Nomination season is coming
on literary awards and wanting to win one
Not to be too needy about this but MYCOPHILIA is eligible for all major and minor 2023 sff and horror awards and if I was even breathed at for them I would be so ecstatic the average happiness of the planet would rise a small but appreciable amount. If you are able to suggest, nominate, or vote for it in something like the Nebulas, the Hugos, the Stokers etc, please do. I would be very happy.
I expect nothing, but hope for a great deal.
Awards are a strange concept, really. I’ve won a few awards for a few different things in my life and ultimately I remember barely any of them. I think I had a bronze medal for something? Clearly not anything important. It probably wasn’t even bronze.
And yet I crave them. I love them. I want them. Oh, the joy of the work is paramount, and craft matters to me! But I do so much want a little haunted house statue or a framed certificate and the ability to put ‘award-winning’ in my bio.
Like a number of creative, bookish children I consistently sought adult approval and validation. However, much of my childhood was spent… not placing. Not winning. A perpetual runner-up, never quite doing it. Getting gold stickers or a ‘well done!’ on my schoolwork was one of the things that made me feel good.
But awards. Awards! Literary awards! What are they, who decides on them, who gave these people the right, etc etc.
Despite wanting to win one in a way so intense even I find it a little unsettling, they’re… kind of silly, right? Any award for art is. Art, the quality and meaning of it, the value of it is simultaneously inherent, subjective, and personal. An award seems an attempt to control and quantify something that cannot be controlled or meaningfully quantified. This is the ‘best’ of this year. This is the most impactful. This one means the most.
Some of the best books and stories I read this year have won no awards. Some of the worst won many. Awards, then, are meaningless to my ability to enjoy the work and gain value from it. They are meaningless as a judge of the value of my own work.
And yet! They are not meaningless to me. I am, after all, the man who demands treats for every self-defined milestone in my writing career. If I had my way there would be a small parade thrown in my honour every time I finished a draft of something. Perhaps I could sit in a chair being carried by beautiful people while cheerful onlookers threw confetti. It’s not so much to ask, surely?
Apparently it is, since it has never happened. Mostly, I make do with having takeaway whenever I sell a short story and the money clears.
I don’t believe art of any kind can be simply judged, either by peer groups or juries, and have it decided that one example is ‘best’. It’s simply not possible, and so I should stop caring about literary awards and if I’ll ever win one and if so, when. Awards! Who’d have’em.
Me. I would. Please give me one.