Readercon 33 kicks off 10 days from now in Quincy, Massachusetts, and if you’ll be there, too, here’s where you can track me down — when I’m not off on early morning donut hikes or recording new episodes of my Eating the Fantastic podcast, that is —

Writing Hope and Optimism
Thursday, July 11, 9:00 p.m., Salon B
Hopeful and optimistic fiction are having a moment in genre spaces, but what of hopeful and optimistic characters? Cynical ones never go out of style, but is optimism really so uninteresting? What factors contribute to characters’ hopes being perceived by the audience as believable and inspiring rather than naive or cliched? In what ways are notable portrayals of hope across subgenres—including romance, dystopias, and horror—in conversation with each other, and how can a narrative offer hope independent of its characters’ opinions?
with Andrea Hairston, A. T. Greenblatt, John Wiswell, Randee Dawn

I Don’t Know Why I’m on This Panel!
Friday, July 12, 4:00 p.m., Salon 3
In this new take on those dreaded words, all the panelists on this panel have been selected for reasons unknown to them. Will they discover what they have in common? Will they take turns ranting about subjects the others have never even considered? Will they have taken what little advance notice they received to prepare a group song-and-dance number? There’s only one way to find out!
with Katherine Crighton (m), Natalie Luhrs, William Alexander, Zin E. Rocklyn

Meet the Pros(e)
Friday, July 12, 2024, 10:15 p.m., Salon 3
At the Friday night Meet the Pros(e) party, program participants are assigned to tables with a roughly equal number of conferencegoers and other participants, and then table placements are scrambled at regular intervals so that everyone gets to meet a new set of people in a small-group setting. Think of it as a low-key sort of speed dating where you need never be the sole focus of anyone’s attention, and the goal is just to get to know some cool Readerconnish people. Please note that this event will include a bar and is mask-optional, unlike most other programming.

How to Read Like a Writer
Saturday, July 13, 2024, 10:00 a.m., Salon A
Most of us learn how to compose stories through an osmotic process, soaking in influences as we grow as readers, but how can writers looking to hone their skills get the most out of their reading? Panelists will share tools and approaches for active reading, including which fiction and non-fiction books they have found most helpful for improving their craft, from story structure to dialog to perfecting POV and more.
with E. C. Ambrose (m), Chris Rose, Jeanne Cavelos, Storm Humbert

Imaginary Book Club
Sunday, July 14, 2024, 10:00 a.m., Salon 3
Panelists discuss the most interesting books they’ve read in the last year, even though those books (technically) do not exist, and regale the audience with learned commentary designed to persuade them to give some of their precious reading time for these nonexistent classics. Perhaps we will discuss a newly discovered 19th-century werewolf romantasy, or the Complete Goosebumps as annotated by Thomas Pynchon. Maybe the baseball horror anthology “If I Never Get Back”?
with David G. Shaw, Graham Sleight, Greer Gilman, Zin E. Rocklyn

Reading
Sunday, July 14, 2024, 11:00 a.m., Blue Hills

Kaffeeklatsch
Sunday, July 14, 2024, 1:00 p.m. Basalt

If you’re there, please say hello!

Readercon 32 kicks off tomorrow for the first time since 2019. If you’ll be in Quincy, Massachusetts as well, here’s where to find me (when I’m not off visiting the grave of the inventor of the donut, that is) —

Escapism and Allegory in a Pandemic
Friday, July 14, 11:00 a.m., Salon 4
SF is full of escapism and of allegories, and works sometimes move from one category to the other as time passes. During COVID lockdowns many writers incorporated pandemic themes, using art to process the new situation. Simultaneously, readers pleaded for a break from the pandemic on social media. “No pandemic stories” started to crop up in submissions guidelines from editors who needed more variety. As a reader or writer, did the pandemic change where you fit on the escapism/allegory spectrum?
with Stephanie Feldman (m), John Wiswell, Sarah Jean Horwitz

