What's Cooler Than Cool? Losing Like a Big Loser. (Patreon)

Greetings, darlings. It is September, which means it has been almost an entire year since I made a human, which is pure madness and time is both stupid and fake. It also means the crowds on the island will slightly thin as they realize there’s like six weeks left till the pretty leaf time so they might as well go back to their other homes and work or something. I feel like I missed the whole summer, either cooped up working, shaping said human into something other than a particularly loud potato, or traveling to literally the two least summery places in Europe, St. Petersburg and Dublin. 

Whilst occasionally shivering in Dublin, I also managed to find time in my busy schedule to lose a Hugo. I KNOW! It was really tough, but I squeezed it in somehow. So now that I’m home and no one is asking me if I think I have a chance every five minutes and the gin and tonics are once again egregiously terrible and I can safely say I only slightly scratched two Johns (Picacio and Scalzi) with my Eurovision-homage crown, I have some thoughts about awards and ego and coolness, but mainly about losing.

Because you may or may not realize it, but I lose a lot.

Oh, I’ve won, too, don’t get me wrong. Since they decided to allow the Andre Norton to be counted as a Real Life Big Girl Nebula, I’ve technically won like 70% of the awards in my genre. (And 0 in middle grade.) 

But. 

But I’ve only won Hugos for podcasting as part of a group (and both years I lost multiple other categories for my own work), and the Norton didn’t count as a Nebula til a hot minute ago, and literally I don’t think the World Fantasy Award even knows I am still alive. And I have lost…a comical amount of Hugos, Nebulas, WFAs, Locuses, and pretty much everything else. Space Opera was my ninth Hugo nomination and my seventh loss. I don’t actually know how many times I’ve lost the Nebula or the Locus or others, I think it’s four or five for World Fantasy—which I am convinced I’ll never even be nominated for again, let alone win. And Space Opera came last in the voting, both in nominations and votes, scoring no different than my last Best Novel nomination, which was ten whole years and at least two lifetimes ago.

Cue confetti.

A lot of this sounds a bit like posh whining. I’m terribly lucky to have been nominated or won anything ever. But I still sit there in my dress under the lights and hope and hope and then the waveform collapses and I’ve lost again and there is such an expectation that one walks out smiling and gracious and happy to lose. Fucking hell man, yeah, it’s an honor to be nominated, but everyone wants to win. I have all the zen in the world about it, except for the five or ten minutes right before and after I lose. And it’s delicate to discuss, because no one wants to be a poor loser, and no one wants to be seen as wanting it too badly, and yet for some of us, these awards can make our whole careers. So we shred our little hearts over it in private. 

And the funniest thing is—most people don’t even know how much I lose! Shit, I don’t even write speeches anymore. I was told by multiple people in Dublin: oh of course you made the ballot, you always get nominated. My last nomination was five damn years ago. People think I’ve won just about everything ever, they thing I have graduate degrees, that I’m on every ballot every year, they think I’m tall…honestly I should probably just stop correcting people. I’d be a WAY cooler person if I was everything they imagine I am. 

We’re just people. People always want to be told they’ve done well. I am 1000% fine with Space Opera losing. I was thrilled to be part of the conversation. I didn’t expect to win and I didn’t. But I can’t help but sit in that auditorium and think about all the other times I’ve sat there, as a spectator, as a nominee, as a winner, as a loser. I can’t help but connect them like links in a necklace, different cities, different books, different +1s, different dresses, different hors d’oeuvres, different cheap wine in plastic glasses. Same me. Same heart in the same throat. Worldcon is the flipbook of my life. Year by year by year. Flip, flip, flip.

But before we talk about losing, let’s talk about awards. Because we all like to pretend the Work is what matters and awards are frippery, but we still dream about it. The stage and the music and the applause and what we’ll wear and what we’ll say. Writing is a terribly lonely profession, full of old food wrappers and unbrushed hair and skipped social events and crippling, near-immolating self-doubt. We have raised self-doubt to an art form that should qualify for its own award. The Hugo Award for Hating Yourself goes to… It is nice, sometimes, in whatever lonely goddamned gross-ass room one has stunk up in service to their book, to imagine that one day someone will hand you something shiny and tell you you did good, and that you will feel, in that moment, something very like a temporary belief in yourself and lack of self-loathing. And when you’re just starting out, even being nominated seems like an amazing dream, something that would make everything worthwhile, that would mean you’d made it. 

I know there are people who win all the time, who got nominated right away, who sail through their careers bedecked in the jewels of affirmation. 

