2004 Nebulas, Reading, and Writing

by Mike Shea on 5 May 2005

The 2004 Nebula awards came out last night. Here's a list of the winners:

Novel: Paladin of Souls, Lois McMaster Bujold

Novella: "The Green Leopard Plague", Walter Jon Williams (Asimov's Oct/Nov 2003)

Novelette "Basement Magic", Ellen Klages (F&SF May 2003)

Short Story "Coming to Terms", Eileen Gunn (Stable Strategies and Others)

Script: The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens & Peter Jackson (New Line Cinema; based on the novel by J. R. R. Tolkien)

Neil Gaiman gave a great keynote speech.

I've been doing a lot of reading and writing recently. I just finished Neil Gaiman's Stardust, an excellent novel to polish off in a couple of days. After finishing Game of Thrones, an excellent hard-core fantasy that doesn't feel like 600 pages until you drop it on your foot, I read 2001 by Arthur C. Clarke. The ending in the novel is so much more direct and accurate than that LSD trippy ending in the movie.

I also listened to the extremely snobby and nausiatingly high-brow "The Little Guide to your Well Read Life" which contained few useful tips other than ones I already employ including:

Read every day.
Read good books and skip the bad ones.
Read using books on CD, MP3, Tape, or whatever.
Read hardback books. They're nicer and not really that expensive for what you get.

I'm just about to start reading "The Keep" by F. Paul Wilson and I started listening to the unabridged "I, Robot" by Asimov. I also just finished reading I also have one story left in The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian after reading the awesomly politically incorrect "Women of the Lost Vale".

I just finished typing up the second draft of a short story called "The Executioner" and I finished a third and final draft of "Loyalty" after sending it through Critters and reworking it quite a bit. I have two Vrenna stories: "Vrenna and the Red Stone" and "Vrenna and Togaru Village" to edit and Critter as well. Both Loyalty and Vrenna and the Red Stone were sent out to a couple of fiction websites but I expect rejections to show up soon.

I'm not quite sure what I'll start writing next but I have an idea for a fantasy story about how DRM can destroy an entire society's knowledge that I've been kicking around