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Friday 31 January 2014

Hugo Award nomination!

In ridiculously flattering and amazing news, last week I found out that I've been nominated for a Hugo Award as Best Fan Writer! I hadn't even considered the concept of being nominated for a Hugo, otherwise I at least might have mentioned earlier that I'm eligible. Apparently you need about 50 nominations to be shortlisted in the Fan Writer category, which doesn't seem enormously likely for something as obscure as a costume design/movie review blog. But it doesn't hurt to mention it just in case, right?

Re: eligibility, any of my amateur/unpaid writing counts, whether it's on this blog or on Tumblr or elsewhere. You can check out my masterlist here, but it's a little out of date so here are some of my sci-fi and fantasy posts!
I read up on the Fan Writer category the other day, and the list of previous shortlisted writers is kinda daunting. Most of them are either professional sci-fi authors or people who edit or write traditional fanzines. One author/fanzine editor was shortlisted in the Fan Writer category 31 years in a row, and has won 28 Hugo Awards total in various categories.  

Apparently there's been some kerfuffle over whether it's impolite or unfair for writers to self-publicise during awards season, partly because of the way women are discouraged from talking about their own achievements. Amal El-Mohtar wrote a really good post about this, highlighting the way female writers are often overlooked because they don't feel able to mention that they're eligible for awards. This spurred me on to actually let people know that I'd been nominated, rather than just quietly going "OMG" to myself.

Here's how Hugo nominations work:
  • Only members of the World Science Fiction Society can submit nominations.
  • This means either people who bought tickets for WorldCon 2013, 2014 or 2015, or people who have a supporting membership to the Society. A supporting membership is £25 and you get copies of all the books and short stories that are nominated this year.
  • In order to nominate, you HAVE to buy a WorldCon ticket or supporting membership by the end of January 31st! Which is, uh, today. But you have until March 31st to actually turn in your Hugo nominations ballot!
  • You sign up and nominate people at the website for this year's World Science Fiction Convention, which will be held in London. There's another explainer post here.
I have no idea if any of you guys are Worldcon attendees/supporting members, but if you are, please consider me on your nomination ballot! :) Either way, I'm incredibly grateful to the people who have nominated me already. And for everyone else: my next post will most likely be about Supernatural, because I'm currently in the process of catching up with the last three seasons, and it's proving to be very interesting viewing.

2 comments:

  1. Forgive my nitpicking, but Worldcons do not sell "tickets." You're either a supporting member (which you mention) or an attending member. Think of it like joining an organization that holds an annual convention; you have to have the basic membership (what we call a "supporting" membership), and then if you actually want to attend the society's annual to-do, you pay a supplement (the difference between the supporting and attending memberships). That, by the way, is why WSFS doesn't actually charge people to vote for the Hugo Awards; you simply have to be a member of WSFS in order to vote, and that means paying membership dues to the society, like many other clubs or associations.



    I suppose this sounds pedantic, but many of us who have been members of the World Science Fiction Society feel rather strongly about the fact that every person attending is a "member" not just someone who bought at ticket for a show or a sporting event.

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