Capclave kicks off five days from now, where in addition to recording several episodes of my Eating the Fantastic podcast, I’ll be on five programing items.

If you’ll also be in Rockville next weekend, here’s where you’ll be able to find me … when I’m not out on the patio sharing donuts, that is!

Writing at Different Lengths
Friday, September 19th, 4:00 p.m., Monroe
How does an author approach writing a short story from writing a novella, to writing a novel? Do you know what length a piece of writing will be when you start? Or does this change in the editing? What can you do in a short story that you cannot in a novel and vice versa?
with D.H. Aire, Larry Hodges, Leslye Penelope, and Lawrence M. Schoen

Mixing the Genres
Saturday, September 20th, 11:00 a.m., Washington
Mixing Fantasy with Romance and Science Fiction with Mystery are very common crossovers. What makes them work? What are some less frequently used crossovers and why are they less common? Why when science fiction or fantasy crosses over with another genre, are the works shelved in the sf/fantasy sections of bookstores and libraries, but not the other genre? Or does it make a difference if the author is better known in the other genre? And what happens if a writer known for one genre decides to write in another? How does their experience in the other genre affect how they approach their SF or Fantasy?
with Randee Dawn, Nicole Glover, Joshua Benjamin Palmatier, and Diana Peterfreund

Appeal of Horror
Saturday, September 20th, 9:00 p.m., Jackson
Horror fans know the thrill of being scared. But horror can also explore how we cope with grief and tragedy or play out the extreme consequences of ill-advised choices. What makes horror so compelling? What does flirting with the dark side tell us about being brave and confronting our own fears?
with Zack Be, Randee Dawn, Andrija Popovic, and Hildy Silverman

Author Reading
Sunday, September 21st, 12:00 p.m., Adams
I’ll read from an upcoming short story … while costumed as a fish.

Genre vs Literary Fiction
Sunday, September 21st, 2:00 p.m., Washington
Genre is mostly a marketing tool, yet for many years, reviewers and academics saw genre fiction as inferior. They even denied that literary oriented SF was SF (such as 1984 or The Handmaid’s Tale). Is this still true? Has this changed since many respected literary authors are incorporating science fictional and fantasy elements? Is SF/Fantasy still in the literary ghetto?
with Sarah Avery, Somto Ihezue, Naomi Kritzer, Mark Roth

I hope to see you there!

It’s time for Eating the Fantastic to say farewell to Readercon, as I invite you to take a seat at the table for the third and final conversation recorded for you there. You’ve already shared ramen with Mur Lafferty and Indian food with Karen Heuler, and it’s now time to tear into seafood tacos with Richard Butner.

Richard Butner’s short fiction has been published in such venues as Uncanny, The Deadlands, F&SF, Electric Velocipede, Crossroads: Tales of the Southern Literary Fantastic, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and others. Many of those stories have appeared in Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror, been shortlisted for the Speculative Literature Foundation’s Fountain Award, and nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award. Those stories have also been collected in his books Horses Blow Up Dog City & Other Stories (2004) and The Adventurists (2022). He runs the Sycamore Hill Writers’ Conference, a long-running invitation-only workshop for writers of science fiction, fantasy, and related work, which was started by John Kessel, Mark Van Name, and Gregory Frost.

But fiction isn’t his only focus. He’s also written articles and reviews of hardware, software and websites for technology magazines such as IBM Think Research, Wired, PC Magazine, Yahoo! Internet Life, and Windows Sources, has written for and performed with the Little Green Pig Theatrical Concern (where he was a Writer-in-Residence), Aggregate Theatre, Bare Theatre, the Nickel Shakespeare Girls, Urban Garden Performing Arts, CAM/now, and Lost Immersive, and played in several bands, including the Angels of Epistemology, and/or, Etheroid and the Sacred Cows, and the Aqua Mules.

We discussed the early influence of Harlan Ellison, the time he went through the same trapdoor as Harry Houdini, which creative career he decided at age nine he was already too old to pursue, the paragraph from his recent collection I adored the most, the ways in which setting can be a character, why he defines his writerly self as being neither gardener nor architect but explorer, how he’s attracted to writing about the type of  characters Bruce Sterling once described as “criminally unemotional,” what ambiguity truly means and why it matters, how meeting John Kessel changed his life, and much more.

Here’s how you can join us for tacos at Burlington’s Border Cafe — (more…)

Last episode, my first from the 2025 Readercon, you were able to sit in for my ramen dinner with Mur Lafferty, and this time around, you’ll get to tag along with Karen Heuler for a vegetarian Indian lunch.

Karen Heuler has published more than 100 short stories, which have resulted in her being a two-time finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award, winner of an O. Henry award, and a host of other honors. Her short stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Weird Tales, The Saturday Evening Post, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Ms. Magazine, Daily Science Fiction, and dozens of other venues. Many of those stories can be found in her numerous collections, starting with The Other Door, which was published in 1995, and includes others such as The Inner City, which Publishers Weekly called “one of the Best Books of 2013,” Other Places (2016), The Clockworm and Other Strange Stories (2018), and her most recent one, A Slice of the Dark and Other Stories (2022). Her novels include The Made-Up Man (2011), Glorious Plague (2013) and her most recent The Splendid City (2022).

We discussed how she found herself embraced far more by the science fiction community than the literary one, why she never consciously thought about craft until she had to teach it, the “dud” novels she wrote before she got to the good ones, the students in her writing classes who only wanted to learn how to write bestsellers, why Bartleby the Scrivener seems to have a superpower, the reason she ended up writing science fiction rather than any other genre, the way in which she considers her short stories to be kittens, which character took over control of her most recent novel, the influence of The Master and Margarita, our mutual dislike of writer branding, where we fall on shredding vs. saving our archives, and much more.

Here’s how you can join us for ramen at Mehfil Indian Cuisine — (more…)

In which I track down the Fantastic Four panel which caused me to first enter comics fandom, look back at a 1975 Planet of the Apes contents page where I was credited for no reason I can remember, remain confused about Daredevil‘s Matt/Mike Murdock subterfuge, laugh at the way “Fabulous” Flo Steinberg gave The Thing a super headache, and more.

You can eavesdrop on all those memories via the embed below or download them at the site of your choice.

Here are several images related to some of the topics you’ll hear me touching on during the episode —

Bob Larkin’s cover to Planet of the Apes #4

Planet of the Apes #4 Table of Contents

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Having survived my trip to the Seattle Worldcon, I share a few comic book dreams, learn why I should no longer feel guilty about one aspect of my Omega the Unknown fill-in issue, read up on how Marvel Comics artists felt during the mid-’70s about writers receiving original artwork, explain why the Comics Code Authority didn’t seem to understand how to read comics, reveal the way a wolfman was responsible for me being credited on my DC mystery stories, and more.

You can eavesdrop on all those memories via the embed below or download them at the site of your choice.

Here are several images related to some of the topics I touched on during the episode —

My guilt-inducing Omega the Unknown panels
from issue #7 (March 1977)

The Omega the Unknown panel which assuaged that guilt
from issue #4 (September 1976)

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