Cameron Johnston

Hello Hello! I had some unexpected but wonderful news this week that I am on the shortlist for Best Newcomer in the British Fantasy Awards 2019!!! What an amazing list to be a part of. For 2019, the BFS shortlisted entrants are: Best Fantasy Novel (the Robert Holdstock Award) The Bitter Twins, by Jen Williams (Headline) Empire of Sand, by Tasha Suri (Orbit) Foundryside, by Robert Jackson Bennett (Jo Fletcher Books) The Green Man’s Heir, by Juliet E McKenna (Wizard’s Tower Press) The Loosening Skin, by Aliya Whiteley (Unsung Stories) Priest of Bones, by Peter McLean (Jo Fletcher Books) Best Horror Novel (the August Derleth Award) The Cabin at the End of the World, by Paul Tremblay (Titan Books) Little Eve, by Catriona Ward (W&N) The Way of the Worm, by Ramsey Campbell (PS Publishing) Wolf’s Hill, by Simon Bestwick (Snowbooks) Best Newcomer (the Sydney J Bounds Award) Tomi Adeyemi, for The Children of Blood and Bone (Macmillan Children’s Books) Cameron Johnston, ...

The Dragon Awards have released their 2018 ballot and The Traitor God is a finalist for Best Fantasy Novel category alongside Brandon Sanderson, so that's pretty damn cool :) I'm stoked that people out there decided to nominate it. If you want to sign up to vote you can do it here: http://application.dragoncon.org/dc_fan_awards_signup.php All the finalists for the 2018 Dragon Awards are listed at the link below. Congrats to everybody nominated (especially if any are part of this group) http://awards.dragoncon.org/2018-ballot/

So a very unexpected and wonderful thing happened at the weekend. I got an email to say that The Traitor God is a finalist in the 2018 Dragon Awards in the category of Best Fantasy Novel!! Please excuse the jaw trailing on the floor right now... I have no expectation I will actually win of course, but I'm delighted that something I wrote was liked by enough people to get it nominated, and that's a truly wondrous thing. Thank you all, whoever you gloriously amazing people are! If you want to take part in the final vote, anybody with an email address can sign up to receive a ballot when they are released: http://application.dragoncon.org/dc_fan_awards_signup.php

So I didn't win the James White Award in the end, but it's still a great thing to have been shortlisted in the first place so I take heart from that. The winning story, 'The Morrigan' by fellow Glasgow Science Fiction Writers' Circle member Stewart Horn is an excellent and well-deserved winner. I'll look forward to seeing it in print in a future edition of Interzone.

This morning I awoke to some good news - my short story The Dying Glass has been shortlisted for the 2017  James White Award . The stories that have made it through to the final selection are: Don – Steve Dubois May the Pain Guide You Home – Daniel Roy The Morrigan – Stewart Horn Skin and Bone – Beth Plutchak The Cut – Elsie WK Donald The Dying Glass – Cameron Johnston My short story has some really good company on that list :) We should find out soon who the winner will be *fingers and toes and eyes all crossed* *falls over*

It’s been an eventful and exciting month for me on the writing front, a whirlwind of new experiences, nerve-wracking waits and last minute panics (more on this in the very next post). First up we had FantasyCon 2016, FantasyCon by The Sea, in Scarborough at the end of September. It was great catching up with friends from all over and talking books, writing, and nonsense of all sorts. As always happens at these conventions, my best intentions of going to see a wide range of interesting panels goes mostly unfulfilled in favour of talking in the bar. That said, some of the things I did go to included: -Author Miles Cameron (of The Red Knight fame) talking about war logistics, scouting, water supplies, and why Sauron should have waged economic warfare on Gondor to bring it to ruin instead of going for ‘The Big Win’. -Jonathan Oliver, editor-in-chief of Solaris and Abaddon books had a candid and informative talk on the world of agents and publishing and on how much input his authors ...

Up and Coming: Stories from the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Writers (Which includes me!) anthology has been released, available for free download until the end of March from the folks at Bad Menagerie . Thanks go to SL Huang & Kurt Hunt for organising and compiling this years' anthology. It includes stories from writers currently eligible for the John W.Campbell Award for best new science fiction or fantasy writer, which means writers who had their first sale to a professional paying market within the last two years. I expect to be reading awesome fiction from many writers I haven't encountered yet. This anthology also includes me after the publication of The Economist & The Dragon by Buzzy Mag in 2014. So hurrah for that! :D At the time Buzzy Mag also posted me THE most ridiculously lovely hand-written thank you card when they accepted the story, saying that they enjoyed it very much. That blew me away - so nice of them!