The Omicron surge is making me fear for my participation in future conventions, but that doesn’t erase the fun I had in D.C. last month during DisCon III, the 79th World Science Fiction Convention. I recorded five episodes of the podcast that weekend, the first of which was last episode’s pizza dinner with José Pablo Iriarte. This time around I invite you to join me for breakfast with the award-wining writer Fonda Lee.

Fonda Lee won both a World Fantasy Award and an Aurora Award for her novel Jade City, which was also nominated for Nebula, Seiun, and Sunburst Awards. That first installment of her Green Bone Saga, an epic urban fantasy, was followed by Jade War, which was nominated for both the Dragon and Aurora Awards. Jade Legacy, the third book in her series, was released in November of 2021. Her young adult novels Zeroboxer and Exo were both Andre Norton Award finalists. She holds black belts in karate and kung fu, which probably came in handy when it was time for her to write Shang-Chi for Marvel Comics.

Because Fonda is a fan of Eggs Benedict, we headed to the Lafayette restaurant in the Hay Adams Hotel, where I’d been informed by Tom Sietsema of the Washington Post we could find an excellent incarnation of that dish.

We discussed what it was like finishing the final book in her Green Bone Saga trilogy during the pandemic, her secret for keeping track of near 2,000 pages of characters and plot points, why every book project is terrifying in its own way, how much of the ending she knew at the beginning (and our opposing views on whether knowing the ending helps or hurts the creative process), the warring wolves inside her as she writes the most emotionally difficult scenes, why she starts to worry if her writing is going too smoothly, the framing device that became far more than a framing device, why her natural length for processing ideas is the novel rather than the short story, and much more.

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Here’s a closer look at that Eggs Benedict —

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Please join me two weeks from now for another culinary conversation I harvested from the 79th World Science Fiction Convention in Washington D.C., when I lunch with Usman T. Malik, who won the British Fantasy Award for his novella “The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn,” and the Bram Stoker Award for his short story “The Vaporization Enthalpy of a Peculiar Pakistani Family.”

Thanks for listening!