The last couple of weeks have been a bit overwhelming on the award front in the best possible way. First, the audiobook of A Rake of His Own was awarded an earphones award by Audiofile magazine for its excellent narration by Nicholas Boulton. They were, of course, completely correct to do so because Nicholas has a voice like smooth chocolate and I couldn’t imagine a better performance.
Nicholas Boulton’s narration of this audiobook–part fantasy, part mystery, part romance–is all pleasure. “
Two pointy trophies, in fact, because my story How to Marry A Winged King also won the SJV Award for Best Novelette! This story first appeared in the FaRoFeb anthology Once Upon A Forbidden Desire and is currently out of print, but I’m working on a slightly revised and expanded version of the original and hope to release it later this year.
Thank you SO much to everyone who nominated and / or voted for my work this year. I’m a bit stunned (but will also of course be referring to myself as ‘multi-award-winning-author AJ Lancaster’ from here on out, of course).
I cannot fully express what it means to me to have A Rake of His Own in particular receive accolades, but I am about to get emotional and navel-gazing here and try anyway. You’ve been warned.
I often joke about A Rake of His Own being a “great bonus novella!” because that was how it started life (in theory, at least; in hindsight, it was never going to be anything but a novel). I had wrapped up my series finale, but I had this dangling romantic plotline still hanging between two secondary characters, so I thought I’d write a wee novella to tie that loose thread up.
Of course, A Rake of His Own ended up being my second-longest book, coming in at around 120k words (only The King of Faerie, my Stariel series finale, is longer). I was proud of The King of Faerie, but it had been at times an exhausting book to write, with lots of plot threads to tie up and a weight of expectations on my shoulders to finish the series on a high note.
A Rake of His Own felt free of all such expectations. I hadn’t set out to write it as part of the series or as a novel at all. There were no larger series-arc promises left to keep. So I let myself just write in a way I hadn’t for a long time, without consideration for anyone else but me.
The result is somewhat sillier than the main quartet and a bit more raunchy. The lead character is riddled with anxiety and prone to internal monologuing and self-arguments, in contrast to my more decisive heroine of the earlier Stariel books. It was my first attempt at a murder mystery and also my first book with a gay lead.
Reader, it was so much fun to write.
But I was worried no one would like it. Putting a book out into the world is always an incredible act of vulnerability, but this one in particular made me feel even more exposed than usual, perhaps because Marius’s anxious nature is in many ways my own. What if it was too much? What if no one found my banter funny or liked my murder mystery? What if everyone thought Marius was annoying? What if readers freaked out because I used the word ‘cock’?
I was tempted to tone it down, to smooth away some of its weirder corners or make the sex scenes more euphemistic, even though that felt like a betrayal of these characters. In the past I have occasionally given in to this voice of fear, to an imagined critic, not substantially but in small ways (which is something I now regret and a lesson learned for me to be braver in future).
This time, I managed to hold firm against the clamour of voices in my head. However, I remained a pile of nerves at war with myself over it right up until I hit the publish button and couldn’t unmake the decision.
(Here I would like to thank all my writerly friends who patiently suffered with me during this time.)
All of which is to say is that A Rake of His Own sits very close to my heart. I am so incredibly proud of this book and prouder still that I didn’t chicken out of letting it be its full, utterly ridiculous, shamelessly sensual self. I have been humbled and delighted by its reception and the fact that (thankfully for my career) it has been enjoyed by many people other than me. Mostly people didn’t even freak out about the cocks.
The short version: Two events, a drink that was ON FIRE, and a trophy!
The long version:
This weekend was the annual Romance Writers of New Zealand conference for 2021. This was my second RWNZ conference (I wrote about my first time here), and because of our closed borders, was a little smaller than usual and featured solely local talent rather than the usual line up of international guests. Turns out NZ’s local talent is pretty fabulous though, because it was a fantastic weekend.
In their infinite scheduling wisdom, the national science fiction and fantasy organisation announced very recently that they had decided to schedule their awards on the exact same night as the romance writers. Thus, I was faced with something of a dilemma. I would have liked to attend the RWNZ dinner and celebrate the winners there, but as I was a finalist for the national speculative fiction awards (the Sir Julius Vogel Awards), I decided I should probably go to that one.
I remember being in the crowd at my first-ever SJV ceremony, years before I had admitted to myself I wanted to be a writer. I thought that the pointy SJV trophies were one of the coolest trophy designs I’d seen, but I didn’t even daydream about winning one. After all, to do that would mean having a book published, and I wasn’t a writer.
The world turned.
I kept writing whilst not being a writer (I am sometimes not very bright). I moved nearly 20,000 km away from home. I wrote a book, a practice novel I never intended to let see the light of day. I called it The Lord of Stariel. I admitted to myself I might quite like writing.
