Chronos Awards Ballot Announced

[paulhaines]

I'm pleased that my collection Slice Of Life has been shortlisted for the Chronos Awards for this year.

And somehow the Sean McMullen fan club has knocked my "Wives" novella out of contention for the short fiction slot! What? How could this be? My heart lies broken...

I'm surprised how thin the categories are. I had hoped a lot of people would have

Comments

[paulhaines]

Well, you're up for some tough competition in both of your categories. Bruce is almost guaranteed in the Fan Writer, and the No Award may just pip you in the Best Achievement. (Though you'd fucking hope not!)

I was expecting to see Chuck McKenzie up there for Fan Writer too, and was thinking Chris Green and your good self would also be in the short fiction.

You going to the con? I'm hoping to - my wife is away in Sydney seeing George Michael for that weekend, so I'm planning on getting my bro and sis to come look after my daughter while I sneak out to geek out.

[dalekboy]

Not a huge amount on nominations this year, and bugger all in the fan categories, which is particularly ironic (or annoying) given we had complaints last year that there weren't enough fan categories.

Any time there are multiple eligible nominations for a single person in a category, or a single eligible nomination and no others, we contact the person in question and ask if they want to remove one (or more) of the multiple nominated works, or in the case of the single nomination, are happy for that single work to stand against the dreaded No Award.

Hopefully when the awards happen again in 2011, people will have decided that they are here to stay, and so get more involved. Also that year Continuum 7 will be later in the year, so we're planning to have a full two month nomination period. Voting period will probably only be one month though.

I was disappointed that Chuck didn't have enough nominations, either. But I was very pleased to see Felicity up twice.

[paulhaines]

Here's hoping they gather momentum. Be nice to see them gather enough gravitas to become something as involved as the Tin Ducks are over in WA.

And I remember that fan category issue too. (I was sitting on the writer side of the fence thinking that there weren't many options there, but if the fans are to drive this thing, then so be it...)

[threemonkeys]

For comparison purposes, the Sir Julius Vogel awards took about 5 years to build up serious amounts of competition in the pro categories. So it does take time for awareness to build up. The SJVs still have bugger all in the fan categories.

[dalekboy]

We'll get there, these things take time.

Continuum was always about long-term planning to make sure that (a) there was at least one fan-run con in Victoria every year, and (b) it would essentially act as a training ground so we had more experienced con-runners when things like Natcons and Worldcon came around. As it stands, the chairs for C7 and C8 already exist, so we're running through to at least 2012.

And after that the world ends apparently :)

The awards are also run separately to the cons, so even if there isn't a Continuum one year in the future, the Chronos Awards will still be able to go ahead.