Furry Writers' Guild Forum

The 2013 and 2014 Cóyotl Awards

Announcements
#1

There’ll be more on this topic coming soon, along with a dedicated subforum for it, but for now I just want to announce that we will be holding the 2013 and 2014 awards (for works published in 2012 and 2013, respectively) before the end of this year, in order to get caught up and back on track again.

I also want to publicly express my thanks to Ryffnah, who has agreed to take over running the awards during my term. She’s been part of the Cóyotl process from the earliest days of the awards, and with her hard work and your participation, I hope to see the awards not only revive but flourish in the coming years.

For the 2013 awards, I believe we already have the nominations in place and just need to tally those and begin the voting. Right now, in hopes of possibly being able to have an award ceremony at Rainfurrest as we did before, we’re going to be operating on a somewhat condensed timetable, so the plan at the moment is to do the 2013 voting and 2014 nominations in the same time period (probably July) and then do the 2014 voting somewhere around August. We’ll have discussion threads available before then, of course, for recommendations and announcements of eligible works.

As always, keep an eye here on the forums for the latest updates!

#2

As Poetigress said, I’m taking on the project of getting the Cóyotl Awards running again. I don’t have a lot to add right now, but there should be more news coming very soon. You should all start thinking about what great works of furry fiction deserve recognition from last year, because I hope to open nominations in the next week or so.

#3

I said there would be more news soon, and here it is–

The Cóyotl Awards are back! Check out the website for exciting announcements concerning the 2012 final ballot and nominations for 2013. Spoiler: both are in progress now!

http://coyotlawards.org/2014/07/16/were-back/

#4

A (hopefully rather) brief presidential-ish statement about the 2014 awards:

You’ll notice a few changes in the awards beginning this year. The first is that we’ve added a Best Anthology category, to recognize excellent work in that field. Any individual stories from an anthology can still, of course, be nominated in the short story category, but given how many anthologies are now published in the fandom, I felt we should have a way to recognize those volumes as a whole, including the work done by the editor.

The second major change is that the categories have been simplified, combining the General and Mature categories from previous years. The main reason for this was simple logistics. Having the categories separated created a great deal more work and required a council to help decide where works should be categorized. It was never a perfect system, with a lot of gray area involved in what belonged where, and in the end, the benefits of it were outweighed by the complications. With the categories combined, we now only require one person to run the awards instead of a committee of people, which should ensure we don’t have any more gaps in years going forward. I know this is a decision that some of you won’t be happy with, but I remember well enough from the original discussions we had about the Coyotls that it’s impossible to please everyone in this regard. That said, I feel this decision is the best thing for the awards – and by extension, the guild – as a whole.

Finally, the nomination process has been simplified, removing the previous number ratings and ranking system. Again, this was a decision based on streamlining the awards process as much as possible, to make it simpler and easier to handle in the future.

Once again, I want to thank Ryffnah for her work in reviving the Cóyotls, and Buni for all her work on the awards in the previous years. I’m looking forward to seeing the Cóyotls continue uninterrupted for years to come as they continue to recognize the variety of styles, voices, and content being published in the furry fandom today.

Further news and updates will be posted to the Cóyotls board from here on out:
http://www.anthroaquatic.com/forum/index.php?board=19.0