Views from Medina Road

ICFA: Barring travel complications or catastrophes, it seems I will make it to the ICFA in Ft. Lauderdale this year after all, various domestic disturbances and obstacles successfully surmounted or avoided, to permit a scheduled departure first thing tomorrow (Thursday) morning.

Hugos: OK, I admit it: the Hugo ballot deadline being last Friday, with the administrators' promise to announce the final list by Easter, and with the 'best website' category temporarily revived, I'm checking my inbox each day wondering if a 'do you accept the nomination?' email will appear. (They don't announce the final list until all the nominees have accepted; any who decline are replaced by the next-highest ranking nominee.) A lot has changed in 3 years, and the online world has expanded greatly, so I take nothing for granted. But one can hope. I understand why, even for big-name writers, nominations are significant validations; because otherwise, for most of us, there's so little feedback, other than complaints, that it's easy to lose perspective about whether one's efforts are valued, or even noticed.

Locus Curse: Last week James Patrick Kelly's On the Net column audaciously proposed no less than five website Hugo categories; this week Cheryl Morgan linked this nasty response from 8-time Hugo Award winner (for fanzine and fan writer) Mike Glyer, which ends with the comment

There are also plenty of people who simply feel "We don't need another Hugo to give to Locus every year...."

I've never seen this sentiment so explicitly stated, though I've always suspected it. (I don't follow fannish press, I'm afraid.) I will simply mention that a Hugo to Locus Online is *not* another Hugo to Locus; the website is 99.5% my effort, working in a city 400 miles away from the Locus offices, with only the most incidental support from the overworked staff of Locus Magazine, with any advantage to my website obviously outweighted by the bias against the Locus brand for its continued success over many decades. And I should probably stop there.