bookgazing

Life away from books, TV and the internet has been busy – lots of good personal life stuff and it looks set to be like that for a while. I don’t mind because work is currently dullsville and I find myself wanting to be up and doing stuff quite a bit when I’m away from it. Also, if I have things on at the weekend I feel justified taking Fridays off to “prepare” (which actually turns out to mean “go to lunch with someone” and then ram things into an overnight bag). That’s one less work day to get through (although most of my leave has been allocated by now and all good things must come to an end).

What have I been doing? Well, recently I was a bridesmaid.I attended two hen dos for another bride, one of which was a last minute surprise. I got asked to read at that bride’s wedding (Jane Eyre – dream come true). I went to a “medieval” country fair, which wasn’t very medieval but was very cool – there was stunt guy from the Bond films involved in the jousting part, the birds of prey man had a range of entertaining stories about extremely dangerous eagles and a sheepdog herded the most adorable ducks.

I also visited some blogging friends and this weekend I’ll be seeing some more, as well as spending time with some bloggers I’ve never met before. I went to Shakespeare’s church in Stratford to see his grave, which is the one tourist attraction I think I had left in that town. And I went to the church by way of a lovely dinner and the most delicious whisky sour I have ever tasted. My one day a week swim continues well and next week I think I’ll try to put a second exercise day back in to get me through the start of the week. I do feel much better on a Friday for the exercise no matter how often I’ve stayed up just a little bit too late to be good for me. And there’s been some general hanging out shooting the work day down with friends.

“Yes, Jodie, all of this is faaascinating,” I hear you say (or is it my internal critic?). “Now please, crack on and tell us about books and TV and stuff.”

Well alright then.

TV

’Hannibal’

I started watching Hannibal despite making many, many comments about how I couldn’t and wouldn’t be able to handle it *faints*. I’ve seen two episodes - yes Amy I did watch Ep2 in the end, I just turned it over during the bit where they looked at the mushroom bodies and got all my knowledge from cleolinda’s recap instead. I find I am able to handle the program in the end because the horror isn’t, as I was saying to Amy, built out of lingering images that practically stroke the dead bodies and death hasn’t been dissected into titillating pieces by the camera shots. Instead the horror is supposed to be driven by there just being horrible deaths - the camera takes in the whole scene of death in one practical ‘it is what it is shot’- and through the repeated accidental cannibalism of those around Lecter. Even though it is horrifying whenever someone eats food Lecter has prepared I can take that horror without giving myself nightmares.

I already think I’ll want to write something about this program at the end because the colour palette fascinates me and Hugh Dancy is giving such a great performance as the fragile teacup/Will (he is so afraid of being evil and it’s lovely). I’m enjoying Mads' performance as Dr Lecter, but I think because it is so subtle and restrained its one of those performances that will need a few episodes to build before I’ll be really invested in it. I totally ship Will/Jack and I hope Laurence Fishburne is in every episode pushing Will into uncomfortable situations and shouting at people. Also Hettienne Park plays Beverly Katz and she is one of my favourite ladies on the show - I’m not even going to look at how many episodes she survives for, please let it be all of them.

Soon, according to the recaps, we start seeing a new cannibal groomed and there’s Gina Torres. She makes everything better.

’The Sarah Connor Chronicles’

I started watching ‘The Sarah Connor Chronicles’ and three episodes in I really like this program even though it’s not the kind of show I usually watch on TV (I like action films, but not usually action TV shows). It’s already hit femslash city and I hear there’s more to come - yay. Also there’s a boy with daddy issues and you don’t need me to tell you how much I like those.

I don’t want to say too much because I think it’s really easy to spoil this shows unfolding developments (whereas Hannibal you already know = cannibal) and I think I want to write about it. If I start blabbing in informal posts it usually puts me off doing the whole essay thing. Let me conclude by saying that I just want to look at Lena Headey’s face all the time. And once this is over I’m going to be looking for high school fic featuring Cameron.

