To the eighteen other Zeppelin authors: I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings by singling out Ben’s story in my Hugo post last week. This doesn’t mean that I didn’t love your story or that I didn’t think it was deserving of an award.

Apropos of that, in a discussion on editorial favoritism, award recommendations, and courtesy over at Jenn’s journal, the inestimable Mr. Hartman writes:

In some sense there’s no reason that an editor’s list of their favorite stories should be any more important than a reviewer’s, or your best friend’s, or your own.

So why is it, do you (y’all) think?

The whole awards business has me a little bit at a loss.

On the one hand, it’s easy to see how it could go wrong (and, presumably, has been going wrong).

On the other hand, I’m more likely to nominate and/or vote for stories that I’ve read than stories that I haven’t; of the writers who haven’t already had my attention for years, I’m more likely to read stories by people I know than those by people I don’t; and of stories by people I know, I’m most likely to read the ones they’re particularly fond of, or the ones that’ve already gotten some attention. (If other people think the same way, that probably creates some statistically significant patterns in, for instance, Nebula nominations.)

So, as far as promoting my own stuff goes — since the idea of self-promotion makes me uncomfortable and the idea of getting an undeserved award is distinctly unattractive — I generally limit myself to “By the way, in case you missed it, I wrote this, and you might want to read it if you haven’t.”

But then the other kind of story I’m more likely to read (and so more likely to nominate, vote for, etc.) is one where everyone I know is slapping me with it and saying “READ THIS!” I don’t have any trouble doing that in person, and I suppose I don’t even really have trouble, say, mentioning something here when I’ve just read it.

I did find myself very uncomfortable, though, when I made that Hugo post, with posting my own “year’s best” list. Partly because it would expose how shallow and scattered my reading is these days, I admit, but mostly because it seemed like it would be cruel to all the people I know who did perfectly good work that either I didn’t read or wasn’t to my taste.

Maybe the discomfort with editors listing their favorite stories is related. If nothing else, if I edited something, I shouldn’t have either of those excuses not to reccommend it.