"Great White Ship" nominated for the Sidewise Award

Well, the news has been announced, so I can go public.

The judges for the Sidewise Awards for Alternate History have announced the short list of finalists for the 2012 Sidewise Awards.

I'm proud and grateful that my short story, "Great White Ship", has been named a finalist for the Best Short Form category.

This was the news I referred to in my post last week when I said I was gonna plotz.. I got the email about the nomination last Tuesday. This was the first time I've bee nominated for an award of this kind, and it was a new experience.

The winners will be announced at LoneStarCon 3, the 71st Annual World Science Fiction Convention the weekend of August 30, 2013, in San Antonio.

This year's panel of judges was made up of Stephen Baxter, Evelyn Leeper, Jim Rittenhouse, Stu Shiffman, Kurt Sidaway, and Steven H Silver.

The Sidewise Awards for Alternate History were conceived in late 1995 to honor the best allohistorical genre publications of the year. The first awards were announced in summer 1996 and honored works from 1995. The award takes its name from Murray Leinster's 1934 short story "Sidewise in Time," in which a strange storm causes portions of Earth to swap places with their analogs from other timelines.

Thanks to Daily Science Fiction and the Sidewise judges, as well as everyone who has enjoyed the story.

Tales from the Wild Weird West

Bruce Bethke says my latest story, "Riders of the Red Shift", should be published sometime in the middle of July in the special Tales from the Wild Weird West issue of Stupefying Stories. Looking forward to it.

I'm gonna plotz!

I received an outstanding piece of good news in an email this week, probably the best piece of news since Gardner accepted my story for Asimov's years ago. I can't talk about it because it involves news that's embargoed until this weekend. But I was really floored when I got the email. I'm very happy. Otherwise, can't say anything for a few more days.

Progress

I hooked up the external floppy drive, and it works great. My old backup files are mostly Plain Text or old versions of Word, but I also have a number of backups in Pagemaker 5.0 Pagemaker and Wordperfect files and also Word Perfect. I have the setup disks for both programs, but they won't run on the current version of Windows. However, I also have the disks for Windows 3.1, so I may very well install that so I can run the old versions of them.

All my hard copy submissions up 2005 or thereabouts were done in Pagemaker. I know that might sound difficult to some people, but I used Pagemaker from 1995 to 2001 when I ran my own newspaper, so when I started writing stories in 2002 I just naturally used Pagemaker. I segued to Word in the middle of the last decade.

Great service

Wow, got my external floppy disk drive in the mail today, bought it on eBay Sunday. That's service! I can read the backups of old stories.

I need to read old backups of my stories from before 2005 - which are saved on floppies - as I write up my next project, "Letters from Gardner" for John Teehan at Merry Blacksmith Press. More recent backups, as you would expect, are on thumb drives.

New members

Had some conversations over the weekend just past with some fellow writers, looks like I recruited two new members for SASS, the Society for the Advancement of Speculative Storytelling, the writers' group I've helped organize. Some very positive chats with these people as well as others, pleasant interactions.

SASS has its own web site, if you want to check it out

Otherwise, the only other thing I did writing-related was place a bid and win a external floppy disk drive. I have a bunch of floppy disks I used as back-ups for stories eight years and longer ago, and I need to access them for my next book project. I got one on eBay for $14.01, it should do the trick.

Shutdown

The World S-F Blog has been suspended after a four-year run. It was a venue for original and reprint short story fiction, publishing 60 short stories. My story "Irredenta" was published March 15, 2011. It is unusual - for me - in being set in outer space.  It remains on-line, here: