... Mary Soon Lee sells to the Year's Best! ...
January 17, 1999
9:35 a.m.
I am so pleased to be able to congratulate Mary Soon Lee for her wonderful success with David Hartwell's "Year's Best" anthology. She's a wonderful writer, and the selection is well-deserved.   Lisa and I watched Titanic again yesterday. Brigid has been dying to see it, and we've been telling her she can't watch it until she grows a little older and more mature. But we watched it again - all three plus hours - to ensure we're judging fairly. Brigid will not be watching Leonardo and Kate in this one for a couple more years. It's a grand movie, of course, huge in scope and quite dramatic in content. Some of its effects and some of it's most heartwrenching moments can steal your breath. But let's face it, the storyline is too long, and it's bogged down with a lot of false suspense it could have done without. So, did it deseve the Academy Award it won? Yes, it's that time of year again. I've got both my Hugo and my preliminary Nebula ballots sitting on my desk. I don't mind telling you that I think awards are quite cool. I know there are a lot of politics associated with awards, and that the process for selecting any subjective "best" of anything is going to be flawed. Personally, for example, I can't see Titanic as the best film of any year. Still I love awards. I love their aura. I love the concept. People telling other people that they've done good is a really powerful thing. There are those, of course, who don't see it my way. They say that awards are merely popularity contests where the folks with the most friends win. I can see their perspective. I usually end up voting for people I know, and I can see why it would fuel people with that attitude. It all seems so unfair from that perspective. That's the problem with subjectivity - there's no way it can be fair. It's unfair even in a perfect world where everyone votes their absolute favorite because there's no way for me to tell you what I'm going to like until I see it, you know?. But we don't live in a theoretically perfect world where people vote their absolute conscience all the time. Instead we live in a world of human beings, some of which work their tail off every morning or every evening, putting words on a page, struggling to understand characters and plots. Some of these people peek a little into their hearts and souls with each word, each phrase. Writers are personal people. We take everything personally, whether we admit it or not. Writers are protective of their work because in a very real sense these stories are pieces of ourselves that we let free. And writers are jealous, and greedy, and envious, and selfish and petty and all the other things that human beings are at their worst. And an award can do wonders for the very thing most of us want - that ellusive "career" in the field. So I see how people can take awards, and the way people vote for them so seriously. Awards are serious things. I'm human, like all the rest of us writers, but despite all my flaws, I'll stand by my statement that when it comes to this time of year, I always vote for my favorite stories. It just so happens that most of them are written by people I know. Why is this, eh? The answer is fairly obvious. I cannot read everything written, and when pressed for time, I'll generally read something written by an acquaintence before I'll read something by someone I don't know. And in a similar vein as I'm not going to judge whether a movie is suitable for Brigid until I've really seen it, I'm not going to vote for something that I haven't read. But, you see, I now know a pretty fair chunk of the SF writing community, and there are only so many slots on the ballots. So if I'm going to purposely load my ballot with folks I know, how am I going to pare that list down? I'll tell you what I'm going to do - i'm going to vote for the best danged stories on the ballot. And when those folks that I don't vote for ask me what they should have done to get my vote, what should I tell them? There's no way I can answer that question. Subjectivity, by definition, is not fair. But I rejoice in this lack of fairness - it is somehow linked to the very differences that allow us to see the world uniquely, somehow tied to the essence of ourselves that makes it possible for us to write. How can I rail against that? The danger with awards, of course, is that the folks that don't win can take it as a group telling them that they're dogmeat. Yeah, I'm susceptable to that, too. My only story in Marion zimmer Bradley's FANTASY Magazine won third place in their Caulron award process, and I was pleased at first - then turned to my ugly side and wondered why I wasn't first. But as soon as I start to think like that, I do the best I can to raise myself out of the muck and shake myself. It's that self-awareness thing again, you know? I know myself. I enjoy the work. I love the rush of getting a story right. I like meeting the people inside my tales. I learned something from Sara, the woman I put on Europa, and also from the man who fell for Josie Andrew, and Elron of Keth, even Vinnie Caladina (the hit-man). I'm pleased for my fellow writers when things go well with them, and I do my best to avoid bitterness that I've seen pull at other writers. And if I ever win a major award, I'll be pleased as punch - you can take that to the bank. But if I never do, it won't really matter to me. Because I believe, in the end, the only award that matters is the work. Have a great day.  Daily Persistence is © Ron Collins |
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