let’s do something revolutionary in 2014 – vote the award to a fan.

Civics Lesson

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Cheryl Morgan begins her post titled “On Fan Categories” –

Having listened to the latest Galactic Suburbia podcast, I feel the need to point out that the fan categories in the Hugos are not, and never have been, defined by content. You do not have to write about fandom, or write in a “fannish” way (whatever that means). All that is required is that you do what you do out of the goodness of your heart, and for the good of the community (at least as you see it) rather than being paid to do it.

In respect to the Best Fan Writer Hugo, Cheryl’s first two sentences are spot on. The third expresses a lovely sentiment about amateurism, a requirement stripped from the Hugo rules many years ago. I was surprised to see Cheryl, in particular, making this misstatement.

Eligibility for the Best Fan Writer Hugo is defined in the WSFS Constitution:

3.3.15: Best Fan Writer. Any person whose writing has appeared in semiprozines or fanzines or in generally available electronic media during the previous calendar year.

Those same rules say a “fanzine” is a publication that does not pay its contributors other than in copies. In contrast, a “semiprozine” does pay other than in copies. Pays in money, generally.

And writers who have appeared in either type of publication during the previous calendar year are eligible to be nominated for Best Fan Writer.

I assume it’s simply a mistake, though one that struck me as odd given Cheryl’s history as a champion of the semiprozine category. When Ben Yalow and Chris Barkley tried to abolish the category in 2009, Cheryl did as much as anyone to preserve its existence.

The balance of her remarks are familiar axe-grinding, though with a more grandiose strategy:

I should add that one of the reasons I feel so strongly about this because when I started out people tried to bar me from the fan categories on the grounds that my work was “not fannish”. You may find this hard to believe, but back in the 20th Century many people thought that book reviews were an inappropriate subject for fan writing.

Some of the same people having hurt my feelings now and again, I could supply a list of the names she probably has in mind.

However, having begun with an exposition about the fan Hugo rules, Cheryl here invites the uneducated reader to mistakenly draw a line between that discussion and the allegation that people “tried to bar [her] from the fan categories.” Someone needs to say that is an unjustified connection. For somebody to say they don’t like Cheryl’s writing is one thing. (By the way, I ordinarily find her writing very interesting, whether or not I agree.) However, getting “barred” would involve an abuse of the rules or the interference of a Hugo Administrator for which no evidence has been provided.

2014 FAAn Awards Voting Begins

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Ballots for the 2014 Fan Activity Achievement Awards (FAAns) can be cast through April 5. Anyone interested in science fiction fanzines is invited to vote.

Awards are presented in eight categories: Best Genzine, Best Personal Fanzine, Best Single Issue, Best Web­site, Best Fanzine Cover, Best Fan Artist, Best Fan Writer and the Harry Warner Jr. Memorial Award for Best Letterhack.

  • A Genzine (General Interest Fanzine) is any fanzine with a significant amount of material by authors other than the editor, or with a multiplicity of editors.
  • A Personal Fanzine is any fanzine in which the editor produces all or nearly all its content.
  • Fan Writing is presented in a fannish context, e.g. fanzines, apas, fannish blogs, fan websites and social media.
  • Fan Art is likewise presented in a fannish context, in fanzines and other forms of publication created by science fiction fans, in any media.

Voters will be invited to register their top three choices in each category. The first choice will receive three points, the sec­ond choice two points and the third choice will receive one point. After all ballots are counted, the highest point total in each category will determine the winner.

Click on the link for the 2014 FAAn Awards ballot [PDF file].

Only one ballot per person. Votes may be submitted via e-mail or in paper form – see instructions on the ballot. The winners will be announced at the Corflu 31 banquet.

[Thanks to Nic Farey for the story.]

Nice Is Nice

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A Worldcon coming to London has prompted some of the field’s most literate voices to speak out about their Hugo preferences.

Martin Lewis, reviews editor of Vector, the critical magazine of the British Science Fiction Association, has begun to discuss his nominees online at Everything Is Nice.

His discussion of the Best Fan Writer category is articulate and well-informed, also risk-taking and edgy. I enjoyed his analysis even though the only opinion we share is that Abigail Nussbaum would make a great addition to the Hugo ballot.

Hands down the best blogger in the field. I am in awe of Nussbaum’s ability to maintain the holy trinity of blogging: writing regularly about a broad range of subjects in depth. Even her brief reading round up posts are more in-depth than a lot of online reviews but she rights at length about books, films and television (and even a bit of Shakespeare). She missed the shortlist by one nomination last year, let’s not make the same mistake in 2014.

He’s also to be commended for writing such a post without advancing his own name as a nominee. So few are able to resist the temptation.

Indeed, if you’re as tired as I am of people plugging themselves for the Hugo, check out what Adam Roberts has to say. He told readers at Sibilant Fricative that he never wants to see another self-pimping blog post —

Award season is also the start of the ‘for your consideration’ blogposts, in which writers large and small draw potential voters’ attention to all the things they have published during the relevant period and try, with varying degrees of success, to find endearing or witty ways of making VOTE FOR QUIMBY sound less self-serving than it actually is. I used to find all that blather annoying and vulgar. Nowadays I find it more directly loathly, because it seems to me directly and negatively distorting of the award shortlists that follow.

I saw this paragraph quoted in an e-mail and clicked on the link supposing Roberts’ whole post would be equally earnest. I was willing to pay that price to see a leading writer decry the annual outpouring of awards-inspired narcissism. In fact, the balance of Roberts’ remarks are chatty and humorous and his survey of the pockets of the internet most infected with self-promotion is quite shrewd.