Jeez. Screw that.

At the Hugo ceremony, me and my buddies Lou Anders, Ian McDonald, John Picacio, and Paul Cornell went 0 for 5 on awards. But I was encouraged to discover that, according to the official numbers (PDF), I received the second most number of Campbell nominations (only behind Mr. Lynch) and I came in third in the final tally out of a field of six. Not too shabby considering that I published absolutely nothing in 2007, the year under consideration.

But aside from that, how was the con? I hear you asking. The answer: I had a terrific time at Denvention, in spite of the con’s many challenges. Challenges such as being spread out over a convention hall so large it took you twenty minutes to get anywhere. Such as having all the parties and some of the programming in various hotels several blocks away. Such as having a dealer’s room far away from everything, which sat half-empty most of the time.

Highlights of my Denvention experience included:

• Hanging out at the Hyatt bar and the nearby 24-hour diner until the wee hours of the night with the aforementioned Lou Anders, Ian McDonald, John Picacio, and Paul Cornell, not to mention Chris Roberson, Allison Baker, Deanna Hoak, Sean Williams, Daryl Gregory, John Scalzi, Alan Beatts, Jay Lake, Matt Jarpe, David J. Williams, John Joseph Adams, Rani Graff, and Jetse de Vries.
• Meeting the lovely and hilarious Liza Groen Trombi, Executive Editor at Locus, and discussing all things Locus and all things parenting. I don’t think I quite managed to flirt my way into a cover article, but I’m still working on it.
• Chatting with io9 head honchos Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders, the latter of whom is currently reading Infoquake for an io9 review. (Did I mention how lovely, charming, interesting, and articulate these two are?)
• Attending the Pyr panel hosted by Lou Anders (and featuring fellow authors Kay Kenyon, Chris Roberson, Sean Williams, Mike Resnick, and Alexis Glynn Latner) and the Pyr party in honor of Brasyl author Ian McDonald.
• Talking the ins and outs of publishing with Paolo Bacigalupi, who writes some namby-pamby liberal environmental crap in his new SF collection from Night Shade, Pump Six. Turns out he’s hysterical, interesting, and even nice.
• Meeting fantasy author and fellow SFNovelists.com member David B. Coe in the flesh, and discovering that we have very similar outlooks on life and senses of humor. We now have matching tattoos on our upper thighs.
• Attending one of the best sushi dinners of my life with the hilarious Doselle Young, the fabulously sexy Alethea Kontis, the talented Mary Robinette Kowal, the aforementioned David B. Coe, the delightful Misty Massey, and the almost-unbearably nice Eric James Stone, and one other person whose name is eluding me right now. We spent most of the time prying into Alethea’s love life over sake and offering her unsolicited commentary and suggestions.
• Sharing several panels with Warren Hammond, author of KOP, who is really much too friendly and unassuming to have written a book with a cover like this one on the right.
• Finally meeting and chatting about the writing of second novels with fantasy powerhouses Patrick Rothfuss and Ken Scholes at Joe and Gay Haldeman’s Rising Stars reception.
• Meeting newly minted SF novelist brothers Eytan and Dani Kollin, whose upcoming The Unincorporated Man features a future Earth where free market capitalism has run amuck. Which means I should either be welcoming them into the fold of economic SF writers, or hunting them down and killing them as potential competitors.
• Gabbing at the Aussie party about foreign rights with fantasist Pamela Freeman, who really seems much too nice to be in this business.
• A raucous dinner with (among others) Mario Acevedo, author of The Undead Kama Sutra and admitted deranged mind, Jeremy Lassen, unflappable zoot suited impresario of Night Shade Books, Irene Gallo, keen-eyed Art Director for Tor Books, Paolo Bacigalupi, and Jetse de Vries. John Scalzi may brag about being in the group that thought up the market segment of “unicorn bukkake,” but I was in the group that dreamt up “YA zombie porn.” (Interestingly enough, Paolo is the only person who was part of both groups…)
• Breakfast and con story swapping with the ever-interesting, ever-gracious Alis Rasmussen, aka Kate Elliott.
• Watching the unending line of signature seekers in the dealers room for Elizabeth Moon, while I sat in the next chair over and smiled pleasantly at the half-dozen who decided to seek out my signature. (Ms. Moon seemed almost embarrassed about the disparity, and assured me many times that she had been in my shoes before.)
• Post-con recapping over beer at the Denver airport with fellow DC area writer David J. Williams.

Believe it or not, those are just the highlights. My apologies to anyone whom I may have hung out with/chatted with/drank with/gotten tattoos with and didn’t mention here, but there’s only so much time I can spend recapping this stuff.

