Six years ago, I started inviting you to tag along with me for culinary conversations during conventions, though the events of 2020 forced me to switch things up so the chatting and chewing often occurred with hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of miles between me and my guests.

But we’re slowly moving on to whatever our new normal will turn out to be, which means this episode, you’ll get to come with me as I attend my first true convention in nearly two years — last month’s Capclave in Rockville, Maryland. I was able to harvest two con conversations for you there, something I haven’t been able to do in far too long — the first, this episode’s lunch at Mykonos Grill with Suzanne Palmer.

Suzanne Palmer is a multi-award-winning science fiction writer. Her novelette “The Secret Life of Bots” won a Hugo Award in 2018, as well as the Washington Science Fiction Association Small Press Award, plus her story “Waterlines” won the 2020 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. She’s published three novels with DAW Books about an interstellar repo man — her debut novel Finder in 2019, followed by Driving the Deep (2020) and The Scavenger Door (2021).

Her love of narrative science fiction extends beyond the written word, for when she was obtaining her Bachelors degree of Fine Arts in sculpture from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, her thesis exhibition consisted of an entire museum of artifacts from a fictional world, including clothing, coins, furniture, manuscripts — and an 8′ tall horned creature covered with fur. I found that part of her background, unknown to me until I started preparing for my conversation, fascinating, since as longtime listeners know from my interview with the team at Submersive Productions in Episode 86, I love immersive theater.

We discussed her recurrent dreams of accidentally impaling someone with her Hugo Award trophy during the ceremony, the Ray Bradbury story she copied out of a library book by hand word for word as a child, the differences between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (and why some readers have difficulties with the latter), the way a friend’s urgings she do NaNoWriMo caused her to take her writing more seriously, the spark that gave birth to her interstellar repo man Fergus Ferguson, how the pandemic affected the writing of her latest novel, and much more.

Here’s how you can take a seat at the table with us —

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And here’s what we nibbled as we chatted —

Scott’s Roasted Leg of Lamb

Suzanne’s Grilled Marinated Breast of Chicken

Baklava

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Please join me two weeks from now when I’ll chat with Lawrence M. Schoen, two-time winner of the Cóyotl award for Best Novel for books in his critically acclaimed Barsk series.

Thanks for listening!