This year’s World Fantasy Awards nomination period is now open.

The World Fantasy Awards will be presented in Washington, D.C. during the World Fantasy Convention (Nov. 6-9). Deadline for nominating is and ballots must be received by May 31, 2014.

All registered members of the 2012 World Fantasy Convention, the 2013 World Fantasy Convention, and the 2014 event in Washington, D.C. will be eligible to vote before the deadline. If you didn’t attend one of the previously mentioned World Fantasy conventions, and you don’t plan to attend this year, you can still nominate by purchasing a supporting membership.

Already registered? Go and nominate your favorite works! Voting information is available on the World Fantasy Convention 2013 website.

To assist you in finding material to nominate, I’ve assembled this post to list everything that I worked on in 2013.

• All of Lightspeed‘s original fiction from 2013 is available online (and also much of the 2013 original fiction is available as a podcast).
• All of Nightmare‘s original fiction from 2013 is available online (and also much of the 2013 original fiction is available as a podcast).
• Selected stories from Oz Reimagined are available online.
• Selected stories from The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination are available online.

If you are planning and eligible to vote for the World Fantasy Awards this year, if you email me proof of your World Fantasy membership (i.e., your name is listed on the World Fantasy website as an attending member, or the email confirmation or receipt you received when you purchased your membership, etc.) I would be happy to make all of my 2013 content available to you in digital format.

After the jump, you’ll find all of the 2013 eligible stories/authors that either appeared in Lightspeed or Nightmare, or in projects I’m otherwise affiliated with.

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This year’s Hugo Awards nomination period is now open. The 2013 Hugo Awards will be presented in London, England during LonCon 3, the 72nd World Science Fiction Convention (Aug. 14-18). Nominations close on March 31, 2013. Anyone who has a supporting or full membership of LonCon 3 as of January 31, 2014 and all members of Lone Star Con 3 (last year’s Worldcon) may nominate works. If you didn’t attend Lone Star Con 3, and you don’t plan to attend LonCon 3, you can still nominate by purchasing a supporting membership. Nominations may be submitted through the online ballot, available here. To assist you in finding material to nominate, I’ve assembled this post to list everything that I worked on in 2013.

• All of Lightspeed‘s original fiction from 2013 is available online (and also much of the 2013 original fiction is available as a podcast).
• All of Nightmare‘s original fiction from 2013 is available online (and also much of the 2013 original fiction is available as a podcast).
• Selected stories from Oz Reimagined are available online.
• Selected stories from The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination are available online.

If you are planning and eligible to vote for the Hugos this year, if you email me proof of your Worldcon membership (i.e., your name is listed on the Worldcon website as an attending member, or the email confirmation or receipt you received when you purchased your membership, etc.) I would be happy to make all of my 2013 content available to you in digital format. After the jump, you’ll find all of the 2013 eligible stories/authors that either appeared in Lightspeed or Nightmare, or in projects I’m otherwise affiliated with.   (more…)

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This year’s Nebula Awards nomination period is now open.

From November 15 to February 15, Active and Associate SFWA members may submit nominations for the Nebula Awards. Nominations may be submitted through the online ballot, available here. For more information, visit SFWA’s How to Vote page.

To assist you in finding material to nominate, I’ve assembled this post to list everything that I worked on in 2013.

• All of Lightspeed‘s original fiction from 2013 is available online (and also much of the 2013 original fiction is available as a podcast). If you are a SFWA member, you can also grab each of the stories in various formats from the SFWA Forums, or else download an ebook (epub/mobi/pdf/doc) compilation of all 2013’s original material.
• All of Nightmare‘s original fiction from 2013 is available online (and also much of the 2013 original fiction is available as a podcast). If you are a SFWA member, you can also grab each of the stories in various formats from the SFWA Forums, or else download an ebook (epub/mobi/pdf/doc) compilation of all 2013’s original material.
• Selected stories from Oz Reimagined are available online. If you are a SFWA member, you can also grab each of the stories in various formats from the SFWA Forums, or else download a DOC of the whole anthology.
• Selected stories from The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination are available online. If you are a SFWA member, you can also download a PDF of the whole anthology.

After the jump, you’ll find all of the 2013 eligible stories/authors that either appeared in Lightspeed or Nightmare, or in projects I’m otherwise affiliated with.

