The Hugo awards are the most prestigious thing you can get in sci-fi/fantasy (other than fat royalty checks, obviously). Getting nominated for a Hugo is a great resume builder. I was a finalist for the Campbell award for best new writer a couple of years back, and though the Campbell is a separate award from the Hugo, it works through the same system, same voters, and is even given away at the same ceremony. Going through that experience was very enlightening.

The Hugo is pretty fancy, but basically, like most awards, it is a popularity contest. So who decides? Anybody who attended the last WorldCon (Chicago 2012) or who is a supporting member of the current WorldCon (San Antonio 2013) or next WorldCon (London 2014) can nominate.  But you need to buy your membership by January 31.

Monster Hunter Legion is eligible… I’m just pointing that out. The fact that I write unabashed pulp action that isn’t heavy handed message fic annoys the literati to no end. When I got nominated for the Campbell, the literati message-fic crowd had a conniption fit.  A European snob reviewer actually wrote “If Larry Correia wins the Campbell, it will END WRITING FOREVER.”  (I’ve since won the prestigious Audie and got nominated for the Julia Verlanger for best fantasy novel IN FRANCE, and all writing still hasn’t been ended, so I must still need a Hugo nomination).

Okay, so you’re not going to be in Texas this year, but how about this? For $60 you can buy a supporting membership (and later on you can upgrade it to a full membership if you actually want to attend). This allows you to nominate whoever you want for the various Hugo awards. You tell them what you think the best books of the year were, the best TV shows, movies, even book review sites.

$60! Sure, Correia, I love sticking it to the man, and having Monster Hunter Legion get nominated for best novel would make literati snob’s heads explode, but I don’t know if exploding English professor’s heads is worth sixty whole dollars! That would buy several pounds of little chocolate doughnuts or half a box of 9mm!

But wait there’s more! See anybody who buys a supporting membership is allowed to vote on all the nominees in every category. In previous years, in order to have informed voters, they’ve sent out the “Hugo Voter’s Packet” which includes eBooks of every nominees’ stuff. This isn’t just best novel, but all the Campbell nominees’ books, all the short stories, novellas, novelettes, all of the supporting works, comic books, graphic novels, supporting works, and pretty much all of that. Heck, I got Schlock Mercenary stuff last time!  Basically, you get more money worth of reading material than the cost of your supporting membership, plus exploding literati heads!

(just imagine with me… Should I vote for the heavy handed message fic about the dangers of fracking and global warming and dying polar bears and robot rape as a bad feminist analogy with a villain who is a thinly veiled Dick Cheney? Or should I vote for the LAS VEGAS EXPLOSION SHOOTING EVERYTHING DRAGON HELICOPTER CHASE ORC SACRIFICING CHICKENS BOOK!?! Grglglgggggsllll………BOOM!)

And for my Texas readers, if I get nominated, I will go to San Antonio, hang out on the River Walk gorging myself on awesome barbeque and burritos bigger than my head, and I will sign all your books! I’ll sign firearms! I’ll sign firearms accessories! I’ll sign your beautiful Texas women!*

*due to legal reasons Larry Correia promises not to “steal all the white women”. For new readers, I give you my greatest piece of hate mail ever: http://larrycorreia.wordpress.com/2011/09/08/im-taking-your-jobs-and-your-women-hate-mail-time/

Give me an excuse to go to Texas! Please. I haven’t been to Texas in three years. Okay, really I will probably be going there on tour this year anyway (thinking of doing a Texas to Florida road trip), but seriously, I love San Antonio.

So for $60 you can stick it to the man, and the next time one of your coworkers looks over your shoulder to see what you’re reading, and they’re all like “I’m a douchebag that only reads what English professors or Oprah’s book club say is profound. That’s stupid and has guns and is stupid in your stupid face.” And then you can say, “But it got nominated for a Hugo.” And then they will EXPLODE!**

** Disclaimer, annoying coworkers may not literally explode.

And here’s the kicker, it doesn’t take very many votes for something to actually get nominated! I was shocked how few it was. The thing is, the same group of people vote every year, so their favorites insta-win, and since most readers who disagree don’t realize that their opinion actually matters, they don’t even bother. In the smaller categories, like Best Fanzine (which ELITIST BOOK REVIEWS should totally win), it only takes like 30 votes! In best novel, the biggest, baddest award, it only takes like 100… Seriously. All these years you’ve thought these fancy awards meant something, it is actually a popularity contest where the nominees have been decided by the tiny percentage of people who cared enough to show up. (sort of like life, imagine that).

