Madeline Ashby's Blog, page 9

I don’t recall the first time I donated to Planned Parenthood. It might have been online. It might have been on the street. I’m not sure. But I will always remember why.

During my sophomore year at university, I was sleeping with somebody every once in a while. At least, I thought I would be. That was how the arrangement seemed to be shaping up — he’d roll into town, and we’d roll in the hay. It was great, or it might have been, because at the time he was really the only person giving me a second glance. Nothing came of it (pun intended) because one of our friends found out and freaked out, and it turned out the guy didn’t even really like me that much anyway. (That happened to me a lot. I was way less sad about some guy deciding I wasn’t hot/cool/whatever enough to sleep with again than I was about the guy who dumped me over email on Valentine’s Day, freshman year. I was learning.) But at the time, when I still had hope, I thought I should do the responsible thing and get some serious birth control going before we slept together again.

I’d been on the pill, before. I got it prescribed for my skin (for which it did absolutely nothing, costing me $40/month that I could have been spending on better skincare products in general). This time I wanted to try something different. So, I went to get an exam. At Planned Parenthood.

My first such exam, in high school at the doctor’s office in my tiny town near where they made Twin Peaks, was a terrible experience. So terrible, in fact, that my doctor prescribed me a bottle of Valium to deal with my subsequent exams. So by the time I hiked up Capitol Hill with a friend, past all the fried chicken joints and the dig sites of condos that wouldn’t be finished until I left the city, I was already a little buzzed. And I told the doctor so.

“That’s okay,” she said. “We have pediatric speculums.”

“They make those?” I asked, because I was an idiot, and also a little high.

“Yes,” she said. “Sometimes we see little girls, too.”

Because of course they do. Because of course little girls have to go to Planned Parenthood, sometimes, when their dads or grandpas or uncles or teachers or moms or priests or daycare providers or soccer coaches or babysitters rape them. And often, places like Planned Parenthood are the only places for these girls to go for help. Not just because they might be pregnant, or because they might have an infection, but because they’re hurt. Emotionally and physically, they’ve been torn open and left to bleed out.

I’ve visited other clinics in other states, since. They’re always full of flyers about rape. But they’re also full of flyers about consent, and about what it means to transition, and what it means to be queer, and about how to seek counselling, and how to find support groups, and how to be safe sexually and emotionally. How to say yes. How to say no. All the things your mother or father never told you. All the things you never knew how to ask.

Because Planned Parenthood isn’t just where you go if you think you’re pregnant, or if you’ve been raped. It’s where you go for pap smears. And mammograms. And counselling sessions. And prostate exams. And HIV tests. It’s where you go when you’re scared.

This is why I donate.

Today, the Supreme Court of the United States decided that corporations could claim a religious exemption for providing coverage for birth control under the federal mandate for affordable healthcare. That decision puts all women at risk, because birth control isn’t just about preventing pregnancy. It’s about dealing with fibroids, and endometriosis, and cancer risk, and maternal morbidity. It’s a matter of life and death, in more ways than one. Women who were looking forward to the basic human right that is reproductive autonomy now have to worry if their bosses will cut costs but cutting their care. In a world in which women still have a hard time having jobs after having children, you have to wonder if Hobby Lobby’s appeal to the Supreme Court had less to do with culture wars, and more to do with corporate America finding ways to keep women out of the workforce. Because hey, if your company doesn’t have to pay for your birth control, you’re less likely to afford it, and more likely to get pregnant. And if you’re more likely to get pregnant, you’re more likely to take maternity leave or leave your job. And the more likely you are to do either of those things, the less likely you are to find another job by the time your kids hit kindergarten. It’s a decision that does more than just enforce the status quo of women working twice as hard for half as much. It privileges the personhood of the corporation and the unborn over the personhood of the working woman and mother. And it puts the burden of affordable reproductive care for women on the shoulders of places like Planned Parenthood.

So . Pitch in. Help the moms who are done having families. Help the women who are just starting their journey toward becoming women. Help the boys who aren’t ready to be dads. Help stop cycles of poverty and abuse. Let every child be a wanted child. Let every mother be a healthy mother. Let every woman be a free woman. Let every little girl be a little kid, for a little while longer.

