The Horror Writers Association has just released its preliminary ballot for the Bram Stoker Awards, which will be given out at this year’s World Horror Convention, held March 27-30, 2008 in Salt Lake City, Utah. Active HWA members will now vote from this list to create the final ballot. Awards will be given out in the categories of Superior Achievement in a Novel, Long Fiction, Short Fiction, Anthology, Collection, Nonfiction, and Poetry. Congratulations to all the potential nominees.

I’m extremely pleased to be able to say that two of the 12 stories on the preliminary ballot in the Long Fiction category were written by yours truly. Here’s the final dozen:

“Afterward, There Will Be A Hallway” by Gary Braunbeck (Five Strokes to Midnight)
“Almost the Last Story by Almost the Last Man” by Scott Edelman (Postscripts)
“Survival of the Fittest” by Scott Edelman (Summer Chills)
“You Never Got Used to the Needle” by John Everson (Needles and Sins)
“Blood Coven” by Angeline Hawkes & Christopher Fulbright (Dead Letter Press)
“General Slocum’s Gold” by Nicholas Kaufmann (Burning Effigy Press)
“Placeholders” by John R. Little (Necessary Evil Press)
“Blood Wish” by Michael McBride (Delirium Books)
“Frayed” by Tom Piccirilli (Creeping Hemlock Press)
“Lost in Translation” by Gord Rollo (NYX Books)
“An Apiary of White Bees” by Lee Thomas (Inferno)
“Trolling Lures” by Steve Vernon (Hard Roads)

My thanks go out to all those HWA members who liked my stories enough to recommend them. Now that voting is about to begin, if there are any active HWA members out there who’d like to receive copies of either of these two stories for further consideration, please let me know. Voting closes February 10, and the final ballot is to be mailed by February 15. I have no idea what will happen next, but that gives me three weeks or so to be happy and hopeful.

Free Range Librarian reports on a brouhaha concerning a recent award given to Orson Scott Card by the the Young Adult Library Services Association. The Margaret A. Edwards Award is given annually to recognize a writer for lifetime achievement in “helping adolescents become aware of themselves and addressing questions about their role and importance in relationships, society, and in the world.” K.G. Schneider states that considering Card’s views on homosexuality, “that’s like the Anti-Defamation League giving Bobby Fisher a lifetime achievement award.”

In a report by the School Library Journal, Roger Sutton, editor-in-chief of the Horn Book, is quoted as defending the choice, stating that “The award is not for being an idiot in real life; it’s for writing books that have made a positive difference in the reading lives of young people.”

In her March 2008 Asimov’s editorial, “Panning for Gold,” Sheila Williams shares the following nugget of information about her readership:

I think that at least 10 percent of Asimov’s readers are currently trying their hands at writing. I suspect that over the years Asimov’s editors have seen stories at one time or another from at least 20 to 30 percent of you—perhaps even more.

I must admit to being surprised that the number is so high. Perhaps it’s because I never tried to calculate such a percentage for Science Fiction Age back when I was editing fiction, and if I’d been paying attention, I would have already been aware of such a large overlap.

Oh, I tallied other numbers on and off, such as the percentage of submissions by women compared to the percentage of published stories by women, so that I could respond when people took me to task for the magazine not being representative of the pool of available stories—but I never thought to examine readers and writers as a sort of Venn diagram in an attempt to divine the correlation.

I trust that Sheila’s observation is correct. I’d love to know whether this fact holds true for other magazines, and for book publishing as well, both within science fiction and without. Is the reader/writer relationship similar in mysteries? How about romances?

I also wonder whether this carries over to other creative fields. What percentage of movie audiences want to make movies? What percentage of people who go to the theater hope to someday work in the theater? Is Asimov’s an anomaly, in that it’s so heavily supported by those who want to be a part of it? Or do Sheila’s numbers hold true for all artistic endeavors?

I’m not sure that there’s any way of finding this out. Any ideas?

I’m about halfway through Michael Chabon’s The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. I know that I’m late to the party (it was first published in 1988, after all), and you’ve all probably read this book years ago. But I guess I’ve always been avoiding it, even though I loved The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay, feeling as if that more recent book had been written with only an audience of me in mind. I didn’t want to go backward through Chabon’s oeuvre, because I was sure that I would only be disappointed. After so perfect a book as Kavalier & Klay, wouldn’t even a near-perfect book seem flawed and primitive by comparison?