If you want to poke the establishment in the eye, you will need to buy your supporting membership (and don’t forget you’ll get a big packet of free eBooks and stories so it is actually a decent deal) you’ll need to do it before the end of the month.

Details:  http://www.lonestarcon3.org/hugo-awards/index.shtml

Application: http://www.lonestarcon3.org/paypal_test/display_entry_new.php

And once you’ve done that, you can nominate. The nominations stay open for a few more months, so I’ll post about some of the things I think which are awesome, but which normally have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning.  http://www.lonestarcon3.org/hugo-awards/hugo-nom.html

So please tell your friends. I will continue to bug you about this for the rest of the month.

The man who simply does not give a crap, AGENT FRANKS. 🙂

 The Drowning Empire is a serial which will be appearing every Friday on this blog based on the Writer Nerd Game Night monthly Legend of the Five Rings game. It is set in the Empire of Rokugan, and is a world based on fantasy samurai, locked in perpetual battles of honor and glory. 

For more details on Rokugan and the game itself: http://www.l5r.com/  

Not an Ending, but Not Quite a Beginning

Gather around, friends. Yes, come closer. Has it really been months since you last were treated to the adventures within the Emerald Empire? My, my…how time flies.

When last we met, the Empire has just defeated the Dark Oracle of Fire. Impressive, it was. Names like Hida Makoto, Ide Todo, Kakita Fujo, and Kuni Magatsu became household names…indeed even my father, Ikoma Katsu became known for his tales of The Paper Lanterns. That story ended, but it was not the end. Time and fate are ever the tricksters that way. No matter what we do, the decisions fathers make affect their sons.

What you will read next is a collection of works from another dark time in the Empire. It seems the Empire has been in constant dark time of late doesn’t it? First, the War of Dark Fire to go along with the Race for the Throne, then the Destroyer War ravaged the land. Can you imagine the Kaiu Wall being breached? Can you imagine the Scorpion having their own wall to keep back the tainted creatures that are spat forth from a new portal to hell? Tell me, can you imagine the Spider—servants of the accursed Daigotsu—refusing to help the Empire in the Destroyer War unless they were made a Great Clan?

For a generation after those events, we knew relative peace under the reign of Hoketuhime. The Empire is again now in chaos. True there are some who can ride that chaos into legend, but those men and women are few, and far between. Perhaps my companions and I will become like our ancestors, and bring glory to our names.

Or, perhaps not.

Indulge me, if you will. History is a funny thing. They say that those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. Is this the case? History is often written by the victor of one situation or another, but more frequently history is written by those who were bored enough sit down and put quill to parchment.

So I ask you this, dear reader: what if history is wrong?

My father told many tales of the Paper Lanterns, as I, Ikoma Uso, will share many tales set during a time when the Empire began slowly drowning…

…hmmm, drowning. There is so much meaning locked inside that word, both for good and ill.

I apologize, readers. It appears I am very much my father’s son. Perhaps less…boastful…but prone to tangents nonetheless.

As a bard of the Ikoma Family, like my late father, I will strive to give you a complete picture of the Empire seventeen years after the War of Dark Fire ended. Though not as overtly destructive as that time, the current timeline has the Empire eroding from the inside out. Famine, revolt, war, piracy and banditry, and the incursion of gaijin threats are slowly drowning the Empire.

I have used that word several times now. Drowning. It fits the situation well. The Empire is out of its depth. Water can be the life-giving force for every person—from the lowest peasant to the most honor-bound samurai. But water can also cause destruction unlike any other element. Water is cunning. It is—pardon the pun—fluid. You cannot fight a war against water. You’d have better luck noticing a difference in the ocean after spitting into it.

But then, that was the entire goal of the Dark Oracle of Water.

I will not spoil the ending for you. There is a special realm of hell devoted to that sort of storyteller.

Storyteller. There is another interesting word, both with negative and positive connotations. I tell this story slightly older, and significantly wiser. Do I see the end of this tale? In a very literal sense, no. Because there is no beginning or end in the Celestial Order. There is only a cycle.