 

 

 

 

 

…I realize how pathetic a plea that sounds, but in this case it’s legitimate nomenclature. On Monday 28 April, I’ll be doing a Google+ hangout with some of my Angry Robot Books cohort: Ramez Naam, Wesley Chu, and Cassandra Rose Clarke. We’ll be discussing 21st century science fiction. You should come hang out with us. It’ll be fun. I’ll even wear pants and everything.

And it’s at io9! (Along with a little essay about the Singularity.) If you’d like to pre-order the book, you can do so here.

All credit goes to the amazingly talented Erik Mohr, who normally works for ChiZine Publications but went to the dark side for me and Angry Robot Books. I’ve wanted an Erik Mohr cover since, oh, 2010, when David’s first collection Monstrous Affections was released. He’s done shockingly good work for David’s novels Eutopia, Rasputin’s Bastards, and The ‘Geisters since then, and so I was quietly thrilled when he casually asked me at a party: “So, when am I doing one of your covers?” (Seriously, it was a bit of an “I carried a watermelon” moment. I think I said, “Uh, um, well, there’s this one I’m working on…about oil rigs?”)

Erik was a delight to work with. He asked all the right questions, and seemed to know exactly what I was talking about before I even said it. He’s also a perfectionist, and won’t let a cover out the door unless it’s just right. If you get a chance to work with him, do.

This year has already been pretty busy, in terms of my foresight work. In January, I ran a workshop at a Day Zero event for Engineers Without Borders Canada AGM. That same month, editors started contacting me about including my story Social Services, which I wrote for an Institute for the Future anthology on the coming age of networked matter, in their “year’s best” anthologies. Then I gave a talk at the Toronto SpecFic Colloquium. And this weekend, I’ll be delivering a keynote on design fiction at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

This summer, I’ll visit Washington, DC to do a three-day workshop on narrative and foresight. Then I’ll head to the World Future Society to attend a symposium on science fiction and teach a workshop on stratifying scenarios so they feel lived-in and real (because your ideal user and the person who uses your product/service/platform are often very different). After that I’m off to LonCon 3, which I will probably start calling “Long Con” after I look at my credit card statement.

In the fall, I might finally learn if the fudning my team applied for to develop a videogame about cybersecurity came through. It’s sort of a mixture of Serial Experiments Lain, Perfect Blue, and Veronica Mars, so I’m hoping it comes through. September marks the publication of the Hieroglyph anthology, inspired by a keynote given by Neal Stephenson and work done between SF writers and faculty at Arizona State’s Center for Science and the Imagination. September is also when my next novel, Company Town arrives on store shelves, or in your phone, or between your nightmares. As that happens, I’ll be working on finishing the Machine Dynasty series with an evil little novel called Rev, and working on stories for a couple of anthologies.

And all of that work leads directly into next year, in a way I can’t really discuss yet. Suffice to say it involves more travel, and more grant applications, and a lot of hard work.

Like seemingly everyone else watching True Detective, I had my theories about who the Yellow King was. But for me, that was of tertiary importance compared to learning the answer to another question: Why the Yellow King?

(Spoilers ahead, for True Detective and Twin Peaks.)

Much has been made about the finale, with reactions ranging from disappointment to adulation. For me, it was a perfectly fine outing, but it left major questions un-answered. All of those questions are why questions, because the series was pretty good about clarifying the what, when, who and how. So we know who the Yellow King is, and who he killed, and when it happened, and how it all went down. Here’s what we don’t know:

Why does he kill both little girls and adult women?
Why does he dress them in ritual garments?
Why does he place them in public locations to be found?
Why are they placed in such a specific, ornamental manner?
Why does he film certain crimes (the rape of little girls) but not others (the murder of adult women)?
Why the Yellow King (and not, say, Randall Flagg, or Cthulhu, or Springheel Jack)?

