Hugo Nominations are Open
The 2016 Hugo nominations are now open. I am a nominating member of this year’s WorldCon, so I now have to come up with my favorite things from 2015 and figure out which category they fall into. (Seriously, who knows how many words their favorite shorter works are?)
There are some awesome resources for people trying to remember all the works that are eligible. (In order to be eligible a work must have come out in 2015. This includes works that were completed or collected in 2015, so trade bind-ups of comics, television seasons, podcast seasons all count.)
Retro Hugo for 1946
Many creators publish blog posts with their eligible works from the previous year. There are also great sites like the SFWA Nebula Suggested Reading List or the crowdsourced Hugo Nomination Wiki and GoogleDoc. It takes a little leg work if you haven’t been keeping up with the media you’ve consumed (which I haven’t because I’m terrible,) but it’s not too difficult to do your due diligence before nominating.
And remember, the nominations are supposed to be personal. These are the things you think are the best from 2015. If you think a post you saw on Tumblr was the best related work (or a series of posts on Twitter about Star Wars) then nominate that post. It doesn’t matter at this point what anyone else says about the things you like. These are your nominations.
The nomination period is open until March 31, so there’s no need to panic. There is still plenty of time to read works you missed.
I’ll post later with my nominations. I’m still undecided about many things (isn’t it nice you can edit your ballot until the last second?) The only work I am positive about nominating is Uprooted by Naomi Novik for Best Novel. I loved that book more than I ever would have guessed.
Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem
We’ve got a quick 6-second book review.
February Giveaway – Prudence by Gail Carriger
It is February, the month that contains my least favorite holiday, Valentine’s Day. So, since I’m going to be grumpy, I thought I’d give away a book that made me happy. This month, I’m sharing a hardcover copy of Prudence: The Custard Protocol: Book 1 by the delightful Gail Carriger.
Comment below and tell me where you would sail your dirigible if you were so fortunate as to have one. Then click on THIS LINK
to go to Rafflecopter and enter the giveaway. The contest will run until midnight on the 28th! Good luck!
Prudence; daughter of Lord Maccon, werewolf; Lady Alexia Maccon, soulless, adopted daughter of Lord Akeldama, vampire, is now in command of a dirigible, a crew, and a mandate to go to India and look into a trifling matter for Lord Akeldama. But nothing is ever simple when her family is involved and so Rue (as she is known to her friends) finds herself neck deep in conspiracies, schemes, plots, and a pack of very familiar looking werewolves.
Chaos Choreography By Seanan McGuire
What I’m Reading: Chaos Choreography by Seanan McGuire
To Be Published: March 1, 2016
Read This: while practicing the tango.
Virginia, our Penguin sales rep, became one of my favorite people when a packaged arrived at Little Professor. This package contained an ARC of the fifth InCryptid novel, Chaos Choreography. I did a little happy dance around the store, clutching the book to my chest. And then I went home and devoured it.
For everyone else, it comes out March 1. I will pick it up on audio at release and listen to it immediately. So far, four is the average number of times I have read/listened to any of the InCryptid books. So, you could say, I like these.
Chaos Choreography opens with Verity happily married to Dominic, the ex-Covanant boy and somewhat happily living in her parents’ house with him. All of that is thrown into chaos when she gets a message on an old email address inviting her to a reunion season of Dance or Die, the television show she almost won with her alter ego, Valerie Pryor. But it would be insanely dangerous for her to go on national television now that the Prices are back on the Covenant’s radar. Right?
So, of course, she goes with Dominic and a splinter colony of Aeslin mice in tow. But now Verity has to slip back into a persona she hasn’t used in over a year. Valerie isn’t such a good fit anymore and dancing isn’t the only thing she wants to do with her life. Which is why, when two of the eliminated dancers turn up murdered and then the bodies mysteriously vanish before anyone notices, Verity is absolutely ready to backburner Valerie in order to deal with the latest supernatural threat.
It’s not difficult to get me to love a book by Seanan McGuire. She pretty much just has to write it and make it available for me to get. But I especially adore Verity. She got under my skin with her first book and pretty much stayed there. I love Alex and I’m looking forward to finding out more about Antimony, but Verity is my first love. And this is Verity getting to do what she loves, fight monsters and dance the sort of tango that could set your panties on fire.
This book has the emotional hit that Midnight Blue-Light Special did while keeping everything that has always made this series great. We also get introduced to a few new cryptids and another member of the Price family. As always, family with the Prices is something… special.
2016 Hugo Nominations Open
Source: 2016 Hugo Nominations Open
The Bone Clocks #6secondbookreview
The plumbingpocalypse is finished, I’ve gotten through all three of my long days at work for the week and so I’m headed to bed early after taking another decadent shower to celebrate my plumbing. But, so I don’t deprive you of my wit and wisdom, here is my most recent #6secondbookreview for you to enjoy. (Also, we shot three reviews and I only flubbed one take! That is AMAZING for me. Usually, I end up using my favorite all ages expletive, “Son of a potato!”)
The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell
https://vine.co/v/i5ZzWUVn9w0/embed/simple
Plumbingpocalypse Finally Ends
I finally have my yard (mostly) back. The earth mover hasn’t been picked up yet, but that will be gone soon. The dirt is all back on the yard and covered in pine straw. I can engage in activities requiring plumbing with no reservations.