’Nikita’

I’m also watching ‘Nikita’, which yes Amy you were right, all I could think for most of the first episode was that it was so like ‘Alias’ despite the fact that Nikita’s rebellion takes place in the open. Then the ending of the first episode happened and I was like *boom* not like ‘Alias’ at all – ladies bringing down the system together. Right now I think the training school set up is my favourite part. Am I the only one who wants Jaden and Alex to be best friends? And Melinda Clarke’s addition is creepy good. She has the best voice for playing subtley threatening characters and I would have her play all in every show about secret agencies undermining the government if I could. I like the fact that her role (as a literal groomer) means they’re pulling out the element of feminine presentation that goes into female spying – you’ve got to look right to gain access and female spies are almost never asked to enter situations where they have to wear baggy jeans and a big knit cap are they?

Things you should know already

I think you should all be watching ‘Parks and Recreation’ (I’m into S3 now), ‘Scott and Bailey’ (these two programs are what I look forward to all Wednesday), ‘The Mindy Project’ and ‘Nashville’. Prepare for a super long ‘Nashville’ essay once the series finishes here (I think we have seven episodes to go in the UK).

I am mostly invested in getting more people to watch ‘Scott and Bailey’ though. If you like police drama but you want more central female characters and you hate when police officers lose their control in interview rooms try this show. This series Nicola Walker (of ‘Spooks’ fame) is a new addition to the cast and she is acting out of her skin. Everyone needs more Nicola Walker in their lives.

Things I haven’t done.

I haven't caught up on ‘Dr Who’. I will, I will - promise. I’ve just been out doing other things while so many of the episodes were on and now it feels like there’s a huge pile of episodes to climb through to get to the end. I’ll probably start catching up next week after the finale shows.

Anything else?

Oh, yes! I started watching ‘Sanditon’ which is the new series from the makers of ‘The Lizzie Bennett Diaries’. I never did finish ‘LBD’ because reports of how the Lydia storyline worked out put me off, but maybe I will go back to it if I’m get excited by ‘Sanditon’. They’ve so far managed to set up the struggling town and old residents vs. new vibe quickly and wow do I love that kind of scenario. Looking forward to meeting all the new characters and this time I’ll be going in with no idea of how the plot unfolds this time as I haven’t read Austen’s unfinished novel which means surprises!

Books

’Where’d You Go Bernadette?’ – Maria Semple

I finished ‘Where’d You Go Bernadette?’ and it was so much fun. You might have to let yourself go a little bit to enjoy it, because the characters are kind of awful sometimes but they’re that kind of balanced awful where sometimes you really like them and then you find something you’re not so keen on. Anyway, it’s a really quick read with an addictive mystery about Bernadette’s past and the format (e-mails, letters, and reports) allows the author to bring in a whole host of perspectives and voices.

’We Have Always Lived in the Castle’ – Shirley Jackson

I’m currently chatting about this with litlove (always a pleasure). Who knew modern classics could be such addictive, horrific fun to read? I absolutely tore through it and I see it becoming a re-read favourite for Halloween. I'll have more words on this later probably.

‘One Nation Under Stress: The Problem with Stress as an Idea’ by Dana Becker

I’m reading non-fic, it’s a miracle. Right now I’m half way through and so far, so interesting. The background history to how society ended up talking about stress the way it does is informative and I’m learning quite a bit about the medical industry and stress. I just feel like the book could do with spending a more focused chunk of time explaining and justifying its central concept, instead of just slotting in concluding sentences and then going off to talk about another historical aspect. Maybe that dedicated examination is coming later? Hopefully it is, because my brain needs time to settle and process in order to absorb these ideas.

Otherwise reading

I’m a couple of chapters into ‘Orleans’ by Sherri L Smith and I can already see that when I finish I’m going to want to talk about this and ‘Beasts of the Southern Wilds’ – any takers? I think I’m going to start ‘Gold Boy, Emerald Girl’ by Yiyun Li soon. And I should probably pick up a library book.

The Library

I went to the library and I got:

‘Cold Fire’ – Kate Elliott
‘Quarter’ – Jean Rhys
‘The Heart of the Matter’ – Graham Greene
‘Smiley’s People’ – John Le Carre

Since I don’t have any ‘Star Trek: Into Darkness’ views to share yet (probably not seeing it for two more weeks) and ‘Gatsby’ is only just out here so I haven’t had a chance to see it yet that’s it from me about media for now. If you want to see me actually reviewing, check out my thoughts on ‘Cold Earth’ by Sarah Moss at lady business.

