(1) KILL YOUR DARLINGS. Jason Cordova of Mad Genius Club thinks after a month of writing, you need “NaDecEdMo!”
Why is that, though? Why do we get to have a NaNoWriMo and not a NaDecEdMo? Because NOBODY wants to be that butthead who is celebrating an author who is gutting their baby.
That’s what editing is, in a nutshell. It’s taking out that precious baby of yours and changing it, ruthlessly making it better. It’s a rough, rough time for an author when this is going on. The author is feeling insecure about their novel as is, and now they have to look at it with a critical eye. That cute scene that you really liked but now doesn’t really fit into the story as much? Gutted like a day old fish on Market Street.
(2) SALE. Francis Hamit of Brass Cannon Books is running an experiment – and you can save.
A consultant has told us selling e-books for 99 cents each will inspire those customers who like them to then buy the print edition to have forever. . What the heck! We’ll try it. All fiction e-books and mini-memoir are now going for 99 cents each in e-book form for a limited time only. Starting February 5th, 2016.
(3) PLYING THE KEYBOARD. Nancy Kress asked her Facebook followers —
Since I am always behind the curve on everything, I have just become aware that nowadays people put one space after a period in manuscripts instead of two spaces. Is this widespread? Do I need to learn to do this? I’ve been doing it the other way for 40 years; old habits die hard.
(4) BY THE NUMBERS. Natalie Luhrs of Pretty Terrible looks for statistical evidence of bias in “A Brief Analysis of the Locus Recommended Reading List, 2011-2015”.
I want to preface this by saying that I believe that the Locus staff works very hard on this list and intends for it to be as comprehensive as they can make it. I know how hard it can be to stay on top of the flood of fiction and other affiliated works that are produced each year.
But I also believe that Locus has a responsibility to think about their biases so that lists of these type don’t inadvertently perpetuate structural inequalities–as our field’s magazine of record, this Reading List is published around the same time that Hugo nominations open and while qualified members of SFWA are filling out their Nebula nomination ballots.
One of her many graphs shows —
…The majority of the authors or editors of the works included on the Locus list are male–over 50% each year. Female authors or editors come in second in the 35-40% range. Mixed gender collaborations are next, followed by non-binary authors and editors….
(5) A NEWS STORY ABOUT NO NEWS. Bleeding Cool gives a status on some aging litigation in “Disney Pursuing Stan Lee Media For Half a Million, Finds Bank Accounts Emptied”.
With Hillary Clinton running for President, her association with convicted drug dealer and fraudster Peter F Paul and Stan Lee Media may well hit the headlines again.
Paul run the (then) largest political fundraiser ever for her Senatorial campaign and tried to get Bill Clinton onto the board of his company Stan Lee Media. The company was set up to exploit Stan Lee‘s name after he left Marvel Comics, to benefit from his new creations for comics, TV and films.
It all went sour rather. And Stan Lee Media – a company no longer associated with Stan Lee – has spent the last ten years trying to claim rights to all Stan Lee’s creations from Marvel – and now Disney. Despite six courts saying they have no claim.
Stan Lee Media have claimed that Lee transferred all his creative rights to the company in exchange for a large sum of money, and that includes Spider-Man, The Avengers, the Hulk. X-Men, Thor and the like. Unfortunately the courts really don’t see it that way. And Disney was awarded almost half a million in costs.
ScreenRant continues, adding its two bits:
The ongoing issue has come up again largely because of old political connections involving Stan Lee Media co-founder Peter F. Paul, a businessman and former convicted drug-dealer notorious for a series of allegedly illegal international political dealings. Paul fled the country during the initial SLMI investigation for Sao Paulo, which became a mini-scandal in United States politics when it was uncovered that Paul had been a major financial backer of Hillary Clinton’s U.S. Senate Campaign and had even lobbied for former president Bill Clinton to join Stan Lee Media’s board of directors. Paul at one point produced videos supposedly showing Stan Lee himself participating in campaign-finance calls with the Clintons as proof of his (Lee’s) complicity in the company’s bad dealings (Lee counter-sued over the matter). However, it didn’t stop Paul from being convicted to a ten year prison term in 2009 for fraud.
