It’s Sad Puppies Time again. For those of you unfamiliar with Sad Puppies Time, it’s bestselling author Larry Correia’s annual appeal to get nominated for a Hugo award. Appealing to only our basest emotions and our empathy for depressed, fluffy canines, the goodly Mr. Correia is trying to break the clique of far-left Worldcon idols and get some actual popular fiction nominated. It’s a people’s choice award, after all. Larry is one of my favorite authors. The kind where I never have to re-read a paragraph trying to figure out what esoteric concept he’s driving at. He’s a meat and potatoes SciFi and Fantasy writer, and I know that when he releases a book, it will a number of things I will enjoy. You can mix and match, but some constants include:
- Many, many guns, described in near-pornographic detail
- Explosions
- World-eating alien forces and/or monsters from your worst nightmares
- Protagonists you really enjoy seeing kick some ass
- Moar guns
- Villains that you love to hate
- Larger capacity magazines for guns
- Dark, ironic humor
- Guns
Last year, I joined Worldcon, paid my dues, and nominated Monster Hunter: Legion for a Hugo. Sadly, it didn’t make the cut. I don’t think I even wound up voting for much of the final slate, because I just didn’t know and/or care about the majority of the nominees. Rumor has it that my membership is good for nominating again this year, if not for voting for the finalists. So you can bet I’ll be putting in my bid for Warbound. But I wanted to do more. So when I read Larry’s Sad Puppy post, and saw that he wrote in a part for a voiceover guy, I knew what I had to do. I took this:
VOICE OVER GUY: The ugly truth is that the most prestigious award in sci-fi/fantasy is basically just a popularity contest, where the people who are popular with a tiny little group of WorldCon voters get nominated and thousands of other works are ignored. Books that tickle them are declared good and anybody who publically deviates from groupthink is bad. Over time this lame ass award process has become increasingly snooty and pretentious, and you can usually guess who all of the finalists are going to be that year before any of the books have actually come out or been read by anyone, entirely by how popular the author is with this tiny group. This is a leading cause of puppy related sadness.
And I turned it into this:
It was the least I could do.
What I did not expect was Larry’s response. On Facebook, he wrote:
One of my fans Steve Skojec made this for Voice Over guy from today’s blog post. Holy crap. Watch it. I about died.
He then appended it into the space just above the voiceover text in the original post, and gave it its own post besides. It’s a silly thing, but I enjoy my unofficial contribution to the Correia canon nonetheless. My general feeling can be described as follows: 
Steve Skojec is a husband, father, storyteller, writer, and podcaster who dabbles in photography, filmmaking, and graphic design. His commentary has has appeared at outlets such as The New York Times, Foreign Policy, USA Today, The Washington Post, Fox News, and The Washington Times. He lives in Arizona with his wife Jamie and their many children.