In short, what we’re never told is the killer’s motive. Which is kind of a big deal, when you think about it. Most people who commit murder have a motive. Even serial killers, who feel a compulsion to kill, still have a reason to continue indulging the compulsion despite how risky it is. David Berkowitz’s claims of demonic possession became claims of Satantic cults assisting his murders, but both he and the Zodiac Killer thrived on interaction with police and from terrorizing the public at large via mass media. Ted Bundy was a necrophile who liked to preserve his victims’ remains in some way. So did Gary Ridgway and Jeffrey Dahmer. Ridgway buried over 45 women in the backwoods of Washington State over a span of decades; he visited their bodies multiple times as they decomposed. Dahmer once said that his compulsion was “an incessant and never-ending desire to be with someone at whatever cost,” which led him to eat their flesh and keep their bones. Randy Kraft shared a similar compulsion: he photographed his victims as he seduced and drugged them, then again after their rapes and murders. He kept all the photographs, and developed a scorecard system that kept immaculate record of who, where, and when he had killed.

All of these are highly ritualized behaviours with deep personal meaning. They have a beginning, middle, and end, and they help the killer meet an emotional need. They involve a fleeting relationship with the same victim over and over, though his or her face might change: the same age, the same gender, usually the same race, of the same socioeconomic background. It’s madness. But it’s not indiscriminate madness. It’s a curated experience.

Even Charles Manson believed he was accomplishing something. So, what was Errol Childress trying to accomplish? That’s all I want to know.

No, really. How do you answer this question? Childress wanted to rape. Childress wanted to murder. Sure. But most rapists and murderers don’t need white dresses and antlers and twig sculptures and grass masks to meet their needs. There’s a whole material culture at play in Childress’ killings that goes un-examined. Despite having a storage unit full of evidence, we never see Rust visit a librarian or an anthropologist to discuss the significance of the antlers, the spiral, or the sculptures. We never see him Google the words “Yellow King.” We never see him read a copy of Chambers’ book. It’s kind of shitty detective work, when you think about it. For a guy who’s so well-read, it’s a little weird that Rust wouldn’t phone up some of the Jesuits at Loyola — or, given his atheism, some of the profs at Tulane — and say: “Do the words yellow king mean anything to you?” The forensic pathologist tells him outright that he should speak to an anthropologist about the sculptures. Does he? Nope. Not once, in twenty-two years.

For a long time, I had hoped that the supernatural threads of True Detective were being woven into something cohesive. And to my way of thinking, they still could be. We have no idea if Rust’s hallucinations were genuine. If he truly did comprehend another dimension for one brief moment, his deathbed embrace of the form in the void would make more sense. But even the presence of supernatural phenomena doesn’t explain the rules of the game. Did the Yellow King ask Childress to kill? We don’t know. Does the Yellow King’s church require ritual sacrifice? We don’t know. For a series that begins with committed atheism and ends with the reluctant acceptance of the possibility of the divine, it doesn’t offer any details about the god its villain worships.

Ultimately, that’s a failure of worldbuilding. In refusing to commit fully to multiple genres, True Detective missed out on some basic points of storytelling about serial killers and ritual killings despite engaging primarily with that sub-genre of drama. Your average episode of Criminal Minds or Millennium spends more time dwelling on the belief systems of its villains, and explaining their motives. I know more about BOB and the Black Lodge than I do about the Yellow King, and I learned it from characters who talk backwards.

So the next time someone tells you “Well, it’s more about the characters,” remind them that villains are characters, too.

And for the record, here is how I watch True Detective. My fanthropology, if you will. How I filled the gaps in the story. Much of it is borrowed from Twin Peaks, which despite being as opaque as a stream of pine pitch, still has a basic mythos at work.