(6) MESKYS’ GUIDE DOG PASSES AWAY. It’s as if the beginning of the New Year also signaled the opening of the floodgates of misery, with one sad loss after another.
Ed Meskys, a blind sf fan, reports, “This morning I lost Gyro (public name ‘Killer Dog’) my guide dog with 9 years of service, just weeks past his age of 11…. He had been welcome at many conventions, SF and [National Federation of the Blind]. He will be my last dog guide as I am weeks short of 80, cannot bend to pick up after a dog, and have trouble with stairs….”
(7) NIRASAWA OBIT. Kaiju designer Yasushi Nirasawa , (1963–2016) died February 2. The Japanese illustrator, character designer, and model maker was known for his work Kamen Rider Blade, Kamen Rider Kabuto, and Kamen Rider Den-O and the creatures in the GARO series.
(8) MITCHELL OBIT. Edgar Mitchell, who 45 years ago became the sixth man to walk on the moon, died February 4, on the eve of his lunar landing anniversary. He was 85.
(9) TODAY IN HISTORY
- February 5, 1953 – Walt Disney’s Peter Pan premiered.
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOY
- Born February 5, 1914 – William S. Burroughs.
(11) SCIENCE SHOWS CANADIANS ARE NICER. Oliver Keyes says “When life gives you lemons, make science”.
Ever since my writeup on leaving R my blog has been getting a lot more traffic than usual and many more comments. Usually this would be fine except the topic means that a lot of those comments are blathering about whiny SJW babies or actual death threats. 28 at the last count.
But, sure, it’s the social justice people who are oversensitive and fly off the handle…
This isn’t a formal study so my definition of arsehole can be basically whatever I want it to be. I settled for any comment which exhibited one of the following traits:
- Accused me of lying about everything that had happened to get some benefit that apparently comes alongside threats, harassment and weird emails. Nobody has explained to me what this benefit is but I eagerly await my cheque in the mail from the nefarious SJW cabal apparently causing me to make shit up;
- Contained threats, goading-towards-suicides, or generally obscene and targeted harassment;
- Used terms like “SJW” or “pissbaby” or “whinging” or really anything else that indicated the author had, at best, a tenuous grasp on how the world works;
- Was premised on the idea that I was “oversensitive” or “overreacting” which is pretty rich coming from people whose idea of acceptability includes insulting people they’ve never met on somebody else’s website.
So I took this definition and hand-coded the comments and grabbed the data. We ended up with 107 users, of whom a mere 40 weren’t arseholes, producing 183 comments in total. Then I worked out their referring site and geolocated their IP address, et voila.
(12) RABID PUPPIES. Vox Day posted his picks in the Best Fanzine category.
This appears to be one of those increasingly misnamed and outdated categories, but based on the previous nominees, it has apparently become the functional equivalent of “best SF-related site”. Using that as a guideline while keeping the eligibility rules in mind, here are the preliminary recommendations for Best Fanzine:
Black Gate succumbed to the genetic fallacy in turning down last year’s nomination; regardless of whether John O’Neill will do the same or not again this year, it remained the best SF-related site in 2015.
People I respect have suggested I publicly demand that Vox Day remove File770 from the Rabid Puppies slate. Then having done so, if Day fails to comply and I ultimately receive a Hugo nomination, they feel I can accept it with a clear conscience.
If I understand Steve Davidson correctly, he wants everyone to make a public statement repudiating slates. I don’t think people are unclear on how I feel about slates, thus it really becomes a question whether — by modeling that behavior — I want to encourage Steve to go around hammering people who don’t post the equivalent of an oath. I don’t.
Consider this point. I have been planning to nominate Black Gate because I’ve been reading it since last year’s Hugo contretemps brought it to my attention, and think they do a terrific job. What if they don’t make a public declaration? Should I leave them off my ballot? And thereby fail to do what I tell every other Hugo voter to do, nominate the stuff they think is the best?
