Views from Medina Road

The online Locus Poll ballot is up; the recommended reading list is up; as 4E Ackerman once said, please VOGT in our POHL. Special this year is a category for 'best all-time fantasy story', which we've seeded with a drop-down list of 50 well-known stories, though of course, as always, voters are free to vote for anything they want via the write-in boxes. Providing a set of options biases the vote in favor of those options, of course--that's the idea of the recommended reading list itself, we freely admit--but in the case of an open-ended category like this one, the alternative might be votes so scattered as to provide no meaningful results. Jonathan Strahan was the inspiration behind this category, and I'll leave it to him to comment more about it in his blog.

Next up on the site, after I catch my breath, are two special-to-Locus Online best of the year essays, by Claude Lalumiere and Jeff VanderMeer. I've had Claude's piece for 3 or 4 weeks now, while Jeff's just came today. I'd debated about whether to post them separately or together; as it's turned out, having been busy the past few weeks with other things, they'll be posted as a pairing. Early next week, if not before.