Bill Gibson writes about U2’s Vertigo tour over at Wired.

As with any other number of bloggers, I saw this over at Neil’s Journal, and thought it was worth repeating. If you’ve ever wanted to get your name, or the name of someone you love, into a book, here is your best chance ever. A bunch of terrific writers over at eBay are auctioning the right to have your name, or choice of name, appear in their next book. All monies go to a suitably worthy US-based cause, and it’s a lot of fun. For example, you can be in Stephen King’s next novel, though he does say that the “Character can be male or female, but a buyer who wants to die must in this case be female.” Hmmm. It’d be fun to be in a Neil Gaiman book or a Kelly Link story. Don’t know if I real want to have my brain fried by a fictional cell phone, but it’s cool. Go for it.

It’s not a question I’ve ever asked myself, and I doubt it would ever have occurred to me, had I not been surfing the Interaction website and happened to look at the Interaction Complete Nomination Statistics, which were quite interesting.

Of the 4,000 or so Interaction members (the number I’ve heard mentioned), 546 nominated to vote and 684 actually voted. It took 33 nominations to make the novel ballot, 29 to make the novella ballot, 19 to make the novelette ballot, and just 18 to make the short story ballot. Interestingly, given all of the discussion of the editor category, it took more nominations (71!) to make the final ballot for editor than for any other category in the awards. It is something people feel passionately about, obviously.

I don’t know how typical these figures are, but it obviously it can’t be that hard to get a Hugo nomination if all you need is 18 nominations. I don’t suggest or condone vote stacking, but you can see what leads to it. The belief that it isn’t that hard to get a result. Interesting.

Edit 10/8/05: Check out the comments for this, as Cheryl makes some good points. The one thing I’d hope people would carry away from this post is that people who care about the awards should nominate and vote. The process is only effective and meaningful if it’s widely used.

Things around the web. Jeff VanderMeer forces Kelly link to walk the plank, to delightful result, while John Clute looks at the watch within the living that is Jeffrey Ford’s new novel and finds that The Girl in the Glass is magic.

So, I was reading Charlie’s journal, and he asked the question: “When was the last time that a work of Lovecraftiana won a Hugo award?” As it turned out, it had been Neil Gaiman the year previously for “A Study in Emerald”. Briefly I though, time for a Lovecraftiana anthology. I could… And then I stopped. I took a deep breath. I decided to leave such efforts for those who have a deep love of Lovecraftiana. It was good.