Posts Tagged: Best of ’13

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The 2014 Hugo Award Voter Packet is now available to all voters!

Nominated for two 2014 Hugo Awards, A Dribble of Ink was invited to contribute a collection of essays/reviews/posts to the Voter Packet that best represent its writing and contributions during 2013. So, I went wild and created a collection that will fill even the staunchest of traditional fanzine publishers with pride! It’s 66 pages of A Dribble of Ink goodness.

“But wait! I’m not a voter,” you might be thinking. Worry not. While voters will receive this collection in their packet, I want to make it available to everyone as a thanks for supporting A Dribble of Ink in 2013. After all, without all of you readers (and my wonderful contributors) there’d be no nomination!

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It’s no secret that I believe we need to do a better job at engaging in positive discussion about genre’s best works in relation to award season. We’re really good at getting annoyed, upset and frothy at the mouth about some things (as Abigail Nussbuam recently wrote about with much finer words, and more hands, than I could ever hope for), and it’s important to also apply that passion and energy to screaming loudly enthusiastically about the books, films, and people we love.

Over the past six months, I’ve discussed my own ever-evolving list of recommendations for Hugo nomination. I’ll do so once more before the close of the nomination period on March 31st, 2014. However, those posts are very distinctly one person’s opinion, and the genre fanscape is much larger than one opinion (no matter how highly I think of it.) In fact, the reason that I’ve decided to post various versions of my ever changing nomination ballot is because the good people of the Internet (they do exist, we’re not all bad!) have alerted me to so much cool stuff that I’ve had no choice but to revise my ballot several times.

So, here I’m curating a collection of publishing Hugo Award recommendations, in the hopes that you (like me) might find something of value in there that makes it onto your final ballot (if you’re a Hugo voter), or just makes you smile. Read More »

Last September, in the wake of the 2013 Hugo Award announcements, I decided to put together an early draft ballot for 2014, a look ahead at what I’d already enjoyed in 2013 and hoped to see awarded at the next WorldCon. Now, with nomination period open, I am revisiting that list, with revisions.

Below are the writers, books, movies, videogames and other SFF-related goodies that, if I were filling it out today (I won’t be, I’ll fill it out in March, after I’ve had time to digest more work), would appear on my ballot. Tell me why I’m right (or, more likely, wrong), and let me know what is going to make your ballot (or would, if you’re not a WorldCon member.)

Note: New additions to the list have been marked with a red asterisk, like so *.

So, onto the awards. Read More »

Best of '13 — My Favourite Books by Women

Note: This article was originally published as part of Smugglivus, a year-end celebration of all things books over at The Book Smugglers. Check out the rest of the fun!

To begin the year, I set myself a challenge: read a perfect split balance of male:female authors in 2013. It was a personal challenge, and I asked no one else to follow along with me. This challenge had two purposes. The first was to provide more exposure for female fantasy and science fiction writers. The second was to expand my own tastes, to discover new authors. As 2013 winds down, I consider this challenge a success, but it wasn’t without some controversy.

In particular, the comments thread generated some salty discussion about my challenge and the idea of ‘quotas’ playing against the natural interests of a reader/critic. I read a lot of the same arguments, mostly about being ‘genderblind’, that I had once made. These arguments are so easy to fall back on, a safety net to avoid falling into blame. At first, I was quick to respond the same way, “I just read what I want to read, and ignore the gender of the author completely.” Well and true, maybe, but I started to recognize that, despite these excuses, there was a large bias (about one to three, female to male) in my reading habits. I began to ask myself why. I still don’t have an answer, but I did recognize that a conscious course correction was something I could be proactive about without needing an answer right away. Read More »