Odds and Ends

Fri, 17 Apr 2015 20:23:03 GMT

Been another week of Hell Cold, Mom crises and novel revisions. I am finally doing better, hopefully on the mend though, and decisions about Mom's future get tackled next week. She's doing better, but it's not clear that she's going to do enough better to go back to her apartment. Still wrangling finances, seemingly endlessly (into Month 3 on trying to close her accounts now) so still good times ahead. novel revisions are picking up steam as are bit and pieces of press planning. Hopefully, a healthy ten days or so and I get caught back up.

In other news, I've added an event on Sunday, June 14th at noon. I'll be doing a Author Koffee Klatch with MinnSpec, which is an hour long talk and Q&A session. They do these a couple of times a year and I'm pleased to have been asked to do one. Please register and come one by!

I'm also sponsoring a Con or Bust membership for Arcana: A Conference of the Dark Fantastic, I'll be the GOH at Arcana this year and I've decided that i want to try and donate Con or Bust memberships where I can because it's an effort I want to support. I sponsored one for Diversicon this year in honor of GOH Ytasha Womack and it's already been accepted, so hopefully this one goes as well. Please spread the word to anyone you know who might be interested. Applications will open in a month or two. Also, check out the Con or Bust page for links to their terrific annual auction, which is is always worth shopping at and which opens on 4/20.

Re: other events of the week, I'm sure you're wondering if I have an opinion about the Hugos. Or not. And I do, though I don't know that it is necessarily more nuanced than those found other places. Short, consolidated version: I think the Puppy Slates (both of them) exploited some obvious loopholes in the Hugos nomination process, but I think other folks "helped" them along by not nominating more quality work and voting.That said, if this year provides nothing else, I think it's woken a lot of folks up, at least for the moment. I think the Awards will need to make some changes and I truly feel for the Administrators because this has got to be a hell of a lot of undeserved crap to deal with. That said, I'm voting No Award in any Puppy-dominated slot because I'm not a fan of playing footsie with homophobic white supremacists who like to throw in a healthy dose of misogyny (such a surprise!). I'm voting for the best of the nonPuppy candidates available in in each slot and no Award if I think there isn't one. As for those professionals "drafted" on to the Puppy slates who have chosen to remain on the ballot, thereby benefiting however unintentionally from the system being gamed in their favor, I think that the ones doing award-quality work will deserve nominations in future years. As for the others, wails of "victimhood" and all, too bad. Many kudos to the two authors who took the high road and did the right thing by withdrawing their nominations; I look forward to reading the works of Annie Bellet and Marko Kloos for future award consideration.

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Dwelling in Probabilities

Odds and Ends