I am overjoyed to be able to announce that “Conditional Love” has been nominated for a 2010 Nebula Award in the short story category!

This is an immense honor. I’ve daydreamed about being up for a Nebula, but I hadn’t expected to get there so soon. Now I get to daydream about celebrating and meeting people at the Nebula Awards Banquet in May, which is a very near future. Much nearer than flying cars!

“Conditional Love” was first published by Asimov’s Science Fiction and will soon be available as a free pdf from their website. I’ll post again when that is up, [I have posted my story on my author site in several formats! -FAS, 3/3/11] but if you’d like to listen to the story, narrated by Mur Lafferty, on Escape Pod, that is already available!

The Short Story category is a big one this year, with seven nominees (there are five in each Nebula category unless there are ties in the number of nominations):

• “Arvies” by Adam-Troy Castro (Lightspeed, 8/10)
• “How Interesting: A Tiny Man” by Harlan Ellison (Realms of Fantasy, 2/10)
• “Ponies” by Kij Johnson (Tor.com, 1/17/10)
• “I’m Alive, I Love You, I’ll See You in Reno” by Vylar Kaftan (Lightspeed, 6/10)
• “The Green Book” by Amal El-Mohtar (Apex, 11/10)
• “Ghosts of New York” by Jennifer Pelland (Dark Faith (anthology))
• “Conditional Love” by Felicity Shoulders (Asimov’s, 1/10)

To the best of my knowledge, this is the first nomination for Amal El-Mohtar and Vylar Kaftan as well as for me!

I hope you’ll take a look at the full list of nominees. Congratulations to all the nominees, including my fellow Portland-area writers Mary Robinette Kowal, M.K. Hobson (both nominated for their first novels!)

I am so happy that it’s been very hard to keep the news under wraps until the press release. I’ve been running through huge numbers of exclamation marks — don’t be surprised if there’s a regional shortage — and smiling, even early in the morning, for days. A marvelous surprise, and, with apologies to the replica pulse rifle, the best birthday present ever. Who could mind turning 30 when she knew about this?