True Detective takes place in a world where Chambers’ book does not exist.
In this world, people take drugs to access other planes of reality, and commune with the Yellow King. This is the drug found in the bodies of Childress’ victims.
Worshippers of the Yellow King strive to maintain the ways of living that they and their families have enjoyed for generations. This includes an isolation within the bayou, and inattention from authority figures. Like Brigadoon or Avalon, Carcosa is an idyllic utopia for some that must be hidden from the outside world by its residents. At the same time, Carcosa is also a state of being believers can enter when in communion with the Yellow King. (“You in Carcosa, now…”)
In order to keep Carcosa hidden, worshippers must draw on the Yellow King’s powers. He is appeased through ritual rape and murder. The rituals may be the second act of the play The King in Yellow, which exists in our world as a work of meta-fiction.
Rust’s extremely unusual experience working undercover in Vice make him uniquely qualified to deal with this situation. Not only does he have multiple drugs in his body’s tissues that cause “flashback” type hallucinations — which are actually glimpses of something genuine — but he is also accustomed to metaphorically crossing between worlds and wearing different identities. (“Take off your mask…” “No mask! No mask!”)
For this reason, Childress engages with Rust by leaving clues for him to find. While Errol’s father took the role of high priest and marked his son for the work by scarring his face, Errol Childress has no children of his own to pass the role onto. He chooses Rust, based on Rust’s investigations of the Tuttles and their school system — which provided children for sacrifice. This is why he addresses Rust as either “prince” or “priest” in their final confrontation.
However, Rust was not the first choice for this position. That was Marty. The body of Dora Lange was left for Marty to find, not Rust — Marty was Louisiana CID long before Rust, and Marty’s eldest daughter Audrey appears to have been being groomed for the cult based on her drawings and play-acting, which reflect elements of the ritual rapes. It isn’t until Rust investigates the Tuttles at their HQ that the focus changes direction. (As a sidenote, “Audrey” is the name of another sexually-precocious character in Twin Peaks, who almost becomes the victim of a serial killer.)

Rejoice. Death is not the end. Rejoice, Carcosa.

Today marks the end of Meanwhile, the 25-year period that, according to Twin Peaks lore, Special Agent Dale Cooper has waited in the Black Lodge for Laura Palmer to return and end his torment.

(Spoilers.)

I have a special relationship with Twin Peaks. 25 years ago, my parents had just moved to a split-level house in a small town on unincorporated county land in Western Washington, not far from where the series was filmed. The countertops were orange, the linoleum was yellow, and the carpet looked like someone had skinned the Snuffalupagus to make it. Much like the Double R Diner, there was faux wood panelling everywhere. Being as I was five or six, I wasn’t watching the show. Instead, I watched news of the Green River Killer, who remained active as a serial murderer of women until I graduated high school. I also had the soundtrack by Angelo Badalamenti, because someone had given one of my parents a cassette. I have strong memories of walking home from middle school in the rain, tricking the thermostat into coming on with a sack of frozen peas, stripping my wet jeans off and waiting for my mom to come home from work as I listened to this tape with my cold feet clinging to the vent under my desk. I remember keenly the first time I heard that big key change in “Into the Night” — how scary that sharp, sudden sound was. And I remember thinking that those moody, creepy, jazzy tones were exactly what the green and grey world outside my window sounded like. And that, eventually, this was also how adulthood would sound. Slow. Wet. Dark. Isn’t this music just too dreamy?

I didn’t actually watch any of the series until later, when my university friends and I went through our inevitable David Lynch phase and watched a torrented edition of Fire Walk With Me on a 17″ monitor perched atop an old Amazon delivery box. (That’s the most 21st-century sentence I’ve ever written, by the way. That one, right there.) It gave me that usual David Lynch frisson: something terrifying was always hiding just off the edge of the frame, waiting to grab you. Especially if you were a girl.

As a little girl, I was fascinated by very dark stories about women in trouble. I didn’t go outside. I stayed in, and watched Rear Window, and Vertigo, and occasionally North by Northwest. (When I was little, I knew I wasn’t pretty simply because I don’t look like the type of woman Alfred Hitchcock would trap in a predatory contract. Later, I learned all the other reasons.) I read a lot of Stephen King. Once this other girl got me in trouble for it and got my copy of The Shining taken away by the playground monitor. Then I started watching The X-Files, and later Millennium. They were made in Vancouver, about four hours away. The climate was still the same, and so was the light, which meant all those shows about dead kids in the woods looked like they’d been shot in the greenbelt at the end of my cul-de-sac. I read a lot of Sebastien Japrisot: The Lady in the Car with Glasses and A Gun; A Trap for Cinderella. One weekend at my uncle’s old double-wide on Puget Sound, I read The Silence of the Lambs. Mom had never allowed me to see the film, but I was three-quarters of the way through the novel before she noticed, and by then Miggs had already flung cum on Clarice’s hair.

