Last Saturday, I won an AnLab award. This is the annual readers' poll conducted by Analog magazine. I won for best short story of 2003 with my story "Lavender in Love." I won another short story AnLab back in 1998 for "Already In Heaven." I am thrilled receive another AnLab. It's not on the same level as, say, a Nebula or Hugo award, but it's nothing to be sneezed at, either.

Funny thing about those two stories: they really didn't get a whole lot of attention when they came out. Analog has the highest circulation of all the science fiction magazines, so you'd think the short stories that its readers voted the most popular for a year would have been fairly well known, but I think not. Apparently, the readers of Analog are not really the typical SF reader. Both of my AnLab stories were pretty much ignored in the Nebula voting (one recommendation each; it takes ten to get on the preliminary ballot). Not a peep from Hugo-land, either. Neither were recommended stories in the monthly fiction reviews in Locus, nor were they cited in Locus's year-end summary, and were not mentioned in the Locus readers' poll. Neither story was picked up for a "best of the year" anthology (although Gardner Dozois' gave both honorable mention nods) nor any sort of reprint opportunity.

I don't really know how my two stories won these AnLab awards, as they really didn't get "talked up" by reviewers or readers on the usual on-line forums. I guess a lot of people just quietly liked them enough to vote for them, without making any sort of fuss over them otherwise. That's OK by me, I guess.

Thanks to all of you who voted for them. And if you didn't vote for them, well, maybe next time. I'll make more.