Today I want to talk about confidence and writing. Read: I am having a mild panic about something that probably seems quite simple to other people - please send words if able.

I have always been one of those people who is easily plunged into self-doubt about their writing, but lately that’s been changing. I found some good tools to help me cope and keep on writing. Chuck Wendig recently put out a piece of advice about dealing with writerly self-doubt that I find immensely useful – basically, barrel though because you are not best placed to assess how good your writing is while you’re in the middle of writing. I have a couple of really lovely writing support teams around me. And if everything gets too dire I can re-ignite my self-belief by sticking the ‘Little Hater’ series of videos on repeat. I think I am genuinely starting to move past that place where I automatically assume everything I write is awful. Let me tell you it feels pretty good.

And yet this good feeling brings up a new problem of confidence – what if now I’ve gone become too self-assured about my writing? Now that I have finally managed to internalise some shred of conviction (so much so that I actually wrote a few words of original fiction this week – a big, little step for me) how do I distinguish between the effect of my new found confidence, necessarily keeping me from a spin out of despair, and actual good writing? As a result of feeling like I can do the writing, might I be ignoring the awful; might I just not be able to tell if my work is terrible now because I have so many good resources around keeping me from crashing into a lake of immobilising self-pity?

A common piece of advice for writers is that if something feels good you should probably destroy it (advice stemming from Faulkner’s ‘kill your darlings’ quote and Samuel Johnson's idea that ‘where ever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.'). Does this mean that to really get the best from themselves writers have to ignore their hatred for their work, but never actively love it? Should the baseline feeling about your own work be ‘It’s probably not too awful’? What if you like some of the things you write – are you doomed to be unknowingly terrible? And how do people know which assessments are right and which are just unhelpful demons? How do you know whether to have confidence in your opinion of your work or not when you’re generally sure you’re wrong about everything – is there some trick to this like the ‘fake it’ advice given to people who don’t like public speaking? Opinions would be welcome!

And so we come to the end. As always there are huge spoilers for the entire series and probably all previous series in this post. Iris, Amy - here we go.

( Episode Twenty one: ‘Before Sunset’ )

( Episode Twenty two: ‘The Departed’ )

( That spin off )

And I’m done. Amy, Iris I hope you’ve enjoyed this re-cap phase. I can’t promise to do it for series four, because turns out re-caps take a lot of time – I am even more in awe of anyone who does regular, proper re-caps. I will promise to at least think about it if you cheer loudly enough for it though.

Recently, a smart friend made me face up to the fact that sometimes practicality limits our capacity to do good. We’re all individual people, we all get tired and it’s better to concentrate on the few things we can do. It’s a hard thing for me to accept even though I know my friend is right; we all want to be good people and the bar for ‘good’ is set pretty high these days. We’re all scared that no one cares about the things we want in our lives. We don’t want to be the cause of our own downfall. It’s difficult to let go in order to focus and achieve.

Her e-mail came just after I read an essay, which among other things discussed people’s inability to imagine life differently. I stewed about it a little bit to be honest, that essay. I shouldn’t have, my reaction was defensive, but I feel like I’ve reached my limit when it comes to hearing that individual people don’t [insert X] enough. I thought about my recent fascination with authors who believe that individual responsibility is limited in a society built out of fixed and uncaring structures. And I wondered if I was attracted to that idea because it was real, or because it gave me an out. I couldn’t tell. I felt insecure about my empathy, about my ability to care; whether I was caring enough and about the right things. I watched this gif run over and over again.

