January 2024 Newsletter

Award season and other items of note

Well, so far, 2024 certainly is a year that has started. Has this month seemed bizarrely long to anyone else? It feels like the holidays were ages ago — and yet, at the same time, it seems impossible that we’re barrelling swiftly toward spring.

News

It’s nomination season! Specifically, nominations are open for the Hugo Awards — and as of sending this newsletter, you still have a little time left to become a member of Glasgow Worldcon 2024 and get nominating privileges! The nomination packet alone makes it worth the membership, honestly. You get an incredible amount of reading, listening, and even viewing material.

And, look, I have reasonable expectations of nominations for The Bloodstained Shade and the Aven Cycle. (Though it would be really cool to make the long list!) But Worldbuilding for Masochists is really what I’m pushing. We’ve been nominated three years in a row. We want to make it four! And winning in Glasgow would be a lot of fun. 😉 So if you’re already a WorldCon member for 2024, or if you’re willing to become so, we would love and appreciate your consideration.

The Bloodstained Shade is also a nominee for RavenCon’s Webster Award! This makes a hat trick on nominations for this award for the Aven Cycle, which I’m quite pleased about. From Unseen Fire won back in the covid times, so I had to accept it by video. I’ll definitely be at the con this year, though, and it sure would be fun to accept in person… 😁 Voting is still open!

But wait! There’s more! The Bloodstained Shade has also been nominated for several Queer Indie Awards! I’m particularly tickled by the worldbuilding nomination, of course, and by the character-focused categories: Best Villain for Corinna, Best Supporting Character for Aula, Best Friendship for Latona and Vibia, and Best Relationship for Latona/Sempronius. You can vote directly on those here until February 2nd. I recommend using CTRL+F or “Find in Page” to locate it, because there are a lot of things on that form!

Okay. Enough with the awkward self-promotion.

Upcoming Events

My other big news right now is that I am helping out with Halcy-Con, a boutique convention celebrating the Galactic Starcruiser and its community. It has so far been whirlwind and wild, but I think it’s going to be so much fun. Our tickets sold out in five hours. And the first room block went in, I think, twelve minutes.

The event organizers are two of the hosts from the Heroes of the Halcyon podcast that I did an interview with back in September, and they have done so much already just in getting this thing off the ground. I’m serving as their Programming Coordinator, which ought to be similar to the work I did on MISTI-Con back in the day. It should about the same size, too, which will make for an intimate experience—just like the Halcyon herself was. I’m very much looking forward to helping this community live on!

And, of course, it’s an excuse to build a few more cosplay outfits for Lady Annazena.

What I’ve Been Reading

• The Scandalous Confessions of Lydia Bennet, Witch, Melinda Taub

• All Systems Red, Martha Wells

• A Prayer for the Crown-Shy, Becky Chambers

• The Goblin Emperor and Witness for the Dead, Katherine Addison

• Fortune’s Favorites, Colleen McCullough

• A Deceptive Composition, Anna Lee Huber

(As always, these are affiliate links from which I will earn a small commission)

Scandalous Confessions was one that I confess I was a bit skeptical about going in, but I thoroughly enjoyed it! It’s a delightful and wildly unexpected spin on Pride & Prejudice.

I re-read, or rather re-listened-to, The Goblin Emperor as a way of bucking up my courage to do frightening things with informal pronouns in Infinite Variety, and I went on to Witness for the Dead because I hadn’t yet. Witness is a very different book in the same world, a sort of fantasy detective procedural, and its narrator is someone who believes himself outcast and looked-down-on, and is consistently surprised by the willingness of people to be kind, care for him, help him, and just generally be friendly to him.

Wrapping It Up

It’s Imbolc this week, which always signals the real turn toward spring for me. Oh, it’s still cold and generally miserable, true, but from here on out, you can better feel the days getting longer. It’s a little easier to have hope, a little easier to believe that bright things, green things, life and warmth will in fact return.

Anyway, here’s an Oona:

May the remainder of winter be as warm and cozy as possible for you and yours!