Key Lime Pie and a Nebula

It was very good that TWONG -- known to people who are neither myself nor Kathleen Bartholomew, sister to the late, great Kage Baker, as THE WOMEN OF NELL GWYNN’S -- won its Nebula for best Novella last weekend at Nebulas Weekend in Cocoa Beach. The story wasn’t An All Time Favorite among the family, but it’s solid. And winning mattered a lot to me and Kathleen, who is old enough and experienced enough to know that an author wins an award when it’s time for her to win.

Fortunately, when three people had approached Kathleen and told her that, really, the nomination wasn’t the SF Literati equivalent of a belated pity fuck, she asked me what to think. I said they were telling the truth and she should believe them. So she did.

That is she did, until we opened the program at the banquet/awards event and saw that Kage’s bio piece had been omitted. She was livid. Truly. But like her sister, Kathleen is a lady, so I knew it wasn’t likely she’d lose it. I started to cry, but I was crying for her, so I followed her example and sucked it up.

But seated on Kathleen’s right was somebody who must be on the list for the coolest guy in fandom: Steven Silver. I’d never met him before and, actually, didn’t then, but he had a job at the banquet, and that job was troubleshooting. Nice man. And handsome, dressed in a dinner jacket with studs and links. The table kept track of how many minutes Steven was in his seat and how many he was out bagging troubles large and small; his longest stay at the table was seven minutes. Anyway, Steve apologized to Kate for the omission, and he meant it. Which was good; as he did not make the mistake, but, if he were OCD, he could have caught it. But he did think it was a shame. Also, he promised that the piece would appear somewhere else, though I couldn’t hear where.

Then we had Key lime pie.
Then we won!
And then we saw it was the most gorgeous Nebula ever!


--Linn Prentis