I’m not voting for Black Gate because of a slate, and I don’t intend to be prevented from voting for it by a factor that has nothing to do with what I think about the quality of its work. That’s also why I’m choosing not to follow the advice I received about handling File 770’s apperance on the slate, though the advice is well intended.
(13) NUCLEAR TOY. In 1951, A.C. Gilbert, inventor of the Erector Set, released the U-238 Atomic Energy Laboratory. Using real radioactive materials, one could witness mist trails created by particles of ionizing radiation.
The set included four Uranium bearing ore samples, and originally sold for $49.50. That would be $400 in today’s dollars.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, JJ, and James H. Burns for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
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Well by that argument Vox Day is beholden to everybody here who so effectively convinced him last year that most of what he was recommending was pretty bad. You are now trumpeting how good his recommendations are this year but his recommendations have moved much closer to the kinds of things that get Hugo nominations without Puppies of any kind.
I had nothing to lose and hence if I have lost everything to Vox then he has won nothing. If Vox has gained greater wisdom from us then we have not become less wise as a result.
@Greg: 25 out of my 35 five star stories are by women which is obviously (without running the math) statistically significant in their favor; but, apart from my personal tastes, the slant is probably due to the fact that unlike you I didn’t just read through a set of publications, I sought out recommendations, and some of the lists I consulted focused on women, POC, and so on.
So tell us about some of these books you’ve been reading on Vox’s recommendation – we like book recs here.
Has been for not what?
So if that is something important to you, have you considered a blog called “Whatever”. Every few days the blogger list new books from various publishers and solicits comments. He his doing that today… take a look.
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2016/02/05/new-books-and-arcs-2516/
Perhaps you might ask Vox to alter his slate to include “Whatever”?
Correction, 22 out of 34. Doesn’t change the result.
I notice that this site is rife with naming errors today. It’s not just me!
No, Loomis, it’s not just you.
What?
My long listing process isn’t very sophisticated (basically just a sheet with some highlighting for my current favourites) but I did a swift count and I was pleasantly surprised to find I was pretty much 50-50 m/f. Other than making sure I tried some of the less established story sources I wasn’t making any particular efforts in that regard.
Syntax Error, I name thee Fred The Abhorrent.
Quoting myself from yesterday, “Outside of KotakuInAction, Brietbart, and ReturnOfKings, who’s going to care when they start saying doing the basement-dwelling internet boy routine of “Nyahuh! If you vote for that you’re morally, legally, heuristically, holistically, obliged to be my straw man, due to the power of my overwhelming logic!” “, and looking at today’s visitors, Hooc Ott, Guess, and Chesterton, I feel quite vindicated.
Do any of you know what Stalinism actually was and what it entailed? Or are you just barking for a fish?
Hi all,
Someone, I forgot who, asked for pictures from the Lois M Bujold signing.
Voila! (I also shared a couple on twitter, too)
@ULTRAGOTHA
I would add he seems to include a few innocent bystanders as well, presumably thinking whatever happens–above No Award then “look, I brought this guy to notice” or below, “look how unfair and mean SJWs are–he’s won. And of course one or two of the standard puppy dreck.
Guess it’s nice to see what he’s trying to do. Now that it’s fairly clear, not sure it will matter until we see who is on the ballot.
@Vasha
Yeah, that’s 1 chance in 1000, assuming women account for 40% of stories. 3 in 1000 if you go with 50%. Not sure that’s a big deal, though, since you’re countering the average trend.
I’ll bet most of the reviewer bias against women authors comes at the selection level. They think they’re just picking novels that “seem interesting,” and they’re unaware that the gender of the author factors into that. I may have saved myself from that because, as you say, I try to read everything in a magazine or anthology if I read any of it.
It seems fairly clear that last year BT made rather a mess of things; he could have nominated things, consistent with his general outlook, that showed it in a better light than he actually did. And VD, for the most part, just followed BT, adding some stuff published by himself, which is generally not very good. I’m sure he could, with a bit of thought, come up with something better than last year’s SP slate, and so far, to a large degree, he seems to be doing so. (‘Better than last year’s SP slate’ is not a terribly high bar, of course.) I’m not going to vote for anything just because he says so (and last year, at least, he did explicitly invite people to do that), but if it’s just a matter of treating his recommendations like anyone else’s recommendations, why not?
