On Awards This Year
Hey peeps,
I’ve had a few people ask me, so I guess I should say publicly what I’ve been saying to people when they ask.
I don’t wish to have my work considered for awards this year. I’d like to just have 2016 to get stuff done, worry about my readers and my career, and (hopefully!) not be involved in any award business. I’m not attending Worldcon 2016 either (I’ll be there for 2017 though, yay excuse to go to Finland!).
So please… if you read and enjoyed something of mine that was published this year (and there were a few things I think are some of my best work), thank you. But don’t vote for my stories. I’ve got cool work coming out next year, and maybe by 2017 I’ll have healed the stress of this last award season, but for now… please, I want a year of not having to even worry about it, slim as my chances might be.
My advice for award reading in general is this:
Read widely (there’s tons of good fiction for free on sites like Clarksworld, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, Nightmare, etc as well as lots of inexpensive anthologies and ebooks out there). BUT! Don’t feel like you haven’t read “enough” to vote. Even if you only read one story/novel/novella/whatever and it really touched you, made you want to re-read it, etc… then nominate that story or novella or book or film etc. Your opinion matters. You don’t have to know everything about every work published in 2015, or about every category. It’s okay to leave things blank. Just… read what you can. Vote for what you love.
Thank you!