How can short story authors build an audience?
Friday, July 14, 3:00 p.m., Salon 4
Short stories today are published across a wide variety of media, formats, and imprints. As a result, writers specializing in short stories have difficulty connecting with and building an audience over time. How can you find the people who enjoy your work, and how can they find you in a cost-effective way? We will discuss short story collections, social media, conventions, and other ways of finding and keeping in touch with our favorite short fiction writers.
with F. Brett Cox (m), Arley Sorg, Christopher Mark Rose, and Katherine Crighton

Reading
Saturday, July 15 10:00 a.m., Blue Hills

History of Readercon
Saturday, July 15 3:00 p.m., Salon 5
Veteran Readercon participants and organizers will tell stories of Readercon’s nearly 40 year history. Learn about the awards and ceremonies that are or have been hosted here, events that have come and gone, clandestine attendance by rockstar authors, and maybe a little bit of drama if the panelists think it wise to share. Come to the first of this potentially annual panel and join the circle of knowledge in this con’s legacies and culture.
with David G. Shaw, B Diane Martin,The joey Zone

Speculative Memoir
Sunday, July 16, 11:00 a.m., Salon A
The two Hav novels by Welsh travel writer Jan Morris, published in a combined volume under the title Hav in 2006, detail the author’s experiences in a city state that does not exist. How do such works achieve the effect they do, and how are they like (but also unlike) the memoir-esque frame stories that we are familiar with, from The Princess Bride to much of 19th century fiction? How can we carry their legacy forward? Who else is writing this way? Is “speculative memoir” a useful characterization, as opposed to “fake history”?
with Henry Wessells (m), Alexander Jablokov, Greer Gilman, Matthew Cheney

Kaffeeklatsch
Sunday, July 16 1:00 p.m., Concierge Lounge

I hope to see you there!

It’s time to say farewell to Readercon! Which means it’s time for a seafood dinner with Jack Dann, following my burgers with the Nebula Award-winning writer P. Djèlí Clark and an Indian lunch with Bram Stoker Award-winning writer Lucy A. Snyder.

Jack’s an old friend I see far too infrequently ever since he moved to Australia. I was privileged to publish a story of his in Science Fiction Age back in the ’90s, but that’s the least of his accomplishments. His first novel, The Man Who Melted, was nominated for a 1984 Nebula Award, and since then he’s gone on to win a Nebula Award, two World Fantasy Awards, three Ditmar Awards, and the Peter McNamara Award for Excellence. His short story collections include Timetipping, Jubilee: the Essential Jack Dann, and Visitations. His 1998 anthology Dreaming Down-Under (co-edited with his wife Janeen Webb) is a groundbreaking work in Australian science fiction.

He’s also created some amazing stories in collaboration with the likes of Michael Swanwick, Gardner Dozois, Barry Malzberg, and others, and since you know from listening to Eating the Fantastic that collaboration completely baffles me, we dove into a discussion of that as well.

We stepped out to The Chowder House, which has been in operation since 1985, but has a history which goes all the way back to 1920, when Darcy’s Irish Pub opened — and over the decades expanded into a row of family-owned restaurants. It was a comfortable spot, with good food, and the perfect place for us to catch up after far too long apart.

We discussed the novel he and Gardner Dozois always planned to write but never did, how a botched appendectomy at age 20 which left him with only a 5% chance of survival inspired one of his most famous stories, why he quit law school the day after he sold a story to Damon Knight’s Orbit series, the bad writing advice he gave Joe Haldeman early on we’re glad got ignored, the secrets to successful collaborations, the time Ellen Datlow acted as referee on a story he wrote with Michael Swanwick, how it felt thanks to his novel The Man Who Melted to be a meme before we began living in a world of memes, why he’s drawn to writing historical novels which require such a tremendous amount of research, the time he was asked to channel the erotica of Anaïs Nin, the gift he got from his father that taught him to take joy in every moment — and much more.

