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:

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