When I finally did watch the film, it was a revelation. Here was this perfect film, basically, complete unto itself in the way that Casablanca is, about a woman who succeeds in her transformation from student to master in the way her enemy — a man who kills women so he can become one — fails to do. The film makes sure you notice this, by including a shot of a hanging ornament with a butterfly on it after Clarice succeeds in her quest — Buffalo Bill might have kept all those Death’s Head moths, and loved them, but Clarice is the one who actually emerges from her chrysalis. The Silence of the Lambs is the perfect psycho-horror kung-fu movie: everything is there, from the training montage to the teacher who speaks in riddles to the faithful friend. It’s what would happen if you made Star Wars: A New Hope about a young woman raised not in the desolation of Tattoine, but the deprivation of West Virginia. I watched it as obsessively as I had once watched the Star Wars movies, and the Hitchcock ones. AMC ran it a lot.

In 2012, I got my wallet and passport stolen in San Francisco. It included my permanent residency card. Without that card, I couldn’t come home to Canada. So I took a 12-hour Greyhound trip to Los Angeles, where my roommate from university lives. (“You took The Dog?” another traveller asked me, when I told this story. Yes. I took The Dog. I took the dog with a couple of Australian girls and a guy kicking my chair and blaring Nordic speed metal. On my period. In heels. Bring your worst, assholes.) When we got to her amazing place in Larchmont Village and the first thing I asked was, “Do you have a copy of The Silence of the Lambs? Because I want to watch it.” She didn’t, she said. “But I have Dragon Tattoo. The Fincher one. Do you want to watch that?”

I did. And then I wanted to watch it again, and again, and again. What people don’t know about TGWTDT is that it was originally titled Men Who Hate Women. It’s a story about misogyny. It’s a story in which misogynists are explicitly evil. They’re not misogynists because they’re evil. They’re evil because they’re misogynists.

When I got home to Canada, I started watching Twin Peaks. For the first time, I really started digging into it. I told myself that it was because on some level, I was homesick.  I wanted to look at a place that looked like home. (And it does, with that fog and those trees and every road slick with rain like loose spools of film.) But then I watched The Killing. And then Top of the Lake. And then The Fall. And then, eventually, True Detective. All stories about serial murderers. All stories about women in trouble. And as I watched, Company Town began taking shape in my mind.

Much has been written about how True Detective the person most likely to rape you as a kid isn’t a stranger, it’s your dad.

Twin Peaks was the first show on American television to say this, explicitly. It made a lot of missteps, and it was awkward and zany and campy and soapy, but damn if it didn’t say something pretty basic about the long shadows cast by the upstanding men of small American towns.

So, if you’re a woman and you’re wondering about your allegiance to shows like True Detective, don’t. It may not be perfect. But it’s a representation of how the enemy thinks. And it’s the closest to a real heroine’s journey you might get. Until more stories are told.

Which reminds me. I have fiction to write.

For each book I write, there’s a separate tag in my Favourites file. (I’m old-fashioned, and don’t carry a mobile Favourites with me. Doing so reminds me of my time in academia, when every scrap of information had to be saved. It also gives me hives.) Here are a few from the Company Town tag:

Apocalypse, New Jersey: A dispatch from America’s most desperate town
10 Failed Utopian Cities That Influenced the Future
The Dark Side of the “Smart City”
Arcfinity: We’re reading up on transhumanism.
Amor Mundi: The Superlative Summary
Intelligence and analysis delivers big results for law enforcement

Company Town, you’ll recall, is the story of an escort’s escort named Hwa who starts working for vertically-integrated energy concern when they buy the city she lives in, which happens to be a series of autonomous towers floating around an oil rig in the North Atlantic. Protecting the heir to the firm means going back to finish high school, fighting off some post-Singular asshole who thinks it’s the Terminator, and catching a serial killer. You know. The usual senior year bullshit.