The final toll was much more money than I would like to think about.
The plants are pretty much toast.
I had five roses, two hibiscus trees, two azaleas, a peony, numerous bulbs, bee balm plants, and wild flowers.
After the plumbingpocalypse I may still have two roses. I’m not actually sure. One of them is now half the size it was and leaning at a 50 degree angle. The other one was uprooted and put back down elsewhere, so we’ll see.
I will now be starting a vigorous campaign to get friends, family, and amiable strangers to give me plants to cover the vast wasteland that is my front yard.
All of it will be worth it when I take a hot shower tonight, though.
My Hamster Princess Giveaway has ended. My next giveaway will start on February 1. This time, because I wanted to do another pink book, I’m giving away a copy of Prudence: The Custard Protocol #1 by Gail Carriger.
LetterMo 2016
I have participated in the LetterMo Challenge since 2013 and it is time again! The premise of the challenge, which was started by Mary Robinette Kowal, is to encourage connections between people by committing to send something through the postal service every day the mail runs in February. For those of us in the US, that is 25 days this year. That’s not so bad; twenty-five letters, postcards, packages, or other interesting mailable items you commit to send.
You can write to people you already know, people you meet on the LetterMo forums, or people from online penpal groups. It’s all fair. We had some great international postcard exchanges last year.
There is a website with an active forum, a Habitica Guild and challenge, and a Facebook community. So, you can be as social as you want to be or you can participate without getting involved in any of that. It’s all up to you.
And, if anyone is interested in exchanging letters or postcards, just let me know. I’ve got some AWESOME postcards!
House Read – You’re Never Weird On the Internet
What I’m Reading: You’re Never Weird on the Internet (Almost) by Felicia Day
Published: Touchstone, 2015
Read This: while working on your award winning web series
Felicia Day, Queen of the Geeks.
Or, slightly awkward nerd girl you think would probably be a pretty good friend, but you might have to calm her down a bunch, but still probably cool.
I discovered Felicia Day in a round about way. I knew that The Guild was a thing, but I’d never seen it. I didn’t play MMOs, so that obviously wasn’t for me. (Also, I’m really uncomfortable with awkward humor.)
I knew she’d done guest spots on shows I was aware of, but always after I stopped watching them (Buffy, Season 7 anyone?) But then, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-along Blog happened and I now knew Felicia Day and I cared about her. Luckily, she had a backlog of stuff on the internet for me to consume. For free.
And now, a memoir, so I can find out more than I ever should have wanted to know about the origin story of Felicia Day.
I don’t read that many memoirs. At the end of the day, unless you’re really unusual, I just don’t care that much about your life. I’m sorry! I’m sure you’re really nice, but “slice of life” stories kind of bore me. However, exceptions can be made for certain people (usually women) I admire. Or, if you did something really, really awesome like Julia Child being a spy during WWII.
Felicia’s life story is pretty interesting in a quirky and awkward way. She didn’t have a background like mine, but I could see hers from here. I wasn’t homeschooled, mostly because my mom had to work full time and she was worried I’d become a shut in. But I thought it would be awesome. I didn’t get big on the early internet because we couldn’t afford the hourly rates and by the time AOL discs with 500 free hours started to liter the landscape, I was at boarding school with no dialup access. And I was NEVER going to be a musical prodigy. I just wasn’t that good at anything except reading.
But, I can still identify with lots of the things Felicia talks about in her book. Feeling lost the first time she went to a dance and was WAY overdressed. Being put into ALL the lessons because her mom didn’t really know what to do with her. Retreating into fantasy worlds because real life was difficult. I had books, she had video games. And Perry Mason books. Apparently.
I listened to the audio version of the book, read by Felicia, which was fun, but a little bit weird if you’ve heard her talk a bunch. Her cadence is different when she’s reading the book than when she’s recording a vlog, so that threw me just a little. It’s not bad, just different.
The book is charming if you’re willing to be charmed and frank about the difficulties she’s had growing up in an unusual way and then issues she had due to the pressure of success as well as illness. It’s nice to know that I’m not the only one who has those “please love me” thoughts every time I meet a new person or put something I did out into the world. If someone like Felicia Day can have them, then maybe it’s ok that I do too. After all, she’s the Queen of the Geeks.
#1000BlackGirlBooks
I was at work yesterday when my friend Dawn came in and told me I was going to help her with a project. Cool. I love projects. (You may have noticed.) So, I asked what it was and she said it was for the 1000 Black Girl Books drive. And I blinked because I had no idea what this was. So, she explained.
#1000BlackGirlBooks is a book drive started by Marley Dias in conjunction with the GrassROOTS Community Foundation. Marley is, by the way, eleven and thoroughly awesome from what I can see. The #1000BlackGirlBooks was started in response to her dissatisfaction with always reading about white boys and their dogs. She wanted to collect books where black girls were the protagonists, not just the best friends or side characters tossed into the mix. Her goal is to get 1,000 books by February 1.
http://up.anv.bz/latest/anvload.html?key=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
If you’ve got books you’d like to send books into Marley’s drive you can send them to:
GrassROOTS Community Foundation
59 Main Street
Suite 323
West Orange, NJ 07052
Medusa's Library 