One of Those Days

I think I now have some inkling of what it must be like to have caused a traffic accident that caused serious injury to someone you are very fond of. Obviously you didn’t mean to do have a crash, and certainly you didn’t mean to injure someone, but it happened, and there’s no question that you were responsible. Now you have to live with what you have done, and there’s nothing that you can say or do that will come anywhere close to apologizing for what you have done. Fortunately in my case no physical injuries are involved, but things may be kind of quiet here for a while until such time as I trust myself to go near a keyboard again.

10 thoughts on “One of Those Days

  1. We’ll miss your wit while you do so — One does *hope* this is more fixable than it appears on first blush…

  2. Yes, I have, haven’t I.

    I really wasn’t expecting this. If John Scalzi is eligible for Best Fan Writer (and I wholeheartedly support his being there) then surely Cory Doctorow and Neil Gaiman should be on the list too, not to mention Jay Lake and Elizabeth Bear. Obviously I’m very honored, but there are way better people than me around.

  3. In the grand scheme of mountains, it’s a molehill. It will just take a few days for folks to simmer down enough to realize it’s a molehill. It has not harmed the process, and it has not made more work for the administrator. It’s just ruffled a few feathers.

  4. Well, I have to say I was one of the however-many-people-it-is who nominated you, I think it was well deserved by you, period, and if you could enjoy it half as much as Scalzi is enjoying his we’d all feel a lot better about things.

  5. I’ve always thought that one of Cheryl’s strengths — and one of the reasons she’s nominated — is that she “speaks” to multiple communities that intersect within the Worldcon community. The converse of that, which she’s pointed out now and then, is that she ends up being disliked by people in all of those sub-groups. Someone who sticks to only one specialty will only be disliked by people in that area, whereas that person will be unknown to everyone else.

    But having a target painted on yourself from all sides isn’t always the most comfortable position to be in. As a former sports official (soccer, baseball), I have some sympathy for this position. As someone who has been told almost simultaneously that (in fannish terms) he is both too liberal (for wanting to destroy the sacred traditions of Worldcon and turn it into some media SF festival) and too conservative (for defending a stodgy, books-only literary convention like Worldcon as having any relevance to modern SF fandom), I have lots of sympathy for this position.

    On the other hand, pretty much by definition, nobody can get a nomination for a popularly-voted award if they are universally disliked, so Cheryl must be doing something right!

  6. Mike:

    Scalzi is a professional writer. He has fans. It is one of the perks he gets for being a much better writer than I am. And one of the things that fans do is tell the object of their adoration how wonderful he is. It is a sort of gift economy. He gives them Whatever, they worship him, because they very much like what he gives them.

    I don’t have fans. When someone asked me for my autograph in Toronto I almost fainted with shock. Thankfully no one has been that silly since. My function in the world is not to be adored, it is, as Kevin points out, to be shot at from all sides. I like to think that the Hugo nominations are in some way payback for that.

  7. Many congratulations on the Hugo nomination! Notwithstanding your protests to the contrary, it is very much deserved.

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