Award Categories

Seems I created a little confusion with my post about the Nebulas. Here are the formal definitions, quoted from the Nebula® Rules:

  • Short Story: less than 7,500 words.
  • Novelette: at least 7,500 words but less than 17,500 words.
  • Novella: at least 17,500 words but less than 40,000 words.
  • Novel: 40,000 words or more. At the author’s request, a novella-length work published individually, rather than as part of a collection or an anthology, shall appear in the novel category.

I believe the Hugo Award uses the same (or very similar) definitions.

The Nebula, by the way, is awarded yearly by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) and is a peer award voted on by the active membership of SFWA, or at least those who have time to read.

The Hugo is awarded yearly by the membership of the annual World Science Fiction Convention (worldcon), and is a fan award. (Some of those fans are also members of SFWA, but most are simply avid readers and, well, fans.)

If you’d like to know more about the Nebula Awards, browse the many entries on SFWA’s Nebula Awards page.

Nebula Awards ® 2005

The results are in from the Nebula Awards ceremony held last weekend in Chicago. Here are the winners:

  • Best Novel: Paladin of Souls, by Lois McMaster Bujold (Eos, Oct03)
  • Best Novella: “The Green Leopard Plague” by Walter Jon Williams (Asimov’s, Oct/Nov 2003)
  • Best Novelette: “Basement Magic” by Ellen Klages (F&SF, May03)
  • Best Short Story: “Coming to Terms” by Eileen Gunn (Stable Strategies and Others, Tachyon Publications, Sep 2004)
  • Best Script: The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King by Fran Walsh & Philippa Boyens & Peter Jackson (New Line Cinema)
  • Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award for lifetime achievement in the field: Anne McCaffrey

Congratulations to all the winners, and all the nominees!

More info at: http://www.sfwa.org/news/05nebwin.htm
Photos at the MidAmerican Fan Photo Archive http://www.midamericon.org/photoarchive/05neb01.htm

Young Adult Award Coming
Next year, for the first time, the Science Fiction Writers of America will be presenting an award for outstanding young adult science fiction/fantasy, with the first annual Andre Norton Award—to be awarded concurrently with the Nebulas.

Still Alive

Well, they haven’t killed me yet, and I guess they’d better not, because now they’re counting on me to get the book written in time. I’m a’crankin’ on it. It’s interesting to see the difference between writing something in someone else’s universe, and writing in your own. It’s a lot easier to do someone else’s story. For one thing, you don’t have to make everything up. (In this case, I’m taking a storyline that’s already set in celluloid and, er, binary digits, so the plot is already there.) When you want to know a technical or background detail, you can ask someone else. (That doesn’t mean you’ll get an answer, or at least a quick answer, but you can ask.)

The changes in technology have affected the process of doing this kind of writing, I’m guessing. Instead of just going by memory, and by a script that’s *way* out of date as far as the final show on screen is concerned, I can have the whole thing readily at hand. I’ve loaded the DVD right onto my hard drive–both on my desktop and my laptop–so I can simply toggle between my work and the video. I can get the dialogue right (for that matter, I can get the scenes right–you’d be amazed how much it all gets moved around and changed in final production and, I assume, the editing suite). I can look closely at the set, and the characters, and their mannerisms. I can also move on from that to add the layers of depth and texture that distinguish prose fiction from a visual production.

The trick may be to keep from getting too tied into that. I do, after all, have to write this book quickly. But you know something–I’m having fun.

A Hint

Okay, I’ll say this much. I’m writing the novelization of a really popular SF miniseries, one that has spun off a regular show.

That’s it. I can say no more. I’ve already said too much.

They’ll probably have to kill me now.

Blast. I’ll miss you all.

At Work, Never Fear

It’s hard to keep up a daily entry in a blog, when life is so busy! I wound up having to get a new laptop–a Winbook something-or-other, which I got marked down at Microcenter–and have gotten it wrestled into shape, all while getting a pretty good running start on the new writing project. I haven’t said what that is yet, have I? Well, unfortunately, I’m not free to say until I get an all-clear. But I can say this—I’m taking the next three months to work on something completely different, even as I read through the Sunborn first draft (700+ pages of it) and let it steep in my subconscious.

