One thing. The gut punch GRRM refers to may have been the death of a friend. Someone on Twitter made the same inference, then deleted the Tweet, and apologized for it after finding about the death of GRRM's friend. I saw this happening live on Twitter and have no citations to show you, but I thought you might want to know. That being said, GRRM did do a poor job as Hugo MC. I thought he would have been good since he was younger than David Gerrold who MC'ed the Hugos in 2015 and did a pretty good job. IIRC Gerrold did not do a long look back as GRRM did. As Hugo MC, you should as either be quick as you can like John Picacio (2019) or really prepare for something innovative like Karen Lord (2017) or Afua Richardson and Michael Scott (2019).
One thing. The gut punch GRRM refers to may have been the death of a friend. Someone on Twitter made the same inference, then deleted the Tweet, and apologized for it after finding about the death of GRRM's friend. I saw this happening live on Twitter and have no citations to show you, but I thought you might want to know. That being said, GRRM did do a poor job as Hugo MC. I thought he would have been good since he was younger than David Gerrold who MC'ed the Hugos in 2015 and did a pretty good job. IIRC Gerrold did not do a long look back as GRRM did. As Hugo MC, you should as either be quick as you can like John Picacio (2019) or really prepare for something innovative like Karen Lord (2017) or Afua Richardson and Michael Scott (2019).
This was a great look at a bad year.