Tag Archives: Angus Watson

Has it Really Been That Long Since I Posted?

I guess it has.  Time flies, whether you’re having fun or not.  The Fourth was laid back.  My wife took a few days off from work to visit her parents, and my son went with her.  Since I had classes starting while she was gone, I stayed here and had the house to myself, just me and the dogs.

Things have been hectic at work.  Classes started on Tuesday, and I still had seven teaching assistant slots to fill before labs started on Wednesday.  That number went up before it went down, but all the positions are filled and all the labs are covered.  I’ve got a good group of students in the course I’m teaching.  Summer students tend to be of higher quality than the general student population, and that seems to be particularly true about this bunch.  My class is every day from 8:00 to 9:50 in the morning, and they’ve done a great job of showing up on time and awake.  I wonder if the quiz I started class with on Wednesday had anything to do with it….

Age of IronAnyway, I’ve been a bit distracted, but I’m working on some things.  I’m reading Age of Iron by Angus Watson, which is up for a Gemmell Morningstar Award.  I’ve not gotten far, so I’m reserving any comments for the review.  I’m also reading for my next BAF post at Black Gate.  This is the Lin Carter edited anthology The Young Magicians.  Now that I’ve made it through the James Branch Cabell story, I should make better progress on it.

So unless something happens, I’m probably not going to have much to post about until next week.

It’s Time to Vote on the Awards Shortlist

The awards I’m talking about, of course, are the David Gemmell Awards.  As I’m sure you know, there are three.  The Legend Award for the best novel of the year.  The Morningstar Award for best fantasy debut novel.  And the Ravenheart Award for best fantasy book cover.

abercrombie-half-a-king-203x300I’ll post the short lists below after a few comments.  I’m going to read as many of these as I can, especially among the Morningstar candidates (with one exception, which I’m not going to touch).

The Legend Award is another matter.  The reason is that most of the Legend nominees are parts of series, and they’re not the first installment.  The exception is Joe Abercrombie’s Half a King, which I started reading last night.  I intend to read some of the others, but I may not make it by the deadline as I haven’t read the books that precede them.

And regarding the other award that’s generating some attention, I’ll try to read as many of the nominees for that one as possible.  I’ll read all of the short fiction nominees (that I haven’t already read) and will blog about some of them.  The same is true for Best Related Work.  Again, with one exception, I’ll try to get to as many of the novel nominees as I can, although as soon as my attention starts to drift, I’ll move on.

Here are the Gemmell nominees.  Voting closes on July 17. Continue reading