I think people mostly think I'm exaggerating when I tell them that for me the fun is in being nominated for awards, not in winning, but overall that's true. [...] I guess it's because I've been an awards judge and have watched what happens (all too often, everyone's second choice wins, because everyone can agree on that), and because the gap between win and lose is so small. I like being nominated -- it makes me feel like I've hit an award-nominated level of quality, and that feels good. Beyond that, it's a horse race and the end result of the horse race doesn't matter. I realise that there aren't a lot of people who feel like this about awards, and I'm also aware that it's easy for me to say, because I've already got my fair share of awards and more, so talking about not caring about the actual winning can sound, frankly, smug. But it's still how I feel. [But I could really use 35,000 euros...]
And this [the Edge Hill] is a good award: there's not enough attention paid to short stories. They're seen as trivial, or not as good as novels. They have that whiff of unreality about them that means that people who only write short stories are always being asked when they will be writing a real book. I've not seen another award given to single author collection regardless of genre.
I write fiction. My latest novel is Zeroes, the first book of the Zeroes trilogy (YA fantasy), a collaboration with Scott Westerfeld and Deborah Biancotti. My novel Sea Hearts is published as The Brides of Rollrock Island in the UK and the US. I've also written Tender Morsels and five short story collections: White Time, Black Juice, Red Spikes, Yellowcake and Cracklescape.
The light bulb for my torchiere light went out a couple days ago. Turns out it’s a weird bulb, so I had to buy it online (at topbulb.com), but then I stuck in the new bulb, and nothing turned on. Turns out the bulb didn’t die (though it seemed that way), the fucking light died!
Then I realized the recently-installed cheap CD changer still doesn’t play MP3 CDs properly. Better than before, but it still skips. And it can’t be a power issue anymore since it’s getting it direct from the battery. Grr. I hate stuff like that. I may just return the damn thing.
Oh yea, and Windows XP crashed while I was recording something off TV for Olivia. Nice. Luckily I rebooted and I think I only lost 2 minutes of commercials from the recording, so no harm there. But still.
On a final breakage note, yesterday I hit CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE by accident went I meant to hit CTRL+ALT+DELETE. When running X, CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE shuts down XFree86 entirely, if you don’t know (while CTRL+ALT+DELETE does nothing–I needed to send that command to my Windows server which I was VNC’ing into). Well, it turns out that somehow, by shutting down X at the wrong time, my Gnome panel’s clock applet wouldn’t start. Had to dig around the error message to find the solution, but in the end I had to copy my root account’s gconf entries for /apps/panel/profiles/default/ and then re-customize my gnome-panel. Havoc sure was right awhile ago when he said gconf can corrupt sometimes. I didn’t listen, and I had to rebuild my panel as a result.
It’s finally done! I have finally managed to get my new and improved pixelmonkey.org site online. I am now fully powered by WordPress and Gallery, two amazing projects (written in PHP) which allow for blog/content management and photo gallery management. I even integrated the two together by having them share stylesheets wherever possible.