Awards

Loncon3 and Hugo Awards: A Brief Recap

Us

Hello everybody, Ana here. You might know that we just attended our first Worldcon as well as the Hugo Awards last night as Best Fanzine nominees. I just said goodbye to Thea and am at my desk at work trying to get through this sleepless haze and remember everything that happened as I attempt to “recap” our long Loncon3 weekend. Mostly, I will just post pictures. Because words? I do not have them.

Briefly:

Thea and I did a lot of work on Friday – from 8am to 8pm, we sat down and talked about everything relating to The Book Smugglers and its publishing branch, our upcoming short stories (announcement to come soon-ish) and other stuff. It was an extremely productive day and we got a lot done. A lot. We did have time to chillax a bit in the evening and had awesome cocktails at the restaurant at the top floor of the hotel we were staying at. Beautiful views of London and strawberry martinis FTW.

Strawberry Martinis

Thea does not approve of strawberry martinis

Saturday morning we made it from central London to the Excel, where the con took place. It is a gigantic convention centre and it accommodated the record-breaking number of attendees really well. We never felt it was over-crowded.

excel

The Excel

Our first step was to register and get our Hugo Award stuff. This was deemed The Coolest Thing Ever for about 24 hours until the actual awards happened and blew our minds away.

Hugo stuff

Hugo stuff

The programme at Loncon was amazing. There were several tracks, panels that ranged from the fun and silly to the academy and thought-provoking. A lot of diversity and inclusivity and great topics and panellists all around. I can’t even imagine the work that went into programming that many panels but kudos to everybody. Thea herself was in two panels (YA and the Big Screen + My Opinions, Let me Show You Them) and they seemed to have gone well, both rooms were packed.

With that said, we ended up not attending as many panels as we had hoped. We spent a lot of time just meeting and greeting the many, many friends we made over the years online – meeting everybody in person was just…wow. I can’t begin to describe it. Foz Meadows, Liz Bourke, Niall Harrison, Martin Lewis, Paul Weimer, Abigail Nussbaum, Aidan Moher, Aisha, Amal El-Mohtar, Sunil Patel, Estara, Lou and Has, D Franklin, Shaun Duke, Li, Justin Landon, Mahvesh Murad, Nic Clarke as well as all the lovely authors we met and oh gods, so-many-more-I-am-sure-I-am-forgetting someone: it was so freaking great meeting you all.

Us!

The epic get together of Team Awesome: Jared, Anne and Justin

And finally, the Hugo Awards. Surreal doesn’t begin to describe it. There was a pre-ceremony rehearsal in which all nominees got to hold the trophy and walked through the stage in case of victory. Then, a Hugo reception in which we got to mingle with other nominees and get an official photo taken per category. David Tennant was at this party. THIS IS NOT A DRILL, DAVID TENNANT WAS AT THIS PARTY. The best part though, was to see all the nerds losing their shit over this (including us, obvs).

David Tennant

The Doctor!

The Awards: the auditorium was massive and we were a pile of nerves walking into it – thankfully we were sitting with other bloggers and friends and we made the most out of it. There might have been a bottle of whisky being passed around. We were sitting right in front and made sure to be loud and cheerful. This was a vibrant awards ceremony (at least from our perspective – we felt like were just hanging out with friends) and as the winners were announced and the whole sad puppies ballot was CRUSHED and that bigoted asshole Vox Day lost, we celebrated like there was no tomorrow and we specially made sure to give standing ovations to John Chu and Ann Leckie.

Special kudos to Kameron Hurley’s Best Fan Writer speech (delivered by Kate Elliott) for being strongly worded and political and subversive and amazeballs. You can read it here if you missed it.

And OK, so we lost the Best Fanzine award to Aidan Moher of A Dribble of Ink. We are a bit gutted of course, but Aidan is such a cool guy and we have known him for ages and ages and we love A Dribble of Ink so we are cool with it. Mostly. Maybe.

Fanziners

Four losers and a winner

Then we had the party-after-the-Hugos aka the Losers Party where we got to drink our sorrow away mingle with other awesome folks. George RR Martin was handing over Hugo Loser ribbons (!!!) and we might have danced-whilst-answering-questions for Shaun Duke’s new video project and then proceeded to take pictures with all the awesome folk there.

