Views from Medina Road

Ads: HarperCollins has kindly purchased no less than three ad spaces on the site this month -- the homepage banner (at the top), a sidebar banner also on the homepage, and a flash banner ad (with the sound of a scraping sword) on five additional pages, including the Links Portal. Please show your support for HarperCollins and for Locus Online by clicking on the ads now and again -- obviously, you're not committing to buy anything just by browsing their webpages.

Poll: Locus Online ran an 'all-time poetry' poll alongside the formal Locus Poll this year, and voting for both ended April 15th. I have yet to tally up the results of the poetry poll, but will do so soon. (Curiously, no one has queried me about when the results will be released.) The response was of course far short of the response to the annual Locus Poll -- just 61 e-mail submissions -- so I'm not entirely sure the results will be meaningful. We'll see.

Blog: It was slightly disconcerting to chat with three or four folks -- real writers whose names you would recognize -- over the Nebula Awards Weekend who alluded (one in print) to reading this blog (!). I tend to write as if my readership here consists of 6 or 8 folks with too much time on their hands, 2 of whom are myself a few weeks and months later. Thinking that it might be otherwise makes me self-conscious not so much about what I write here, as about how often I post; I've noted myself that an ideal blog should be updated every day. It's not that I don't have things to write about; the challenge is finding the time to do so, coherently.

Photos: OK, so I'm not a great photographer (Hi Chris!), at least not when jostling among 15 others (who *are* all these people?) trying to snap pix of the latest set of awards winners, who are quickly distracted, with a basic digital camera that blurs half the shots I do take. Tonight I replaced my own pic of the Nebula winners, which I hope did not embarrass the Locus name-brand too much, with a better photo taken by the magazine executive editor Liza Groen Trombi. Apologies to anyone who deserves them.