Miscellany

By Cheryl Morgan

Locus Poll Voting Opens

Voting is now open for this year’s Locus Poll. As usual, Emerald City is eligible for the Best Magazine category. We finished 8th in the past two years, which I think is phenomenal given that we are up against the likes of Asimov’s, Analog, F&SF and Interzone. As regular readers will know, this is the award I really care about. It isn’t one we’ll ever win, but it is one that gets us credibility in the industry. It costs you nothing to vote. You don’t even have to be a Locus subscriber. You can cast your ballot here.

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The Announcements Blog

Regular blog readers will have noticed something new this month. For a long time I have been struggling to keep up with the amount of SF&F news there is around the Internet. I generally post news if people send it to me, but I only get a fraction of what is available, and there’s no way I can follow every author blog. There are just too many of them. What I felt I needed was a central place where I could get the news without the chat. And I thought other people might like to see such a thing too.

Not that I have anything against author web sites. Putting up a whole load of personal information is exactly what a lot of fans want authors to do. But people will only follow such blogs for their favorite authors, and thus might miss the news of someone coming to town for a signing, or releasing a new book.

So far things are going quite well in that I have a lot of people signed up: mostly authors but also editors, publicists, critics and so on. Basically this is a "more the merrier" thing. I don’t expect many people to post regularly, but with a lot of people involved we’ll still get plenty of traffic.

Anyway, the blog is here. And if you’d like to be involved please let me know.

And, not content with that, I’m pleased to note that you can also get industry news from the SFWA Pressbook. Thanks to the nice people at SFWA, you can read it on the Emerald City web site, right next to the Announcements blog. There’s a small amount of clever technical stuff involved here, but basically syndication is good. Expect to see more news on the web site soon.

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Crawford Award Short List

The short list from which this year’s Crawford Award will be picked has been announced by the Award’s Administrator, Gary K. Wolfe. The Award will be presented at ICFA, March 15-19 in Fort Lauderdale, though the winner may be announced before then.

The Crawford is presented to a writer for a first fantasy book. The lucky nominees are: Judith Berman for Bear Daughter; Hal Duncan for Vellum; Frances Hardinge for Fly by Night; Joe Hill for Twentieth Century Ghosts; Sarah Monette for Melusine; Holly Phillips for In the Palace of Repose; Anna Tambour for Spotted Lily.

There has been a certain amount of confusion in the blogosphere as to what the award is actually for. Just to clear this up, the Crawford is for the Best New Fantasy Writer (or words to that effect) of the preceding year. However, one’s status as a "new fantasy writer" is defined by the production of a book. You can’t, for example, win the Crawford on the basis of short fiction in magazines. And, unlike say Best Professional Artist in the Hugos, the judging is not done on the basis of the entire body of work in the year in question. It is done on the basis of the book that qualifies the author for the award.

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Hugo Deadline Approaches

The nominating deadline for this year’s Hugos is midnight on March 10^th (PST), so if you have not nominated yet you don’t have a lot of time. If you are still stuck for ideas, you can find a lot of suggestions on the Emerald City Hugo Recommendations Page.

And, quite importantly, if you are kindly considering nominating Emerald City, please remember that you have to do so in the Best Semiprozine category.

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Mewsings Move

At the same time as setting up the Announcements Blog I also moved my personal blog to the Emerald City site. This was basically a matter of my being fed up with Blogger but not wanting to have to pay for database support on the cheryl-morgan.com web site. The plus side is that if you do what to know where in the world I happen to be then the information is one click away from the main Emerald City blog. The new location for Cheryl’s Mewsings (rugby rants and all) is here.

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Nebula Final Ballot

Just in time for this issue, SFWA has issued the final ballot for this year’s Nebulas. The short lists are:

Novels: Air - Geoff: Ryman (St. Martin's Press, Sep 04); Camouflage - Joe Haldeman (Analog, Mar-May 04, also Ace book Aug 04); Going Postal - Terry Pratchett (HarperCollins, Oct 04); Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell - Susanna Clarke (Bloomsbury, Holtzbrinck Publishers, Sep 04); Polaris - Jack McDevitt (Ace, Nov04); Orphans of Chaos - John C. Wright (Tor, Nov 05).

Novellas: "Clay’s Pride" - Bud Sparhawk (Analog, Jul/Aug 04); "Identity Theft" - Robert J. Sawyer (Down These Dark Spaceways, Mike Resnick, Ed., Science Fiction Book Club, May 05); "Left of the Dial" - Paul Witcover (Sci Fiction, Sep 04); "Magic for Beginners" - Kelly Link (Magic for Beginners, Small Beer Press, Jul 05); "The Tribes of Bela" - Albert Cowdrey (F&SF, Aug 04).

Novelettes: "The Faery Handbag" - Kelly Link (The Faery Reel: Tales From the Twilight Realm, Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, Ed., Viking Press, Aug 04); "Flat Diane" - Daniel Abraham (F&SF, Oct\Nov 04); "Men are Trouble" - Jim Kelly (Asimov’s, Jun 04); "Nirvana High" - Eileen Gunn and Leslie What (Stable Strategies and Others, Tachyon Press, Sep 04); "The People of Sand and Slag" - Paolo Bacigalupi (F&SF, Feb 04)

Short Stories: "Born-Again" - K.D. Wentworth (F&SF, May 05); "The End of the World as We Know It" - Dale Bailey (F&SF, Oct/Nov 04); "I Live With You" - Carol Emshwiller (F&SF, Mar 05); "My Mother, Dancing" - Nancy Kress (Asimov’s, Jun 04); "Singing My Sister Down" - Margo Lanagan, (Black Juice, Eos, Mar 05); "Still Life With Boobs" - Anne Harris (Talebones, Summer 05); "There’s a Hole in the City" - Richard Bowes (Sci Fiction, Jun 05).

Scripts: "Act of Contrition/You Can’t Go Home Again" - Carla Robinson; Bradley Thompson; and David Weddle. (Battlestar Galactica; Jan 28, 05 / Feb 4, 05 [two part episode]); Serenity - Joss Whedon (Universal Pictures, Sep 05).

Andre Norton Award: The Amethyst Road - Louise Spiegler, (Clarion Books, Sep 05); Siberia - Ann Halam (Wendy Lamb Books, Jun 05); Stormwitch - Susan Vaught (Bloomsbury, Jan 05); Valiant: A Modern Tale of Faerie - Holly Black (Simon & Schuster, Jun 05).

The winners will be announced at the Nebula Award Banquet to be held in Tempe, Arizona on May 6^th. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for Geoff Ryman and Kelly Link. I’m assuming that Margo Lanagan doesn’t need any finger crossing.