Since it has become a tenet of my writing practice that I never get nominated for awards, and given that I compensate for this fact psychologically by telling myself how unimportant awards are, how the best writers never got/get them, how the fact that I'm never nominated is a testament to a global conspiracy against me by the Knights Templar and the Masons (rather than, oooh I don't know, that my books are crap, perish the thought) -- bearing all this in mind, I've been surprised by how chuffed I am at getting a [1] 2005 British Fantasy award nomination for my short story 'Roads Were Burning'. Even the fact that I almost certainly won't win doesn't take the shine off it. [10 October update: And in the event I didn't get the award; ah well.]

In other news, I have had feedback that the cover-image posted below for the Palgrave Critical History of Science Fiction was bad, very bad, bad yes bad. One comment: 'it looks like a spontaneous aggregation of dalmations of something'. Now I can't deny that the image below is crap, something which reflects my inadequacies as a webmaster. Rather than erase it, I shall let it stand to keep me humble in the face of my failings; but it's probably worth posting better images. This, for instance, is how the book is being bigged-up [2] by the publishers Palgrave themselves. Nice, eh?

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