The Corruption of the Hugo Awards Nominations Process

In short: a bunch of rightwing SF/F writers and fans colluded to stack the Hugo Award nominations with their own candidates, effectively excluding better works — and they invited Gamergaters to join them in their quest.

[Note: lots of late edits]

Jennifer Rardin (1965-2010)

Jennifer Diana Rardin (28 April 1965 – 20 September 2010)

It was with no little dismay that I discovered this evening (via Smart Bitches, Trashy Books) that author Jennifer Rardin had died suddenly on 20th September.

Carrie Vaughn @ Galaxy Books, 19th Sept 2010

Carrie Vaughn

Urban fantasy author and creator of the Kitty Norville series Carrie Vaughn had a signing at Galaxy today, and I was there with a few books bought specially for the session (unfortunately you can’t get your e-book collection autographed) and prior permission to hang around and take an excessive number of photographs.

Charles Stross, Karen Miller and Kate Elliott @ Galaxy, 26 August 2010

Before the signing: Kate Elliott, Charles Stross and Karen Miller

When Worldcon comes to Australia, it brings with it all sorts of interesting and wonderful people, opportunities and things. And if you can’t make it to the convention in Melbourne, sometimes the attendees make a side trip (to Sydney, yay!) to do a signing in your favourite bookshop.

Yesterday, Galaxy Bookshop was graced by the presence of Charles Stross, Kate Elliott and Karen Miller.

Nalini Singh at Galaxy Bookshop, 15 Aug 2010

Nalini Singh

Paranormal romance/urban fantasy writer Nalini Singh took some time off from the Romance Writers of Australia conference this weekend to visit the Galaxy Bookshop in Sydney and sign books for her fans.

The Beast Lord’s Ebook

Sweeeet!

Ilona Andrews‘ Kate Daniels series is written from, well, the POV of Kate Daniels. Kate has frequent (snarky, violent) encounters with Curran, the Beast Lord or leader of the Atlanta shapeshifters. So what does he really think of her?

Gordon Andrews occasionally writes scenes from Curran’s POV containing gems like this:

What could possibly cause a cat, a wolf, a hyena, and a middle-aged medmage honey badger to risk my wrath? I couldn’t figure out the what or the why, but I had a damn good idea of the who. Kate Daniels, professional fuck-up.

Kate short-circuits my brain. In my head we always have these clear coherent exchanges, but once we meet, what comes out it is, “Kate, do what I say or I’ll kill you.” Her default reply is, “Fuck you!” and we go downhill from there.

and occasionally posts them on the blog.

And Ilona has just announced that the first volume of the collected posts: http://www.ilona-andrews.com/2010/07/12/on-beast-lords-web-presence-of is now available as free downloads on Smashwords.

Multiple formats are available: HTML (for online reading), Javascript (for online reading), Mobipocket/Kindle, epub, Sony LRF, Palm, and plaintext.

Like I said: Sweeeet!

Oh, and thanks, Ilona and Gordon. 😉

Nalini Singh at Galaxy Bookshop, Sydney

Nalini Singh

Sometimes I get to crow over the fact that I live in the Antipodes and get to attend signings that a USAian fan can’t get to, like today’s Nalini Singh signing at the Galaxy Bookshop in Sydney. 🙂

(More on) e-books and me

I dropped this comment into Tor.com‘s “Bells, Whistles, & Books: Going Paperless” thread:

—

I’m no longer a library user and probably shouldn’t weigh into the digital vs print argument in that context, so I won’t. (Except to say that disposing of the existing p-books is incredibly wasteful and short-sighted: I’m sure that many of these books don’t have a digital counterpart.)

Some of my reasons for choosing e-books over p-books are enumerated in a comment I made on Dear Author and which is reproduced in my blog, and I won’t repeat them here.

I have been a reader for some 40 years and have a huge p-book storage and organization problem which would be even worse if my collection hadn’t been severely culled several times to keep the costs of moving house (internationally) to a minimum. I decided this year to move to e-books and chose the Sony PRS-700 (despite some concerns about display quality), and I’ll address some of the points in the OP and comments upthread from the perspective of a Sony user.

Why I prefer ebooks

I wrote this comment in Dear Author‘s “Long Live the Content” (13 Sep 2009) thread:

—

I bought an eReader earlier this year and my preferred book format is now electronic. I have a large portion of my library, including e-versions of the books I already have on paper wherever possible, on a single device that I only need to charge once a week and which only needs a USB cable and a computer or a USB power adapter.

I’ve bought nearly a hundred books which, if they had been paper, would probably have made my house explode from the overload. Or, at the very least, they’d have eventually made their way into one of many unsorted, uncatalogued filing boxes from which they’d be difficult to unearth without a protracted search.

How not to write a romance

I’m an avid reader with a lifelong aversion to Romance for no other reason than that there were piles of Mills & Boon and Barbara Cartland books in my house back in the mid-70’s and when I leafed through a few of them in a desperate effort to find something to read I came all over ick.

It wasn’t until 2007 that I came to the realization that there was more than bodice-ripping and near-porn in the genre when I wandered over from Making Light to Dear Author during the Lanaia Lee plagiarism wanksplosion. I found Smart Bitches, Trashy Books later, probably through DA.

I still don’t deliberately read Romance, but now it’s more a matter of priorities: My limited book budget goes almost entirely to SF and Fantasy, with an emphasis on Urban Fantasy. I still follow DA and SBTB for the industry news and book/hardware reviews.

In March this year, Jane of Dear Author posted a hilarious, snarktastic,  spoilery review of Knight Moves by Jamaica Layne. It had me crying with laughter from beginning to end, and I cackled intermittently for the rest of the day as memories intruded. Nothing that I can write will ever do justice to the post, so:

Queeb.

See other reactions in Fandom Wank and Weepingcock.

Oh, and those three links above? Definitely Not Safe For Work.