I just signed up as a supporting member of Worldcon so I can vote in the Hugos this year--which I'm mentioning in case others didn't realize it was an option. (I certainly didn't before this week.) It costs $40, but I decided that was a price I was happy to pay as a fan, a writer whose next project is likely to be fantasy, and a mother of an 11-year-old girl who's already ensconced in fandom and dreams of designing video games and/or creating her own comics and/or graphic novels someday.

Yeah, anyone can vote in the Hugos if they pays their fees, and I think that's why the Sad Puppy hooraw is such a big deal. I think voting for the Nebulas is more restrictive...yeah, to vote you have to be an Active Member of SFWA, and for that, you have to be a published, for-pay writer. I could be an Affiliate Member, but I couldn't vote.

I'll probably become an Affiliate Member next year.

It's definitely making me feel better about the Ritas. For all the debate and controversy over the categories and judging system that crops up in RWA almost annually, they're at least extremely difficult to game. (Any author with a qualifying novel or novella that year can enter, and in the first round each book is scored independently by 5 judges. I think good "typical" books tend to get awarded over more innovative, niche-y work, but I don't think that's unique to the contest or the genre, and I can't imagine anyone being able to push crap with a political agenda into the finals.)

Barb won a RITA!

I know, and that book is awesome! There are definitely plenty of exceptions to my good-but-typical comment--it's just a general trend I've seen, particularly in the romance subgenres I read most frequently.

Sherwood Smith has a great essay here on the difference between Austen and Heyer: [link]

And I learned a new thing!

Also, if people like Regency romances, Sherwood's two latest novels, Rondo Allegro and Danse de la Folie are both very good, although I liked Rondo Allegro better.

Consuela, I was just coming in here to post Sherwood's essay. I love it so.

So many great things being written on awards right now. Among them, the fact that Kit Reed (one of Joss Whedon's teachers) and many other female writers and writers of color have gone for much longer than since 2009 without receiving a shiny rocket... and kept writing. Kit pointed out somewhere recently that if she'd written with an eye to awards, she would have buried her typewriter by now.

And the amazing Michi Trota said something I've been thinking about more and more. Awards are great for the extended reading lists -- and reasons to read -- that they provide. This year's reading list (I've given it a crack already, as I'm determined to give everything at least a paragraph to win me over) is differently shaped and I am missing a lot of new voices that emerged in 2014.

It's harder for me now to make public reading lists, but I'd love to keep one somewhere -- maybe here? I don't know, I'm mostly musing.

It's harder for me now to make public reading lists

Why?