I came home. I started publishing books.
Last year was the first time I made the finalist list for the awards, and the flock of pointy trophies sitting up by the podium took on a whole new meaning.
Awards don’t matter, really, you tell yourself. And they don’t; they’re not what keeps you typing when every word feels like a battle. They aren’t a measure of any objective Truth or Worth; every award has its own biases in who gets one and who doesn’t. You have not failed by not winning one. Making the finalist list is an achievement in itself. Plus, after the awards ceremony you get to drink and chat with cool people, which is fun regardless of the outcome.
I told myself the same things this year (and they are true things, I want to emphasise). But, oh, winning does feel good too!
This is a long-winded way of announcing that I won the Sir Julius Vogel Award for Best New Talent this year! I can’t remember what I said when I went up to receive it – it’s all a joyful blur – though friends assure me it was totally coherent and professional. I do remember the last line, though, which was me giddily bursting out with: “Yay, a pointy trophy!” as the presenter handed it to me.
Totally professional.
Here is the celebratory drink that I had afterwards, at a nearby pirate-themed bar. The bartender set my drink on fire (deliberately)!
My celebratory drink!
This was my last year of eligibility for this award, and coming so close on the heels of releasing my series finale was a special moment. Congratulations to all the finalists – there was some amazing talent represented on the lists – and to the winners on the night. Thank you so much to everyone who supported me on this journey.
In 2013, a friend dragged me along to the national NZ science fiction and fantasy convention, which that year was held in Wellington. My only knowledge of conventions up to that point came from American TV shows and movies; these had not prepared me for the NZ experience, which is much, much smaller (think around 100 people).
One of the items on the programme was called “NZ in 2020: Yes or No?”. I asked the friend what that meant, and they explained that it referred to deciding whether to put in a bid to hold a big international SFF convention in New Zealand in 2020. The big international convention was called Worldcon – the World Science Fiction Convention, and this was the first I’d ever heard of it.
“It’s not going to happen though,” the friend added, rolling their eyes. Even I, fandom-newbie, didn’t need to ask the reason for their doubt. Worldcon requires more volunteers than there were people in total at our national convention.
I didn’t go to that programme item. Obviously, other people did, and beavered away in the background, plotting.
In 2018, when New Zealand actually won the bid to host, the general reaction in my fannish circles was a kind of bewildered excitement – mixed with panic. Did the people making these sorts of decision know just how small NZ fandom is? Did they know that Wellington, the city it was going to be held in, doesn’t actually have a convention centre?
“We’re going to need, like, every SFF fan in New Zealand and all their dogs to mobilise to make this happen,” I said to a friend at the time, only half-joking. “Or it’s going to be a total omnishambles.”
(I will not swear to the actual word ‘omnishambles’ being used, but the meaning is true)
“Yes,” they said, “I’ve already volunteered,” and promptly roped me into volunteering too.
As well as panic, there was a dawning awareness of the opportunity this could mean. This would be an incredibly rare opportunity for New Zealand. New Zealand SFF writers could sell our books in the dealer’s hall at the convention – international fans would be looking for local books, right? Editors and agents the likes of which we never see on our shores would be there. We’d get a chance to hear and maybe meet big-name SFF authors. New Zealand’s national SFF awards (the Sir Julius Vogel Awards) would get a way way higher profile than normal.
(Though this is a low bar, since the Sir Julius Vogel Awards normally have a profile that is – being generous – limited to perhaps a few hundred people. They are not well-known awards within New Zealand. I’ve written a bit more about the awards here)
Of course, other things happened in 2020.
I think we all expected the convention to be cancelled, once the extent of the pandemic’s impact became clear. When the committee announced CoNZealand would instead be going virtual, my feelings were mixed. On the one hand, a virtual convention was better than no convention, but on the other, this wasn’t going to be the same as the convention being physically held in Wellington.
(Also, more selfishly, this meant I would still have to do the volunteer work I’d signed up for.)
However, I’d already paid my membership fee, so what did I have to lose?
So, basically, this is a very long preamble to the main post of:
How did my Worldcon 2020 experience go?
I have now emerged out the other side of my very first Worldcon. It was, as I suspect many things are, a mixed bag (the Hugo ceremony being a notable lowlight), and I still feel a bit deer-blinking-in-the-headlights about it all.
However, in this post I’m choosing to focus on the personal highlights of my first Worldcon experience, for posterity:
The 2020 Sir Julius Vogel Awards
This was one of only two in-person Worldcon events. The ceremony was filmed four days before the recording aired as part of the wider CoNZealand programme, and we were all sworn to secrecy about the results.