 

I’m late posting this, but I’m honoured to be a guest of the 2014 Toronto SpecFic Colloqium. The theme this year is “Unnatural Histories,” and I’ll be getting a lot more personal than I usually do. More to come.

Yes! For For a whopping $1.79, according to my Amazon. (American browsers might see $1.99.) If you have not read vN already (and I know there are a lot of you), this would be the perfect time to pick it up and give it a try. Or if you have a grandmother who you particularly loathe, sending her a copy might be a subtle way to start that special “get the fuck out of my life, you hateful old bitch,” conversation. Or you could send it to your ex-boyfriend with a note that reads, “This is why I never read all that Asimov you lent me.” Or you could send it to your friends who say they don’t read SF by women writers, along with a baby blanket and a pacifier so they can at least suck on something instead of just sucking in general. What I’m saying is, a book always makes a good “Thank you” or “I love you” gift. But sometimes, a book can also sometimes make a good “Fuck you,” gift. And that’s the kind of book vN is.

Photo: Adam Christopher

Last year, I was nominated for a Campbell Award, for my debut novel vN. Then I declined the nomination, because I realized I wasn’t truly eligible for the award that year. Why? Because I’d already made a sale to Nature magazine. SFWA treats Nature as a Campbell-qualifying market, which means my “Campbell clock” (which I imagine looking like the glowing crystal in Logan’s Run) has been running since 2009.

I spoke about this at length with the organizers of LoneStarCon 3, the 2013 WorldCon in San Antonio. Back when they contacted me about my nomination, I was naturally very happy about it. I cuddled up to David and told him I was so happy he was the one sharing this moment with me. For a moment, I imagined myself wearing that tiara. I imagined how happy my publishers would be with me, and having the opportunity to return their investment in me. I imagined more people reading my book and wondered if they would enjoy it. Then the doubts started creeping in. And I started to feel sick. Was I really eligible? Had they checked? That night, I didn’t sleep at all. I kept thinking about my friends Helen Marshall and Tim Maughan, who I had included on my Hugo ballot. Could I really face them, if I accepted this nomination? No. I couldn’t.

You see, I had written up my own eligibility at Writertopia, having been told by reviewers and friends that vN should be eligible. (After all, vN was nominated for both a Locus and a Kitschie in the debut category.) I had written up my own profile on the logic that no one was going to do it for me, something Amal El-Mohtar discusses here:

You cannot with one breath say that you wish more women were recognized for their work, and then say in the next that you think less of people who make others aware of their work. You cannot trust that somehow, magically, the systems that suppress the voices of women, people of colour, disabled people, queer people, trans people, will of their own accord stop doing that when award season rolls around in order to suddenly make you aware of their work. You MUST recognize the fact that the only way to counter silence is to encourage speech and make room for it to be heard.

The presence of women on science fiction shortlists is pretty marginal, in part because it’s tough to get a genre novel written by a woman reviewed. And that stems in part from publishing statistics themselves (which sometimes involve editors who think it’s a woman’s own fault for being intimidated, and not an editor’s responsibility to scout or encourage talent).

So it was with that in mind that I wrote up my own eligibility, honestly thinking I was eligible and not expecting anyone else to mention my work. I have a lovely agent who represents my manuscripts, and my publisher employs a full-time publicist who works tirelessly on our behalf, but awards promotion is another beast (unless you work for, say, the Weinsteins). I ran headlong into this process, having only the vaguest notion of what the Campbells were about, and assuming that a first novel counted.

It doesn’t. Not necessarily.

