Reading stories to nominate for the Hugos
Number of stories from a given year that I normally manage to read before the Hugo nominating-ballot deadline: 0.
Number of stories from 2022 that I set out (in February, 2023) to read before the Hugo nominating-ballot deadline: about 12.
Number of stories from 2022 that I ended up reading over the past two and a half months: 71.
(By “stories” I mean all of the short-fiction lengths; but I mainly focused on the short story category per se (under 7,500 words).)
This project kinda snowballed—I had thought it might be nice to read a few 2022 stories so I could nominate some for once, but every time I thought I had finished all the stories I was going to read, recommendations or information about some others came along.
The ~70 that I read is still only a fifth of the ~350 short-fiction works listed on the Lady Business Hugo-recs spreadsheet, which is in turn only a fraction of all the short sf that was published in 2022. But it’s still way more of a given year’s short sf than I’ve read in the past ten years.
There ended up being maybe ten stories that I want to put on my short-stories-category nominating ballot, and maybe another twenty that I would have been happy nominating if I hadn’t had others I liked more. Of those top ten, I’ve now picked five to list on my ballot (and I’ve submitted my ballot), but I’m gonna take one more look at them before the ballot deadline, and I might change one or two choices.