(more…)

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LIGHTSPEED is currently looking for a few volunteer first readers (a/k/a “slush” readers). We’re using a Google Docs form to solicit our applicants, so if you’re interested, please submit your application there. The form is embeded below, but if you can’t see it for some reason, you should be able to access it via http://tinyurl.com/lightspeed-slush.

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Back in June, I sold an untitled anthology to Baen on the subject of “military fantasy.” And what is that, you might ask? Military SF, of course, is a long-time staple of science fiction, but fantasy fiction often has just as many battles and military engagements and yet we rarely hear the term “military fantasy.” So I proposed an anthology that would focus on those fantastical battles and the soldiers that fight them.

In any case, the contracts were signed, the contributors started writing their stories, and all was well. The problem was: I couldn’t think of a title for the damn thing. I found that particularly troubling as I pride myself on being able to come up with good titles, and, indeed, I frequently suggest alternate titles to authors who sell me stories. Thus this failing on my part to come up with an adequate title for this book has plagued me lo these many months. Well, I guess that’s not quite true. I’ve come up with plenty of adequate titles. I just haven’t come up with anything that feels perfect.

Which brings us to this blog post. I need your help, dear readers: What the heck should I call this thing? Rather than just ask and solicit suggestions, I thought I’d make a contest out of it, so the person who makes the best suggestion would win a cool prize.

Before we get to the nitty-gritty, here’s a bit more info about the book. There are still a couple of stories forthcoming, but I’ve already accepted stories from the following authors: Myke Cole, Glen Cook, Simon R. Green, Tanya Huff, Yoon Ha Lee, Ari Marmell, T.C. McCarthy, Seanan McGuire, Elizabeth Moon, Linda Nagata, Weston Ochse, Carrie Vaughn, and Django Wexler. Otherwise, all you really need to know is that its focus is military fantasy. Think The Battle of Helm’s Deep from Lord of the Rings; The battles in Naomi Novik’s His Majesty’s Dragon; The Battle of the Blackwater from GRRM’s A Song of Ice and Fire. And naturally several of the anthology’s contributors have written military fantasy novels and other stories as well.

So let’s do this, people! Help me title this anthology.

Prizes for the Winner: (1) A copy of the anthology (hardcopy, when it comes out); (2) A one-year ebook subscription to Lightspeed Magazine; (3) An ebook of my anthology Seeds of Change; (4) Acknowledgement of your contribution in the book itself.

Disclaimer: If I don’t get any entries that I think are good enough to use as the title, I reserve the right to not title the book with the winning entry. However, I will definitely choose a winner, and whoever has the best entry will receive the prizes even if I end up not using their title on the book.

Rules: Just fill out the form below with your title suggestions, your name, and your email address. That’s it! I’ll decide which title I like best and I will declare that title the winner.

What I’m Looking For: The ideal title would be short and to the point, and say both “military” and “fantasy” equally. I’ve been thinking something that takes a well known military phrase or title and gives it a fantasy twist could work.

Best (?) Things We’ve Come Up With So Far: Blood & Magic; Tactical Magic; Military Magic. (FWIW, it’s totally fine for it to not have “magic” in the title!)

Deadline for Submissions: Jan. 31, 2014

Note: Contest Closed! Thanks everyone for submitting your suggestions!

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This is a post about what is quite possibly the geekiest thing I’ve ever done. And being I’m a professional geek, that’s really saying something.

It IS in fact about football, but trust me, it’s super geeky. I mean, I’ve always thought that there’s plenty geeky about football fans anyway–the obsessive tracking of stats, the unthinking devotion to your favorite franchise, even when it sucks, etc. Which, of course, leads us to Fantasy Football, which I’ve always said is actually way geekier than anything I do on a day-to-day basis. But I digress; this is NOT about Fantasy Football. Or rather, it’s not about the traditional definition of Fantasy Football.

So anyway, I’m a geek, but I grew up loving sports as well, especially NFL football, and one of my early video game obsessions was the Madden NFL football game series. One of my favorite things about Madden has long been the ability to build and create your own team from scratch—to basically build an expansion team. Not only build your own team, but then also develop the players too. In that respect it shares a lot in common with a roleplaying game; you don’t get XP per se, but your skills advance based on how well you do, etc.