I moved on, sort of. I read a post about the breakdown of imaginative thinking within a community. I thought about the riots, about how they supposedly showed just how little community was left and how they really did show that some people are terrible and broken. I couldn’t work out whether we had learned anything from that outburst of violence, or whether we could learn how to rebuild a structure from individual real life acts of violence. Taking history at college I was taught you can’t make lessons out of past lives, that the solution to everything is not a tidy 'Never again!' narrative and that solutions rarely come when we impose our own political reading on a past situation instead of embracing everything about that situation. As an adult I find I can’t escape; somewhere today someone will be trying to make a neat lesson out of life. The trending idea that villains deserve to be struck down by debilitating diseases, as if these diseases are some kind of just punishment, enrages me. Criticism of the government that only seeks to replace one party with another makes me want to cut myself off. I can’t believe that things are as simple as people, people I think have good ideas and people I never want to share a room with alike, want to make out. I thought about the two different narratives around the riots - how difficult it is to find people who can acknowledge both ideas, who can stare straight at the wrong in kicking a homeless person and acknowledge that while still standing strong against the idea that our society is broken. I worry that my failure to take in everything always shows a similar lack of willingness to engage with intellectual complexity.

I worry about a lot of things to do with empathy and caring. I worry that focusing on the communities I’m building instead of reaching out to strangers is not the way to approach things if I want to be part of change. I worry that my decision to keep away from certain situations has become a negative form of protectionism, instead of a positive one. I worry that when I try to go deeper with the people I want to form a community with I mess it up. I am concerned and I find myself having the same internal conversations over and over without ever sparking any answers. I watch the Hank Green gif again.

You know what I realised through watching all those circling worries come round and round though? Empathy is hard. It’s a hard thing, but we’re encouraged to believe it is simple. Being a good person is easy right? Just don’t be awful. And do some good things along the way if you have the resources. What I think we fail to take into account, and why we so often end up in shame cycles about our own inability to react with empathy, is that while empathy and goodness are simple qualities the practise of them is complex. No one exists in a vacuum and people are tired all the time because they are putting so much emotional effort into so many places. At the same time, no one is putting their empathy into a welcoming vacuum (if you've ever worked a customer service job you know people don't have to be nice just because you're being helpful) and while it’s important to put love and understanding in without expectation it can also be draining. In the end, I think we’re told that empathy is easy because it keeps us miserable. When governments and influential figures ignore the way the world works they can make people feel awful and in turn keep them inactive and less effective just by “advocating for a better society”.

I see a similar thing going on with calls for greater community. We’re told that supporting our communities is easy if a bit more labour intensive than empathetic support. Just do good things. Bolster these sales, write this work, support this project, link to this, and follow up. I get that these are mostly not big tasks individually, but when people are often in multiple communities all these tasks quickly add up. Regular exhaustion, I’m beginning to realise, is really the bottom threshold of tired and incapable. There are whole layers of weary above exhaustion and I think people mostly end up wedged in these layers because they spread themselves over so many things. When we can’t support everything we crash and burn in a shame spiral which does not exactly help us gather the necessary energy to put useful work into other important projects in need of support.

I hear that no one cares. I hear that a lot. I feel like those words, that condemnation of our society, are a way of making us all so ashamed we hang our heads and in the process miss that a whole chunk of society is laughing itself silly at our genuine concern. Sometimes I buy into the idea that no one cares and that cages need to be rattled so I start replicating that oppressive kind of attitude; sometimes out loud sometimes just internally where everything gets stuck so much deeper. Frankly I do this because I’m afraid. I’m afraid that if I put down the enormous load I sometimes feel I’ve taken on, just for a moment, just to rest, that no one outside my small and scattered communities will be around to pick it up. I’ve thought I should lean in more and I recently told people there was work to do. While I don’t exactly regret that (dudes I think some of you have the capacity to pick up the slack) I do wish I didn’t feel like I’d managed to make people who are supportive parts of my community feel worried, like they needed to load more onto themselves, while trying to pull new people in to support something important to me.

This is why we need stories I think. At least, we need the kind of stories that are willing to really let us inside someone else’s head and to give us everything we can handle. There’s so much, so, so much, which desperately needs caring about that we just can’t take all that need in without collapsing. Stories can be tools to let us understand why it’s important to care for a few hours, a short amount of time that we can handle, and then put the white hot immediacy of the world’s need somewhere we can process it effectively. That need is not so overwhelming if you break it down into chunks and digest it. Stories block out your constantly screaming fear that OMG everything is wrong and nothing’s changing, without requiring you to cut yourself off from feeling, empathy and the world. As long as they’re complex, stories can be a wonderful help.

