If you’re a member, you can see who’s recommending you, which may possibly influence you to recommend those people. In other words the process is social and can, one would imagine, be to some extent gamed. This said, in many or most cases the outstanding quality of a story or a novel is what brings it to the top.

I’m not myself a member of SFWA at this time. When I was a beginning writer, I was proud and happy to be able to join, and I was in it for a number of years. But eventually the awards bulletins became something of a distraction and discouragement to me and I dropped out. But I do think that SFWA has over the years done many good things for the status of SF writers vis-a-vis the publishers, critics, Hollyood and so on.

I no longer worry very much about whether I’ll ever get a Nebula or, for that matter, a Hugo. The main thing is that I’m still writing and that I’ve had many, many devoted readers over the years. And I did get the two Philp K. Dick awards. At this point, I think my role is to be a “beloved cult author” or an “underground writer” as opposed to being a “best-selling mass-audience author.”

Perhaps at some point in the future there will be some movies of my novels, or a wide-spread rediscovery of my work—and that would be cool. But it would be foolish to spend my remaining years obsessing over these somewhat remote possibilities. I’d rather be grateful for the success I’ve had, and to continue enjoying the craft and process of writing day to day.

So this is a very long answer to a short question — which indicates, despite my protestations to the contrary, that I AM in fact more than a little hung up on the whole awards and recognition thing—but that’s fairly typical for a writer!

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As for the endless edits issue, there is something to that. At times it feels like every time I read something I find more things to fix. But it does tend to settle down after, say, the sixth or the tenth go-through. Not entirely, but at some point, you just have to say that’s enough. There’s also a fear of over-editing, over-smoothing, and removing some of the cruft and gnarl that made a piece interesting in the first place.