Balticon 60 begins in two weeks, and in addition to appearing on five panels and doing a reading, I’ll also be throwing a party to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Eating the Fantastic — a party which since my planning began has turned into a celebration for the podcast’s Hugo nomination as well.

There’ll be donuts and door prizes, so I hope you can make it.

If you’ll also be in Baltimore over the Memorial Day weekend, here’s where to track me down —

Building a Podcast From the Ground Up
Friday, May 22nd, 7:00 p.m. (Mount Washington)
Podcasts are a common way to engage a wide variety of listeners about interesting topics. Podcasts such as Writing Excuses and Eight Days of Diana Wynne Jones got the attention of the Hugo voting public. What makes these podcasts unique and how can you choose a format that can be sustained over time? Let’s discuss planning episodes, defining your audience, and setting realistic production goals with an emphasis on thoughtful creation rather than chasing trends.
with Alan J. Porter, Mark Painter, and Dominick Rabrun

Do Plot Devices Really Need Explaining?
Saturday, May 23rd, 2:30 p.m. (Mount Washington)
Current writing advice encourages everything to have a reason for existing, that every question is a promise to the reader for the future. But what if there aren’t explanations to be had? When is it okay to leave things unexplained? Can the wondrous sometimes be left up to wondering?
with Sally Wiener Grotta, Brianna Wu, and Maeghan Jo Kimball

What Makes a Good Editor?
Saturday, May 23rd, 5:30 p.m. (Pride of Baltimore II)
What are the hallmarks of a good editor? What strategies and techniques do professional editors use to review a story or poem and help it become its best self? How does one navigate the editor/author relationship from the editorial side? Is there a trick to convincing a publishing team that this book right here is the one the publisher needs? Our panel of editors will discuss these and other important facets of editing.
with Dave ring, Scott H. Andrews, and JL Gribble

Eating the Fantastic’s 10th Anniversary Celebration
Sunday, May 24th, 10:00 a.m. (Ballroom A/Con Suite)

I Don’t Know How to Write What I Know
Sunday, May 24th, 1:00 p.m. (Guilford)
Writers hear ‘write what you know’ all the time. But how do you take this aphorism and apply it to SFFH? Let’s talk about what ‘write what you know’ really means and how to apply it to your fiction.
with Ann Chatham, Leslye Penelope, David Walton, Haley Gelfuso

Autograph Session
Sunday, May 24th, 2:30 p.m. (5th Floor Lobby)
with Charles E. Gannon and Walter H. Hunt

Author Readings
Sunday, May 24th, 7:00 p.m. (James)
with Jennifer R. Povey and MJ Huntsgood

If you’ll be there as well, please say hi!

One of the first things I did after deciding to attend this year’s Eastercon in Birmingham was research the city’s culinary specialties, which is how I learned about the Birmingham balti, so famous the city has even applied for cultural heritage protection for the cuisine. On the first night of the con, award-winning writer Paul McAuley and I headed over to Shababs — which reportedly serves up the best — to check some out.

McAuley has published twenty-five novels — the most recent of which, Loss Protocol, was released in February — as well as more than a hundred short stories. A twenty-sixth novel, Heaven’s Grand Design, will follow. His fiction has resulted in five nominations and a win for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, seven nominations and a win for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, two nominations apiece for the Philip K. Dick Award and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, winning each of those once, as well as multiple nominations for the  British SF Association Award and British Fantasy Award.

He’s also co-edited an anthology, In Dreams, with Kim Newman, and published a Doctor Who novella and a BFI Film Classic on Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil. He wrote a regular book review column in Interzone magazine back in the 1990s, and since then has written book and film reviews and pieces of journalism for a variety of publications, including the Guardian and Independent newspapers, Crime Time, Arc magazine, New Scientist, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

We discussed his fascination with James Joyce and how it played out (or didn’t) in his own writing, why he’s thrilled the first short story he sold to a pro market was never published, the reasons he loves Los Angeles, what he learned as a scientist which helped him write better science fiction, why he compared his writing style to Raymond Chandler’s, the way his world-building takes place during writing and not before, whether or not his new novel should be considered science fiction, what I feel that hovel has in common with Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, our shared love of the ambiguous ending, what he learned by rereading his short fiction to assemble a career-spanning collection, and much more.

Here’s how you can join us at Shababs — (more…)

This time around, I reminisce about what it meant to have met Gerry Conway in 1971 when I was only 16, the comic book comrades I should have known better but never had the chance, my dreams of decluttering with Bernie Wrightson, the first two origin stories I thought up for The Scarecrow before the one fans got to read in 1975, and more.

You can hear me get all nostalgic via the embed below or download the episode at the site of your choice.

Here are a few images related to a couple of the topics I mention this episode —

Gerry Conway
as interviewed on Episode 99 of my Eating the Fantastic podcast

My original notes for The Scarecrow’s (wisely) unused origins

How those origins were summarized on a Dead of Night #11 text page

The first of five conversations I captured across the pond in Birmingham during Eastercon was an Eating the Fantastic reunion, because Farah Mendlesohn last appeared on the podcast on Episode 126. Back then, we discussed their newly released book The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein, which I was pleased went on to receive a Hugo nomination for Best Related Work.

This time around, you’ll get to hear us discuss their newest work, Considering The Female Man by Joanna Russ, or, As the Bear Swore (Luna Press), which I hope will be recognized with its own Hugo nomination next year.

Farah’s a seven-time nominee for the Hugo Award, winning (with Edward James) in 2005 for The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction (Cambridge University Press). Farah also won a World Fantasy Award in 2017, which they wrote with Michael M. Levy. They’re also the author of Rhetorics of Fantasy (Wesleyan University Press), On Joanna Russ (Wesleyan), The Inter-Galactic Playground: A Critical Study of Children’s and Teens’ Science Fiction (McFarland), Diana Wynne Jones: The Fantastic Tradition and Children’s Literature (Routledge), and Creating Memory: Historical Fiction and the English Civil Wars (Palgrave Macmillan).

We discussed whether their Hugo-nominated Heinlein book changed the conversation about that author, if there’s such a thing as an inverse of The Suck Fairy, why it might be wrong to chat about The Female Man while nibbling on toast, the reason Russ’s novel took so long to get published, the probable purpose of the self-critique within the book, the difficulties in communicating with cross-cultural metaphors, why The Female Man is a version of The Christmas Carol, the reason the book isn’t Postmodernist but Modernist, why I failed to pick up on the novel’s Jewishness, what surprised them most during their rereading of the novel, the reason Considering The Female Man by Joanna Russ was so painfully hard to write, and much more.

Here’s how you can join us at Chris’s Cafe — (more…)