Justin of Staffer’s Book Reviews is notorious for discussing the ins and outs of book awards. Recently he went to WorldCon and wrote up this post about making his own awards. Well, this is interesting to me for multiple reasons. First of all, I live in Utah, which is a crappy state at the best of times. I don’t think I’ve ever heard an author/publisher/cool genre person ever say, “Hey, let’s go to Utah because Utah is amazingly hardcore and lots of people live there who want their books signed/want to go to an event.” This state is a black hole. No one comes here. It’s the forgotten land with weird alcohol laws. Then, you add a two-year-old and paying off cancer debt to the list, and you see why I never get to be involved in the stuff I’d LOVE to be involved in.
Basically, I’m like so many of the people out there. I’m a huge genre fan who dedicates the amount of time I’d spend at a full time job to running this website for the past three years, and because of my location and finances, I’m pretty much left out of everything. This is why Justin’s idea for a new award is so interesting to me. Anything that even toys with the idea of involving the general genre populous in some big genre event peaks my interest. We are all fans, and I know so many of us would love to be more involved, but we can’t be for one reason or another.
So, let’s play pretend for a moment.
If you were the judge, jury, and executioner of an award (IE: In charge of the whole thing), who, as of now, would get your awards for the 2012- current 2013 year for:
1. Best Novel
2. Best First Novel
3. Best Editor
4. Best Short Story/Short Story Collection
5. Best Fan Writer (lets put blogs in this category because, really, what are we if we aren’t fan writers)?
6. Best Publisher
Feel free to say why you picked all these people. Let’s throw some bones out there, and let people know who should be recognized, and why. No, this isn’t as cool as going to a convention and the only thing I can give out is this neatobandito picture of a trophy, but this is all about “let’s pretend.” I’m interested in who you would vote for.
So, your Award of the Bookworm (Check out that cheesy title) would go to….
4 Responses
1. CHAMPION OF MARS, by Guy Haley.
Because it takes chances with its narrative, and we need more chance takers. Plus, it’s just written really well.
2. I HAVE NO IDEA. Didn’t read enough debut novels last year to really judge.
3. ROSS LOCKHART, Night Shade Books.
Not prejudice about this one at all, of course! But really, he’s a great editor and in many ways he *seemed* to be holding Night Shade together. (That’s just my view; I have no facts on that count to convey.)
4. NO IDEA.
5. REQUIRES HATE.
Because she shakes shit up and challenges people, and that’s valuable.
6. CHIZINE.
Duh.
So I don’t actually have any awards to assign, but I wanted to reassure you about your state, haha. I just had a conference in Snow Bird which was lovely! It’s the first time I’ve really been up in and around mountains and the view from my hotel was awesome. Perhaps there will be an event there someday? >.>
Snow Bird is beautiful. Utah has some GORGEOUS landscapes. That’s just about all we have here, though. The “Utah culture” blows, and unless strapping on skis or hiking up cliffs is fun (I can’t do either) then you’re pretty screwed.
I hope we get good events here. Salt Lake Comic Con started up this year. It needs to go through some growing pains, but I have very very high hopes that it’ll get bigger and better as the years go on. It has lots of promise.
I’m lousy at answering questions and assigning awards to single books or people like this, because it’s so hard to narrow my lists of favourites down so far.
But I can relate somewhat on living in a lousy place. Hell, most Canadians even forget that New Brunswick exists. It’s like there’s a big blank of the map between Quebec and Nova Scotia, and even Newfoundland gets more exciting stuff in it than NB!