I’m totally blown away. No way. NO FREAKING WAY. No way.

Servant of a Dark God just won the Whitney award for speculative fiction. Look who the others were in the category–three New York Times best sellers and a book that had something like 11 or 12 printings in Europe before coming to the US. Holy crap. I’m thrilled the academy voters liked it so much.  

Servant of a Dark God by John Brown	The Maze Runner by James Dashner	Wings by Aprilynne Pike	Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson	I Am Not A Serial Killer by Dan Wells

When I informed the academy president, Robinson Wells, I couldn’t come, he asked if I had a speech should I win. There was no way I was winning. So I was like, yeah, whatever. So I wrote him this:

Yeah, like that’s going to happen (grin). But should something go wrong with the chads, you can simply say that “John told me if he won, that would mean the events in Revelations were probably upon us, and he’d be headed to his father-in-law’s underground bunker with his wife who was the brains behind the whole operation. He’s thrilled so many of you liked his story enough to vote for it. Thank you, thank you, thank you. But he’s also sad that you’ll all be toast before Fox News airs at 9 PM.”

Holy, heck. I’d better get to that bunker.

Here are the other categories and winners:

• Best Romance: Counting the Cost by Liz Adair 
• Best Mystery/Suspense: Methods of Madness by Stephanie Black (absolutely love the cover)
• Best Youth Fiction:  The Chosen One by Carol Lynch Williams
• Best Speculative Fiction: Servant of a Dark God by John Brown
• Best Historical: The Last Waltz by G.G. Vandagriff
• Best General Fiction: Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford
• Best Novel by a New Author: I Am Not A Serial Killer by Dan Wells and Gravity vs. The Girl by Riley Noehren (it was a tie, obviously)
• Best Novel of the Year: In The Company of Angels by David Farland

Of course, you had to have read all the books in a category to vote on them. You can see the finalists in each category here. So while Farland’s book didn’t win in his category (I”m assuming with the hard core historical fans), it did win with those who read every finalist.  Same with Dan Wells. So what this tells me is that depending on the cross-section of voters a lot of us could have been winners. I’m just happy I got the cross-section I did–ye speculative nut jobs :) Hooray for the Whitneys!!

Yea! Thanks to those of you who nominated. The judges have chosen Servant of a Dark God as a Whitney Award finalist. Of course, the four other books in the category are great. Here’s the list of finalists in my category:

Check out all finalists in all categories here. If you click on the Whitney Academy link on the top of that site, you’ll see all the folks who will be voting on the finalists.

The Legend Award

I was informed today that Servant of a Dark God is on the Longlist for the David Gemmell Legend Award for Fantasy and the Morningstar Award for best fantasy debut. I believe this means the Rapture is close at hand, folks. Or maybe it just means Cthulhu has taken over the North Pole. In either event, Hunger, Sugar, Talen, Hogan, Nettle, Legs, River, the Mother (and the kick butt Hag’s Teeth) can win an award for general awesomeness. They can because voting is open to the public.

Kind of Like American Idol

You may ask: Is this like getting the Nobel peace prize? No. You have to have actually done something like take out a group of speedy Somali pirates or write a fantasy novel. These awards are not given out as scratch away prizes at McDonalds (you can get them at Wendy’s). This is an award given to:

• A full length novel published for the first time in the English language during the year of nomination (2009)
• Traditional, Heroic, Epic, or High Fantasy and/or in the spirit of David Gemmell’s own work

The nominees were submitted by editors working within a commercial genre fiction publisher (kind of like Hollywood week at American Idol). All the nominations are then put on the award’s Longlist.  The public then votes for their favorite on the list. The poll opened December 26, 2009. Voting on the Longlist will close March 31, 2010. You’ll notice it is indeed a looong list. But you don’t have to have read all the novels. You just vote.

The top 5 novels with the most votes will be put on the award “Shortlist.” Then in April the public voting for the winner out of those five will begin, open to all.  See, American Idol, except you can’t vote two gajillion times for the same girl/guy just because of the her/his drool inducing factor. 

How to Vote

1. View the list of Legend nominees here: http://gemmellaward.ning.com/page/legend-1
2. Cast your vote by hovering over the Legend menu item as shown below; you’ll see a red Vote link; click it and select the book you want to vote for
3. View the list of Morningstar nominees here: http://gemmellaward.com/page/morningstar-1
4. Cast your vote by hovering over the Morningstar menu item and clicking the red Vote link.

Who is David Gemmell?

David Gemmell was a British writer of heroic fantasy. I’ve pasted two of his covers below. You can read more about him here.

For those of you interested in LDS authors, nominate SERVANT for the Whitney

Now that you’ve done your part to restore world order in the fantasy genre, if you’re interested in LDS authors/fiction, you can also nominate the Sugar, Talen, Hunger and the gang for The Whitney Award.

This is an award for novels by LDS authors. It works in the opposite way of the Legend award. In this one, the public nominates novels by LDS authors they like. Then a “panel of industry professionals, including authors, publishers, bookstore owners, distributors, critics, and others” vote on the nominations. Of course, because I’m one of those Carrier Monkeys of Evil Mormons (a future post, folks), Servant of a Dark God is eligible.

To nominate Servant of a Dark God go here: http://www.whitneyawards.com/nominations.php 

Whew.  Be happy. I’ll keep you updated to let you know if SERVANT makes the short list for either of these.