The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Sarah Avery:

Thanks much! I didn't think the Sobol Award passed the smell test. Good to know my nose is tolerably well educated now--for which, again, thank you.

The thing that still mystifies me is Publishers Weekly's handling of the story. That they should be treating the Sobol Award as legitimate...I just don't know enough about the industry to make that make sense. Were they delicately refraining from connecting the dots, assuming their readers would connect the dots on their own? If it's newsworthy that the award is out there in the first place, surely it should be newsworthy that the award is bogus.

Any thoughts about the Sobol Award? The first time I saw an article about it, it set off all my scam alarms, but the second article I saw about it was at the Publishers Weekly website. If they do what they say they'll do, money will flow toward the author. The non-cash part of the prize is representation, not publication. I don't know much about contracts between agents and authors, but the percentages in the agreement that the writers in the final round have to sign look like they're in line with the customary cut.

The thing that still sets off my alarms is their zeal to help unpublished writers. Lots of people mean it when they say they want to help unpublished writers, but the sincere ones generally don't wave money around.

My favorite literary fantasy finds this year were Hope Mirrlees's Lud-in-the-Mist (yeah, it's from 1926, but I only discovered it once Cold Spring brought it back out), and Angelica Gorodischer's Kalpa Imperial.

I'll be doing NaNoWriMo, too. I'm hoping the crazy pace will make it easier for me to write a short book this time.

Probably I am not the first to notice this, but I just saw your blacks-loot-but-whites-find-wtf gotcha appropriated by the comedian Carlos Mencia. An ad for his show, The Mind of Mencia ran during The Daily Show, and there Mencia was with those now-familiar wire service photos and those same captions, objecting as all of us objected. We can hope the T&A fans who tune in for reruns of the Pamela Anderson roast are also seeing this same ad.

The DAR's nothing to long for. It's pretty embarrassing, all around.

My grandmother withrdrew her membership from the DAR when they banned Marian Anderson from performing at Constitution Hall because she was black.

My great-grandmother left the DAR when they denounced Earth Day as a Communist plot.

I'm descended from lots of New Englanders with odd given names like Philander, Breedlove, and Consider. Also, if the family records are to be believed, some privateers, William the Conqueror's tax law expert, and Pope Landus. (The preceding sentence was a lot more entertaining before I added the serial comma.) I'd be prouder of the abolitionist ancestors if they hadn't paid their way out of serving in the Civil War once they'd fomented it.

Up the other line, it's mostly lumberjacks and Hessian deserters. The saner side of the family didn't preserve much more than a few phrases of German.

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