That said, I do not know if I see an end to the Dark Oracle of Water. I have not seen it yet. If I don’t survive, then hopefully I will join my ancestors, and some other storyteller will finish my tale. If I survive, well, then I will finish the tale as I will remember it.

Do you see the issue there?

So, do you trust me? Do you trust that I can give you, the discerning reader, an unbiased account of the adventures my companions and I had? If not, I completely understand.

If so, you are a fool.

Read these words, friends. Maybe they are real. Maybe not. After all, who am I to judge their authenticity? Perhaps this is not even really me.

All I can say is that I pray the names Ikoma Uso, Akodo Toranaka, Tamori Isao, Yoritomo Oki, Moto Subotai and Suzume Shintaro are remembered well.

Of course, that is all a matter of perception, is it not?

This is the story of those six samurai. It spans their entry in the Topaz Championship, through their investigation of the plight facing the Empire, and into the great events beyond.

This, my friends, is the story of The Drowning Empire.

 

An Empire chokes,

enemies on every side.

We drown. Yes, we drown.

Signed, Ikoma Uso

Just a Bard

***

This week’s episode was written by Steve Diamond of Elitist Book Reviews. http://elitistbookreviews.blogspot.com/

If you want to check out some of Steve’s fiction, he cowrote Son of Fire, Son of Thunder with me here: http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=monshuntnati-20&o=1&p=8&l=as4&m=amazon&f=ifr&ref=ss_til&asins=0984006559

For the gamers who want to know more of the behind the scenes crunch (and for everybody on this first one because I posted character sketches) here is where I’ll be posting everything in one place on the L5R forums. http://www.alderac.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=295&t=101206&p=1332536#p1332536

To be continued next Friday with a letter from Moto Subotai:  http://larrycorreia.wordpress.com/2013/01/11/the-drowning-empire-episode-2-letter-from-moto-subotai/

W.N.G.N. stands for Writer Nerd Game Night.  Once a month I get together with a bunch of other novelists and we have an RPG night. And since I play with a bunch of other writers, obviously they like to write about it.   For people who aren’t familiar with the RPGs (and for my readers, I need to specify that is Role Playing Game and not Rocket Propelled Grenade, because it really could go either way around here) that basically means a board game with no board and more imagination.

This tradition began when I joined Dan Wells’ game night. We were at a book signing, and Dan asked me if I’d ever played role playing games. Yep. (I hadn’t for about 10 years, but I did all through college and high school). Next question. Do you like samurai? Well who doesn’t? (okay, in truth I’m addicted to samurai movies and anything involving Toshiro Mifune, so now you know where Toru the Iron Guard came from in Spellbound) So I got invited to Dan’s monthly Legend of the Five Rings game.

So I jumped in on that and had an absolute blast. It had been over a decade since I’d last played an RPG.  One thing about fantasy writers, many of us are gamers or former gamers, and ironically enough the character Lorenzo from Dead Six is basically a modernized version of a rogue I played in a D&D campaign in college. Take away the sword and replace it with an M-4, and move him from the Forgotten Realms to The Confederated Gulf Emirate of Zubara and I had myself a character.

Dan put a lot of effort into creating a fun world. In fact I had so much fun playing imaginary magical samurai, that a couple of days later while I was stuck in the Chicago airport for a long layover, I wrote a bit of fiction about the character I was playing.

http://larrycorreia.wordpress.com/2011/10/21/the-burning-throne-part-i-diary-of-a-crab/

That kind of started a tradition and soon everybody else in the group was writing fiction about our game too. It quickly grew to novel size. Dan named it the Burning Throne (which worked for the campaign, but two seconds after I posted the first one to the blog you guys pointed out that it made great potty humor, whoops) 🙂  I started sticking them up on the blog every Friday, mostly because when you are a writer and you are having fun with something, you really want to share it. And besides, since we were playing in somebody else’s world (Legend of the Five Rings belongs to AEG), it wasn’t like any of us were going to publish it. (not that I won’t totally steal that one epic Battle of Pale Oak Castle sequence I wrote to shove it into my own fantasy novel next year).

Then Dan decided to move to Germany for a couple of years (writers can do that sort of thing) so our group broke up. We wrapped up the Burning Throne campaign and I posted all of them here on the blog. There were 46 episodes in total, and I’d encourage you to check them out, because it made for a pretty epic story. Hey, free novel!

