In case you want to think about nominating any for the Hugo, say. These are all 2012 short stories. All short forms, so novellas are included.
Obviously they are going to follow one person’s taste: these are the stories Rachel Swirsky liked best this year. She says she read over 500 short stories this year! I can’t even imagine!
Even if my taste turns out not to run parallel with Rachel Swirsky’s, this is still a very useful list for me, considering that without it I would neither read nor nominate any short-form fiction at all. And hey! There actually is still time to nominate!
Incidentally, yes, I have revised the first four chapters of my manuscript this weekend. Mostly today. The rain was helpful. I’m about 1/5 done with this first pass. So I think I’m on target to finish this revision this month. Yay!
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Just this past weekend I buckled down to read a bunch of short stories from last year, figuring that’s the best value-added I can manage as a Hugo nominator — if I have time, I’ll look at some novelettes, too. But based on last year’s ballot, I decided novellas can take care of themselves (and novels, to a lesser extent; but I bet more people focus on them).
By the end of the month I’ll make recommendations, and let you and the Schiffers know about them in an effort toward force multiplication.
The takeaway so far, by the way, is that SF shorts trend heavily towards bleakness and despair. (Fantasy less so, but a fantasy will have to be significantly better before I’d nominate it for an SF award.) There hasn’t been much overlap with Swirsky’s list, but I read “Mantis Wives” and was niether impressed nor pleased, so I’m pretty sure our tastes don’t overlap much either.
Well, re “Mantis Wives” — I vividly remember “Ponies” by the same author, and I sure hated that one. It definitely had the bleakness and despair thing down cold. Plus, I happen to really like praying mantises, which are one of my favorite arthropods EVER, so that may color my reaction.
I’ll look forward to your recommendations!