You see, as I discovered after speaking with Todd Dashoff of LoneStarCon 3, I learned that “For Campbell Award purposes, a professional publication is one for which more than a nominal amount was paid, any publication that had an average press run of at least 10,000 copies, or any other that the Award sponsors may delegate.” Todd got this from Trevor Quachri, who was administering the award. What that boils down to is that first-time publications need not hit a trifecta of criteria in order to start the Campbell clock, they need only meet one criterion. Realizing this, I backed out of my nomination. Here is what I said:

I’ve looked over the eligibility requirements a second time, and it looks like my mistake was in thinking that my previous publications had to hit *all three* criteria (nominal amount, circulation, delegated), rather than just a single criterion. This was an honest but stupid mistake, and one that caused a lot of extra trouble for everyone, and I’m sincerely sorry for it. Having looked over it, I don’t know how I could accept the nomination, because I was never eligible. It would be wrong to accept the nomination under those circumstances. Worse, I think doing so would be stealing attention from other writers who have a legitimate shot at the award. And it would impugn the honour of the award to do so — put simply, it would take a two-minute Google search for any Hugo voter to find that I was ineligible, and that wouldn’t do anything for the credibility of the award or its winners. I have an opportunity to gracefully and graciously back out now, and I feel that I should.

Dashoff and other organizers then told me that they had reviewed my entire fiction CV, and agreed I was not eligible. I then told Mr. Dashoff that I thought the eligibility requirements were a bit confusing, especially for beginning writers, and he told me this:

The Campbell is not a Hugo, and is administered by Dell Publications under a different set of eligibility rules than are currently used by WSFS. I discussed the situation at the beginning of the year with the current administrator, Trevor Quachri, and he confirmed his desire to stick with the current (different) rules. Add to that the fact those rules involve a payment of only $50 to technically start the clock running, while at the same time including a long list of exceptions, and you have the formula for problems, as occurred this time. WSFS can request changes to the process, but if Dell declines to change, we are stuck having to play by someone else’s rules.

So, what does this mean?

Writertopia, the site from whence many Hugo voters derive their knowledge of Campbell Award eligibility, doesn’t vet their candidates. At all. That’s apparently your job, as a writer or as a reader. If a writer has been dishonest with them, or has made a mistake, they have no way of knowing. I mean, look at me. I almost got away with it, and I wasn’t even trying to get away with anything. Before you nominate someone, Google them. Do your homework. Nobody else is going to do it for you.
The “nominal amount” of payment that starts your Campbell clock can be as low as $50. That’s what professional rates are, according to the administrators of the award. Congratulations, professionals — you can celebrate your nomination with a 2-for-20 deal at Applebees!
To my knowledge, I’m still not eligible for the award. That means that posts like this one recommending me for the award, while delightful and flattering, are inaccurate.
If you voted for me in the last cycle, I stole your vote. I did so unwittingly, but it’s still a type of disenfranchisement, and for that I apologize. I was wrong. I fucked up. I put self-promotion ahead of basic research, and juked the stats for everybody. That was stupid. While it’s clear I never would have won the award (see the picture above), I want to thank everybody who supported me, but I also need to apologize for having misled them. I’m sorry.

I’ve debated writing about this for a long time. I didn’t want it to come off as sour grapes, because by and large I’m happy with my career. I mean, I’d love to win an award, and I’d love bigger sales, and I’d love some kind of media adaptation, but that just makes me a writer. It doesn’t make me an unhappy writer. I’m choosing to write about it now because awards season has started again, and Writertopia still has my profile up, so well-meaning folks are already sending me anthology and interview requests, as well as recommending me for the award. I wanted a Google-friendly post that would disabuse them of that notion. And I also wanted to show you how the Campbell sausage gets made. Further, I want to stress that Todd Dashoff and the other LoneStarCon organizers were flawlessly kind and polite during this process. What happened here was sad — for me, at least, in that it felt like handing back the One Ring — but it’s not nearly so appalling as what happened to Mary Robinette Kowal and her story, “Lady Astronaut of Mars.”

And that’s my story about declining a nomination for the Campbell Award. If you’re curious about what I’m actually eligible for this year, I suggest you read my second novel, iD: The Second Machine Dynasty, or my story “Social Services” in the Aura of Familiarity anthology, or my story “Permacultures”, in the Cautions, Dreams, & Curiosities anthology of the Tomorrow Project. If you’re not already exhausted by my writing after such a long post, I hope that you enjoy them.