A few years back, Stephen King put out a book called Joyland. As it turns out, another writer I know, Emily Schultz, also had a novel called Joyland. When King published his book, people started buying her book, thinking it was the same one. Hilarity ensued in Amazon reviews. Now Emily has created a blog chronicling how she’s spending the Stephen King money. I talked to her about the whole bizarre experience over at The Province.

Then horror writer Stephen King published a novel called Joyland, and Schultz’s life went a little crazy. Readers started buying her Joyland novel, thinking it was King’s new book. Joyland’s publisher, ECW, contacted Schultz to let her know her book had suddenly sold 200 copies. “It was exciting for about 60 seconds,” Schultz says, “then I realized, uh-oh, there will probably be some angry readers out there! Sure enough, the one-star reviews started piling up on Amazon.”

So I wrote a quick overview of the Hugo Awards controversy this year for The Province. It’s really the sort of crazy situation that would need a novel to adequately cover, but who has time for novels these days?

The catalyst for the conflict was the announcement of the Hugo shortlists, which included a couple of expected nominees — Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice and Charles Stross’s Neptune’s Brood for best novel — but also a number of highly controversial and perhaps unexpected selections (or perhaps not, depending on who you talk to). Larry Correia made the best novel list for his book Warbound, Book III of the Grimnoir Chronicles, as did Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson for the entire Wheel of Time fantasy series. That’s right, an entire series stretching back many years is nominated for best novel of the year. It’s one of those technicality things. To top things off, controversial writer Vox Day was nominated in the best novelette category, enraging many in the sci-fi community who have battled with him online.

I’ve been sick for, oh, a month or so now thanks to the latest bug my son brought home for preschool. I think I’m almost over it, though, which means it’s time for him to bring a new bug home.

At least I’ve managed to do some writing, in between surfing various blogs detailing the Hugo Awards brouhaha. It’s like a train wreck with new trains coming along and crashing into it every few minutes. I keep thinking I should write a newspaper piece about it but I don’t even know where to start.

Anyways. The writing. I’ve finished a new Azrael story, tentatively titled “The Angel Azrael Is Sacrificed to the Snake God.” I wrote it with an Azrael collection in mind, and I think I’ve got about 30,000 words of Azrael stories now, which is about half a book for me. (Most of my books start out around 60,000 words and then grow to 70,000 or 80,000 in the editing process.) So that’s something.

All right, now I’m going to curl up with some Neo-Citran and watch some more trains crash.

I just became a supporter of Vancouver writer Siliva Morena-Garcia on Patreon. I discovered Patreon recently and it’s pretty cool. It kind of works like Kickstarter, in that you pledge money to your favourite content creators. Rather than a one-time payment, though, you generally pledge a monthly payment to help your fave artist do their thing (although I think one-time payments are an option in certain cases). In return, you get access to the creator’s personal Patreon feed and various rewards. Here’s a video explaining how it works:

Here’s Silvia’s Patreon page. Check it out and pledge if you like what you see. Or check out some other creators using Patreon, like those crazy Postmodern Jukebox videos you’ve been seeing in your feeds or the Hijinks Ensue comics. Or, you know, make your own Patreon page and throw out a tip dish.

The nominees for the 2014 Hugo Awards have been announced, and I’m delighted to see Beneath Ceaseless Skies up for Best SemiProZine (Semiprozine? SemiproZine?). I love BCS, and not just because a few of my Angel Azrael gunslinger stories have appeared there. It’s a fine, fine magazine that champions literary fantasy, sic-fi and all sorts of speculative fiction (or just good writing, if you’re not concerned about categories). Or, as the BCS site puts it, “adventure fantasy plots in vivid secondary worlds, but written with a literary flair.” It’s the sort of magazine I think we need more of.

Of course, the Hugos being the Hugos, there is controversy about the list of nominees. I don’t really have anything to say about it myself — it’s the way of awards, after all — but if you’re interested in following the discussion, you can read more at John Scalzi’s Whatever or Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter Nation to get the basic idea of what’s going on and see who’s on what side, etc.

Although, really, your time would be better spent reading Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

I woke up this morning to find my feeds filled with the news that CanLit icon Alistair MacLeod had died. I didn’t really know the man myself — I’d only met him once in passing at a writers fest years ago — but I had taught some of his stories in university back in my grad school days. They were always the works that my students actually found themselves caring about, almost against their will (survey courses generally having a narcotic effect on undergrads). He was a writer who made people care, as is evident in the number of tributes being written about him even as I write this. He made a difference, and that is all we can ask of life.

Mark Medley has written a good summary of MacLeod’s life and legacy at the National Post, and Steven Galloway has penned a personal piece of his encounters with MacLeod for the Globe. Good reads all around.