Day: January 15, 2009

First, the view out my hotel window:

It doesn’t suck.

Second, yet another reminder to folks that the fantabulous Mary Robinette Kowal and I will be at Borderlands Books tomorrow at 7pm for an evening we’re calling “John & Mary Show You Their Shorts.” We’re reading mostly humorous short fiction we’ve written, although the way we’re planning to do it, it’ll be as much performance as reading — and, to reward the folks who actually do show up, we’re doing something very cool and original and special. How cool? How original? How special. So cool and original and special that I’m not going to tell you what it is here. You’re just going to have to show up to find out. But I guarantee you won’t be disappointed. We’re going to have fun, people. You know you want in on this.

Also: hey, could someone bring, like, a mike and a computer or something? We kind of want to have a record of this, and we both stupidly left our podcast-quality apparatus at home. Thanks.

Anyway: Tell me you’re going to be there. It won’t be the same without you, man.

The view from my chair:

You can tell it’s a swanky hotel because the plants aren’t plastic (yes, I just checked). I’ve actually stayed here before, although the last time was back in the early 90s, for a Disney movie press junket. That was the junket where I got to see the sets for The Nightmare Before Christmas and saw Danny Elfman sing “Jack’s Lament” live while a rough cut of the scene from the movie unspooled behind him. Danny Elfman’s not here this time, drat the luck. I’ll have to find something else to do with my time, I suppose.

Anyway, I’m waiting for my room to be available. This is what I get for taking a morning flight. What are you up to?

This will be of interest only to hardcore SF geeks, but that’s me, so: The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) have revised the rules for their Nebula Awards, and I have to say I approve. First, it gets rid of the “rolling eligibility” rule (in which a Nebula could be won by a novel or story released two calendar years earlier, thus crushing any use the award has for relevance) with a far more sane calendar year system, and it also adds other new innovations to streamline the process and basically make nominating and voting easier and smarter, thus encouraging SFWA members to actually nominate.

This is all welcome news, since for the past several years the Nebula has been marinating in irrelevance; a shame both for the award, and for the authors who have won it and who had hoped to see some benefit from it in their careers. It’s going to take more than rule changes to restore the Nebula to equal footing with the Hugo, to be clear — but the rules changes had to be made as a first step. That first step is taken; now on to the next steps.

Thursday is AMC SF movie column day, and this week I’m looking at science fiction TV series which — unlike Star Trek, above — tried to make the transition to film and did a nice fat faceplant instead. What did they do wrong? Well, I’ll tell you. Warning, Browncoats: Serenity is in there. Oh, don’t look at me like that. You know I like Serenity. Lots. It doesn’t mean it wasn’t a flop, though. But of course you can register your howls of outrage over on the AMC site. The comment thread is just waiting for you there.