Here’s how you can eavesdrop on our conversation at The Chowder House — (more…)

It’s time to return to Readercon for another meal with a creator of the fantastic. Last episode, you headed out from that con for burgers with P. Djèlí Clark; this time, we’ll escape for Indian food with award-winning horror writer Lucy A. Snyder.

Snyder’s a seven-time Bram Stoker Award finalist and a five-time winner, including for her first novel Spellbent in 2009, and most recently for her collection While the Black Stars Burn in 2016. She has published more than 80 short stories in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Strange Horizons, Weird Tales, and more. Her nonfiction book Shooting Yourself in the Head for Fun and Profit: A Writer’s Survival Guide. was published in 2014. She was a Bram Stoker Award nominee at this year’s StokerCon for her collection Garden of Eldritch Delights.

We took off for lunch one afternoon to Punjab Cafe, which has been operating in Quincy since 2000, and is by all accounts the best Indian restaurant in the area. They had a tasty looking buffet option available, but we ordered a la carte instead, because a buffet is definitely not the way you want to go when you’re trying to maintain the flow of a conversation and are both wired to a recorder.

We discussed how Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time made her want to become a writer, the rare bad advice she got from one of her Clarion instructors, the way Hunter S. Thompson and Truman Capote taught her about consensual truth, how she learned to embrace her uneasy relationship with horror, the time Tim Powers said of one of her early stories that “this is an example of everything that’s wrong with modern science fiction,” why if you want to write flash fiction you should learn to write poetry, what you should consider if you’re starting a new writing workshop, how best to prepare for public readings of emotionally difficult stories, the way she used Kickstarter to continue her Jessie Shimmer series (plus everything you need to know to start your own campaign), what it was like writing in the Doctor Who and X-Files universes, and much, much more.

Here’s how you can eavesdrop on our conversation at Punjab Cafe — (more…)

This year’s Readercon‘s a month in the past, but here at Eating the Fantastic, it’s only just beginning, because it’s time for the first of three episodes I recorded at a con I’ve been attending since 1987.

P. Djèlí Clark won both the Nebula Award and the Locus Award for Best Short Story earlier this year for “The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington” — and is currently up for a Hugo Award not just for that, but for his novella “The Black God’s Drums” as well. His fiction has appeared online at Tor.com, Lightspeed, Fireside Fiction, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and elsewhere, and in print anthologies such as Hidden Youth and Clockwork Cairo. He is founding member of FIYAH Literary Magazine.

We got together for dinner Friday of the con at Quincy’s Fat Cat Restaurant, which specializes in comfort food like nachos, wings, mac and cheese, and ribs, though they also serve higher end items like duck and ribeye steaks. But our tastes were not quite so upscale that night, so we stuck to chicken quesadillas and burgers.

We discussed his upcoming first novel (the sale of which was announced only days before we spoke), the background which gave birth to his award-winning story “The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington,” the reason The Black God’s Drums switched point-of-view character during his writing of it, what he learned about New Orleans due to an unfortunate encounter with the local police department, how he found success when he switched from writing multi-volume sagas to focusing on shorter forms, his complicated feelings about Ray Bradbury, how being a professional historian helps his writing, our favorite (and not so favorite) episodes of The Twilight Zone, and much, much more.

Here’s how you can eavesdrop on our conversation at Fat Cat — (more…)

Readercon starts five weeks from tomorrow, and those who know me already know I’ll be there. I’ve attended every year since the con began in 1987, except for one notable exception.

The full schedule has now been released, so here’s the official programming on which you’ll be able to find me July 11-14 —

Saturday, July 13, 2:30 p.m., Salon C
Reading
I’ll be reading from “Opossums and Angels,” which was published in my recent collection Tell Me Like You Done Before (and Other Stories Written on the Shoulders of Giants). It’s an homage to both “The Screwfly Solution” and “The Women Men Don’t See,” my two favorite James Tiptree, Jr. stories, though I don’t think familiarity with either is necessary to enjoy mine.

