THE SIPPY AWARDS 2019! The "There's Something in My Eye" Sippy for Excellent Making Me Ugly-Cry in Short SFF

The 5th Annual Sippy Awards show no signs of slowing as we move past horror and settle into a whole new emotional destination. That's right, people, it's time to bust out the tissues, because this category is taking aim directly at your feels! I might be something of an emotive reader, but I feel that comes with trying to approach fiction openly and engage with it deeply. I tend to let stories in to where they can hurt the most, because while that can often backfire and leave me hurt and angry, it can also lead me to some amazing emotional connections with stories, which I'm honoring with the...

“There’s Something in My Eye” Sippy Award 

for Excellent Making Me Ugly-Cry in Short SFF

Following horror with this category makes a lot of sense to me, because for me both are about evoking emotions. With horror, that emotion is fear. With these stories, it's probably a bit more about...pain. Which might seem a strange thing to value in fiction. But it's not that the stories are about making the reader feel sad. There are plenty of ways that people seek out pain. Through exercise, through sport, through food--pain is about more than telling person that they've taken damage. It's a powerful experience, one of the most primal things, and a story that can hurt in the best of ways is rare and precious. Because it allows people to experience in a controlled way something they'd probably never want to experience in their own lives. It gives perspective, and it mingles pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow, despair and burning hope. It takes a great deal of care, and requires a bit of trust, but these stories I feel earn it and then some.

Publication wise, it's another rather eclectic mix, though Strange Horizons does appear twice. Really that's no surprise for me, as the publication really does a great job at reducing me to a small puddle of tears on the regular. What's doubly appreciated is that Strange Horizons offer ample warnings for people who might not want to take the emotional plunge into a work that deals with such heavy themes.

Quick Sips - Beneath Ceaseless Skies #288

Art by Ferdinand Dumago Ladera

Well the anniversary issue is over and it’s back to business as usual at Beneath Ceaseless Skies, which in this case means back to two stories about distance and isolation, memory and transformation. In one, a man looks back on his life and especially his youth, preparing himself for a new kind of adventure. In the other, a boy finds that he can’t remember his life, and that as a ghost he only gets to interact with the living world one day a year. Both are slow and winding stories, serene but ruled by sadness and yearning. Both find characters who are looking to move on, and might finally have found a way to do just that. It’s a somewhat sorrowful issue, and I’ll get right to reviewing it!