Answer: We’ve all been nominated at some point for a Hugo award! (Just not all in the same year.)

Specifically: “Writing Excuses Season 4″ by Brandon Sanderson, Howard Tayler, and Dan Wells, produced by Jordan Sanderson, has been nominated for the 2011 “Best Related Work” Hugo. We’re honored, and we’re thrilled.

In very, very related news, Dan Wells has been nominated for the John W. Campbell award for Best New Writer, and Howard Tayler’s Schlock Mercenary: Massively Parallel has been nominated for Best Graphic Story.

Several former guests here on Writing Excuses have also been honored with nominations. Larry Correia was nominated for a Campbell Award, Eric James Stone’s “That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made” is up for Best Novelette, Moshe Feder is up for Best Editor, Long Form, Mary Robinette Kowal’s “For Want of a Nail” is up for Best Short Story, and Phil and Kaja Foglio’s Girl Genius Volume 10 is up for Best Graphic Story.

The voting will take place between now and sometime in July, and the winners will be announced at the World Science Fiction Convention in Reno.

For a full list of Hugo and Campbell award nominees, as well as information about voting, past awards, and the history of the award itself visit thehugoawards.org. There’s also a list here on the Worldcon site.

Note: We’ll have a regular episode of Writing Excuses up in an hour or so. Don’t worry — we’re not using this nomination as an excuse to depart from our regular schedule of leaving you out of excuses.

Here’s the Amazon link for the paperback release of John Brown’s first novel, Servant of a Dark God. There is no Amazon link for going out and voting, but what if there were?

There. There’s your writing prompt: “Election services offered online via an Amazon link.”

Since NaNoWriMo is already a day old, we hope you don’t still need a writing prompt. You’re out of excuses. Now go write.

Some people complain that we are not thorough enough in our coverage of certain topics. This episode is not for those people.

Writing Prompt: Write a piece of flash fiction that can be printed on a business card. Hat tip to Eric James Stone, whose business cards are awesome.

Note: if you’re looking for something longer-winded, check out Howard on Mur Lafferty’s excellent “I Should Be Writing” podcast. We talk at length about the personae we adopt as authors and artists with an online presence. Or check out the Fantasy Authors panel at NYCC, with Jim Butcher, Joe Abercrombie, Peter V. Brett, Naomi Novik, Deborah Harkness, and Brandon Sanderson. So long it had to be cut into two parts!

Writing Excuses was named “Best Content Creation Podcast” by the Parsec Committee at the 2010 Parsec Awards at Dragon*Con. This is our second year in a row winning this particular award, and we’re both honored and humbled.

Not very much of that came out during this recording, in which we see why it’s probably a GOOD thing that we weren’t present to give an acceptance speech. Nevertheless, we’re very sorry to have missed the awards, and we have a plan for next year that does NOT include letting our respective publishers, agents, and handlers drag us off-site during something we really should be attending.

And speaking of attending… we will definitely be at WorldCon in Reno next August, and hope to also put in an appearance at Dragon*Con. By way of public service to our many Con-attending listeners, note that this Thursday, September 30th is the last day you can get your WorldCon membership for just $160. It goes up to $180 on October 1st.

This episode takes “fluffy” to a new, flufftastic level. Here are twenty minutes excerpted from almost sixty minutes we recorded in line at the Hero of Ages book release and signing event at the BYU Bookstore. It’s almost like being there, complete with the people in line who have read more of Brandon’s books than you have, and will spoil key points in them via t-shirts. We interview these people, and we also interview a few people who have dirty secrets about Brandon, but are unwilling to share them.