Last year, Eating the Fantastic traveled to New Zealand for the World Science Fiction convention, Scarborough UK for StokerCon, Los Angeles for the Nebula Awards weekend, and made various other stops on the convention circuit — because even though all of those events were forced to go virtual, I decided to act as if we had the year we deserved rather than the year we actually got.

This episode, we’re going to once again refuse to let a con going virtual steal from us the sense of community which comes when people break bread together and food loosens their tongues. This time around, we’re heading to Boston for my first con of 2021 — Boskone.

My guest this time around is Zig Zag Claybourne, the author of The Brothers Jetstream: Leviathan and its sequel Afro Puffs Are the Antennae of the Universe. His other works include By All Our Violent Guides, Neon Lights, In the Quiet Spaces, and the short story collection Historical Inaccuracies. His fiction and essays have appeared in  in Apex, Galaxy’s Edge, GigaNotosaurus, Strange Horizons, and other venues.

We discussed how creators can self-define their success to avoid jealousy and despair, why he’s always preferred Marvel to DC, how he’d annoy his family with his love of the original Star Trek, the two professors who showed him he could be a writer, why the title is the soul of a story, the most important pointer he received after reaching out to romance writer Beverley Jenkins for advice, why he does some of his best writing in the bathtub, how dialogue reveals character, whether his wild duology will ever become a trilogy, how to survive toxic fandoms, and much more.

Here’s how you can eavesdrop on our conversation —

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3) Or listen using the embed below.

Here’s what we chewed on while we chatted —

Zig Zag’s Full Spread
mac-n-cheese, ribs, carrot cake

My Triple Threat Pork Sandwich

Slow’s Triple Threat Pork Sandwich
(which I was attempting to replicate)

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I hope you’ll join me two weeks from now for another Boskone conversation when my guest will be A. T. Greenblatt, who won the 2019 Nebula Award for Best Short Story for “Give the Family My Love,” and who is also on the current Nebula Awards ballot for her novelette “Burn or The Episodic Life of Sam Wells as a Super.”

Thanks for listening!