A Comment I Made at Brad T's Place

[daveon]

I said this to somebody at Brad T's Blog and I want to save it because I think it sums my thoughts up well.

Plus it illustrates a big issue at hand.  The Nominations ARE NOT THE VOTE.

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“So your argument is”

No.

” “I couldn’t be bothered to vote, but now I’m all butthurt because somebody else did, and they voted for stuff that I didn’t like.””

Couple of things. Nominating and Voting are two different things – we are agreed there? I’m ‘butthurt’ that the nominating process has been stuffed up which means that the things I get to vote for are stuffed up. To whit: Book 2 of a trilogy, a Fantasy, a MilSF novel that Amazon tells me is like something I didn’t like, Book 1 in a new series following on from another series, and Book 15 in an ongoing series I stopped reading around Book 2 or 3. Obviously what we think is a good set of nominees differs there.

In years where I hadn’t read enough to nominate, you know real life does get in the way even of reading some years, the items on the ballot always, generally met my personal criteria as set out above i.e. Original Stuff not a series etc… in fact, in the last decade, I have had something like a 50% ‘success’ rate in seeing things I nominate or liked going on the ballot.

However, in the vote… that’s a different thing entirely. Looking at 7 years I’ve voted over the last decade I have voted for exactly 1 winner.

Until now, that’s hasn’t actually bothered me, much. Apparently other people get very ‘butthurt’ about not getting their way in the nominations and the vote. A few years ago it was the Book Bloggers wanting diversity and literary merit in the Hugos and now its the Puppies wanting something else.