Fast forward a bit and I decided to start a new WNGN. This one was going to be held once a month at my place on Yard Moose Mountain. I grabbed a couple of guys from the old group and invited a few other friends who I figured would be into imaginary magical samurai heroics. All but one of them was a professional writer (but he hasn’t let us down on that front, and I’ll get to that).

I volunteered to run this one, so I started putting together a new story which would begin one generation after the Burning Throne ended. I wanted the events of our last campaign to have changed the world. The last one was about the element of fire, this one would be about water.

So we started, and the group turned out great. It is without a doubt the best game group I’ve ever belonged to. When you’ve got a good game group, it isn’t just a GM setting the stage and then some guys rolling dice to see how good they kill stuff, but instead it turns into a sort of cooporative story telling and world building exercise, where everybody is creating something more interesting than what any one of us could come up with by ourselves.

My group is made up of:

Me, Larry Correia, some dude who writes some series of fantasy novels about monsters or magical gangsters, or something.

Steve Diamond, who runs Elitist Book Reviews, who has published several short stories, and who is shopping around his first YA novel. (I’ve read it, and it is awesome). Steve is also my assistant at my Evil Military Industrial Complex day job.

Paul Genesse, author of the Iron Dragon series and editor of the Crimson Pact anthologies, who also happens to have the extremely low stress job of cardiac nurse. “How was work, Paul?” “Eh, I’ve got my hands in some dude’s ribs, I’ll call you back.”

Paul and Steve were in the last WNGN. Paul played Kuni Magatsu and Steve played Ide Todo. I played Hida Makoto.

And the new guys,

Pat Tracy, who has published several short stories, and who is an award winning poet. And when I say poet, I mean, this guy writes poetry that is freaking astounding, and I don’t even normally like poetry. Pat also happens to be one of those World’s Strongest Man kind of guys, who bends big nails with his bare hands and rips phone books in half for fun, and is the only person I know who could actually use my Christmas tetsubo effectively and not injure himself.

Brad Torgersen, probably one of the single most talented sci-fi authors around, Brad’s short stories have been published in everything. In 2012 he was a finalist for the Hugo, the Campbell, and the Nebula award AT THE SAME TIME.  He was Analog’s writer of the year. Basically, the dude can freaking write. Brad’s a Chief Warrant Officer in the US Army.

Zach Hill wrote his first few books while serving two tours in Iraq. His first pro publication will be out soon with Uprising Italia, (zombies in Italy!), but regular readers will know him best as the guy behind my favorite history webpage, Minimum Wage Historian. He’s the guy who actually knows how real samurai culture worked, which is why it must pain him when I chuck that right out the window.

 Tony Battalingo is the only guy in our group who isn’t a published author, but you can’t tell because he jumped right in on the fiction too, and I’m happy to say he’s gotten pretty darn good at it. Tony is an active duty EOD Tech. (and he’ll hate me for bringing up this totally unrealistic movie, but like the Hurt Locker. In my defense, Tony, most folks don’t know what EOD means, and it is pretty badass).

One Friday a month, these guys show up at my house around six and we end up playing until 2 AM. And we’re all grown ups with jobs!

And the fiction… Holy moly… It has been great. There have been a few which comletely blew me away, seriously as good as anything I’ve ever seen published. I will be posting it every Friday here on the blog again, and this time I will be posting more of the game details along with it, so the readers can have a clue about the things which transpired that don’t show up in any one character’s narration.  I’ll also be cross posting to the official L5R forum with all of the nerdy stats and nitty gritty game details which most of the folks reading here won’t care about at all. You guys are probably in it for the story.

So starting tomorrow, and every Friday after that until the campaign is over, I will be posting a bit from the new Writer Nerd Game Night serial, The Drowning Empire.

So we slammed our brakes on right before going over the cliff, and instead we simply picked up a rock and brained ourselves a few times, so that way we can simply fall over the cliff next year.  Taxes were raised, but no spending cuts were made to anything, because every single government program is vital and super important, and simply can’t be cut. At all. Ever. But don’t worry, I’m sure all that new tax revenue (there won’t actually be any as the economy shrinks, but go with it) it will totally take care of our spending problems.

Here is a nifty graph I found on the Blaze which shows what a difference this will make.  http://www.theblaze.com/stories/stunning-graphic-shows-possible-reason-the-house-gop-is-balking-at-senates-fiscal-cliff-bill/