And so Eating the Fantastic says farewell to Balticon … by saying hello to writer, editor, publisher, foodie, baseball enthusiast (and more!) Cecilia Tan.

Cecilia is the publisher of Circlet Press, the author of the Slow Surrender trilogy and the serialized Darron’s Guitar Chronicles, the cowriter of The 50 Greatest Yankee Games and The 50 Greatest Red Sox Games … but that’s just a partial list of her accomplishments, as this episode will reveal. We broke away from Balticon for lunch at Family Meal (the site of my earlier chats with Sarah Pinsker and Fran Wilde), as the restaurant’s not only good, but extremely close to the con hotel.

Cecilia and I discussed how her self-published Telepaths Don’t Need Safewords gave birth to the Circlet Press empire, the advice she received from Tor publisher Tom Doherty, her love for the Legion of Super-Heroes, the lesson you should learn from the fact mass market publishing finally caught up with what she’d been doing all along, and much more. Plus a few things you might not know about her, such as her teen presidency of the largest Menudo fan club in the English-speaking world!

Here’s how you can eavesdrop— (more…)