Sock puppet vuvuzelas

Some sock puppets explain just why I've been avoiding the World Cup this year:

Truthfully, I would probably be avoiding the World Cup anyway, but these vuvuzelas bring on a pretty much immediate headache.

And, oh, yes, I was supposed to be blogging more on nicely serious topics, or just blogging more at all, right? Hmm. I blame the vuvuzelas.

World Fantasy Nominations

Just got off my World Fantasy nominations - right under the deadline. That wasn't fun.

Part of the problem is that, as I realized when putting together my list, most of the works I read last year weren't eligible. It isn't that I haven't been reading - although my fantasy reading has definitely slowed - but that most of the fantasy novels and collections I did read dated from 2008 or earlier, which makes me feel as if I'm being unfair both to the few books I nominated and to all those I didn't get around to reading. (I left blank spaces, because I will not nominate books I haven't read.)

The same happened in the novella category, where I nominated all of two works. But in the short story category, I had exactly the opposite problem: I had 14 stories I wanted to nominate (15 if I'd been able to nominate me, and this list easily could have been stretched to 45, without including me), and could only list 5. The non-professional, on the other hand, was surprisingly easy, and I was surprised to realize that I even knew a couple of artists to nominate.

And then we have the problem of the Lifetime Achievement Award. With all of the Oz posts, my main nominee was the brilliant fantasy artist (if terrible writer) John R. Neill, but dead people aren't eligible, so I was stuck once again trying to narrow a too long list down to just five people.

But this, combined with the SF Signal "apparently I haven't read a science fiction book published in this century" debacle has convinced me that I am going to have to get better at reading recently published material, instead of my usual, hmm, what's on the bookshelves or what's getting recommended to me this time method. I'll try to do better next year, guys.