On another topic, I noted a while ago that of the eight Hugo-eligible novels I had read so far, seven were by women. This was in no way a conscious choice on my part, so I’m not sure what accounts for it. I have a nasty feeling that it may be that works by women are more likely to be available early in paperback
@ Zenu
I think HO may have meant “for naught”.
KEYBOARD: I still type very badly, using 7 fingers, having started using 2 fingers on the portable manual typewriter I took to college.
Not only is there now supposed to be only one space after a full stop, but indents have disappeared, except in lists; you can center things without using tabs; heading hierarchies are easy to format, and ragged-right text formatting is returning to popularity, as readability studies show that it’s easier to read than justified text. So change moves both ways.
Does he also give lessons on how to sound like a poorly-written supervillain?
@Hooc Ott
http://www.thewrap.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/bloom-county-opus.jpg
Scared me there for a minute.
I remember checking out Beales alltime toplost for SF last year and it was anout the same stuff I would have chosen. As long as his weird trolling ideology doesn’t come in the way, I see no reason for why shouldn’t be able to come up with some good stuff.
Or maybe he just copies his recommendations from Scalzi or something.
So I requested John Joseph Adams’s Hugo reading packet, and it included the anthology Press Start to Play which I’d been looking forward to due to the one story I’d read, Charlie Jane Anders’s “Rat Catchers Yellows” (which I enthused about at some length back on November 3). Unfortunately it was largely a disappointment. The one really interesting original story was Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s bizarre bit of existential anxiety “Respawn” (starts out with a guy being randomly murdered and his consciousness transferring to the murderer’s body). Hugh Howey’s “Select Character” (protagonist is a woman who has what seems to her husband and his buddies a very weird gaming style) wasn’t very complex but left me grinning at the end. The rest, mostly OK.
I learned to type early – my mother had a typer that was surplused from her father’s workplace (USPS), a Royal from about 1925. Then I took typing in high school (instead of chemistry) and spent a year learning the rules, on, IIRC, Underwood manuals. I haven’t done two paces after a period in years, since going to word processors. As for paragraphs – I generally do no-indent for myself, but when working on tabular stuff, I tend to go with hanging.
I had one job where we typed labels on an IBM Executive, for the electronics we were building. (Carbon-film and three space bars, as well as something resembling proportional-spacing Times Roman. Backspacing was a really bad idea.)
(I have an Olympia with an parallel connector socket. Haven’t ever tried connecting it to a computer.)
My favorite keyboard tell is when someone who learned to type on a typewriter that didn’t have a 1 key is still using a capital/uppercase i for 1 when typing numbers.
You’re supposed to use lower-case ‘L’ (or ‘l’) for that. I thought everyone who’d learned on a no-1 typer knew that bit.
Hmm, #11 (Canadians are nicer) reminds me a bit of this episode of Wondermark (the webcomic that gave us “sealioning”). 🙂
HUGO FUN!
(12) RABID PUPPIES. While I feel most folks should ask to be removed, or make some broad anti-slate statement, there are some high-profile exceptions where it’s obvious the person doesn’t want to be on a slate. (And some people made prospective statements along these lines last year, anyway.) So I understand @Mike Glyer not wanting to play what he feels are others’ games. For less-well-known people, though, or people whose feeilngs are unknown, it’s IMHO not a bad idea to say something, whether specific or general.
But as I keep saying, we’re not robots, required to nominate or vote as Beale thinks we should, based on his misunderstanding of reality. BTW the comments over there are hilarious; someone actually said basically any outcome was a win for Beale. LOL! Nope. It’s like “if everything’s important, nothing is” – if everything’s a win condition for Beale, then clearly, nothing is – he can only lose.
