With Balticon behind us, it’s time to move on StokerCon, which took place the following weekend in San Diego. I captured four conversations for you there, the first of them with Ai Jiang. And the timing couldn’t have been more perfect — for we chatted with the Bram Stoker Awards ceremony a mere two days in the future, where she was nominated in the Long Fiction category for Linghun. And even though as you’ll hear she had doubts she had a chance of winning — she won!

And that’s not the only thing she won following our conversation, for a week later, her I am AI won a Nebula Award. I am AI is also currently on the final ballot for the Hugo Award, where she’s also up for the Astounding Award for Best New Writer. But that’s not all when it comes to Ai Jiang and awards. She won an Ignyte Award for her poem “We Smoke Pollution,” received a Nebula Award nomination for her short story ““Give Me English,” was part of the Strange Horizons collective nominated for a semiprozine Hugo Award, and has been nominated for a British SF Association Award and Aurora Award as well.

Her fiction has also appeared in the magazines Fantasy & Science Fiction, Interzone, The Dark, Kaleidotrope, The Deadlands, Planet Scumm, and others, as well as in such anthologies as Fighting for the Future: Cyberpunk and Solarpunk Tales, Step Into the Light: An Anthology of Daylight Horror, and Mother: Tales of Love and Terror. Her short story collection Smol Tales From Between Worlds was published last year.

We discussed why being nominated for multiple awards may actually have made her Imposter Syndrome worse, what the Odyssey workshop taught her which helped her finish her first novel (and whether that book might be too ambitious a debut), the novels which made her want to be a writer, what makes us power on in the face of rejection, how writing is like competitive badminton, the secret to writing successful flash fiction, the book she was given which turned her from a pessimist into an optimist, what she learned from her “soul-draining” career as a ghostwriter, how an editorial suggestion turned Linghun from flash fiction into a novella, the most daunting aspects of revision, and much more.

Here’s how you can join us at Friend’s House Korean restaurant —

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And here’s what loosened our tongues at Friend’s House Korean restaurant —

Starters
including kimchi, fish tofu, potatoes, radish, bean sprouts, broccoli

Seafood Pancake
shareable korean pancake with mixed veggies and pork

Ai Jiang’s BBQ Short Ribs
bone-in marinated korean short ribs

My Bulgogi BBQ Beef
sliced sweet korean beef mixed with inions and mushrooms

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Coming up next — tea and scones with two-time Hugo Award finalist Chuck Tingle, who first came to prominence with such erotica of the fantastic as Pounded by President Bigfoot and Taken by the Gay Unicorn Biker, and whose USA Today bestselling horror novel Camp Damascus was up for a Stoker Award during last month’s con.

Thanks for listening!