DragonCon is an legendary sci-fi convention held every year in Atlanta. It is a 60,000 person party that takes over four city blocks for a weekend. And it isn’t a stuffy, literati snoot-fest. It is Nerd Mardi Gras. The whole city turns out for the costume parade. And at night every college student in the southeast crashes the place. It is young, vibrant, energetic, and frankly a little crazy. Nobody gives a crap if you are having fun wrong, just that you are having fun.
And this year they have started their own fan awards. http://awards.dragoncon.org/
These awards are open for anybody who loves fantasy and sci-fi to vote. There’s no membership fee. It doesn’t cost anything. They just want as many fans as possible to participate.
This weekend I was at LibertyCon, and I ran into one of the organizers of the Dragon Awards. He said that he was kind of surprised that he hadn’t seen me talk about them online much. I told him that was because of Sad Puppies, I’m a controversial figure, there are just too many bitter harpies and poo flingers from fandom’s inbred pustulent under-choad who automatically flip out about anything I do, so I didn’t want to rock the boat for them.
But his response? Screw that. This award is for ALL FANS. And you have fans. So GO BUG THEM! We want so many people voting in this thing that no little clique or faction can sway it. The more fans involved, the better.
(an attitude that demonstrates why DragonCon is awesome)
There is no *gasp that outsider author dared to talk to his enthusiastic fans rather than suck up to our cliques discreetly* nonsense. Come to the Dragon Award and fly your wrongfan flag proud.
So if you’ve not already, go click that link and nominate your favorite things. Let’s flood this sucker! Tell your friends. Share the link. Spread the word. This award isn’t for a small clique to take turns telling each other how brilliant they are. This award is for all of fandom to celebrate what they think is great.
Now me personally, I’m a little biased. 🙂 I voted for Son of the Black Sword for best fantasy.
(apparently so did a bunch of you for a different prestigious award, but that is tomorrow’s blog post!)
There are categories for military sci-fi and fantasy too, a category that sells piles of books, but traditionally doesn’t get much love from awards. There is also a category for horror, which I think is fantastic, because there is a ton of crossover between fantasy, sci-fi, and horror, and most of us read all of them. And since it is like the biggest thing in the bookstores, they’ve got a Young Adult category, and all I can say to that is about damned time!
So let’s go tell all our friends, and make the 1st annual Dragon Awards as big as possible.
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EDIT: This is the first year so they’re working the bugs out of their system. Some people who signed up early had a technical problem where they didn’t get the response email. If you’ve not got a response from the help email there, post in the comments here and I’ll give a heads up to the admin.
I got an email asking me to confirm that I wanted to use the email registered, but never got anything further. No link to vote or anything else. Yaishman AT gmail.com
You have to respond and confirm’
I am planning to go just so I can meet John Ringo. I haven’t been to a con in years. Think my last was 1997 GenCon
I accidentally deleted my response email and emailed them about it a few days ago and they haven’t gotten back.
Since you did not finish registering, there is no account on file and you might find it easier to just register again.
Anybody know a decent paranormal novel I can recommend?:-)
You might check out C. Chancy if you don’t read much of that subgenre.
*Looks up at name of blog.* Ummm…
Same here. Registered back when they announced the award but received no link to vote. When I tried to register again today it showed my email as already registered, but with no way of logging in, I have no way of getting any further without a special link.
I have a different problem. When I logged in early to the Dragon Awards, right near the very start of the process, the following happened.
a. The voter FAQ was not working.
b. The Author FAQ was accessible, and had one set of dates for nomination, that didn’t make sense at the time because the voting dates started DURING the nomination period and listed eligibility periods.
c. The ACTUAL nominating page had COMPLETELY DIFFERENT dates in the “bugs” (things you could highlight/click on for rules) for the eligibility dates for nominees. The first two categories went from 1/1/15 to 3/1/16, and the rest went 1/1/15 to 2/1/16.
Silly me, I figured that the page without blatant date conflicts (c) had the correct dates, and a bunch of my nominees were suddenly ineligible when they corrected the dates at a later time. And, of course, as I’d already made nominations in many categories based on the erroneous information, I couldn’t make new ones for those categories (and wasn’t about to use a second e-mail to make new ones, as not to give even the hint of a “wrongfan trying to stuff the ballot”)
I got a confirmation email right after my nominations (and showing my nominations), but don’t know if I still have it, due to computer issues (including dealing with the recent ransomware infection of Ringo’s ad service requiring a reset and reinstall of software).
