It’s been a long few months of writing, applying, and nervously waiting, but the time has come. We have carefully reviewed your applications—all 73 of them—and painstakingly narrowed the field to a few exceptional finalists. Of those we have chosen one winner, whom we notified yesterday, and now that she has accepted it our great pleasure to announce that the 2013 “That’s a Pretty Good Excuse” scholarship goes to Alissa Leonard.

The quality of the applications was higher than we expected, all across the board, but not only did Alissa win the most votes, she won ALL the votes: the four podcasters and our mystery sponsor picked her application unanimously. She will receive full tuition to the 2013 Writing Excuses retreat, a free room in the nearby hotel, and up to $500 for airfare to get her there. Her writing samples show a lot of promise, and we hope this retreat helps her hone her skills to an even higher level.

Those of you who didn’t win, we still love you! You are amazing writers and amazing people, and we hope you continue working hard on your dreams. Keep writing, and make sure to say hi if we ever see you at another convention or conference.

To Alissa and the other retreat attendees, we’ll see you in June!

Last year we announced the first ever Writing Excuses Retreat, and an awesome scholarship to go along with it. We’ve never done an event like this before, but we feel pretty good about it, and we think it will be a big help to a lot of writers, and we don’t want that group to be limited by money. If you’re a good writer, eager to become better, but can’t quite afford a week-long conference, we want to give you our scholarship. But there’s only one week left.

The scholarship application deadline is January 15–just a few days away. If you were thinking about applying but never got around to it, there’s still time! If this is the first you’ve heard of it, jump in and go for it! The application process is involved, because we want to make sure this goes to the right person, but we really think it’s worth it. Read all the application info here (http://www.writingexcuses.com/2012/11/05/the-out-of-excuses-writing-retreat-and-the-thats-a-pretty-good-excuse-scholarship/), follow those instructions exactly*, and let’s make this happen.

Good luck!

(*Note: Seriously, follow the instructions exactly. We winnow applicants the way publishers winnow slush…)

For your convenience, we’re putting together this list of what works each of us have eligible for the Hugo and Nebula awards. In case, you know, you were looking for things to consider.

Related Work

• Writing Excuses Season 7

Why is this under related work and not podcast? Because as far as we can tell from the rules, our podcast is considered professional and thus not eligible in the fan category. So– Related Work

Novel

• Glamour in Glass – Mary Robinette Kowal
• The Hollow City – Dan Wells
• Partials – Dan Wells

Novella

• Legion – Brandon Sanderson
• Isolation – Dan Wells
  
• The Emperor’s Soul — Brandon Sanderson  (He will send The Emperor’s Soul to Hugo nominators for free. they should email which Worldcon they are a member of to ebooks@brandonsanderson.com.)

Novelete

• “Flight of the Runewright” — Howard Tayler
• “The Lady Astronaut of Mars” – Mary Robinette Kowal  
  
• “Mecury Retrograde” – Mary Robinette Kowal
  

Short story

• “Ginger Stuyvesant and the Case of Eastwood Abbey” –  Mary Robinette Kowal
• “Weaving Dreams” –  Mary Robinette Kowal
• “The White Phoenix Feather” –  Mary Robinette Kowal
  

For the first time, the Writing Excuses team is hosting a workshop and retreat for our listeners. This week long event gives you one on one time with the hosts, Brandon Sanderson, Dan Wells, Mary Robinette Kowal, and Howard Tayler.

Registration is currently sold out. Please scroll down for information about the waiting list.

WHAT’S INCLUDED?

The week kicks off with three full days of intensive workshops taught by the WX hosts. All on-campus meals are included during the week.

WX will also be recording sessions while there, so you will get an opportunity to shape episodes by the questions you ask. Plus you get to watch the team record live.

Starting on Wednesday evening, the remainder of the week is time for you to put what you learned to good use, and write. You’re out of excuses… Read The Full Story…

First and foremost: a close examination of the rules for Hugo Nominations reveals that Writing Excuses Season 4 is eligible to be nominated under the “Best Related Work” category. If you attended WorldCon in Melbourne, or if you already have your Renovation membership, you’re eligible to do some nominating. So, for your consideration, Writing Excuses Season 4. It ran from January 2010 through August 2010, and the full content is available online at this site. The easiest way to surf it all is to use the date widgets over in the right sidebar. But for heaven’s sake don’t do it all in one sitting. Those episodes probably add up to at least nine full hours of us not being that smart because you’re in a hurry.

Secondly: We just performed a WordPress upgrade, and upgraded the plugins we use as well. If you see weirdness, let us know so we can figure out what we broke. (And by “we” we actually mean “Howard.”)

Third: This Thursday, Friday, and Saturday we’ll be variously attending (Dan and Howard) and presenting (Brandon) at the Superstars Writing Seminar in Salt Lake City. We hope to record a few interview episodes while there, because the list of presenters for that event is pretty stellar.

It has just come to our attention that Writing Excuses has been nominated for the 2010 Podcast Awards: The People’s Choice under the Education category.

If you are a “people” and would like to make Writing Excuses your “choice,” visit podcastawards.com and vote! You may vote once every 24 hours from now until December 15th, which might mean this is “The Fanatically Devoted Or Maybe Automated People’s Choice,” but this is the World Wild Web, and that’s how things seem to be done.

We, of course, are honored to have been nominated, and are pleased to see so many other quality podcasts similarly honored. May the best botnet win!

Writing Prompt: Imagine a future in which political elections are now voted by botnet. Give us a story in which this is actually the best of all possible democracies.

Ladies and gentlemen, geeks, nerds, and enablers, and of course our listeners: THANK YOU!

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.

Parsec Acceptance Speech 2010 [ 2:48 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (11285)

Sorry! Brandon, Dan, and I recorded episodes 27 and 28 last night, but Jordo is out of town and hasn’t had a chance to prep the files for posting. We should have Episode 3.27 posted tomorrow.

Last week we recorded four episodes, but apparently they haven’t been dropped into the hopper for posting yet. I blame the long weekend and good barbecue. As soon as the file has been processed by Producer Jordo I’ll start writing it up and get ol’ 3.6 on the air for your edification.

Sorry for the delay! We here at Writing Excuses hope your Independence Day was enjoyable and your weekend long enough.

Jordan emailed me from his Blackberry to say that the power is out on his block. The audio file is therefore trapped on a cold disk, so barring Jordan driving over here to my place right now we’re not going to get our second Tracy Hickman episode posted until Monday morning.

In completely unrelated news, I suppose at some point we could do a podcast about “setting expectations vs. fulfilling promises.”