Write That Fic

"NO MORE EXCHANGES UNTIL YULETIDE" I wail, as I peruse the femslashex  tagset and want to write at least twenty of these pairings. If I get ahead on my schedule for other writing I will let myself write some treats, I suppose. I mean even if I signed up I wouldn't get assigned every single pairing I love in that tagset, so I would still have 19 other things I wished I was writing. Right?

Meanwhile I've been doing the thing I'm supposed to be doing and focusing on iddyiddybangbang , and to my own surprise I'm making progress! I'll be past 5k by the first checkin for sure. I'm still not entirely convinced that I'll finish the fic by the posting deadline and it will be a bummer to drop out, but either way I'm getting a lot of words in on a project I've wanted to write for ages.


The Hugo Awards were announced this morning, while I was sleeping, and this year the results made me very happy. :D Despite having been into scifi since I was a teenager, I somehow managed to miss that anyone could vote in the Hugos (for a joining fee) until conservatives decided to game the nominations several years ago. This is despite knowing since high school that the Hugos use the Australian preferential ballot system! And I didn't realise it was publicly voted! What!!!

So I got into the Hugos because of the voting thing, because I'm a gigantic nerd for voting methods, and spent some time in 2014 having extremely strong feelings about voting systems and voter disenfranchisement, and started reading short form SF instead of just the occasional novel, and by 2016 I finally went "so... I love SF short fiction... and voting... and the Hugos combine these things..." and FINALLY FUCKING REALISED I COULD VOTE.

I don't think I cared all that much for the short fiction offerings in 2016, after all that - I think quite a lot of the ballot was taken up by the right wing anti-PC brigade, and I remember one nominated story was so apallingly racist that I didn't make it past the first page. But this year I had VERY STRONG FEELINGS and I'm over the moon that Seasons of Glass and Iron is the winner. It's a F/F fantasy story with a fairy tale tone, beautifully told, about women who suffer but save themselves. I didn't expect this! I thought Our Talons Can Crush Galaxies was going to win and I was v grumpy about it because I hated that story but my fave won. :D

I'm also pretty happy that Ada Palmer won the Campbell award for best new writer because I found her debut novel Too Like The Lighting a) incredibly niche and b) INCREDIBLY MY NICHE, MY GOD, IT HIT SO MANY OBSCURE CORNERS OF MY ID and c) incredibly ambitious in its scale and complexity and deserving of some kind of recognition, but d) not Best Novel, because, again, SO NICHE.