Hopefully, they’ll send me a reminder when voting starts next month.
I have the same problem as Woelf Dietrich, and I signed up to nominate and when I found it, to vote the day I found out about the Dragon Awards, which was ’round when it was first announced. It’s been some months and my memory is hazy about which email I used, but I’m fairly sure I signed up with the name R.K. Modena, Glad to hear you’re willing to pass on a word for us fans, Larry!
(Also was briefly amused at the snobbish screeching from the usual suspects, but I’m meh, will vote and nominate because we’re welcome at the Dragon Awards.)
That was also a great response to the whole clique problem. “Make it so big, there can’t be a clique that controls” – I really hope Kate Paulk saw your post. ^_^ Its what she wanted with the SP4 campaign.
And, inevitably, the Blog of Eternal Stench vomited forth:
“steve davidson on July 13, 2016 at 5:31 am said:
(snip irrelevant stuff)
Day and Correia are rapidly becoming one of a kind: flogging the dead horse for the amusement of their (thankfully) limited audience. One Trick Pony Dead Horse Floggers.
They’re beginning to sound like those washed out comics you run into in casinos, the ones whose material hasn’t been updated since they failed to make it on the Tonight Show.
I truly think it is a shame that an individual can grow up in the US and come out of the experience that damaged.”
That last sentence is really head-scratching.
Also:
“Dex on July 12, 2016 at 9:28 pm said:
(snip whining about Vox)
And the only place LC is a controversial is in his own head. He’s a mediocre writer hopped up on Libertarian nonsense and gun culture, which frames his entire life view. Which means the Wrongfans he thinks make him controversial generally ignore the moron.”
I find this one really strange? Are they seriously trying to say that Larry somehow *isn’t* controversial? That really makes no sense in light of the past three years. None.
Correia isn’t controversial, but let’s link to everything he says about any topic so we can all have a giant freak out about it! 😀
Funny how they keep paying attention to what we do, when it’s supposedly beneath their concern to mention.
*grin*
He’s not controversial and that’s why we must cast him out!
SJWs typically try to minimize the targets of their ire, claiming that no one reads non-SJWs or that non-SJWs have no influence.
“Which means the Wrongfans he thinks make him controversial generally ignore the moron”
Umm, ya precisely how can one be a fan of something that one ignores?
Don’t try to diagram their sentences. Down that road lies madness. 🙂
Coming from a rip off artist whose only claim to fame is that he bought a defunct magazine, I’m not too concerned about his definition of relevance.
Actually all he did was notice the trademark had lapsed, and stealthily claimed it as abandoned.
That’s just a cross Mr Correia has to bear. No matter how many millions of books he sells, he can’t be A Real Author until the Blue CHORF Fairy waves her wand.
Signed up way back when you announced it the first time and went through the whole confirmation process. I’ve never received a voting email. I wrote to them on the link they offered for questions but never got a reply on that. Now I’ve made a comment on the Dragon Con website but I think that’s also messed up because there were no other comments besides mine and that just seems hinky.
It might be easier to just register again now, when there is less problems. If you never confirmed, you can still be eligible.
Wrongfans having wrongfun. Count me in!
If you have a problem voting email awards@dragoncon.org Thanks.
Been there, done that and would have the t-shirt if I weren’t already behind on my drawing duties.
And while you’re on the topic of Sad Puppies.. I only voted in D.C. awards because you reminded me of it, but I didn’t vote for SotBS. I hadn’t read it yet.
I really wish we could get the actual nominee records from SP3. Because I bet the sweep was 25% rabid pups, and 75% sheer overlap from book bomb readers who picked 1/3 – 1/2 of the list titles because they’d read them and liked them better than anything else they’d read that year.
Good luck!
Shoot, I can’t find a list of the nominees. If they have a link on the main page, it’s too obscure for this old guy.
This is where you nominate. That is open until the 25th. Then they’ll post the finalists.
Ah, OK. Thanks.
Hey folks, if you are having issues or you haven’t received your confirmation email from us, please email us at (dcwards AT dragoncon.org). Bill Fawcett mistakenly included an incorrect email address below. We’ll either get the registration process restarted for you or deal with it in the database manually. Thanks – Dave Cody, Dragon Con