In the end, I don’t think the problems of our world come about because people don’t participate or because we don’t care. They come about because there is so much to do and so little help available. It’s not that we can’t dream, or that we are broken, or that we can’t reach out. It’s that we are all reaching our limits in a world that is very hard to navigate. I used to worry that I was fundamentally hollow inside because I couldn’t support everybody and or care about everything that was of the moment. Sometimes I poke at that idea, but mostly I don’t feel that way anymore. Empathy, community, just living - these are difficult tasks. Let’s not forget it and let’s cut ourselves some slack. Fuck knows no one else is going to.

What I’m reading now:

After this weekend (when I made two train journeys without picking up the book in my bag) I decided to chuck out my on-going read and start again. I realised I was feeling a need to be free to do what I want… which has had some unfortunate financial consequences but we will come to those later.

‘Maul’ by Tricia Sullivan, which I’ve wanted to get to for ages, but have been putting off because I thought it might be a bit too brutal. It which got pushed up the list by my desperation over the women in SF numbers for the UK and it is brutal, probably even more so that Kameron Hurley’s ‘God’s War’.

‘Kidnapped’ by Robert Louis Stevenson, but it’s an old school adventure story which means it needs me to spend more concentrated time on it than contemporary adventure stories do. And I just haven’t had time to give it. It’s a library book so I might have to renew.

I’m also thinking about starting a piece of non-fiction (‘Quiet’, ‘What’s Wrong with Publishing’, ‘Why Love Hurts’, the chapter Nymeth sent me from ‘Bad Pharma’) which, wow, it has been a while since I wanted to do that. I’m kind of in a place where I want to open all the books and be reading everything at the same time which is bad for progress but sometimes just feels so rightly decadent.

Edited to say: And I also read a graphic novel, 'Skim' in one day. I stayed up until midnight like you're s'posed to when you love a book but often can't convince yourself to do when you have work the next day.

The library:

I said on Tumblr that I’d picked up four books at the library recently. I’ve only read one so far, but hey why let that stop me from going back and picking up um five more? I came back with ‘The Abominables’, ‘Where’d You Go Bernadette?’ (Women’s Prize finalist), ‘Baba Yaga Laid an Egg’, ‘Earth Girl’ and ‘The Great Gatsby’ (so I can refresh my memory before the film).

From the previous haul - I’m working on ‘Kidnapped’, ‘Silver’ I think is unfortunately going back unfinished (wow Motion likes explaining things that he has already made perfectly clear through symbolism), I read ‘Cold Earth’ and have started a review about it. The fourth book turned out to be a sequel and I like to start at the very beginning (it’s a very good place to start) so back it goes.

Things I did:

I’m afraid I went on a bit of a spending bender. I bought a dress (which I did need for a hen do), a necklace… then quite a lot of DVDs… and then some books. I’d like to share what I bought but to be honest I’m a bit embarrassed about my lack of restraint and my apparent inability to turn ‘earns more’ into ‘saves more’. There really should be a link there now that my fiancés are stable.

Otherwise, well I was a bridesmaid a month ago. The wedding went off very well and the couple had a lovely honeymoon. I attended a wedding where no one tried to set me up with their spare friend (which was so relaxing) and failed out of being a grown up around a dude I had a thing with a long time ago. I was very much a grown up in many other ways as bridesmaid (working hard to make sure my social problems did not make a negative impact on the hen do or wedding and socialising with strangers) so I feel proud of myself.

I visited Cambridge to see some blogging people, which is where the dress was bought. Also we saw David Almond speak which was really inspiring. I didn’t expect it to be quite so oddly moving.

Going back to swimming once a week. I wish our pool weren’t so crowded with people who bimble and talk while they swim for the first half hour of the session I can go to, but trying to remember that public spaces are for everyone.

Things I’ve been watching:

Finally finished ‘TVD’ S3. ‘The Village’, which is growing on me. ‘Scott and Bailey’ S3. I started watching ‘Broadchurch’ but then it started clashing with speedway meeting nights so now I’m just catching the last ten minutes and waiting to see who the murder is. ‘Parks and Recreation’ of course. And ‘The Mindy project’, which goes up and down in funny. My next DVD series will be ‘Borgen’ S2.

