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Posts Tagged ‘hugo awards’

Hugo Story Withdrawn

I have withdrawn my story “Goodnight Stars” from consideration in this year’s Hugo Awards.

I want to make it clear I am not doing this lightly. I am not doing it because I
am ashamed. I am not doing it because I was pressured by anyone either way or on
any “side,” though many friends have made cogent arguments for both keeping my
nomination and sticking it out, as well as for retracting it and letting things proceed without me in the middle.

I am withdrawing because this has become about something very different than great science fiction.  I find my story, and by extension myself, stuck in a game of political dodge ball, where I’m both a conscripted player and also a ball. (Wrap your head around that analogy, if you can, ha!) All joy that might have come from this nomination has been co-opted, ruined, or sapped away. This is not about celebrating good writing anymore, and I don’t want to be a part of what it has become.

I am not a ball. I do not want to be a player. This is not what my writing is about. This is not why I write. I believe in a compassionate, diverse, and inclusive world. I try to write my own take on human experiences and relationships, and present my fiction as entertainingly and honestly as I can.

I am proud of “Goodnight Stars.” I wrote a damn good story last year that a lot of people have enjoyed. I believe it could have maybe even won.

But it is not the last story I will write. It is not even the best story I will write. I have perhaps already written better stories this year. I will write better stories next year, and the year after, and for decades after that. I hope to be like Ray Bradbury and write every moment until I go gentle into that good night, pen in hand.

There will be other years and maybe other rockets. I don’t want to stand in a battlefield anymore. I don’t want to have to think over every tweet and retweet, every blog post, every word I say. I don’t want to cringe when I open my email. I don’t want to have to ask friends to google me and read things so that I can at least be aware of the stuff people might be saying in my name or against my name.

This is not why I write. This is not the kind of community I want to be a part of, nor the kind of award I want to win.

I am not your ball. My fiction is my message, not someone else’s, and I refuse to participate in a war I didn’t start. It has become clear to me that the only way to stay out of this is to pick up my ball and go home. So this year, I will not put on a princess gown sewn with d20s. I will not win a rocket. But I will be able to sleep and know that when I get up, there won’t be fires waiting for me.

There will only be my words. My stories to tell.

Because all I have ever wanted from being a writer is to write books so good that readers cannot set them down.  And I’m going to go back to doing that now. Maybe someday I will get to sit in a pretty dress next to my mother and know that if I lose the rocket, it will be because someone wrote a story that resonated more than mine. To know that I will lose to a person and not a political fight. To sit there and know if I lose, no one will cheer. And if I win, no one will boo. Perhaps someday I can win this award for the right reasons and without all the pain.

Thank you to everyone who supported me. Who sent amazing messages of love, and empathy, and compassion. Thank you to everyone who read the story and nominated it because you felt it was worthy. Thank you to my editors, who have been nothing but amazing through the entire process of not only these last crazy weeks but also publication and all that entailed.

Thank you all for reading.

Nominated Story Online

The anthology editors John J Adams and Hugh Howey have generously made my Hugo Award nominated story free online. You can read it online in text or download the format of your choice (including the audio). Click Here to read it or download.  The story will also be in the Hugo Nominations packet.

If you enjoy the story, or just love apocalyptic and post apocalyptic fiction, I would urge people to get the whole series. There are many fantastic authors in these anthologies, all of us writing a huge range of different world-endings and situations. Click Here for more information and how to buy the full anthologies.

For information on Sasquan, the 2015 Worldcon, and/or the Hugo awards, please see the official Sasquan website: http://sasquan.org/

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Final note, comments will be closed on this post. I appreciate all the supportive things people have said over the last terrible week, but I’ve got a book to finish and I need to just move on. I hope I’ve said my piece and made it clear how I feel about this whole mess. I hope everyone who is able to will read as many of the nominated works as they can and vote, and I hope that this weird rift in fandom will be healed. Mary Robinette Kowal and George RR Martin have said very kind, smart things about it all. I urge people to go read the entirety of what GRRM has had to say. He put on a little school about the Hugos and why they matter.

Award Eligible Fiction

It’s January, so I guess that means it is time to put up a nice handy list of award-eligible fiction.  I have a bunch of fiction eligible in various categories for the Hugos plus I am in my second and final year of Campbell Award eligibility.   So here’s a list of things and the categories they are eligible for.  If you are interested in reading something for award consideration and you would like a free copy, please email me at anniembellet AT gmail DOT com or you will also find that most of my stuff is available free or inexpensively as ebooks on the web (or in paperback in the case of my novel).

Hugo Award Eligible things:

Novel Category:

Fantasy novel, published in March 2011.  Click picture to go to Amazon page for details (or check out my “read my fiction” page in the sidebar).

Novelette Category:

The Light of the Earth As Seen From Tartarus– Hard near-future SF novelette published January 2011

Delivering Yaehala– Otherworld Fantasy novelette published December 2011

Crawlies– SF short story, published in the collection The Spacer’s Blade & Other Stories, January 2011

 

Short Story Category:

Pele’s Bee-Keeper– SF short story, published in the collection Deep Black Beyond, September 2011

I, Vermin– SF short story, published in the collection The Spacer’s Blade & Other Stories, January 2011

The Spacer’s Blade– SF short story, published in the collection The Spacer’s Blade & Other Stories, January 2011

The Scent of Sunlight and River Daughter and La Última Esperanza and Roping the Mother– from the fantasy short story collection River Daughter and Other Stories, October 2011 (all four stories in this collection are eligible)

Flashover (A Remy Pigeon Story)– Paranormal Mystery, December 2011

Of Bone and Steel and Other Soft MaterialsSF story published in Mirror Shards: Volume One, August 2011

Nevermind the Bollocks– SF story published in Digital Science Fiction Issue #2, July 2011

Broken Moon– Fantasy story published in the collection Gifts in Sand and Water, May 2011

Lists– Fantasy flash fiction published in Daily Science Fiction, December 2011

Love at the Corner of Time and Space– SF flash fiction published in Daily Science Fiction, June 2011

 

That’s all of it, I think. Enjoy!