@steve davidson: You can nominate File 770 with a clear conscience regardless. Come voting time is when many folks have an issue with how something got on the short list. You seem to be one of the only people who wants Beale to control your nominating ballot, which I still! don’t! get! Not that I have to get it.
@Various: I wouldn’t look to Beale’s list for people to investigate now, as possibilities to nominate. Good grief. I want to be aware of it without letting it drive my own nominations; I care more during voting time than now, really.
@Lois Tilton @ 9:43 AM: IMHO, people doing fan writing about SFF games – i.e., clearly SFF-related – are eligible for fan writing, though if it’s more about gaming and less about SFF, then it drops in SFF-relevance, to me. Not that I play computer games or read computer game related blogs. But SFWA’s irrelevant here; the Hugos, from WSFS, have their own rules. SFWA doesn’t even have fan awards, so looking to them for guidance on how to nominate for an unrelated type of award from another organization seems odd to me. No offense intended – and you’re not the only one who seems to look to SFWA for guidance on the Hugos – but IMHO it makes no sense to do so.
@Zenu: Smart editors include a list of works edited, some of which you may have read or may choose to explore, come final ballot time. Extra-smart editors include samples of the works they edited (this seems a new and rare trend, thus far). I’m not saying it’s perfect, but it’s something to go on. Except, of course, editors like Weisskopf, who supply nothing useful. 😉
I just slung fourteen Hugo-eligible novel reviews in the direction of Ken Marable’s recommendations blog… he took them with good grace, poor guy. Looking at them, I see ten female authors and five male (one was co-authored by two men). Two were translated, both by male translators.
I have no idea if this proves, or even suggests, anything worth proving or suggesting.
@Kendall: last year, Jennifer Brozek included a nice anthology she’d edited in her information for Best Editor (short form). Last year, Jennifer Brozek topped my ballot for Best Editor (short form). This is not a coincidence: I am easily bribed with good stories.
RANDOM FUN! Including way too much about punctuation. 😉 I love this blog and these comment threads.
(13) NUCLEAR TOY. What the f’ing f?! Wow, that just boggles the mind. This makes me think of “Everyone Glows” by the Capitol Steps (sample).
@Rev. Bob: “The Two-Space Problem” – LOL, ISWYDT.
@Wildcat: Good catch! NaDecEdMo is a very funny error in a post promoting editing.
@alexvdl: NaNoWriMo – National November Writing Month, where we celebrate writing the word “November.” 😉
@K8: Agreed. re. the serial/Oxford comma. 🙂 Not using it is a crime against nature, usually.
@Jim Henley @ 7:10 AM: ROFL! So you’re the throne behind the power?
@Lois Tilton @ 7:12 AM: Meow! And that’s a meow of catty respect, not catty denigration, FWIW.
@Vasha: Thanks for signal-boosting re. Weightless Books! I’m frequently a thread behind, and I forgot last night to look for the latest Pixel Scroll.
@Mary Frances: I believe semicolons get one period, not two. I figured it’s because the next part is technically part of the same sentence (else it would end with a period)? Re. hyphens (used as em dashes), I’ve seen different styles (spaces around or not), so I’m never sure what’s “right”! My own style here is just space-dash-space, though I know that’s totally wrong.
@Vasha & @Zenu: “I have a Kindle.” Heh, I get confused with ereaders, yes. A recent joke around my office, now that someone’s using the Kendo UI Javascript toolkit, is “Kendall UI.” 😉 I told them I’m a reasonably-priced toolkit, and easy to learn! I think we’re back to the name game now, aren’t we.
@Vasha: I thought about asking JJA for the extra stuff, but I doubt I’ll have the time, so I felt funny asking. So I didn’t. thanks for the comments on what you read from the anthology!
I’m a little disappointed that Beale has done what I assumed he would last year and start sticking in a bunch of ‘hostages’ in the list to ensure he can claim victory whatever happens.
I suspect that John O’Neill at Black Gate will ask to be removed and if that doesn’t happen we move on, I was going to nominate it anyway after finding it through last year’s fiasco.
I suppose we should let him play Heads I win, tails you lose for another cycle….