But then a review copy of the new edition of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh showed up in the mail last week. I have no idea why; there’s no reason Science Fiction Weekly would ever run a review of a 20-year-old non-genre book. And I thought—it’s a sign. Time to cast off my silly fears and finally read the thing. I figured, well, it would be what it would be, and no matter what I ended up thinking of it, moving back in time would not diminish my love for Chabon’s more mature work. (more…)

John Joseph Adams, editor of the recent post-apocalyptic anthology Wastelands, which has been receiving rave reviews, informed me late last night that he’ll be reprinting my “Almost the Last Story by Almost the Last Man” in his upcoming zombie anthology from Night Shade Books. The book, tentatively titled No More Room in Hell, will be published in October. Good news with which to start off 2008!

And for those of you who wanted to nominate the story for a Nebula Award last month, but couldn’t because the story’s original venue was a UK magazine, mark your calendars, because its eligibility period will begin in October with this first U.S. publication.

Robert Silverberg was born 73 years ago today. Here’s a picture I took of a slightly younger Silverberg at the 2005 World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow. See that photo behind him? That’s of a much younger Silverberg at the 1957 World Science Fiction Convention in London.

I’ve been reading Robert Silverberg for as long as I’ve been reading science fiction. And why not? Bob’s career is one year older than I am, since he published his first short story in 1954. (Though maybe I shouldn’t rub that in.)

Happy birthday, Bob!

I have been following the Cassie Edwards brouhaha with interest via GalleyCat and Smart Bitches Trashy Books. Edwards is a writer of nearly 100 historical novels who has allegedly lifted descriptive passages from earlier works by others to reuse in her own books with little change and no attribution. Edwards has stated that that she didn’t know she was supposed to credit such sources, telling the Associated Press that “When you write historical romances, you’re not asked to do that.”

The last time this sort of thing came up in the romance field was when Janet Dailey plagiarized the work of Nora Roberts. In that case, Dailey eventually apologized, blaming it on “a psychological problem that I never even suspected I had … I have already begun treatment for the disorder and have been assured that, with treatment, this behavior can be prevented in the future.” (more…)

If you haven’t yet discovered the comic strip Lio, written and drawn by artist Mark Tatulli, you should. Tatulli’s warped sense of humor is refreshing on the comics page of the Washington Post, a melding of Charles Addams and Gahan Wilson. Here’s yesterday’s installment, which managed to make me laugh this morning. (Click through for a larger image.)

What can I say? I’m a sucker for exploding fish.

The Fix has just run a review of the November 2007 issue of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet which contained a sentence that raised my hackles. (Not a pretty sight.) Reviewer Martin McGrath started off his piece by tackling the very title of the magazine, stating that “Pretensions to literary stylings would seem to be a certainty, but does the obscure title also hint at a deliberately obscure approach to story and language?”

Personally, I’ve always felt LCRW‘s title to be whimsical rather than obscure, but no, that wasn’t what bothered me. The sentence that irritated me was still to come. McGrath continued by stating:

There are those writers whose primary purpose is to communicate with their readers, to tell a story, make a point, or engage in a conversation, and there are others who seem primarily concerned with demonstrating the range of their command of the English language and the scope of their intelligence.

My immediate response to this statement was to think—where are these writers who are just trying to show off how smart they are, who care nothing about touching readers? Because I’ve never met them. (more…)

Once you’ve completed the homework I handed out a few days ago of designing the cover to a new edition of J. G. Ballard’s Crash, it will be time to turn your hand to re-envisioning Eustace Tilley, the monocled character who has been The New Yorker‘s iconic mascot since 1925.

Those unfamiliar with this cover boy can find an essay laying out the history of Eustace Tilley here.

Contest rules, plus some of the more unusual versions already done of the character, can be found here.

The most bizarre? This unsettling riff by Charles Burns, whose work I first became familiar with in magazines such as Raw and Heavy Metal. Back then, I’d never have dreamed that he’d be allowed in the pages of The New Yorker. But the same can be said of Robert Crumb, Chris Ware, and Art Spiegelman, all of whom share their takes on Tilley.

As the entries pour in, you’ll be able to check in on your competition here.

I’m counting on you!