Originally published on Facebook 1 March 2015.
Okay, so David Gerrold did his Facebook essay on writing awards; I guess I’ll do mine. It is impossible to accomplish this and completely avoid self-aggrandizement, so I’ll get that out of the way in the first graf.
1) Just to provide the data, I have been nominated for eight Nebulas, three Stokers, two Hugos, and one Grand Prix d‘el Imaginaire; won none of them. I have won the Analog Reader’s Choice award a few times, the Seiun once for a novella written in collaboration with Jerry Oltion, and the Philip K. Dick Award for EMISSARIES FROM THE DEAD. I have won a couple of smaller things, that need not be mentioned here.
1a) Winning the Dick Award leads to a lot of unintentionally funny sentence formulations. I won a Dick! I have the Dick in my display case! Since it was a tie, David Walton and I share a Dick! You have absolutely no idea.
2) Any artist who cares about this kind of thing wants to be in the audience when his name is called; in the case of the Seiun and the Philip K. Dick I was literally thousands of miles away, each time, and that was fine. In practice, I have found that when somebody else’s name is called, my overwhelming immediate reaction was not disappointment, but relief. I’m not happy to have lost, but the tension of wondering whether I’ll win, even when I’m pretty sure I won’t, is such a strain on the system that the body relaxes out of sheer relief that it’s no longer something that needs to be worried about.
3) When I am nominated for anything, I immediately examine the other names on the list and pick another nominee who I will, from that point until the ceremony, tell myself is the likely winner. I do not want to think, for even five minutes, that I have a chance, and I am mentally chanting this other name up until the moment that the winner’s name is read. This little act of emotional self-defense keeps me from caring too much.
4) If I am at the ceremony and lose, the tidal wave of commiserations is so overwhelming I start looking around to see what relative just died. Again, this is not necessary, because my overwhelming reaction is relief.
5) That said, there have been a couple of occasions where one of my best stories lost to a story I despised or didn’t respect, and that made me grumble inside. If you think I’m gonna name those stories publicly, you’re crazy. That would be really awful behavior, on my part, not the least because it would be almost impossible to distinguish from sour grapes. However, if I did say so, at any point, I would not be “only saying so because I lost;” it would be because I have a critical judgment separate from my self-interest and honestly believed those couple of stories to be way inferior to others on the list, including mine. I know this because…
5a) …conversely, I utterly understood the propriety of me losing multiple times to stories by Ted Chiang. Or twice to Stephen King. Or to my pal Jerry Oltion. Superior work, in all cases. I’ll take that.
5b) People are more impressed with me for losing to Stephen King than they are for me winning the awards I did win.
6) Award nominations not campaigned for can be useful rubrics for determining just where a given story, or my career in general, makes its biggest splash. For instance, I am nominated for Nebulas every couple of years now, and have not been nominated for a Hugo for well over a decade. From this I deduce that my work holds a somewhat higher relative place, in the respect of my fellow writers, than it does among readers. I am not, among readers, a big name or popular figure who can count on a nomination even for a mediocre story, out of affection. This is an interesting and useful thing to know, though I don’t know what I’m able to do about it. Similarly, when a recent science fiction story surprised me by being nominated for the Stoker as well as the Nebula, I deduced (duh) that it successfully crossed over past the science fiction readers to the horror audience. Nice to know. Really helpful. Ditto with foreign nominations, ditto with my absence of World Fantasy Award nominations. It all gives me a little, very little, perspective on just how my work is perceived.
7) Of the sf/fantasy/horror awards, the Hugo is generally agreed to have the most commercial value. It is distantly followed by the Nebula, a writer’s award often given to folks who have produced superlative work that readers don’t want to pay for. So, yeah, naturally, given a choice, I would want a Hugo most. In terms of the artifact itself, my Hugo-envy changes depending on its design, any given year; some have been ugly, some downright beautiful. The Hugo I most wanted for myself was for a year I wasn’t even nominated; it was given at LA and the base was a film cannister, with a background designed to resemble the horizon from Forbidden Planet. Sheer acquisitiveness made me want that. Overall, I think the Stoker has the neatest statue; it’s a haunted house, with the author’s name inside a little swinging door. I’m not too proud to admit that, for geek value alone, I want that. I really want that.
8) However, this acquisitiveness has a limit. I once expressed my love of the Stoker trophy to an HWA officer who said he had a couple of unengraved ones in his closet, taking up space; he’d be glad to send it to me, as long as I didn’t represent it as my award. On another occasion, I was given the same offer by a past Worldcon official with unengraved Hugos in his closet. In both cases, I discovered that my reaction was an immediate and firm no. In both cases the folks making the offer gave me credit for passing a character test. I’m kinda proud of it, myself.
9) All that said, the business of being nominated for and sometimes winning awards is secondary to the endeavor under discussion here; you can win or lose enough of the damned things to line a driveway and you’re still faced with the same problem on Monday morning: filling a blank page with people who don’t exist in situations that haven’t happened, and making it as real as the world itself. I win an award every time I get an acceptance letter. But more than that, I win an award every time I come up with a sentence that makes me stop and marvel, “Holy crap. That came out of me.” Or finish a story and say to myself, “Now, that one’s a winner.” It doesn’t happen often enough. But that’s nice to have.
10) What’s even nicer? Since beginning the Gustav Gloom series I’ve been visiting schools, and nothing’s better than meeting a kid whose eyes light up at the very sight of me, or who tells me that the latest Gustav Gloom is the best book she’s ever read; or hearing of two young girls who play pretend Gustav and Fernie games in their backyard; or finding out from parents that kids who were previously cool to the idea of reading devoured the latest volume in a day and then demanded a trip to the bookstore to see if there was anything else that cool to be found. In my office, I have a big 3-D “Adam-Troy Castro, My Favorite Books” diorama made by a very shy young girl who presented it to me with shaking hands. If I had a choice between that and a silver rocketship and could only have one, I’d take the diorama every time.
Comment By: Keith R.A. DeCandido
March 1st, 2016 at 11:04 am
#10 is what it’s all about right there. 🙂
—K