Hello, just a storyidentificationquestion.
The story is horror I belive.
It is about a blind dinner resteraunt, were there is a speciality.
Every week one of the people in the resteraunt has the Special previlige to go to the kitchen and help to make the speciality. (I don’t have to mention that this guy is never seen again)
The resteraunt is Invitation only and the main character is invited to the kitchen in the end.
Could be quite old.
StefanB
Spoiler for “The Specialty of the House”
You are sort of, but not precisely, describing Stanley Ellin’s short story, “The Specialty of the House,” about a fantastic gourmet place that the lead character’s friend, Laffler, introduces him to. Much is said about Lamb Amirstain, the legendary house special, which the lead hasn’t had yet. I don’t recall whether Laffler has already tasted it. Things gradually become clear to the lead and to the reader, and at the end of the tale, the two friends learn that the dish will be featured that very night, and Laffler is to be taken to see the kitchen for the first time. The lead character watches silently as the restaurant’s owner ushers Laffler back to the kitchen, one hand on “Laffler’s meaty shoulder,” as Ellin puts it.
This was Ellin’s first published story, as I recall, and it was published with enthusiastic fanfare by Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, which, from that point, would publish one Ellin story a year in their “best of” annual collections. He wrote a small number of novels which I find shatteringly good, and some of his stories are remarkably pointed. “The Question” is my favorite, and “The Day of the Gun” is a close second. His collections are worth the effort of finding, and the Ellery Queen collections are a good method of locating some of them when the collections don’t present themselves. He tried a lot of styles and genres, and settled down to thrillers for a while. His last book was another experimental departure, examining an act of deliberate, horrific evil.
If the story I described isn’t the one you’re thinking of, then at least it was a good reason to talk about one of my favorite writers. I think of him as a writer’s writer, like Albert Brooks was a comedian’s comedian back while he was doing comedy. Top recommendation from me.
@Hooc Ott
Yes you are now beholden to the fact that not only has Vox Day made worthy recommendations but has made recommendations more worthy then the nominations would be without him and his rabid puppies.
All the shit slinging that has been leveled at him over the Puppies and at Sad Puppies because of his association with them has been for not.
Your comment, other comments here, and Mike’s Black Gate comments have proven him absolutely goddamn right that the Hugos stink worse then Denmark.
You have lost everything and Vox has just won everything.
Hahahahahahahahaha
Sean O’Hara on February 6, 2016 at 11:27 am said:
This is the conventional wisdom, and, like much conventional wisdom, is absolutely wrong. Extra-wide space after sentences was totally standard with proportional fonts in the 18th and 19th centuries. The idea that it was invented for the fixed-width fonts of the typewriter is complete malarky. It predates the invention of the typewriter. And it seems to have been done (as far as researchers have been able to determine) because it helps with comprehension and reading speed. Even when using proportional fonts!
That said, one space is quickly becoming the new standard, and since it is the standard, I have mostly managed to retrain myself to use one instead of two. It took a while, and I was thankful for the fact that HTML doesn’t care during my retraining period, as the number of spaces I was typing between sentences began to approach 1.5. 🙂
The amount of pixels that have been spilled over this truly minor and trivial topic is astounding, though. As is the amount of misinformation. There’s a reason that Bill and Opus chose this as the “wedge issue” for their political campaign in the Bloom County reboot!
eta: the one I’m really not sure about is em-dashes. CMos says no spaces around them. AP style says zero to one half space at most. But I see people using full spaces with them all the time…
Vasha and Kip – no problem, guys.
I always type my blank spaces in bold for extra emphasis.
@Rev. Bob: “This should be fun… and why does my Viggle point count end in 666 right when I say that?”
Too many inopportune 1-minute checkins? 😀
Speaking of Viggle, how are you dealing with the recent inflation in the Viggle store? I’m very confused by this upcoming Perk merger.
“Nobody would interpret a File 770 Hugo win as a puppy accomplishment.”
VD will. No one else will care.