But let’s face it, that’s not most of us.

First of all, awards themselves. There are almost entirely out of your control. You could write the greatest story mankind has ever known, a story that would bring tears to the eye of a rock or even a Republican, a story to salvage the soul of humanity from the depths, water all our crops, freshen our complexions, redeem all our past unhappy love affairs, stop Brexit, stablize the markets, initiate contact with another benevolent species and convince them of our worth, and even make your father love you again, and still not see it on that Hugo ballot. It’s very, very possible. Easy, even. (Frankly, I was more surprised by one of the other losses than my own.) Maybe it wasn’t published in a venue that got enough eyeballs of the kind that were likely to vote. Maybe everyone was just really into yakpunk that year and you wrote a llamapunk story. Maybe it came out really close to the end or the beginning of the year, and not enough people had read it or too many had forgotten it. Maybe that controversial llama monologue (llamalogue) about how all yak sexuality is a form of colonial expansion made people feel all defensive. Maybe that year a bunch of Nazis decided to hijack the awards. Maybe there were just five or six other stories that did all of the above and also refroze the ice caps. Or didn’t do any of that but just had more yaks and were written by people with more name recognition. Or you hadn’t been to Worldcon in several years to build up an audience among the people who vote. Or you said Kylo Ren sucks on Twitter so everyone was mad at you. Or the way you write was cool before and will be cool again but isn’t cool right now. Or because there is no justice in literature.

But it was probably the yaks’ fault.You can blame the yaks.You have my permission.

All you can do is write that amazing story. Whether or not it gets awards is up to the dictates of fate and fashion and the popularity contest that is social media. My first award was the Tiptree, and it pretty much literally fell out of the fucking sky. I wasn’t anybody. The book hadn’t been some kind of crazy bestseller or buzz factory. It was an email. Whose subject heading was simply Concerning the Tiptree Award. I fully assumed it was a fundraising email. Like hey Cat can you make brownies for the Tiptree bake sale. Instead, it said I had won. I blacked out. (I had the same reaction when I got the email for my first Hugo nomination. And in retrospect, it was fully insane that Palimpsest was nominated in 2009. No one could have predicted it and I don’t even think I really deserved it. But certainly nothing like it had been on the ballot before, and I was going to hear all about that for the next five months.) I called my boyfriend sobbing uncontrollably on the phone. He thought someone had died.

But I didn’t campaign for that. I didn’t set out to do it. You can’t. It just happens to you, like lightning or deadlines or a 7 am alarm clock. And what’s more, if The Orphan’s Tales was published today, I guarantee you it does not win that award. You have to do a lot more than retell a bunch of fairy tales with women at their centers to win the Tiptree these days. The yaks, they are very woke. So even there, my first award, had as much with the time it was published and the trends amongst which it landed as any quality of the work.

The first time I lost a major award was also The Orphan’s Tales. World Fantasy. Saratoga Springs, I think. It gets blurry sometimes. What I do remember is that every single person who came up to me after the ceremony (I lost to Gene Wolfe, no shame in that) shook my hand and said the same thing to me: well, you’re young. I guess? Cool? You’re not going to die soon probably so you’ll win at some point? I can’t even explain why it put me off so much, just to be told I’m young over and over. Maybe they meant I lost because I was young and needed to pay my dues? Maybe my age shouldn’t have been discussed quite so often in relation to my work? I WAS A SENSITIVE LITTLE BABY SQUIRREL AND ALL I WANTED WAS FOR MY PRECIOUS WALNUTS TO BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY.

You can only be so proud of any given award. Only some of it is even about you at all.

And you can only be so sad about losing one.

In a very real sense, writing professionally, by which I mean, writing, once you are past that seemingly-insurmountable hill of publication, is about repeated, tedious, often punishing but at least interestingly varied, loss. That sounds fucking GRIM, I know. And the premium ham I am about to fry up in the next paragraph is gonna be WORSE. Of course, it’s not all loss. There’s wins and joys and beauty and luck and fun and precious, beautiful goodnesses in this stupid, gorgeous job. But no one needs to be told writing is a good gig. If they did, a thousand MFA programs would disapper in a puff of money. That year I lost for Palimpsest? I went to Worldcon in Melbourne, Australia, knowing I would lose, happy to lose, and a cute boy came and sat in the front row of my reading and changed the course of my life, and that was exactly nine years ago today, nine years between a reading and the little baby half-Australian boy asleep upstairs. It’s not even the only time losing a Hugo has brought a pretty ace consolation prize in its backpack. So I’m not entirely being Pollyanna’s goth-ass angry punk pierced tattooed MMA fighter dark-side sister here. Just a little. Which is pretty on brand for me, I guess.