Saturday, July 13, 3:00 p.m., Concierge Lounge
Kaffeeklatsch
with Ellen Datlow

Sunday, July 14, 1:00 p.m., Salon 4
From Seed to Story: How to Escape the Slush Pile
As Ann Leckie explained in a 2013 blog post, even great writers will have stories rejected if they write 7,000 words around an underdeveloped idea. So what kind of research should go into a short story? How much plot and exposition are called for? What questions should the writer be asking and answering before they even start writing? Panelists will explore various methods by which a story seed can be nurtured into something publishable.
with Martin Cahill, James Patrick Kelly, Benjamin C. Kinney, and Kenneth Schneyer

Of course, that’s not the only place you’ll be able to find me — should you happen to spot me in the bar or wandering the dealers room, don’t hesitate to say hi!

I hope to see you there.

It’s time for the second of three episodes recorded during my recent trip to Quincy, Massachusetts for Readercon, following up on last episode’s lunch with horror writer John Langan, and preceding next episode’s dinner with comic book writer and old Marvel Bullpen pal Don McGregor. This episode, you’ll get to sit at the table with the award-winning writer Rachel Pollack.

We had lunch on the final day of Readercon at Pho Pasteur. This Quincy restaurant is a 2017 spin-off of the original Boston Vietnamese venue which has been open since 1991, and since that cuisine is one of her favorites, I thought we should give that venue a try.

Rachel Pollack is someone I’ve been connected to for a third of a century, even since I ran her story “Lands of Stone” in a 1984 issue of Last Wave, a small press magazine I edited and published. But she’s gone on to do so much more since then!

Her novel Unquenchable Fire won the 1989 Arthur C. Clarke Award, and her novel Godmother Night won the 1997 World Fantasy Award. Her other novels include Temporary Agency, which was a 1994 Nebula Award nominee. Her comic book writing includes an acclaimed run on Doom Patrol, as well as New Gods and Brother Power the Geek. She is also an expert on the Tarot and has published many books on the subject, including a guide to Salvador Dali’s Tarot deck. Her comics and Tarot loves blended when she created the Vertigo Tarot Deck with writer Neil Gaiman and artist Dave McKean.

We discussed why Ursula K. Le Guin was such an inspiration, the reason celebrating young writers over older ones can skew sexist, what Tarot cards and comic books have in common, how 2001: A Space Odyssey isn’t a science fiction movie but an occult movie, why Captain Marvel was her favorite comic as a kid (Shazam!), the serendipitous encounter which led to her writing Doom Patrol, how she used DC’s Tomahawk to comment on old Western racial stereotypes, the problems that killed her Buffy the Vampire Slayer Tarot deck, how she intends to bring back her shaman-for-hire character Jack Shade, and much more.

Here’s how you can rip into those chicken wings with us— (more…)

After six episodes, the Nebula Awards weekend is now in the rearview mirror, and it’s time to move on to the first of three recorded during my recent trip to Quincy, Massachusetts for Readercon. I’ve attended every Readercon since it began in 1987 save one, and that year, when I was off covering the San Diego Comic-Con for the Syfy Channel, I was so sad to be missing out on my friends, I sent a live-sized photographic standup of myself so people could snap selfies with me and post them online to cheer me up.

Luckily, last month, the real flesh-and-blood Scott Edelman was able to attend, though, yes, there were probably some who would have probably preferred the flat me, and I’ve returned with many hours of ear candy for you, starting with John Langan.

John Langan wrote the poetic horror novel The Fisherman, which was probably my favorite book of 2016. And I obviously wasn’t the only one who felt that way, because it won the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Novel the following year. His short fiction has been published in magazines such as Lightspeed and Fantasy & Science Fiction, anthologies such as Lovecraft’s Children and Poe, plus many other venues.

His debut short story collection, 2008’s Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters, went on to become a Stoker Award nominee. He and I may be the only two people in the history of the planet to write zombie stories inspired by Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town”—his 2008 story “How the Day Runs Down” and my 2001 story “Live People Don’t Understand” tackle that theme in very different ways. He’s a co-founder and on the Board of Directors of the Shirley Jackson Awards.

