Locus Poll final day(?)
Today may be the last day in which to vote in the 2005 Locus Poll & Survey; it says the deadline is May 1, but I don't know whether that means votes have to be in today or tomorrow. Very soon, at any rate.
I vaguely recall hearing that participation in last year's poll was very low. If that's true again this year, it may mean that (a) your vote may have a big impact, and (b) your vote may help them decide to keep running the poll. I'm making a lot of guesses and suppositions there, though; I could be totally wrong about all that.
Anyway. I definitely don't recommend voting if you don't know anything about the categories. But if you do, hie thee hence and get to votin'. You don't have to be a Locus subscriber to vote.
They provide convenient drop-down lists of works and people in each category, plus text boxes for write-ins. Note that they put my name on the list of editors (and Mary Anne's) but not Susan's; if you're considering the editor vote a vote for the editorial choices made and for running the magazine, and if you want to vote for us SH editors, you should probably write in Susan Marie Groppi rather than picking me.
(Note just to be clear: Please do not vote for me/SH if you're not familiar with the choices in the relevant categories. As with all polls/surveys, I strongly recommend voting only in categories where you're familiar with a reasonable percentage of the candidates.)
The other omission I noticed from the editor list was Juliet Ulman of Bantam Dell. Write her in! If you like the kinds of stuff she's publishing, of course.
As with Hugo nominations, I was sad to only get five votes in the novelette and short story categories. And I discovered just now that Lois Tilton's "The Gladiator's War" was a novelette, not a novella; I mis-nominated it on my Hugo ballot (and my novelette slate was full, so the administrators couldn't move my nomination to the right category). Oops.
Oh, and they're also running a separate poll for All-time greatest fantasy story. I put together some brainstorming thoughts about this a couple months ago, but I don't think I have the brainpower at this point to turn them into a coherent vote or even a coherent discussion. But if you have ideas on what the greatest fantasy story of all time might be, go vote. You can vote for up to five; write-ins go down at the bottom of the form. You can only vote for stories published in 1995 or earlier. I assume the deadline is the same as for the main poll.