At least he’s moved on from 100% garbage to 20% stuff that would be on anyway, 40% game stuff (his “souper genius” plan probably involves trying (and failing miserably) to get some game-related site involved) and 40% Castalia crap.
I’ll still be No Awarding best long form editor, as there are problems as a reader knowing what impact the editor had.
“Black Gate” is an excellent magazine. I would not presume to assume anything about what publisher John O’Neill might or might not do about nominations based on any actions of persons of ill-will and malicious intent, irrelevant as they may be.
Hmmm, the restaurant’s name in “The Specialty of the House” is Sbirro’s (Sbirro appears in the story) which is a little to close to a fast food pizza chain…
(You can find the story on Google books.)
Kendall – SFWA isn’t a place to which I ever look for guidance in such matters. It’s more a case of incremental evidence, a datum suggesting an ongoing shift in the consensus regarding the place of game-writing into the genre mainstream.
Hey, if anybody wants the ebook of Letters to Tiptree, it’s on sale now at Amazon US for 99 cents.
@Cat, @Matt Y, regarding loyalty oaths, I was addressing the specific situation of OGH, who has been unambiguous in his statements about slates and yet has been advised to publicly repudiate his inclusion on VD’s slate. Also, if I am understanding Steve Davidson correctly, if OGH does not do so, Mr. Davidson will neither nominate nor vote for File 770 regardless of its merits. I imagine the same would be true of Black Gate, in spite of their equally unambiguous position last year. That brought about thoughts of blacklisting and thence to loyalty oaths: I am not now nor have I ever been a willing participant in a slate.
@Hooc Ott – Yes you are now beholden to the fact that not only has Vox Day made worthy recommendations but has made recommendations more worthy then the nominations would be without him and his rabid puppies.
Heh. Having watched VD’s GoodReads takeover plot (and we all know how well that turned out) generate due to repeated prodding by a commenter on MGC, I’m just going to assume his Hugo picks are equally derivative. After all, he isn’t actually more equal than other animals.
Also, that Stanley Ellin story is one of my favorites. I reread it recently after I unearthed a copy of MWA’s First Stories in a junk store.
eta: Of the 31 pieces of fiction currently on my long list, seven are by men.
Zenu: With pups it is going to be all Toni all the time. They want to be able to brag that if not for them Baen in general and Toni in particular would never be considered.
It’s immaterial to me. Until such time as 1) Baen starts producing books which don’t have a raft of spelling and grammar errors in them, and 2) Baen editors are willing to specify which books they edited, all Baen editors are going below “No Award” on my ballot.
I won’t be voting to give awards to people who refuse to do their job because “it makes a late book even later” or “it doesn’t improve sales”.
redheadedfemme: Hey, if anybody wants the ebook of Letters to Tiptree, it’s on sale now at Amazon US for 99 cents.
Oh, hey, thanks for that! I’ve been interested in reading it.
Well, I picked up Kaleidoscope from Weightless Books and I look forward to the free LCRW issues. Yeah, it’s short fiction (which I don’t make enough time for) and YA (which I’m generally not into). But I read the first story quite a while ago in the sample, and liked it, so I’ve had my eye on Kaleidoscope for quite a while. Maybe I’ll try to mix some short fiction in-between novels or something. 🙂
Hopefully I don’t hear a chorus of “oh no, Kaleidoscope was horrible, why’d you buy that?!” now, LOL.
@ All Right-Thumbed Spacers: Because we used our LEFT hand to return the carriage, of course!
@Kendall: (1) @k8 and the Oxford comma. Just had this discussion with our ad people–Me: “Please insert a comma after ‘faculty’ in the sentence ‘Students, faculty and staff should submit their creative writing and artwork by March 1st.’ because it is ambiguous.” Ad Dept.: “We follow the AP style sheet on this and omit the final comma in a series.” Me: “Even when it’s ambiguous without it? “Ad Dept. “Okay, we’ll change it THIS time.”
@Kendall: (2) @Mary Frances. When I typed and edited two older siblings’ MA theses in the 70s and my own dissertation in the 80s (all in different disciplines), the style guides all gave one space after a semi-colon and two after the others you mentioned; I think that the rationale for colons was to make the “list” (which could be a list of one thing) stand out.