We discussed how reading Conan the Barbarian comic books as a kid made him hope he’d grow up to be a comic book artist, why his evolution as a writer owes as much to William Faulkner as it does to Peter Straub, what he learned about storytelling from watching James Bond with his father and Buffy the Vampire Slayer with his wife, the best way to deal with the problematic life and literature of H. P. Lovecraft, the reason his first story featured a battle between King Kong and Godzilla, his process for plotting out a shark story unlike all other shark stories, why a writer should never fear to be ridiculous, what a science experiment in chemistry class taught him about writing, his love affair with semicolons, that time Lucius Shepard taught him how to box, the reason the Shirley Jackson Awards were created, and much more.

This episode’s venue was about a 15-minute Uber ride from the Readercon hotel. We had lunch by the water at Tony’s Clam Shop,which has been in business along Wollaston Beach since 1964, and is worth a visit if you happen to be in town.

Here’s how you can share some fish and chips with us— (more…)

It’s only 16 days until the start of Readercon, which I’ve been attending since 1987. I love it so much I’ve only missed one.

Readercon has bounced around Massachusetts over the decades, and this year it’s in Quincy for the third time, where it will run from July 12-16.

Here’s the programming on which you’ll be able to find me—

Thursday, July 12, 8:00 p.m., Salon 5
Writers Who Edit, Editors Who Write
Those who edit as a full-time job rarely do much writing on the side, but many full-time writers bolster their incomes through editing. Why does this equation seem to function better in one direction than the other? How do writers who edit avoid the pitfalls experienced by editors who write? What can be done to address an ever-widening taste gap, and the tendency to self-edit into the ground?
with Julia Rios, Mike Allen, Sabrina Vourvoulias, Mimi Mondal, John Edward Lawson

Thursday, July 12, 9:30 p.m., Salon B
Reading
I’ll be reading “The Stranded Time Traveler Embraces the Inevitable,” which will be published later this year in the anthology If This Goes On.

Friday, July 13, 2:00 p.m., Salon C
In Memoriam: Gardner Dozois
Gardner Dozois (1947–2018) was a towering figure in the field. He won 15 Hugo Awards for his editorial work, which included 20 years as editor of Asimov’s and 40 years of editing annual surveys of SF and fantasy as well as other anthologies. Less celebrated, but also excellent, were his short fiction and novels. We were honored to make him a guest of honor at Readercon 22. Join us in celebrating his life and work.
with Henry Wessells, Shawna McCarthy, Sheila Williams, Michael Swanwick, Gregory Feeley

Saturday, July 14, 10:00 a.m., Seven Masts
Kaffeeklatsch
with Victoria Janssen

I hope to see you there!

The second episode of Eating the Fantastic recorded while on a meal break from this year’s Readercon—which occurred the day after my dinner with James Patrick Kelly—was with award-winning science fiction writer John Kessel. We had lunch by the water on a warm sunny day at Bay Pointe Waterfront Restaurant in Quincy, Massachusetts.

Kessel’s latest novel, The Moon and The Other, was released in April from Saga Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. He’s a two-time Nebula Award winner, first in 1982 for his novella “Another Orphan,” then in 2008 for the novelette “Pride and Prometheus.” He set a new record with that second award, in that the 26 years between the two was (at the time) the longest gap for a winner in Nebula history. His short story “Buffalo”—one of my all-time favorites in or out of genre, and one which I reread often—won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award in 1992.

We discussed why he suddenly has two novels coming out within a year two decades after his last one, how attending the 1969 St. Louis Worldcon changed his life, the ways in which his objections to “The Cold Equations” and Ender’s Game are at their heart the same, his early days attempting to emulate Thomas M. Disch, the time-travel short story he couldn’t whip into shape for Damon Knight, which author broke his 26-year Nebula Awards record for the longest gap between wins, the secret behind the success of his many collaborations with James Patrick Kelly, and more.

Here’s how you can share some quahogs with us— (more…)