Hugo/Campbell Nomination Deadlines

Just a friendly public service announcement that just so coincidentally happens to pertain to, well, um, me.

The deadline to submit nominations for the Hugo Awards and for the John W. Campbell Best New Science Fiction Writer Award is not until March 3, 2007. Plenty of time. However… in order to nominate someone, you must have either been an attending or supporting member of last year’s WorldCon in Anaheim, CA or this year’s WorldCon in Yokohama, Japan by January 31, 2007.

In other words… if you didn’t attend WorldCon last year, and you don’t intend to trek out to Japan this year, you have until tomorrow, January 31, to pay for a $50 supporting membership if you want to submit nominations. The official nomination page says you must be a member “before January 31, 2007.” I assume that means “before the midnight Greenwich Mean Time that occurs between January 31, 2007 and February 1, 2007,” but like so many other things in science fiction fandom, that’s not clear.

And what a crop of potential Campbell nominees there is to choose from. The Writertopia Eligibility Page lists a number of deserving folks, including my friends Cat Rambo, Mary Robinette Kowal, Maria V. Snyder, and Joel Shepherd. Other names of note on the list include Brandon Sanderson, Naomi Novik, Justine Larbalestier, Cherie Priest, and Alma Alexander. And might I also humbly and with the utmost humility and graciousness suggest… me. Me! Mememememememe! Meeeeeee!!! Over here, look, me! [waves] [whistles] [hoots] [carries on shamelessly like this for another few minutes]

So how do you get a supporting membership? Go to the Nippon 2007 Registration Page, whip out your credit card, and plunk down $50. Reading this page after January 31? Don’t despair… according to the rules, you’re still eligible to actually vote for the nominees that make the ballot if you get a supporting membership and get your ballot in by March 3.

I will also mention that my book Infoquake is eligible for the Hugo for Best Novel. And that the book is still available via Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Booksense, Books-a-Million, etc. And that — [sound of giant Monty Python foot splatting blog author]

Meanwhile, I had an interesting moment this morning. I received a MySpace friend invitation from Dove, one of those fake women inviting me to have some fake webcam fun with her. As I was glancing through the profile to see if it was a real person or not, I noticed that some other fake webcam hottie named Avi had left a spam comment. Yes, the spambots are now being spammed by other spambots.

And now, because of this mention in my blog, if for no other reason, Google’s bots and Yahoo’s bots and who knows how many other bots will now be zipping over to read and catalog this spam.

Your assignment for the day is to identify all of the grammatical mistakes in these two sentences: “Anywayyyss I kinda wanted to know if you wanted to have some fun on my cam haha! I know that sounds kinda slutty I don’t care though.”