So! I had some lovely news earlier this week, and a nice surprise this morning, but I never claimed to be consistently chronological: last things first.

“Conditional Love” on Escape Pod
As I announced in September, my story “Conditional Love” was accepted for publication by the one and only Escape Pod, the fabulous science fiction podcast. Its episode, #279, went live today! My story is read by Mur Lafferty, the host and editor of the podcast, and I’m pretty thrilled with it! (As you can tell by my running through today’s quota of exclamation marks in the first two paragraphs of this post. Damn, how will I finish the post now? With an illusion of decorum, I wager.)

Escape Pod is free: you can download Episode #279 or stream it from the show’s website here. It will also be available on iTunes (still free!) in the near future, and of course if you subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, the new episode will turn up in due course.

This is a big first for me. It’s an exciting, yet embarrassing gratification to hear my words read back from my laptop in Mur’s assured tones. Go, listen! Make my ears even redder!

“Conditional Love” on the 2010 Locus Recommended Reading List
Locus Magazine published their 2010 Recommended Reading List last week, and “Conditional Love” is among the recommended short stories. (Must…not…use…exclamation points.) The list is full of really splendid pieces of short fiction that I enjoyed this year (as well as novels that I intend to enjoy at some point in the future) and seeing my story in that company is dizzying.

The Locus List is, of course, also the initial ballot for the 2010 Locus Awards.

Rumors of my tossing my dinner aside in order to rip open the February 2011 issue of Locus and see this list again on paper are surely exaggerated. After all, that dinner contained fried okra. And I have decorum. I managed to delete all the extra exclamation points from this post, didn’t I? Oh, except those two. Damn.