Update 8/11/08 @ 10:08 pm: Can’t believe I forgot to give a shout out to my buddies at Solaris, George Mann, Christian Dunn, and Mark Newton, among whom I spent many hours drinking and schmoozing. Always good to see those guys.

Update 8/12/08 @ 8:48 am: Patrick Nielsen Hayden reminds me that the photo credit for Mary Robinette Kowal is his, and that the photo is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license. Thanks, PNH! Sorry, didn’t intend to imply this photo was my own.

• Reading Tolkien in the Early Years (Wednesday, 11:30 am)
• Why Didn’t SF Predict the Internet? (Thursday, 10 am)
• Reading from Infoquake and MultiReal (Thursday, 1 pm)
• Rising Stars Reception (Thursday, 2:30pm – 5 pm)
  
• Emerging Technologies: The Top Ten Jobs of 2050 Don’t Exist Today (Friday, 4 pm)
• Pyr Books Presentation (Friday, 5:30 pm)
  
• Hugo Reception and Ceremony (Friday, 5:30 pm – 8 pm)
• Signing (Sunday, 11:30 am)

In general, if you’re looking to find me, check the hotel bars. Not because I intend to drink like a fish, but because that’s where everyone hangs out at these cons. (And that doesn’t mean that I don’t intend to drink like a fish.)

You can always email me as well. I’ll have my BlackBerry with me, and if my past experience with T-Mobile service is any guideline, there will be at least a 4′x4′ space in the Denver area that gets reception sufficient for me to pick up an email.

I read on somebody’s blog this afternoon that Scott Lynch would “win in a walk.” Between you and me, I’m expecting he’ll win the Campbell this year too, but at least I want to make him sprint for it a little. I haven’t heard a bad word about his Lies of Locke Lamora (except from me) or the follow-up, Red Seas Under Red Skies. I dunno, given that he’s the Hot New Fantasy Author on the block and everyone I know universally acknowledges him to be a great guy, there must be something wrong with him.

I met Jon Armstrong at World Fantasy this year, and I have read his debut novel Grey. It does share a number of thematic concerns with my own Infoquake — economics, rampant consumerism, class discrepancies — and it’s quite funny to boot. The book got one of the best advance blurbs I’ve ever seen from the inimitable Michael Chabon: “Jon Armstrong is a genius, with an umlaut, to the fifth power.” On a personal level, my impression of Jon (sorry, Jön) is that he’s a much, much nicer person than me, though that may be damning him with faint praise.

I haven’t met David Anthony Durham yet, but his name seems to crop up quite a bit these days as a fantasist to watch. He’s already got a solid foothold in Respectable Lit’rary Territory with his historical novels Gabriel’s Story, Walk Through Darkness, and Pride of Carthage. A vote for David might be a solid strategic move if only because it will put another dent in the armor of the snooty academics who look down on genre fiction.

I would be very, very pleased to see Mary Robinette Kowal walk off with the Campbell tiara. And not just because she’s smart, she’s my friend, she’s got a story in George Mann’s new Solaris anthology with me, she’s got a highly original voice (in both the literary and literal senses), and she’s dead sexy. She’s also the only nominated author this year with no published novel under her belt. C’mon, big New York publishers, what are you waiting for? Make this gal famous already so we can start our own cool, edgy, avant-garde writers’ movement.

My fellow Pyr novelist Joe Abercrombie stands a good chance of staging an upset win this year for his The Blade Itself and Before They Are Hanged. I’ll confess I haven’t gotten around to reading them yet, but the adjectives that get tossed around about this guy’s work are enough to make anyone jealous. Plus he has a highly entertaining blog. You know, on second thought, please help me bury Abercrombie’s work in obscurity before he totally reinvents the genre out from under the rest of us.

And what about my chances? Well, I’m not totally counting myself out of the running. But admittedly I was rather quiet for most of 2007, and I think by the time people read my upcoming MultiReal this summer and get reacquainted with my work, the voting deadline might have passed. I’m contemplating sending my spouse down to North Carolina to stir up some racial tension, and pressing for a recount of the Hugo ballots in Michigan and Florida. If I do win, I’ll make sure that the world knows it’s not because I’m a better writer, but because I kicked up more dirt, threatened more people, tossed around more money, and slept with more influential people.

But you want to know the real interesting question? I’m wondering if Patrick Rothfuss still got more nominations than any of us, even though he’s not eligible for the award due to a technicality. It’s simply not right to pen an article about Campbell Award nominees in 2008 and not mention Pat, who would otherwise be the bearded 800-pound gorilla this year for his debut The Name of the Wind. I’m kind of disappointed he didn’t pick up a Hugo nomination instead.