Archives: 2009 August

Image of a coffee cup, piping hot!

Featured Author

Steve Rasnic Tem’s newest book, IN CONCERT (Centipede Press), collects all his collaborations with wife Melanie Tem.

Featured Book

Machiavellian? That’s kids’ stuff! Beware humanity’s new neighbors.

Nebula Awards Weekend

The Forty-Seventh Nebula Awards Weekend will be held Thursday through Sunday, May 17 to May 20, 2012 at the Hyatt Regency Crystal City in Arlington, Virginia, near Reagan National Airport.

We honor Connie Willis as our Grand Master!

To register, click on “Registration” in the menu to the immediate left. Then scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on the “Register” button.

Tours, workshops and panels are available for registered attendees (the number of people who can be accommodated on the tours and workshops is limited.) Active and Associate SFWA members may nominate works, until February 15th, for the awards to be presented at the May 19th Nebula Awards Weekend Banquet. Hour long interviews and readings will be recorded by Jim Freund for his Hour of the Wolf radio show broadcast on WBAI (99.5FM) in New York City.

Jon Williams is our Toastmaster (he will also conduct a half-day Writers Workshop on Friday morning.) Mike Fincke is our Keynote Speaker.

The Mass Autographing Session on Friday, May 18th will be followed by a reception to honor the nominees and other honorees.

You don’t have to be a nominee, a member of SFWA, or even a writer to participate in the weekend. Registration for the 2012 Nebula Awards Weekend is open now. The cost for the Nebula Awards Banquet is $75.00 per person. The cost to register is $50.00 for a SFWA Member and $60.00 for a non-SFWA Member until February 29, 2012. Rates for registration will be higher as the date of the event draws closer.

Results from the 2010 Nebula Awards (presented 2011).

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Archive for August, 2009

Redshift Rendevous

Monday, August 31st, 2009

Redshift Rendevous by John Stith
Nebula Novel Nominee, 1990
(Available for Purchase)

Posted in Available for Purchase, Member Fiction Online, Nebula Nominees | Comments Off

Mother of Kings

Monday, August 31st, 2009

Mother of Kings by Poul Anderson
(Available for Purchase)

Posted in Available for Purchase, Classics, Member Fiction Online | Comments Off

“Ponyo” by Hayao Miyazaki

Sunday, August 30th, 2009

“Ponyo” by Hayao Miyazaki
August, 2009

Tags: Hayao Miyazaki, Miyazaki, Ponyo
Posted in Bradbury Award, Nebula Suggested Reading | Comments Off

“James and the Dark Grimoire” by Kevin Lauderale

Sunday, August 30th, 2009

“James and the Dark Grimoire” by Kevin Lauderale
March 2009, Cthulhu Unbound, Thomas Brannan and John
Sunseri eds.

Tags: James and the Dark Grimore, Kevin Lauderale, Lauderale
Posted in Nebula Suggested Reading, Short Stories | Comments Off

Interview: Jeffrey Ford

Saturday, August 29th, 2009

Before we discuss your career as a writer, I am curious about your other job, that of being a professor. In what ways has being a professor influenced your views of the world and its people? Have you found yourself ever taking a situation in the classroom and incorporating elements of it into your fiction?

Teaching has been its own journey that sometimes intersects with my journey as a writer. I enjoy it. I’ve been teaching for 25 years now, 22 of it teaching at least five courses a semester, two semesters a year, with anywhere from 75 to a 100 students, a lot of them writing a lot. In that time I’ve met thousands of people, helped some of them with their writing, gotten some of them into Early American Literature, listened, did way too much talking, and learned a great deal. Two important things I learned from teaching are: 1) If you let them, people will surprise you. 2) Even though it is not always evident, most young people have a desire to be successful, not necessarily in a monetary sense but in doing something worthwhile with their lives. Figuring out how to recognize that in each individual is the job of teaching. I’ve had much success in this, but can also recall, realizing too late, total failures on my part that I can never seem to shake no matter how many years go by. The people I work with are, to a person, all very cool. Brookdale Community College, where I teach, has stubbornly retained its sense of humanity over the years through the efforts of all. Not a bad gig, if you have to work.

Very cool! I’ve been a teacher myself for most of the past 10 years and I agree wholeheartedly with what you said there. I recently read your short story “The Honeyed Knot” and I felt a special attachment to that story because of how it seemed to intersect the personal and professional lives of a teacher. Have you written other stories that came close to touching upon what you’ve experienced as a teacher over the years?

There’s one other very brief story in my recent collection, “Ariadne’s Mother.” I’d like to write more fiction about my experiences teaching, but I’m torn in doing so. To write this kind of stuff, I’d have to base it on real-life experiences—it’s the way I know that I could get the most out of the subject—otherwise it would come across cliche. There are elements in the real world of the classroom and teacher/student interactions that are compelling but, like dreams, seem lame if faked. On the one hand, using the stuff of my students’ lives, even with names changed, seems somehow morally wrong. On the other hand, as a writer, I feel I need to express myself, my experiences of the world, that I have an intrinsic right to and that that should ultimately top all concerns. So I’m kind of stuck in the middle, and though there are at least a solid dozen stories I could tell (some of them genuinely weird or supernatural), and a hundred more I could develop, I don’t know. Perhaps when I retire I’ll put it all together in a novel.

Read the entire interview at NebulaAwards.com

Posted in SFWA Blog | Comments Off