UPDATE:
Via Facebook: Boskone has just posted this year’s schedule and it looks to be – HOLY COW! What a set of panels! You can see the scheduled events on Boskone 50’s Facebook page.
~~~
File 770 reminds us that nominations for the FAAn Awards are now open. Any interested party may cast up to three nominations in several categories by downloading the PDF Ballot. The FAAn Award (Fan Activity Achievement Awards) categories are:
BEST GENZINE
BEST PERSONALZINE (PERSONAL FANZINE)
BEST FAN WRITER
BEST FAN ARTIST/CARTOONIST
BEST SINGLE ISSUE
BEST LETTER HACK (HARRY WARNER MEMORIAL AWARD)
BEST WEBSITE
BEST FANZINE COVER
If you need explanations of what that’s all about, it is an indication that you need to start reading Leah’s Clubhouse series and/or pay an extended weekend visit to the Tucker Hotel & Brickyard. (Or, I greatly hesitate to say, you might think twice before nominating. Go visit EFanzines and devote that nominating time to playing a little catch-up.)
Fanzines inspired me to learn all kinds of old-world skills like blue-penciling, stencil-cutting, slip-sheeting and how to organize a collating party. And they inspired me to look into publishing and gee whiz fellas! Look where THAT got me!
The FAAn Awards, along with the Harry Warner Memorial Lifetime Achievement Award (achievements in Fandom) will be presented during the banquet at Corflu XXX, the annual convention for fanzine fans. Corflu XXX will be held in Portland Oregon this year, the weekend of May 3rd-5th, 2013. Information about the convention, its history and the most recent progress report can be found at the Corflu site.
OK. For those uneducated but interested: a Genzine is a general fanzine, meaning that it usually covers a wide variety of topics and is written and/or edited by numerous individuals. Kinda like Amazing Stories (right now). A Personalzine is a fanzine that is usually the product of a single writer/editor (though it will often include contributed artwork and perhaps guest pieces). Fan Writers work for the HVAC industry. A Letter Hack is someone who writes numerous (and interesting) Letters Of Comment (LoCs) to numerous fanzines. (The best letter hacks are exemplified by Harry Warner Jr. who began publishing fanzines in the late 30s and wrote two highly acclaimed histories of fandom – All Our Yesterdays: An Informal History of Science Fiction Fandom in the Forties and A Wealth of Fable: An Informal History of Science Fiction Fandom in the 1950s. Warner is also the recipient of several Hugo Awards for Fan Writing and Non-fiction works.) A website is where spiders gather to discuss technique.
For completeness sake, a copy of the FAAn Ballot is right here on site.
~~~
Our Top Half-Dozen Posts From Last Week Were:
A Way To End Ebook Piracy?
The Top Ten Roleplaying Games of All Time
Pulling Back the Publishing Veil: Return Reserves, Buy-in, and Sell-through
Is Science Killing Science Fiction?
Crossroads: Romance – More Powerful than You Could Possibly Imagine
The Clubhouse: ConFusion at 40, Part 2
~~~
The plan to boycott Dragon*Con heats up a tad with the announcement that Phil & Kaja Foglio (Former Fan Artists, now producers of the acclaimed Agatha Heterodyne Girl Genius comic) will not be attending. Reports are that the Foglios do very well (sales-wise) at DC and therefore this announcement is not just a casual undertaking.
Why boycott Dragoncon? Some fans are not happy with the convention’s continued association with Ed Kramer, one of the conventions founders, a current shareholder and also currently incarcerated on various charges related to pedophilia. If you’d like to read up on this:
Why You Should Not Go To Dragoncon
Foglios Boycott Dragon*Con
Kramer Loses Extradition Appeal
Nancy A. Collins calls for DragonCon boycott over ties to co-founder
