Mass gatherings are still on hold, so it looks like 2020 will be the first year since I was 14 during which I won’t get the chance to attend at least one face-to-face meatspace convention. As has happened with many recent cons, next weekend’s Capclave has also transformed into a virtual event.

Which means whatever part of the planet you happen to inhabit, you can easily be there.

Here are the four programming items on which you’ll be able to find me —

Breaking the Genre Boundaries
Saturday, October 17, 10:30 a.m.
What is the purpose of genres? How do they help and hinder authors and readers? How do bookstores know how to shelves slipstream or multi-genre books? How do some authors intersect SF/Fantasy with Horror, Romance, Erotica, Literary fiction, young protagonists, Mystery, Thriller, and other elements? Who does this well and who tries to overload a book?
with Kenneth Altabef, B. Sharise Moore, Joshua Palmatier, Troy L. Wiggins, and A.C. Wise

Reading
Saturday, October 17, 3:00 p.m.

When To Outline and When To Pants It
Sunday, October 18, 1:30 p.m.
“Fleshing out a detailed outline” versus “Diving right into an idea and seeing where the story goes” is one of the perennial debates of the writing craft. What are the advantages of each approach? What are the weaknesses and limitations? Our panelists will discuss when to prefer one approach over the other, and when it’s a good idea to switch to the opposite style even when it’s not your preferred method.
with Beth Cato, Mary Fan, Carolyn Ives Gilman, Alan Smale

Kaffeklatsch
Sunday, October 18, 3:00 p.m.

I hope to see you there!

April’s StokerCon was cancelled — but not here at Eating the Fantastic. That’s because I’m on a mission to reclaim all of 2020’s convention conversations lost to COVID-19. I’ve already shared with you three “might have been” chats which would have taken place in New Zealand during Worldcon — with Lee Murray, Stephen Dedman, and Farah Mendlesohn — and now it’s time to head to Scarborough for lunch — or is it dinner? — with Priya Sharma.

Priya Sharma has published fiction in Interzone, Black Static, Nightmare, The Dark, and other venues. “Fabulous Beasts” was a Shirley Jackson Award finalist and won a British Fantasy Award for Short Fiction. “Ormeshadow,” her first novella, won a Shirley Jackson Award. All the Fabulous Beasts, a collection of some of her work, won both the Shirley Jackson Award and British Fantasy Award. She’s also a Grand Judge for the Aeon Award, an annual writing competition run by Albedo One, Ireland’s magazine of the Fantastic.

We discussed the best decision she made about her debut short story collection All the Fabulous Beasts, how the cover to that book conveys a different message in our COVID-19 world, why we each destroyed much of our early writing, a surprising revelation about the changed ending to one of her stories, who told her as a child “your soul is cracked,” the two of us being both longhand writers and defenders of ambiguity, what it’s like writing (and not writing) for theme anthologies, the most difficult story for her to write, how the pandemic has affected our writing, and much more.

Here’s how you can eavesdrop on our conversation — (more…)