I hope this doesn’t alarm anyone who’s waiting for Sunborn to be finished. It was actually my editor who suggested it, and I thought it was a great idea. It’ll be fun, it’ll be different (and boy, do I need a change), and I will be forced to write it quickly.

More later.

(Yeah, yeah, I know I said that before. But I meant it. I mean it. Really.)

Sunborn–What Took So Freakin’ Long?

Ah. Yes. People have been emailing me for years, asking when the devil the fourth Chaos book is going to be out. Not to mention, my editor and publisher, who have been patiently checking in from time to time, hardly ever mentioning the fact that my deadline is so far in the past it’s nearly red-shifted out of sight. (Thanks, Jim. Thanks, Tom.) Guilt, guilt.

Well, it’s not because I meant to take so long, or haven’t been trying. The first thing that happened was that I had another book to do under a prior contract, which was going to take me a year or two to write—and then I’d get right back to the Chaos series. As it happened, that book was way harder to write than I ever imagined, and longer, and it took nearly five years to get finished. (That was Eternity’s End, and I’m happy to say that it’s met with a good response, and earned me my first and only Nebula Award nomination.) By the time I came back to the Chaos universe, the trail felt a little cold. I had to reread the first three books myself. (I’m rereading them again now, to keep the story clear in my head. You forget things, after a while.)

Basically, three things happened at once, as I worked on Sunborn:

  1. I undertook a book that was way, way harder to write than I thought when I outlined it. (Lots of really cosmic stuff, sentient stars and so on, but at the same time a deeply personal story, always told on a human scale.)
  2. My life as a parent was becoming increasingly full, with lots of activities and competing needs filling the days; and, as well, a need to do consulting work as a writer/editor to help pay the bills. (This is a good place to acknowledge the debt that I, and you my readers, too, owe my wife for bringing in a steady income through her work. Thanks, kiddo. I appreciate it.)
  3. Doing all this other work made it really hard to keep the novel centered in my mind, so that even when I had time to work on it, I couldn’t concentrate.
  4. I’ve been wandering in something of a creative desert for the last few years, trying to find the inspiration to turn this into the book I envisioned (and promised you, my readers) years ago.
  5. Like many of my writer friends, I was trying hard not to feel depressed about the state of my career, the state of the marketplace, the shrinking sales of our books compared to the way they sold 15 or 20 years ago, the loss of readers to competing forms of entertainment (movies, TV, mega-bestsellers, the internet, blogs [oops]). One always tries to appear upbeat in public, but it wasn’t always convincing on the inside.
  6. I began to lose my ability to count.

Somehow, though, I kept at it. The constant support and cajoling of my writing group was invaluable—as was other forms of support, from people who cared enough about my ability to keep writing to help in significant ways. And always at the back of it all, the feeling that God had given me a certain gift for writing, and I wanted to make good on that gift. (Plus, all those promises I’d made to you my readers over the years.)

And so, here I am at an important milestone in this project. As I said in the last post, I have a lot still to do. Probably two more complete drafts, anyway. But it should go faster now, and with much greater feeling of hope.

I’ll keep you posted on what’s happening.

But for now, I’m feeling pretty good.

Sunborn First Draft Finished!

Yes. At last. I have typed the ending words of the fourth book of The Chaos Chronicles! And they are:

“To be continued…”

Which isn’t a joke, of course, if you’ve been following the Chaos series. My faithful readers have been waiting a lonnnnng time for this fourth book in the series, the fourth of a planned six total. (I was shocked myself to look back at the header in the early chapters: I started this thing in the fall of the year 2000. Oy.)

Note the title of this entry, though. First draft finished. I’ve got a lot of rewriting to do. A lot of rewriting. It all came together and made sense (I think) in the end. But a lot of the 706 manuscript pages of this book are…well, I’ll be polite because this is a family publication…a godawful mess. But that’s okay. Really. Because getting that first draft down is the crucial thing. I can always work with it and straighten out the things that are wrong, once I have it down on paper (or phosphors, or LCD pixels) to look at. It’ll take me a while, and it’ll hurt, but I know I can do it.

Yes! Gimme a high-five, please!

