Right, so the politics of this are beyond me, I confess. Shouldn't I just let people nominate stories at they are moved by them? But I guess this year's Nebula nominating period is different because of rules changes and stuff? I also confess that I don't really know how it's all different, because I wasn't a member of SFWA last year. And I also confess that I don't know that I'll ever do this self-pimpery thing again. But anyway. My list of eligible stories is as follows:

Short stories:

"Sun's East, Moon's West." Electric Velocipede (I will go post it on the SFWA forums tonight, or email me and I'll whip you a copy.)

"The Girl-Prince. Coyote Wild.

Novelette:

"The Wedding Dress Tea Parties of 2443." Quantum Kiss.

Now you know.

Re-reading a book is more an ode to the wonder of said book than any other action a reader can take (except buying copies for all of your friends, perhaps). Re-reading a book is a choice, and a strong one. One does not often accidentally fall into a book re-read. Certainly, due to my erstwhile book-a-day habit (I miss you, junior high and high school), it has happened, but no more than twice. One might be required to re-read something for a class or a book club, but even then, it's a choice--having read the book once, one can usually fake it enough for a class or book club, I suspect. It helps that reading (and thus re-reading) isn't a performance art. It's rare that someone is going to sit there and watch you read something.

Re-watching a movie or an episode of a tv show, on the other hand, is often something forced upon us by circumstances. That episode of Friends that is only on when you are in waiting rooms. That movie replay your spouse got sucked into, and now you're watching it for the fourteenth time....

I think it's partly a matter of the choice involved that makes me find re-reading often more rewarding than re-watching. Re-reading a book usually reveals complexities, whereas re-watching a movie usually reveals simplicities. It is a wonderful moment when you re-watch something and it is as good or even better than the first time you watched it--and again, I think it's because circumstances force us to re-watch when re-reading remains so purely, so cleanly optional.

And there's really nothing worse, is there, than that moment when you're re-watching something that moved you emotionally the first time and you feel... nothing. When all you see are the puppeteer's fingers tugging on your emotions, and feel no part of what you did before. The jokes have gone stale. The sadness is clearly relying on some composer's ability to rip off Barber's Adagio for Strings, not on anything that was in the script, either text or subtext, and certainly nothing the actors are doing, either.

Sure, that can happen when you re-read, but it does seems to happen so much less often...

And of course, that's what happened to me during my second viewing of the latest Harry Potter movie. I went because Dann hadn't seen it. And my estimation of the movie plummeted. Everything I glossed over the first time, I hated the second. Some things I liked the first time, I hated the second time. And absolutely nothing new stood out for me.

So, I found myself watching the movie through the "what if Dumbledore IS Ron?" filter for about the last hour. I can't find the link to the earliest iteration of this crackbrained theory, but it's all over the place if you just Google "Dumbledore is Ron." In any case, it's pretty clear to me that Dumbledore isn't Ron, but I did spend the last hour of the movie plotting out a pretty interesting alternate universe of "But what if he were."

And that entertained me, and made the re-watch bearable.

Also, at the end, I realized that was more or less the plot of Star Trek. Only, Dumbledore and Ron both = Spock (one old, one young).

But that might only make sense if you've just spent an hour during which the only entertainment is waiting for your husband to jump when creepy sea-wraiths grab Harry Potter.