Things I’ve been thinking about:

Exhaustion – I pushed words out about that, but I’m still thinking about it.

Why we all get prickly when people say they don’t have time to read, despite the fact that we all know just how busy and clamouring life can be (I think, once we get past feeling sneered at for our “silly hobby” it’s got a lot to do with feeling that our interest is in peril because of its kind of a minority interest, maybe?)

The idea that not all writing is commercial and that this is my biggest trouble with how publishing must work right now.

But have I been writing?

I’ve been leaving reviews and co-reviews over at LB. At the very end of last year I talked a little about ‘The Silver Linings Playbook’.

This year I’ve reviewed ‘The Killing Moon’, posted a lot of words about ‘Les Miserable’. I’ve co-reviewed ‘The Legend of Korra’, the follow up project from the team that made ‘Avatar’ and ‘The Thief’.

I have reviews of ‘Looper’ and ‘Diving Belles’ coming up over there this month. I’m kind of thinking about writing words about ‘Beast of the Southern Wilds’ but I’m not totally sure about that yet.

And you’ve all seen me putting up words about ‘TVD’. I really liked doing posts about all the episodes, but if I hadn’t had a specific audience I knew was going to read those posts I’m not sure I’d have ever actually done it so thanks for providing motivation Amy and Iris. Just the sheer volume of episodes on a US TV series is daunting to write about consistently.

Will I be reviewing here again soon? In the end, I think so. I just need to find the time and the subject I want to put here and not there.
And I am still writing paperlegends big bang stuff – promise paperlegends support group.

So yes that’s me – I am still here.

A while ago I saw someone talking about their idea that even though they believed women are kept down professionally by a lot of societal pressures/expectations/double standards/sexism they also thought women could be kind of self-defeating. Now it was an off hand remark in the middle of some really great commentary and this is an off hand post, so I'm not going to claim to know what they meant by self-defeating, but it's a phrase I've seen used to mean anything from 'unassertive' to 'don't participate'.

Lately I've just been feeling (not to be over drammatic but to try and find a word which really gets to truth) exhausted. Sometimes physically, but actually I'm doing way better in that respect lately, more often mentally and more often than that just emotionally. I'm happy, this has been a way better year than some years gone, but still often at the end of the day I'm just like 'Yay free time' and then suddenly 'Ugh, brain needs down time'. I don't have kids, I work just one job that runs regular hours and most of the things I want to do outside work run on my own schedule or a schedule I'm able to have input into. I still find it really hard to get a lot of the things I want to get done outside of work done, because of a combination of time pressures and just flat out inability to go on (I want regular sleep and I don't want to feel like a failure because I want that).

Anyway today I suddenly thought - hey this is probably more common than we all realise because no one really ever talks about how exhausting just getting by at the things you love is when you have a regular life running alongside it. And I thought it would be nice to make a post that just let us acknowledge how difficult the idea of 'getting stuck in' and 'doing the work' really can be, not just because of other pressures but because of life, this wonderful and necessary side of life that we all have to engage in. Um, yeah I wanted to make a space for us all to say 'Hey, I'm really not self-defeating' or 'I work hard, I just feel like I'd have to work too hard to get everything done and sometimes I stop' or anything else you want to say about the pressures of balancing what pays the bills with the work we all want to do outside of that. Or how much we love the work we're not even doing right now. A venting space maybe.

PS. I wrote this in like 5 minutes just to get it done so if it makes no sense and has terrible punctuation/typos just yes that's the reason.

Finally, I’ve written up my thoughts about the next disc of ‘‘TVD’’ S3. Sorry, Amy and Iris I know I’m taking ages to get to the end of the series.
( Episode Sixteen: ‘1912’ )

( Episode Seventeen: ‘Break on Through’ )

( Episode Eighteen: ‘The Murder of One’ )

( Episode Nineteen: ‘Heart of Darkness’ )

( Episode Twenty: ‘Do Not Go Gentle’ )

On my way to the final episodes!