So when I started playing it again recently, I created my own team. When you do that, you can just replace an existing team in the NFL with your team and take on their roster, or you can have it randomly create a team for you. I chose the “Cupcake” option, which basically gives you a team of all fictional players, who are all kind of shitty, but usually with a handful that have good development potential. (Essentially an expansion team type of roster.) So I did that, and since I had just been playing Fallout: New Vegas, and because I found a cool atomic-looking stock image amongst those you can choose for your team’s logo, I named my team the New Vegas Fallout.

And that was cool. I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to get my team colors just right, and I named the fan section of my home stadium (which the Raiders call “The Black Hole”) “The Wasteland.” And that amused me. I was sad that I couldn’t have a fallout symbol as my team logo, but I figured the atom-with-footballs was good enough.

As it happens, one of the randomly-generated players on my team was named Coulson, naturally I thought of him as Agent Coulson from the Marvel movies and Agents of Shield, and every time he made a play it made me happy. There was another player who almost had a geeky name, and that only enhanced the fun. And all of this seemed to make it more palatable for my long-suffering housemates who had been subjected to my playing of football video games.

I decided to go all in, and made myself a real fantasy football team–by which, of course, I mean a football team of fantasy characters. The game lets you edit player names, so I painstakingly went in and renamed each and every player on my team. (I say painstakingly because I was doing it on a PS3 without any kind of keyboard peripheral, so you can imagine how tedious that was.)

Some of the player names I tried to pair them up with a position that seemed to make sense.

• Jean-Luc Picard (QB) – Obviously! And of course he’s a team captain.
• Peter Spiderman (WR) – Duh! His hands are supersticky!
• The Flash (WR) – Duh! He’s fast!
• Frodo Baggins (HB) – It just seemed like “ringbearer” and running back kind of felt like they went hand in hand to me, plus…
• Samwise Gamgee (FB) – …that let me pair Sam and Frodo up as companions working toward the same goal. (Also I liked to imagine the opponent’s end zone as Mordor, so any time the running back runs in untouched, I would think “It seems one simply CAN walk into Mordor.”)
• I’m Batman (DT) – I’m not sure what position it makes the most sense for Batman to play, but I figured defense makes sense if you imagine them as the protectors and the offense as the villains who are attacking. And of course I could have named him THE Batman, but I liked “I’m,” because then I could imagine him, every time he sacks the QB or hits the RB for a loss, standing over them and growl-whispering in their helmets “I’m Batman.”
• The Nazgul (DE) – I like to think this was one of my more inspired renames. Good Defensive Ends are known for their ability to relentlessly pursue their opponents, and I felt like that kind of sums up the Nazgul perfectly.
• Rubius Hagrid (C) – He’s a giant and thus would make an excellent offensive lineman, I figure. Same goes for Hodor Hodor and Jabba the Hutt and The Kingpin.

(Out of necessity, I ended up with a lot of people on my team whose first name is “The.” A bunch of them are also just named “Mr.” as their first name. Because it’s important that their main geeky name is their LAST name so I see it when I’m playing, since players are IDed by their last name only.)

Others, they don’t make as much sense.

• Logan Wolverine (WR) – Um, because he CUTS THROUGH THE DEFENSE?
• Wesley Crusher (DT) – Um, because he CRUSHES THE QB?

Er…yeah. I mean, obviously there were only so many positions where there was some kind of logic behind the renaming. And geek that I am, I dutifully renamed the whole team (even the third string players who I was never likely to actually see on the field). You can see a photoset over on Flickr that shows the whole team. Lots of Game of Thrones, Star Trek, and comic book references to be had. Also lots of Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter references, though those were mostly to amuse my stepdaughter, who is crazy for Harry Potter, and my sister-in-law, who is nearly as big a nerd for LOTR as Stephen Colbert. You can also view a Google Docs spreadsheet with all the player names.

Everyone on the team was a fictional player, so I didn’t feel too bad about renaming them. Or rather everyone was fictional except for Chris Kluwe (P). Him, I cheated a bit to get him on my team, and so of course didn’t rename him. Why? BECAUSE HE’S CHRIS KLUWE THAT’S WHY.

So anyway, yeah. That’s the geekiest thing I’ve ever done. What’s YOUR geek secret?

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