I have a few things that are coming up, things that you might want to keep an eye on, even.

• For people in … almost any corner of North America, actually, Danielle Corsetto has announced the initial outline of her Girls With Slingshots 10th Anniversary Cross-Continent Road Trip, taking place through most of July and August. More dates and locations are coming, and don’t forget that she’ll be in wildest Kenilworth, NJ for a signing at Wild Pig Comics this Saturday, 18 January, from noon to 5:00pm. Be there or miss out.
• The Hugo Awards nominations are open for those that are associated with this year’s WorldCon in London, UK. The rules surrounding who can nominate and who can vote are somewhat complex when speaking of the Hugos, so please read through all the details here; as often happens at this time of year, a number of people associated with webcomics are eligible, either in the Best Graphic Story category¹, or in other writing categories. My evil twin has put together a list of works he thinks worthy of consideration, both his own and others, for your consideration, and it looks both solid and comprehensive.

  If I might make my own additions to the list, the WSFS constitution states the Hugos are for works of science fiction and fantasy, which I think is broad enough to incorporate Kris Straub’s first Broodhollow collection, Curious Little Thing. For those of you that argue that the WSFS rules don’t say anything about horror, there have been plenty of Lovecraft-inspired works nominated for and awarded Hugos in the past, so deal with it. In the inarguably fantasy-compliant domain Minna Sundberg’s A Redtail’s Dream finished in 2013. Also published in 2013: K Brooke “Otter” Spangler’s AGAHF tie-in novel, Digital Divide, which is a cracking good modern-SF thriller. Anybody eligible to nominate, please give them a read if you’re able.

• And in keeping with the looking theme today, best wishes to Irregular Webcomic creator David Morgan-Mar², who shared with us yesterday the fact that he’s currently waiting out an annoying (but hopefully temporary) condition with his left eye. The fact that Morgan-Mar of all people would have a problem with his vision sits somewhere pretty high up on the irony scale, given that he put his PhD in physics to work in research related to image processing and machine vision, and this his 3000+ plus LEGO®™©^etc-based comics required the mechanical vision of a camera in order to be shared with the world. Yeah, comics are a visual medium, it just seems to me that in Morgan-Mar’s case, everything he touches is a bit extra visual, if you take my meaning.

  Anyway. Take care of those eyes, don’t strain yourself on the research necessary for your Sunday explorations of the history of science (more than 100 of those now, in addition to nearly 3200 comics prior to that point), and if you get any more cool photos of the interior of your own retina, do share because damn, that was neat. Those wishing to share in my get-well sentiments, Dr Morgan-Mar can be reached on Twitter, or at his personal site.

• One last bit — I am now especially looking forward to Something Terrible, as it’s passed the stretch goal to achieve hardcovers. Awesome.

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¹ This will be the first year of the BGS’s five-year existence in which Howard Tayler will definitely not be among the nominees, given he didn’t complete a story-arc of Schlock Mercenary in calendar 2013.

² Quick question: are there any other webcomics creators with an Erd#337;s-Bacon number? Morgan-Marr’s is 6, which is pretty damn impressive. Even more impressive, he has an Erd#337;s-Bacon-Sabbath number (something achieved by only 37 people in the history of the world) of 16, although that site overestimates his Bacon number by 3, giving him a likely EBS# of 13. Damn.