Today Renay launches Coverage of Women in SF/F Blogs (2012) over at lady business:

'Project thesis: when looking at a sample of bloggers reviewing SF/F, a majority of men will skew toward reviewing more men. A majority of women will skew toward a more equal gender parity, or the opposite in which they review a majority of women. There will be a handful of outliers.'

This study follows on from last year's examination of the visibility of female SFF authors in blog reviews and the results speak so well for themselves that's what Renay is letting them do this year.

Well worth a read if you're interested in gender parity in general, if you're interested in books and blogging, if you were once again depressed by the VIDA statistics this year, if you're part of the SFF blogging community, or if you just enjoy data projects for their own sake (lookey - charts).

The study is also accompanied by lots of interesting supplemental material that you can peruse at your leisure. Lots of tools here for the long slog ahead.

It’s almost time for nomination stage of the Hugos to close for 2013. My ballot is in and I’m reasonably happy with how much of it I’ve managed to fill out. Next year, I will have read all the things before nominations close obviously (what?) but for now I’ve pulled together a not too shabby selection, with the help of many friendly recommendations. My final ballot is very similar to the draft ballot, so if you want any more information on a lot of my choices check out that original post, but make sure to investigate the additions too (especially ‘Diving Belles’ – I can’t recommend that short story collection vigorously enough). Here we go:

Best Novel

‘The Killing Moon’ – N K Jemisin
‘Blackout’ – Mira Grant
‘The Snow Child’– Eowyn Ivey
‘Railsea’ – China Mieville

Best Novella

‘Ship of Souls’ – Zetta Elliott

Best Novelette

'The Lady Astronaut of Mars' - Mary Robinette Kowal (included in ‘Rip-Off!’)

Best Short Story

'Payment Due' - Frances Hardinge
'Crow and Caper, Crow and Caper' - Margo Lanagan (both from ‘Under My Hat’)
'Countless Stones' - Lucy Wood
'Of Mothers and Little People' - Lucy Wood
'Notes from the House Spirits' – Lucy Wood (all three from ‘Diving Belles’ -why aren’t you reading this now?)

Best Graphic Story

‘Avatar: The Promise’ - Gene Leun Yang

Best Related Work

(Blog tour) A More Diverse Universe blog tour – Aarti at BookLust
(Tumblr) Women Fighters in Reasonable Armour
(Project) Striking a Pose: Women and Fantasy Covers – Jim C Hines
(Critical essay) 'Table for Two - Kendra and Jordan break down the Vampire Diaries' (published by Racialicious)
(Blog) Lab Lit

Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form)

‘The Hunger Games’
‘Mirror Mirror’:
‘Brave’
‘The Woman in Black’

Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form):

‘Room on the Broom’
Merlin (S5) – ‘The Diamond of the Day’ (Pt 1 & Pt 2)
Legend of Korra - 'Out of the Past'
Once Upon a Time (S1) – ‘Red Handed’

Best Professional Artist

Candace Ellis
Julie Dillon
Jonas de Ro
Paolo Riviera
Ana Juan

Best Fan Artist

RJ Edwards
Kathleen Jennings
Coran Stone
Justin Pierce

Best Semiprozine

Strange Horizons

Best Fanzine

Racialicious
The Booksmugglers
SF Mistressworks
Calico Reaction

Best Fan Writer

Occupation girl
Tansy R Roberts
Foz Meadows
Nic Clarke
Liz Bourke

Best Fancast

The Writer and the Critic
/report
Slate's Cultural Gabfest
SF Signal

The three categories where I didn’t know enough to nominate anything
The John W. Campbell Award
Best Editor (Long Form)
Best Editor (Short Form)

I'm loving seeing other people's finished ballots, so please link me to your choices if you're nominating.

More thoughts on series three of ‘The Vampire Diaries’, which are probably mostly of interest to Amy and Iris. As always spoilers behind the cut tags.

( Episode Eleven: ‘Our Town’ )

( Episode Twelve: ‘The Ties That Bind’ )

( Episode Thirteen: ‘Bringing Out the Dead’ )

( Episode Fourteen: ‘Dangerous Liaisons’ )

( Episode Fifteen: ‘All My Children’ )

Just two more discs to go.