Because gods, there is loss. Even for the most successful of us. Even for the golden children for whom it all just seems to happen. You write and get rejected. You write and people don’t care about the book that took five years and your whole gross dripping sloppy heart to write but they just love that dumb work-for-hire gig you did for the paycheck. You write and you lose confidence, over and over, a hundred times a novel, maybe more, even if you’re Martin or Rothfuss or King. You lose awards. You lose faith. You live in fear you’ll lose whatever you had in the last book that moved copies, that people actually liked and didn’t just blow a shit all over on Goodreads, or worse, totally ignore. You live in fear that one flop could mean you lose the life you built out of books, a life you love despite everything. Maybe you lose mentors, role models, who turned out to be less benevolent than you hoped. You lose the friends who don’t understand why you vanish for a month or two multiple times a year. You lose kind of a lot of friends who aren’t also writers. And maybe, sometimes, you lose a spouse. Because you disappeared into a book for half a year, and then you toured, and then you came home and thought everything would be the same, but it never could be. You lose the ability to read for pure pleasure, without thinking about structure or the market or why this works and that doesn’t. You lose the right to freely bitch and whine about books and movies and tv and sometimes even politics on social media, because it might cost you a job or fans. Sometimes, you lose yourself. You definitely lose that innocent kid who thought that if she could just publish one book, ever, her life would be complete and choirs of cool punk rock angels would sing hosanna forever. 

And very occasionally, and very horribly, you lose your chance to be at a cool party because a bunch of people who didn’t care to know your name didn’t book a big enough venue for a bash you thought was being thrown in your honor, and you’re left outside on the cobblestones looking in. And that’s about as bad as losing an award can feel, so I don’t have a bit of room to complain.

In the end, you just can’t put your self-worth on what you win or lose. It’s a bad bet. The wheel just won’t support it. The biggest prize you can win in literature is a long career. And in a long career, there will be many horrors and glories. Whenever I lost, I used to post: time to write a better book. But I don’t do that anymore, because if you make the ballot, you wrote a better book. It’s rarely that if you had only given it one more editing pass, you’d have won. It’s about fashion and fate and coincidence and luck. And I’d say the same if I’d won. 

You just lose so much in this life. People, opportunities, possibilities, hope, faith, socks. And it’s not so often you get to wear a ballgown and a glittery spikey crown when you lose. Mostly losing is you in your pajama pants being broken in your lounge room. Mostly all that’s on your head is an invisible dunce cap because you done fucked up. One of the worst hits of my life I took while standing in a goddamn sheep field in Yorkshire outside a 500 year old pub in a rainstorm while a soaking wet sheep chewed grass and stared me down all: good job, human, stellar life choices you got there. May I offer you some mud? Sorry, my mistake. You do not deserve this mud. You wouldn’t know what to do with it. 

I don’t ever really pretend to be sanguine about anything I’ve lost, from a husband to a rocketship and anything in between. Cool and sanguine just ain’t my scene. Every single thing in my life, good and bad, is because I wanted things so much. I wanted things so hard I made them happen, and sometimes they burned me and sometimes I burned them, but that wanting is the opposite of cool and the opposite of cool is me. No one can say well, you’re young to me when I lose now. And oh you’ll win someday doesn’t fly either, because in fact, you can absolutely keep on losing. Whatever you’re losing, there doesn’t have to be balance. There usually is, but it often on such a long time scale that it’s hard to see the equalizing until fifteen years down the road, your ears pop.

But it’s okay. Put on something shiny and lose with me. I’m so good at it. I’ve a genius for losing. I’ll buy you a drink and twirl you around. I’ll find you out on the cobblestones and let you in the back door, fire code be damned. The vibe in here is a bit rubbish, but the music is ace.

We are all losers together. Whether you write or not. It’s only that writer-losers process it and redistrubute their pain as entertainment, so that all of us can feel a little less alone. That’s the only point of any of it. That some number of human souls feel less alone. Including mine. Including yours. That when loss comes to you looking like a Yorkshire sheep, you feel a couple of stories at your back telling you how to survive it and also that sheeps are stupid and their butts are gross so don’t listen to them. You know what to do with mud. You’ve always known. You either build something out of it, be it pie or hut, or you wash it clean. Either is good and right and wise. 

After all, you’re young. There’s so much time yet. Even if you’re 80. You’re so young.