Sometimes I choose a restaurant, sometimes a restaurant chooses me, and sometimes one of my guests asks to record at one of their favorite hangouts. That’s what happened this episode when I met with editor Sheila Williams for dinner in Manhattan. She highly recommended the Italian restaurant Cibo e Vino on Broadway and 89th Street, and based on our shared appetizer of flash-fried cauliflower with truffle Béchamel and brown butter … I’m inclined to agree.

Sheila has worked for Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine since 1982, became its editor in 2004, and went on to win the Hugo Award for Best Short Form Editor in 2011 and 2012. She also co-edited A Woman’s Liberation: A Choice of Futures by and About Women with Connie Willis, as well as numerous other anthologies.

We chatted about her first day on the job more than a third of a century ago, meeting Isaac Asimov at an early Star Trek convention when she was only 16, which writer intimidated her the most when she first got into the business, what she learned from working with previous Asimov’s editors Shawna McCarthy and Gardner Dozois, the most common problems she sees in the more than 7,000 stories that cross her desk each year, the identities of the only writers she’s never rejected, what goes through her mind in that moment she reads a manuscript and arrives at “yes,” and much more.

Here’s how you can snag a seat at the tabe— (more…)

I’d never expected to return to Alinea. It’s not that repeat visits aren’t worth it, but I don’t get to Chicago often, and even though I had an amazing time there during the 2012 Worldcon, when I do get to that city I only have so many free nights, and there are many other intriguing restaurants which I’ve yet to try—Grace, Elizabeth, Moto, Schwa … the list goes on.

But Ellen Datlow desperately wanted dinner there during this year’s Nebula Awards weekend, and asked me to use my good karma and Internet-fu to get her a table. I’d assumed that once I snagged the reservation, I’d simply turn the table over to her, but after I had us on the books (within seconds of when reservations began to be taken for the month of June), the temptation of eating again at one of the world’s top restaurants was too great.

Which is how I found myself stepping through the unmarked front door of Alinea last Thursday night with Ellen, Barry Goldblatt, Sam Miller, Cat Rambo, and Sheila Williams. (Yes, unmarked door. Unless you know it’s there, you don’t know it’s there.)

And here’s what, for the next four hours or so, we ate. (And you’ll have to forgive me for not going into detail on each course, but rather relying on the text from Alinea’s own menu, handed to each diner at the end of the meal. After having posted five other food reports from the Nebula Awards weekend over the past few days, I’m all out of superlatives. Simply assume that everything was wonderful.)

Surf Clam
sunchoke, cucumber, lilac

(more…)

In her March 2008 Asimov’s editorial, “Panning for Gold,” Sheila Williams shares the following nugget of information about her readership:

I think that at least 10 percent of Asimov’s readers are currently trying their hands at writing. I suspect that over the years Asimov’s editors have seen stories at one time or another from at least 20 to 30 percent of you—perhaps even more.

I must admit to being surprised that the number is so high. Perhaps it’s because I never tried to calculate such a percentage for Science Fiction Age back when I was editing fiction, and if I’d been paying attention, I would have already been aware of such a large overlap.

Oh, I tallied other numbers on and off, such as the percentage of submissions by women compared to the percentage of published stories by women, so that I could respond when people took me to task for the magazine not being representative of the pool of available stories—but I never thought to examine readers and writers as a sort of Venn diagram in an attempt to divine the correlation.

I trust that Sheila’s observation is correct. I’d love to know whether this fact holds true for other magazines, and for book publishing as well, both within science fiction and without. Is the reader/writer relationship similar in mysteries? How about romances?

I also wonder whether this carries over to other creative fields. What percentage of movie audiences want to make movies? What percentage of people who go to the theater hope to someday work in the theater? Is Asimov’s an anomaly, in that it’s so heavily supported by those who want to be a part of it? Or do Sheila’s numbers hold true for all artistic endeavors?

I’m not sure that there’s any way of finding this out. Any ideas?