Posts tagged with "nebula award" - Faerye Net

Portland Monthly Magazine article out!

2011-04-29T09:10:53+00:00

I am not 100% sure the issue is on newsstands yet (it’s the May issue, with a cover story on Farmer’s Markets), but Portland Monthly Magazine has put their article about Portland Nebula Nominees Mary Robinette Kowal, M.K. Hobson and me online!

Here is the link! Article by our own Camille Alexa and photograph (complete with Marla face) by Michael Cogliantry.

I will cop to finding this pretty exciting!

"Conditional Love" available free online!

2011-03-03T22:24:25+00:00

Spurred on by more experienced nominees, I have posted my Nebula-nominated short story “Conditional Love” on my author site. You can read it online here or download it in PDF or ePub file format to read on the screen (or printout) of your choice. Many thanks to my co-protagonist Ryan for making this happen quickly and beautifully!

My story is by far the latest of the nominated short stories to appear online, so please pass the link on!

I hope you enjoy my story. Here’s how it starts:

Conditional Love
The new patient was five or six years old, male, Caucasian, John Doe as usual. Grace checked the vitals his bed sensors were feeding her board and concluded he was asleep. She eased the door of 408 open and stepped in.

The boy’s head was tilted on his pillow, brown curls cluttering his forehead. Sleep had flushed his cheeks so he looked younger than the estimate. He seemed healthy, with no visible deformities, and if he had been opted for looks, it had worked—Grace would have described him as “cherubic.” He wouldn’t have been dumped if nothing was wrong, so Grace found herself stepping softly, unwilling to disturb him and discover psychological conditions.

“Don’t worry about waking him, he sleeps pretty deep.”

…Read the rest!

Huge news: my first Nebula Nomination!

2011-02-22T07:03:25+00:00

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?

The Booker and other Prize Reading

2008-09-29T21:36:38+00:00

I was a little surprised the other day, perigrinating Powell’s City of Books, to run across an Award Winner section. Maybe they had this before, but it’s certainly noticeable now, and features free bookmarks with lists of winners of the Pulitzer for Fiction, the National Book Award, et cetera. Then, of course, there were shelves and shelves of the books. I took a quick look and realized that I’ve read very few NBA winners, very few Pulitzers. What I do read is Bookers.

1981 Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (on my to-read list)
1982 Thomas Keneally, Schindler’s Ark (aka Schindler’s List, read)
1983 J. M. Coetzee Life & Times of Michael K
1984 Anita Brookner Hotel du Lac
1985 Keri Hulme, the bone people
1986 Kingsley Amis, The Old Devils
1987 Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger
1988 Peter Carey, Oscar and Lucinda (read)
1989 Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day (read)
1990 A. S. Byatt, Possession: A Romance (read)
1991 Ben Okri, The Famished Road
1992 Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient (read)
1992 Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger
1993 Roddy Doyle, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha
1994 James Kelman, How Late It Was, How Late
1995 Pat Barker, The Ghost Road
1996 Graham Swift, Last Orders
1997 Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things (read)
1998 Ian McEwan, Amsterdam
1999 J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace
2000 Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin (read)
2001 Peter Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang (read)
2002 Yann Martel, Life of Pi (on my to-read list)
2003 DBC Pierre, Vernon God Little
2004 Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty
2005 John Banville, The Sea
2006 Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss
2007 Anne Enright, The Gathering

Now, obviously I haven’t read the majority of these, the Booker Winners in my lifetime. But that’s a lot more than I’ve read of the Pulitzer Winners or NBA Winners since 1981.

But another thing I notice is that the ones I’ve read are from 2001 and earlier. Of the more recent novels, the only one that sounds familiar — even having looked at shelves of Booker Winners just over a week ago – is The Gathering, and I couldn’t tell you the first thing about it. It takes a long time for books to come to my attention. Because of this, I am always amazed at how up-to-the-minute some readers are. I’m still trying to catch up on all the books I didn’t have time to read during grad school, a few classics I feel a dunce for not having read, any number of modern sci-fi works because my sci-fi reading was guided by a member of a previous generation. How do people manage to have read most or all of the Booker shortlist in time to have strident opinions about it? (The Booker’s juried, so their opinions are just that.) Are they all librarians and booksellers, book critics and Lit professors, so that it’s part of their job to know what’s coming out and whether they should read it? My way of reading is more haphazard, more organic. I gather suggestions and sometimes act on them immediately, sometimes wait for more information or opinions. I don’t buy many hardbacks and I borrow things from the library, on the whole, for which I don’t have to wait on a list.

I suppose the reason I’m faintly nervous about this topic is that I recently lurked on a forum discussion about SFWA members and the Nebulas. (SFWA is the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Active members can recommend works in the various categories for the preliminary ballot and vote on the preliminary ballot, which determines the final ballot that goes to judges.) Basically, the gist was that SFWA members aren’t active enough in recommending stories, and sometimes vote based on notoriety if they haven’t read the works. I’d like to be a full SFWA member someday (I am becoming a ~~junior~~ Associate Member as we speak) and I worry. I want to be diligent and do my civic duty (as a citizen of the galaxy). Am I going to have to be up-to-the-minute? Buy hardbacks, wait on library lists? Shove my half-read classics and obscure nonfiction reading aside to tackle the latest and greatest? But, then, I suppose, if I get to be an Active Member, doing the diligence will be part of my job too. Maybe I worry too much, because I feel like that would make me more proud than put upon.