Eligibility for 2025 Best Fan Writer award nomination

 I was tremendously pleased and flattered that Nerds of a Feather recently put me on their longlist to consider nominating for the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer. The other nine people on that list are Anna (forestofglory at Lady Business), Gautam Bhatia (Words for Worlds), Jake Casella Brookins (Ancillary Review of Books), Elias Eells (Bar Cart Bookshelf), Zach Gillan (the Ancillary Review of Books, various others), Jenny Hamilton (Reactor, Reading the End), Archita Mittra (Strange Horizons), Renay (Lady Business), and Alasdair Stuart (The Full Lid). I haven't read essays by all of them, but I'm familiar with many, and this is heady company indeed!

Due to this honor by Nerds of a Feather, I'm writing now about my eligibility as a fan writer for my 2024 works. Almost all of my fan writing takes the form of reviews, mostly book reviews, and most of those appear either here on my blog or at Skiffy and Fanty (https://skiffyandfanty.com/author/trishmatson/). Notable exceptions for 2024 include an essay that I wrote for Issue 82 — "Be the Change" of the Journey Planet online fanzine, "Changes Needed for the Hugo Awards Process"; a poem that also appeared in that issue, which I originally wrote for this blog, "A Vanilla Villain's Variant Villanelle" (about Dave McCarty and the 2023 Hugo Awards fiasco); a Skiffy and Fanty interview of Natania Barron focusing on Netherford Hall; and a long composite interview I posted here, with Double-Edged Sword & Sorcery editor Oliver Brackenbury and the two authors whose novellas comprised DESS, Bryn Hammond and Daniel Quiogue.

Some of the audio/video/gaming updates I wrote last year included mini-reviews, and I also participated in a Skiffy and Fanty contributors' roundup of favorite things from 2024. But as for dedicated reviews, I wrote 26 for Skiffy and Fanty and four for my blog in 2024. Here are some of my favorites:

RPG review: Jason Thompson's Dreamland RPG
Book (collection) review: Resurrections, by Ada Hoffman
Book review: Sun of Blood and Ruin, by Mariely Lares
Books(s) review: Liberty's Daughter and Thoughts on Worker Bees
Book review: The Jaguar Mask, by Michael J. DeLuca
Book review: Cahokia Jazz, by Francis Spufford

Audio/Video/Gaming Roundup, 2025 Part 1

This year, I'm going to reverse my process of previous years and post the updates up top so readers don't have to scroll down to see my latest activities. I'll continue to add links to all my text reviews at SkiffyandFanty.com in this older post. For roundups of my 2024 and 2023 activities in podcasting, gaming, media, videos, etc., please see here, here, here and here. Activities from before then are listed further back in my blog.

Jan. 21, 2025
AUDIO/VIDEO: I continue to edit podcasts and YouTube videos professionally for the Twitch streamer Arvan Eleron. The Hearthglow campaign based on the Tales & Tomes from the Forbidden Library D&D 5e module had a new video and podcast posted Jan. 15 and will get another podcast episode Jan. 22. This will probably wrap up in March, and he'll launch something else later.

AUDIO: For Skiffy and Fanty, one podcast and video that I'm on have been released so far this month. It's a "Mining the Genre Asteroid" episode about Leigh Brackett's The Long Tomorrow (1955) that Shaun Duke, Paul Weimer and I recorded this fall on Shaun's alphabetstreams Twitch channel. Skiffy and Fanty will resume streaming there starting Jan. 31, at 8 p.m. Eastern, and should have new programs, mostly live, every Friday.

GAMING:
Jan. 13: Thunderchild: The modified Cold City/Hot War campaign, set in London a couple of months after H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, resumed after its winter break. As other characters explored their own agendas and objectives, my character, Iris Worthington (a suffragist and the daughter of an industrialist), finally won the trust of the head of the Thunderchild science/defense project when she realized her brother had secretly obtained and experimented with Martian War Machine materials, and turned him in to Captain Spencer.
Jan. 20: Thunderchild: It's worse than that; Ronny Worthington was also selling information to the French, and by the end of the session, they had established a beachhead in the south of England. Meanwhile, other characters are finding out horrific things about the Aurora Project to create modified humans who no longer need sleep, and the Royal cousin in our group has been marked for destruction by whoever has been wielding a captured heat ray.
Thunderchild is a game being run on a private Discord server, so I can't share it here. However, the DM, groundhoggoth, is great. He has a number of games for sale at itch.io; I've played two of the Foretold one-shot narrative card games and enjoyed them greatly. 
Meanwhile, Cold City/Hot War will be launching a kickstarter for a second edition soon. That page includes a link to sign up for playtests. You can also find out more about the game at the DriveThruRPG link there.