I know that many of you loved the Santa Muerte cover. But it was communicating the wrong thing. Alas. I love that tattoo. On another site I polled, everyone leaned towards the road and vanishing point. Then everyone I polled personally liked the initial concept for the one below. I liked the road, but the bullet holes won. Here is the final result.
I was informed today that Servant of a Dark God is on the Longlist for the David Gemmell Legend Award for Fantasy and the Morningstar Award for best fantasy debut. I believe this means the Rapture is close at hand, folks. Or maybe it just means Cthulhu has taken over the North Pole. In either event, Hunger, Sugar, Talen, Hogan, Nettle, Legs, River, the Mother (and the kick butt Hag’s Teeth) can win an award for general awesomeness. They can because voting is open to the public.
You may ask: Is this like getting the Nobel peace prize? No. You have to have actually done something like take out a group of speedy Somali pirates or write a fantasy novel. These awards are not given out as scratch away prizes at McDonalds (you can get them at Wendy’s). This is an award given to:
The nominees were submitted by editors working within a commercial genre fiction publisher (kind of like Hollywood week at American Idol). All the nominations are then put on the award’s Longlist. The public then votes for their favorite on the list. The poll opened December 26, 2009. Voting on the Longlist will close March 31, 2010. You’ll notice it is indeed a looong list. But you don’t have to have read all the novels. You just vote.
The top 5 novels with the most votes will be put on the award “Shortlist.” Then in April the public voting for the winner out of those five will begin, open to all. See, American Idol, except you can’t vote two gajillion times for the same girl/guy just because of the her/his drool inducing factor.
David Gemmell was a British writer of heroic fantasy. I’ve pasted two of his covers below. You can read more about him here.
Now that you’ve done your part to restore world order in the fantasy genre, if you’re interested in LDS authors/fiction, you can also nominate the Sugar, Talen, Hunger and the gang for The Whitney Award.
This is an award for novels by LDS authors. It works in the opposite way of the Legend award. In this one, the public nominates novels by LDS authors they like. Then a “panel of industry professionals, including authors, publishers, bookstore owners, distributors, critics, and others” vote on the nominations. Of course, because I’m one of those Carrier Monkeys of Evil Mormons (a future post, folks), Servant of a Dark God is eligible.
To nominate Servant of a Dark God go here: http://www.whitneyawards.com/nominations.php
Whew. Be happy. I’ll keep you updated to let you know if SERVANT makes the short list for either of these.
A true story.
There once was a spider who climbed into a lush, seven-foot fir tree somewhere in Oregon. This happened sometime in September or October. She wove a small, silken pad deep among the needles and laid hundreds of eggs upon it. Then she spun layer after layer of silk over them, sealing them in a warm, white chamber. Her life’s work.
Having fulfilled the measure of her creation, she went where all spiders go. But where is that? Are spiders elegant biological machines, or are they living souls? I don’t know. Perhaps at some future date we’ll be blessed to understand such things.
What we do know is this: as autumn cooled, the temperature dropped below fifty degrees, and her eggs slipped into dormancy. October passed into November. And sometime in the last days of November or early December, humans with chainsaws arrived for the final harvest.
The tree was cut, loaded onto a truck, bundled into a refrigerated trailer, and shipped hundreds of miles away to a Smith’s Marketplace in Logan, Utah. There is stood with a number of other trees in the area just outside the front doors in the snow and cold and fluorescent lights. How many days and nights it waited there, we don’t know. But one evening, a mother and father and their four girls arrived to find their Christmas tree.
They walked among the evergreens, feeling for soft needles, breathing in the deep, resinous smells. They found the tree. It was perfect. They paid for it, tied it to the top of their minivan, and drove home over the mountains to the south end of the lake. Then they set it up, the father complaining, as he always did, about the goofy screw-stabilizers, strung the lights, and hung ornaments from past Christmases. The little tree filled the room with warmth, scent, and memory.
On Christmas morning they came down to open presents. As the sun rose, the light through the front window illuminated the tree. And something was different.
The branches shimmered.
The girls peered closer to investigate.
And found thin silk filaments. Everywhere. And then, to their shock, they saw that the whole tree was alive, moving with hundreds of baby spiders. A small horde that had warmed over the days and hatched silently sometime in the deep night after Santa and Mrs. Claus had gone to bed. A small horde that had then gotten to work—tiny, mad elves weaving their own gossamer garlands through the branches.
When the girls realized what they were seeing, there were shrieks of horror. Then the father, not knowing what else to do, escorted the tree, its decorations, and mad elves outside into the cold. The father returned, closed the door, and the whole family stood there, looking at the tree out on the deck, a bit stunned.
All these years later, it’s one of our family’s warm and funny memories. But if you ponder it just a little longer, it’s also one that lingers.
Are spiders merely elegant machines? Or are they living souls? Do they have claim upon us? Should a swarm of locusts or an infestation of roaches be preserved?
I will leave such questions to you, Dear Reader.
In the meantime, I wish you the merriest of Christmases. Whatever you believe or don’t, may you receive a measure of divine light this season—and reflect it, to brighten the world, if even just a little, for creatures both great and small.
John
I’ll be presenting this Saturday at this conference that will be held at the Bountiful Art Center, 745 S. Main Street, Bountiful, UT 84010. I grew up in Bountiful, and so this is a special treat for me to go back.
COST: Free for League of Utah Writers Members. $25 for non-members. More info at http://www.luwriters.org/.
Raveler is now up on Audible! The other two books are getting excellent reviews so far for both the story and performance by Alex Wyndham. So happy to have these up in audio. Many readers have been asking for audio versions for years.
As of 8:00 a.m. this morning, in the Amazon store, Servant is:
Nook just has a Sci-Fi & Fantasy category. It’s #2 there.
Of all the books sold in either store, it’s #91 on Amazon and #23 on Nook.
We luvs BookBub, Precious.
I had an absolute BLAST with Larry and the audience at LTUE. I think the workshop went very well for the first time. Of course, I’m going to make some tweaks. Paul Genesse had some interesting feedback and I’ll have to see if I can’t do more with character. Two hours is such a short period of time.
The good news for those who couldn’t attend is that we have a recording and will be posting probably next week. Everyone should thank Stephen Nelson!
We ran out of handouts. I printed 80. Then Mark Holt generously had 30 more printed. We still didn’t have enough. For those of you who didn’t get one or who want an electronic copy, here it is.
