GUTTED, CARVED, SLICED

I am pretty sure that I read the books and stories by the people I suspect can tell a good story. Watch what it means to be an award winning author.

(9) NEBULA DIVERSITY. K. Tempest Bradford reported on the Nebula Awards for NPR. 

…This weekend’s winners reflect many different types of diversity beyond gender. Half are women of color, half are self-identified queer women – which mirrors the overall diversity of the ballot. 24 out of the 34 works nominated for the award were written by women from multiple racial and cultural backgrounds and a spectrum of sexual orientations. Of the 10 works by men, five of them were written by people of color and queer authors.
“The Nebula ballot is everything a ballot should be in this community,” said Brooke Bolander, author of the nominated story “And You Shall Know Her by the Trail of Dead.” “It’s diverse, it’s wide-ranging, and it includes amazing stories by amazing authors.”
That’s an important point, given the ongoing conversation about diversity happening now in speculative fiction circles. The Hugos — the other major awards in the genre — are nominated by fans. Last year and again this year, Hugo nominations have been affected by the Sad and Rabid Puppies groups, who campaign against what they see as affirmative action-based nominating and voting in the Hugo and Nebula awards.
But “people want these stories,” says Alyssa Wong. She was the first Filipino author to be nominated for the Nebula award last year and is now the first to win it for her 2015 short story “Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers.” Though she says she’s seen some Puppy-style criticism of her success, most of the reaction has been positive. 

Readers “want to read stories from the points of view of people who have been historically been locked out of the genre,” Wong says. “‘Hungry Daughters’ is about a group of women who are all Asian-American and all from very different backgrounds, all of whom feel isolated in some way … But clearly this is not just Asian-American audiences who this is resonating with. I’m appreciative that people are reading more widely now. It means more opportunities — not just to be published, but to be seen.”

It will no doubt come as a shock that while we visit the bookstores week after week, we leave empty handed. I find it more than sad that I leave both the library and the bookstore empty handed.

Strokes his kindles and ebook readers and moves on, slowly. The bookstores were a foundation of my life growing up. I was awed when I left Hawaii and googled B&N to see if that one store at Ala Moana was unique. One bookstore on just one of those islands. There were no others.

I remember biking from second hand book store to second hand book store in Huntsville. There were 11 of them. If I'd been in Hawaii it would have included sailing from one island to the next to get a book.....

and, if I was anything like them, using the paddle I didn't need as a weapon to get a book at a bookshop.

Not anymore.