The physical ceremony was a great night out. I was nominated for Best New Talent and Best Novel, though I wasn’t expecting to win either (and lo; I did not) – but being a finalist and getting to celebrate nerdy NZ SFF creations and my friends’ achievements on the night was great fun. There was also an open bar.
You can check out the full list of finalists and the winners here (Congratulations all!!! You’re a fabulous lot, and I was honoured to share a ballot and a lot of alcohol with you.). A particular shout-out to Melanie Harding-Shaw, who, most deservedly, won the award for Services to Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror.
Being on a panel(s!)
Prior to this, I’d been on a grand total of (1) panel at one of NZ’s aforementioned very small national conventions. I got the opportunity to be on (2) panels at Worldcon, and I was so nervous in the lead up to them that I just about had kittens. I’m not a real* author; I can’t be on real panels! EVERYONE WILL SEE THROUGH MY FACADE.
*My brain’s definition of ‘real’ in this context is entirely irrational and appears to be “real author = any author who is not me”.
These were my panels:
Imagining Fae in Aotearoa and elsewhere – with Hester J. Rook, Rem Wigmore, Jodi McAlister, and Peter Hassall.
Fairy Tale Contract Law – with Sascha Stronach and Kathleen Jennings
The first panel was made, er, interesting by the dawning realisation during the panel that one of my fellow panellists believed in fairies (and aliens, as it turned out). Gosh.
On the plus side, this panel is also the reason I discovered Jodi McAlister’s compulsively readable Valentineseries (evil fairies in small-town Australia!), which I have now read all of. I can also recommend Rem’s off-beat Wellington urban fantasy The Wind City, which I read a number of years ago.
I was a lot less nervous for my second panel on fairy contract law. It was pure fun, and has made me want to write an entire anthology of things that could go wrong with fairies bargaining for firstborn children.
(What if the fairy only partially fulfils the bargain; does that mean you have to organise some sort of shared-custody arrangement? What if you marry the fairy and your firstborn is thus their firstborn also? What if fairies aren’t very good at telling human ages, and collect the wrong child?)
I have not yet read Kathleen’s just-released novella Flyaway, but it sounds extremely pertinent to my interests! Sascha’s urban fantasy The Dawnhounds was the book that took out the 2020 SJV for Best Novel, and I can recommend it for truly lovely prose and vivid SE Asian-inspired mushroom worldbuilding.
In addition to my panels, I also did my very first reading! Which mostly made me appreciate just what a good job the narrator of my audiobook has done. My own rendition seemed more likely to convince people to avoid the book at all costs than anything else; Finty’s one makes even me want to keep listening to find out what happens!
The WSFS Business Meeting
I’m not joking; this really was a highlight.
Long story short: WsfSfkslj (can never remember the proper acronym: everyone just says “whiss-fiss”) is the official organisation that runs Worldcon, and its constitution says it has to have an in-person meeting at the con or it will cease to exist. There’s no allowance for proxy voting or virtual attendance apparently.
Obviously, this presented something of a problem, since the only people who would be able to attend an in-person business meeting in Wellington were, well, New Zealanders, which seemed a bit unfair to everyone else.
So what did we do? We agreed, unanimously, to do nothing! It was very fun, and went roughly like this:
Chair (glares at the assorted people they’ve bullied into attending in order to achieve quorum, including Yours Truly): Please consider, that when I ask for objections, it is not necessary to say anything.
Us: Are you going to use the gavel? Where did that gavel even come from?
Chair (looks down at gavel on the desk in front of them in surprise): No idea. Maybe Norman brought it? And yes, yes, I am going to use it. OK, here we go: Motion to defer [Item X] until next year. Any objections? (Chair glares at Us)
You can watch the entire event in all its administrative nonsense (minus the intermission) here.
Attending panels
One of the great things about the virtualness of CoNZealand was that the panels were recorded, which meant I was able to watch more than I could’ve otherwise (though it’s a pity they weren’t available for longer, as they were taken down before I watched all I wanted to). There were such a lot of panels, on an astonishing variety of stuff! Here’s just a tiny snapshot:
Infinite Entangled Futures: Indigenous Voices in Conversation
Terrain of the Heart: Landscapes that Influence Story
Constructed Language: From Elvish to Esperanto to Dothraki to Belter
These Old Shades: If Georgette Heyer Wrote a Ghost Story
Also, have a random quote from the Constructed Languages panel that made me laugh, mainly because coming up with fantasy names for stuff is something I really struggle with:
“There’s two poles, shall we say, of how to [include a made-up language in fiction]. One is, you write it down so that hopefully the maximum number of readers can look at it and will pronounce it the way that you intended it to be pronounced.