Getting Back in the Groove

Wow. It’s been too long since I’ve posted–about two weeks. I’ve been caught up in work deadlines (editing–which involves some writing, but not my writing). That’s now behind me for a while, so I’m getting back to work on Sunborn, starting today.

Last weekend I attended Boskone, a very good science fiction convention held in Boston every year, and had a chance to catch up with some of my writing friends. I also picked up some of the latest offerings from Full Cast Audio, dramatized readings of Robert A. Heinlein’s classic Have Spacesuit Will Travel and The Rolling Stones. If you haven’t heard any of Full Cast Audio’s productions, you really should check them out. They use terrific voice actors, and present books in unabridged form. (The man behind the operation is Bruce Coville, who obviously doesn’t have enough to do writing his immensely popular books for kids.) Visit their web site! (And no, I don’t get a kickback from them. But tell them I sent you, anyway.)

As a way to unwind a bit from the editing before starting work again on the book, I turned to a bit of amateur carpentry today. We’ve been doing some renovations in our kitchen, which included replacing the sink cabinet and counter, and putting in a proper dishwasher. That meant we could pass on our old portable dishwasher to someone else, but it left an empty space where the old one provided a small counter by our stove. So…not wanting to throw out something that could be useful, I decided to cannibalize the old cabinet, and see if I could manage to stack two drawers that used to be at opposite ends of the old counter. So I cut the cabinet remnants (it had been pretty well torn apart) and the old countertop -and it looks as if it’s going to work. (Fingers crossed -it’s not done yet.)

And now, I promised I’d get to work on the book, so I’m getting.

Vanity Press Sting

Have you ever wondered just how honest vanity presses are? Well, one of them just showed its stripes to the world. Read about their hilarious comeuppance at www.sfwa.org/news/atlantanights.htm. (Thirty writers got together and submitted the worst manuscript they could come up with, to see if it would be accepted for publication by a “selective” subsidy publisher.)

In case you’re not sure what a vanity press is, it’s a “publisher” that preys upon would-be writers by charging the writers hefty fees to print their books—regardless of quality, or lack of it—with little or no editorial guidance. The unfortunate writer is then left with a thinner wallet and a garage full of generally unsalable books.

Writer beware.

Questions on Writing #1

I hear from a lot of aspiring writers, asking about careers in writing. One correspondent wrote me recently, expressing a great desire to write and to succeed in publishing, and asking what one might expect to earn as a published writer. Here’s my reply, in part:

I’m glad to hear of your interest in writing, and your willingness to learn. It’s a long, difficult road, but it can offer many rewards.

Few of those rewards are likely to be monetary, though. Yes, some people do well–especially if they are prolific. It helps if you write fast, and well, and have a great many stories to tell. Some writers who do well financially are excellent writers; some are not. I can’t tell you why.

You asked what the least was that I made in a year from writing, so that you’d know what to expect. That’s an easy one. Zero. Nada. Zilch. That’s what you can expect. You can’t be in it for the money. If the money comes, that’s a wonderful bonus. But you can’t bank on it, so to speak. If you do, you are apt to be very, very disappointed. You must be in it because you want to write and have stories to tell, and are willing to work hard to tell them well.

My one piece of advice is to try to put your desire to see your name on the cover of a book way, way to the back of your mind. Everyone feels it, of course, including those who already have their names on the covers of books. But thinking about that will not help you learn to write. And that’s what you have to do–learn to write. There are many, many skills that come together in the craft of writing, including storytelling, grammar, voice, sentence structure, vocabulary, imagination, organization of thought, knowledge of science and society and psychology, life experience, and many other things. Concentrate on all of these things. Expect to spend years practicing, and learning from others. Read books on writing. Join a workshop. Get feedback.

Do these things, and perhaps one year you will fulfill your dream of seeing your name on a book cover and sitting next to a favorite author at a signing. (There’s no guarantee, that’s one of the kickers.) Be fiery and determined, but don’t be too impatient.

Read my further Advice to Aspiring Writers, and consider looking at my writing course on CD, which you’ll see a link to on that page. (It’s out of print, but Amazon had some used copies, last time I looked.)

But…please don’t ask me to read your work. For the reason, see Before You Ask Me to Look at Your Work

Good luck!

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