Hugo & Nebula Awards: Best Novels discussion

I have noticed that the group slows down at the end of the month. I was watching "This is not happening" from comedy central on Youtube.

If you haven't watched it...I recommend it. It's comedians telling a story from their life that was just crazy and it's funny. It got me thinking about some stories I have. Which made me think of some stories you might have.

Here is my story:

I'm a social worker by trade and have been since I got out of college. My first job out of college was working for a non-profit organization that helped out individuals and families with a mental health diagnosis. I've also always been a good kid. Never caused my parents and grief nor headaches. Some might say I was naïve...

That's not the story, but it's important to know, because with this job I would pick up and drive people to their doctor's appointments or what-not. After about 2 years of this, I got use to driving some pretty scary people around and lost the fear of it. Which is good in some ways.

Well, I was driving back from dropping one of my clients off at their house. I stopped to get some gas at the local gas station. This older lady came up to me and asked me if I could give her a ride to her house. She said her boyfriend drove off without her because the got in a fight. Now, again, I got use to driving around some big dudes who just got out of prison for some serious crimes. I see this little old lady, who couldn't have weighed more than 90 pounds, asking me for help to get home...I'm going to say yes...

So she hops in and tells me where she lives, talking the whole time about her no good boyfriend. We get pretty close to her house and she tells me to take this one entrance to her neighborhood instead of another because there are always a police officer parked upfront. This should have been a sign for me...but I'm not the smartest man.

We get to her house and I park the car. She thanks me for the drive home and asks me if there is anything she can do for me for some money. Again, I'm not the smartest man, and I didn't know what she was talking about. So I ask her what does she mean? She leans over to me as she starts to put her arms around me...she said something...I couldn't tell you what she said. My arms locked on the wheel, I looked straight ahead, and I'm sure I said in a very manly voice "I have a fiancé I love very much!!!"

She pulls back and tells me that is very sweet. Opens the car door to leave and asks me frustratedly if I at least have any money she can have. I tell her, without looking at her nor unlocking my hands from the wheel that I might have some change in the passenger side door car. She took the change then left.

I then spent the drive back to work trying my best to wrap my head around what had just happened. Obviously my coworkers that it was hilarious. My fiancé, now wife, thought it hilarious and told me I'm an idiot...but she still loves me.

Nice that you were making these end of the month comments Brian, because before I realized you were writing notes here, I was going to write you one.

It's almost October, and I know you like to get your horror ducks in a row for October, so I bring to you (courtesy of another GR book club) a list of the 50 best horror novels (yeah, I don't know according to whom). This other GR book club has turned this list into a challenge to read a book a month (!! I don;t know what I am going to be doing in 50 weeks, let alone 50 months!)

Still, though I know Brian has probably read all of these, here's the list location https://www.pastemagazine.com/article...

Have fun, horror fans!

Kateblue wrote: "...Still, though I know Brian has probably read all of these..."

Nope, only 14 of them.

Well, cool, then, some ideas for your October!!

I didn't count exactly but 20-ish for me. I recently found a 1st edition hardback of Rosemary's Baby for $5 and finally read it.

So about funny horror stories. This one I heard just today.
You may know the play The Government Inspector by Nikolai Gogol. This is a very famous play, here wiki article on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gov...

This year a theater in a small Russian town decided to have it for the season. They make placards where under the title they added a sub-title "the horror of a civil servant"

just in a few days they started to get angry calls from local government, accusing them in "absence of respect to the authorities", demanding to destroy all printouts.

If you read the play you see what a kafkian situation this is.

wow, Oleksandr! It's more Kafka-esque than fiction!

I have not counted how many of these horror books I have read, but maybe the list can spark ideas for our game.

Fun stories. Bryan’s reminded me of an incident from my first ‘real’ job as an EMT. Was I young? Check. Naïve? Check. Maybe a little too comfortable? Hard not to be, with those lights and sirens going.

Anyway, early in my EMS career I moved from Edmonton to a rural community in Alberta. City boy (me) was feeling pretty confident getting around town in my (company’s) shiny ambulance, but sometimes things don’t go entirely as expected.

We’d just responded to a call for a multi-vehicle collision. Lots of excitement from bystanders, who reported lots of interesting and important information about the accident, like how the at-fault driver seemed to be unconscious before he started driving into other cars. This driver’s vehicle had ultimately ended up in a stand of trees well off the road. After we'd confirmed he was the only one hurt, I took the ambulance into the bush a way, we loaded up our patient for transport to hospital...and then we got stuck.

Eep.

For a few seconds, I had the most horrible feeling. On one hand, you can't save everyone, but on the other hand omigod please not like this. [This is not happening, this is not happening, this is not happening.]

As it turned out, just as I was coming to realize we were going nowhere fast, our backup crew arrived on scene; we quickly transferred the patient from one ambulance to the other, and off we went with minimal delay.

Silver lining? Thankfully, there were no cell phone cameras back then to capture that minute or two of madness – phew! Oh yeah, and the patient recovered from his injuries. He’d had a seizure while driving, so definitely could have been a worse outcome (for both of us, lol).