@Kendall, @Xtifr: Most of the old guides used “–” with no spaces for dashes, but these days “–” will generally get you an automatic em-dash while ” – ” will get you an en-dash with spaces, and style sheets vary. MLA and APA both like the em-dash w/o spaces.
@Xtifr: Thanks for affirming the history of two-spacing orthography as I believed it on faith but was too lazy to research. As noted by @Rev. Bob and some others earlier, when HTML appeared, we two-spacers discovered to our horror that it just ignored our second spaces and our tabs. After two-plus decades of effort, I now only type one most of the time.
@Rev. Bob, @Kip W.: Old versions of PageMaker (I started with 3.0, I think), QuarkXPress, etc., didn’t let you embed fonts and such, so if you wanted something different, you HAD to make it into a graphic (like you still have to do for webpages). Old school users probably didn’t notice when that changed.
@Lois Tilton: Gotcha! Apologies for over-interpreting what you said and thinking it was more of what I’ve seen in other times/places. And thanks for elaborating; that makes sense.
Got my PIN! Yay!
PS. Fans of SFF games are fans of SFF, and it seems self-evident that writing even about aspects of gaming not directly related to SFF content is still fannish writing.
PPS. You devout antislaters who are planning to nominate a bunch of Vox’s picks anyway, don’t forget you’ll be giving your friend M. Ward a little boost in the bargain. So many things to vote tactically against this year! How to choose?
@Rev. Bob (I think): Forgot to mention this concerning “kerning”–did you ever go into PM manual kerning and add extra space 1/1000th of an inch at a time so that characters in bold cap headline fonts didn’t touch? Good times (“naught”).
Greg Hullender: …
Oh, good, now that you’re here again, I’d like to know if you’re willing to answer the question I asked in the last thread, which you apparently didn’t see (despite the fact that it was posted several hours before this new thread):
Greg Hullender: I would suggest that anyone who gets slated by Vox Day should simply lay low and say nothing about it until nominations are complete. Then withdraw and let an organic nominee become a finalist.
JJ: I think that is a really terrible suggestion.
Why should Mike Glyer withdraw File770 from being a Fanzine Finalist if it gets there? It would have gotten there anyway without Puppies.
If VD puts Naomi Novik’s Uprooted on his Novel slate, and her book becomes a Finalist, why should she withdraw it? It would have gotten there anyway without Puppies.
Expecting legitimate popular nominees to withdraw simply because VD has included them on his slate is exactly the sort of mindless behavior VD is trying to provoke — and it’s allowing VD to control and manipulate you.
As I’ve said previously, non-Puppy nominators are certainly entitled to choose to allow VD to control and manipulate them. But I can’t, for the life of me, understand why you would choose to do so.
Greg Hullender: I specifically listed File770 as an example of one that would not withdraw.
JJ: And how are you deciding who you feel should withdraw, and who you don’t think needs to withdraw?
Yaaay! Glad you liked it!
I have wandered back to the thread after doing a last pass on edits for my next self-pub book. Since I’m in a typo-slaying mood, I’ll just point out to our newest commenter that the idiom is “all for naught.”
I never fail to be traumatized, when doing these fixes, how I can have all these different proofreaders and every one catches different typos and I always find myself thinking “But what are they ALL missing?!” and then I have to go pour a stiff drink.
ETA: Of course other people have spotted it first…
Ah, those Puppies who keep insisting that non-Puppies are somehow required to vote according to rules which Puppies have made up and assigned to them are still so charmingly bitter, aren’t they? 😀
Kendall: IMHO, people doing fan writing about SFF games – i.e., clearly SFF-related – are eligible for fan writing, though if it’s more about gaming and less about SFF, then it drops in SFF-relevance, to me.
It pretty much ceases to be relevant to me. If such writing does end up getting nominated, I’ll read whatever’s in the packet and decide whether it’s worthy of going above No Award for me — but I’m not optimistic about that.