And then on the other pole there is this kind of – I don’t want to go so far as to call it ‘woo’ – but the idea that you stylise the words to evoke some sort of sense in the reader, so that they just look at it and think ‘Wow, that word really looks like something. I don’t know how it’s pronounced, but it sure looks like something!’” – David Peterson
The volunteers
I personally know only a tiny fraction of all those whose volunteering helped make Worldcon happen, but that tiny fraction was mighty! A particular shout-out to my fellow Wellingtonian writer Darusha Wehm, who good-naturedly nudged me into volunteering in the first place. Darusha and I have fairly different tastes in fiction, but they are an excellent writer (and person) despite their wrongheaded insistence that robots are better than fairies, and you can check out their books here.
Concluding thoughts
So, was CoNZealand as good as the in-person convention I was originally looking forward to? Well, it’s hard to be certain, since that event exists only in the imagination, but I think probably not. Was it a perfect event? Also no. But am I glad I went? Yes, very much so.
This is a special year for New Zealand’s speculative fiction awards, the Sir Julius Vogel (SJV) awards.
Never heard of the SJVs or Sir Julius Vogel? Fear not, I’m here to meet all your long-winded explanation needs!
I only became aware of the SJVs when I started getting into New Zealand’s publishing / writing scene, despite being a big fantasy reader for many years before that. Judging from the number of blank looks I get when I mention the awards to other New Zealanders who are readers but not writers, I don’t think this is at all an atypical experience.
OK, so what is an SJV award?
It’s a metallic, pointy trophy that looks like this:
The awards recognise achievements in NZ science fiction, fantasy, or horror. There are lots of categories, from short stories to best novel to services to fandom.
Why are they called Sir Julius Vogel Awards?
The awards are named after Sir Julius Vogel, an early prime minister of New Zealand. He is credited with writing New Zealand’s first speculative fiction novel Anno Domini 2000, or, Woman’s Destiny in 1889.
I haven’t read it for myself, but reviews suggest it’s unfortunately not a very good book. On the brighter side, the same reviews do think it predicted aspects of the future accurately, so that’s sort of cool?
Er…moving on.
What’s eligible for an award?
The main eligibility criteria is that the work is by a NZ citizen or resident. Oh, and that it’s published in the year before the award is given – so works published in 2019 are eligible for the 2020 awards.
(psst, THE PRINCE OF SECRETS was published in 2019).
The awards process is:
Anyone, anywhere in the world, can nominate works using this form.
The eligible works that receive the most nominations make it onto the shortlist of up to 5 finalists for each category.
Members of SFFANZ (Science Fiction and Fantasy Association of New Zealand) and/or the national science fiction convention for that year vote to decide the winner for each category.
Now, before I get to why this year is special, I have to talk about NZ’s national science fiction conventions.
NZ’s national science fiction conventions (natcons)
So, first off, we have national science fiction conventions. Every year. This may or may not be news to you, but it was something else I learnt only a few years ago. This is probably because NZ’s national conventions are pretty small (~150 people) and fan-run (i.e. don’t have a huge advertising budget).
Once you find them they are, however, very fun. The first one I went to was in 2013, which was…seven years ago. Huh. Time flies, eh?
To make the national conventions trickier to keep track of, their name changes every year depending on which city is hosting. For example, 2019’s national convention was Geysercon, held in Rotorua, known for, you guessed it, thermal mud.
But this year, 2020, New Zealand isn’t just having a normal national convention. We’re having an international one!
The World Science Fiction Convention 2020: CoNZealand
For the very first time, New Zealand is hosting the World Science Fiction Convention. This is an international, entirely volunteer-run convention that moves countries each year, and is where the Hugos are awarded.
Worldcon is going to double as New Zealand’s national science fiction convention this year.
Which means that all the Worldcon attendees will also get to vote for the SJVs this year.
Which basically means an order of magnitude more people than usual will looking at the finalists and voting.
Which means that making the shortlist this year would be really, really awesome. And it all depends on getting enough nominations.
This is where you come in. Please consider nominating my or any other NZ SFF works. The nomination web form is HERE.
My eligible works
The awards I am eligible for this year are:
Best Novel
The Prince of Secrets by AJ Lancaster
Publisher: Camberion Press (that’s just the name for my own indie imprint)
Contact details – aj@ajlancaster.com
Best New Talent
I’m technically eligible for this, since I’m still within my first four years as a professional.
The amazingly organised Melanie Harding-Shaw has also put together an unofficial spreadsheet of eligible works, and I recommend checking it out if you’re interested in what New Zealanders speculative fiction creatives have been putting out in the last year.
The awards are named after Sir Julius Vogel, an early prime minister of New Zealand. He is credited with writing New Zealand’s first speculative fiction novel Anno Domini 2000, or, Woman’s Destiny in 1889.