George RR Martin and Thea

Thea and George RR Martin

Hugo Loser

Hugo Losers!

For a full list of winners and the Guardian’s write-up go here.

Aaaaand that’s a wrap. Our first Worldcon and our first Hugo Awards and it was brilliant. Here is to many more to come. Here, have some Deadpools in a Tardis:

Deadpools in a Tardis

10 Comments

  • Cat Faber
    August 18, 2014 at 11:57 am

    Congratulations on your well-deserved nomination; I am glad that it brought your book blogging to my attention. I’m glad you had a good time at the awards ceremony. And that little “Nominee rocket” is just the height of coolness, IMO. Did they give you one each, or are you going to have to take turns wearing it? (If I had earned one I would so totally wear it at every con I went to; just sayin’.)

  • Martin
    August 18, 2014 at 12:03 pm

    Lovely to meet you both (albeit briefly) and I really enjoyed following Team Awesome at the the ceremony. I also thought the YA on the Big Screen panel was great, really pleased with how that went. Wish I’d captured all the amazing sounding things that were referenced though. Oh, and I’m gutted I didn’t have a chance to watch City Of Bones beforehand. I watched it yesterday morning and thought it was great which didn’t sound like the prevailing opinion. It would have been another chance for everyone in the room to disagree with me!

  • Li
    August 18, 2014 at 12:05 pm

    Love the recap and pics – sorry you missed out on the Hugo, but getting Hugo Loser ribbons from GRRM must have (almost) made up for it! And you know, same room as DAVID TENNANT…

    And I loved finally getting to meet the both of you in person.

  • Ana
    August 18, 2014 at 12:27 pm

    @Cat Faber – Thank you! And yes we each got our own Hugo package so a fight to the death was averted thank gods.

    @Martin: it was SO lovely to meet you and we were both really pleased with the panel too. We were slightly worried about it because there wasn’t a lot of preparation going into it but the panel was entertaining and interesting. And haha you are the only person I have ever heard say that City of Bones is good. Oh man how I wish that was brought up in the panel.

    @ Li – FINALLY. Like we said, we owe so much to your blog and your recommendations, it was really great to finally meet you.

  • janicu
    August 18, 2014 at 2:09 pm

    I would have LOVED to see you guys win! Ah, there will be other opportunities I think. Sounds like an awesome time was had. It’s really cool that there’s a Loser’s party, so everyone has fun regardless of the outcome. 🙂

  • Kristen
    August 18, 2014 at 6:19 pm

    Sounds amazing, and I’m glad you had a good time! Like Janicu, I suspect there will be other chances for you to win a Hugo. 🙂

  • Nona
    August 19, 2014 at 1:36 pm

    Sorry you didn’t win, but it sounds like you had fun!

  • Estara Swanberg
    August 19, 2014 at 3:12 pm

    Back home in Germany with a real KEYBOARD at my command! YOU WAS ROBBED!!!!!! I don’t care how nice Mr. Moher was at the panel. It should have been you or Foz. Period.

    HOW AWESOME to have met you ^^ – I now have all kinds of awesome women signatures on my yogapad ^^ (you are just like you come across, only much more beautiful in person, ladies). I hope Andrea did get to Thea at the end, I was going to try and grab Ana and tell her Andrea was in the room, but because I came too late (too long a chat I think… with Michelle Sagara and her acolytes after her kaffeeklatsch) I didn’t sit next to her this time and when I got out of the room she had already vanished.

    Those dresses are gorgeous by the way.

  • Lou
    August 19, 2014 at 3:41 pm

    It was so great to meet you, Ana (Sorry I didn’t get to say hi, Thea. The My Opinions, Let me Show You Them panel was great). I apologise for being such an awkward dork in the bar. I was like, I’m talking to one half of the booksmugglers. Is this really happening?

    Gutted you guys didn’t win but it was so heartening to hear the big round of applause when your names were read out.

  • Peta
    August 22, 2014 at 7:16 am

    So glad that you had a great time at LonCon and I’m gutted I missed it. Such a shame you didn’t win (love the loser ribbon!) but there’s always next year… 🙂

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