I’m working on an essay for Marvel Comics which will appear in a volume about the Fear Lords, one which will reprint my stories of the Scarecrow, who is these days more commonly known as the Straw Man. And as I thought back on my few years at Marvel so long ago, I suddenly remembered that before there was the Scarecrow, there was almost … the Grim Reaper.

Had that pulp-era vigilante ever made it to the pages of the Marvel B&W magazine for which it was intended, I might never have gone on to create the Scarecrow. No evidence exists today of the Grim Reaper save this one image from 1974, pencilled by P. Craig Russell and inked by Duffy Vohland.

I don’t even own the original, merely a photostat, and one so large I was unable to properly scan it, but instead only photograph it. I’m guessing no original exists. Still, I wanted to share with you another fragment of the secret history behind my first comic book creation.

Of such are alternate universes made.

Happy New Year! Welcome to the first Eating the Fantastic episode of 2017—which also happens to be the first episode recorded at an Uzbek restaurant. My guest and I snuck away from the Gaithersburg, Maryland convention Capclave one night for dinner at Silk Road Choyhona, where we feasted on plov, dimlama, and a variety of other delicacies.

My guest this episode is James Morrow, whose novels and short stories have won him multiple Nebula and World Fantasy Awards, as well as the Prix Utopia for life achievement from the French Utopiales International Festival.

His most recent novel, Galapagos Regained, was published by St. Martin’s Press in 2015. His next will be The Asylum of Dr. Caligari, coming June 2017 from Tachyon Publications.

We discussed his first novel (written when he was only seven years old!), why he feels more connected to the fiction of Arthur C. Clarke than that of Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov, his many paths not taken, including that of filmmaker, the ethical conundrum which occurred after Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. autographed a book “for Jim Morrow, who writes just like me,” how Charles Darwin “confiscated our passports,” and much more.

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

As my Twitter stream shows, I dreamed even fewer dreams last month than the month before, the number of them continuing to dwindle for no discernible reason. Or rather, I continue not to remember them, because I do have them, but often when I wake, I can sense them vanishing beyond memory. I imagine that someday I will stop compiling them here each month.

But that time is not yet now. So—

Last month I dreamt of Robert Silverberg, Kelly Link, George R. R. Martin … and Donald Trump.

December 2016

I dreamt that for Xmas, I enrolled my son in the Moby Dick Chapter of the Month Club, which would send him that, annotated and footnoted. 25 Dec

I dreamt I’d been rehired by @Syfy and was working with @CraigEngler (also back there again) on a TV special aout the history of @Marvel. 24 Dec

I dreamt I was in a hotel moving from one elevator to another but none had a button which would take me to my floor! I was in elevator hell! 24 Dec

I dreamt I was in Nazi Germany at a restaurant where Michael Jackson was a singing waiter. Or maybe I was just in a PLAY about Nazi Germany. 24 Dec

I dreamt I was aboard a tiny bathysphere, feeling quite claustrophobic — especially when it began to sink before it was ready to descend. 23 Dec

I dreamt I bumped into an old banking boss, humming a song he said was written by Joseph McCarthy. Not sure why either man was in my head. 21 Dec

I dreamt I bought a huge sack of diamonds for a jeweler (more than the $10,000 he gave me would have bought IRL), then helped sell them all. 18 Dec

I dreamt I spotted George R. R. Martin in a restaurant being hounded by fans. I tried to rescue him, but alas, there were too many of them. 17 Dec

I dreamt repulsive tenants tried to pin a murder on a homeless person, but luckily, he was smarter than they were, and they got theirs. 17 Dec

I dreamt I was surrounded by Stranger Things-type kids with glowing rocks that gave them odd powers, so I checked out every pebble I saw. 17 Dec

I dreamt a friend of @jaspkelly interviewed me about short stories I’d written in the Gamblingpunk genre — but I had no idea what that was! 16 Dec

Surprised it took so long, but I finally had my first dream about Donald Trump. He was tucking an adult friend into bed. It was very creepy. 12 Dec

I dreamt I was at a con with a group that included @haszombiesinit, trying to track down that shawarma place everybody was raving about. 6 Dec

I dream my current consciousness was back inside my past little kid self, where I was with Isaac Asimov telling him all about the future. 3 Dec

I dreamt I had a stern conversation with Robert Silverberg in which I warned him to stop spending so much time on social media. As if. 2 Dec

Welcome to 2017, and to my first post of the new year!

I always wonder whether anyone bothers to read what I’ve been writing here, but it turns out—you do. So for my 1,837th post since I began this blogging thing, let’s take a look at the most popular posts from the past 12 months, shall we?

Of the top 10, three were food-related, two were about my new podcast (which I guess means five were food-related), two were about comics, two about personnel aspects of my life, and one about my writing. But that last one was far and away the most popular. The universe was evidently very happy I’d final sold a story to Analog.

Anyway, here they are, all linked, should you wish to relive them:

Never give up, never surrender: My 44-year quest to sell a short story to Analog

Our opening night dinner at Pineapple and Pearls

The first episode of Eating the Fantastic (with guest Sarah Pinsker) is now live!

Can you help ID these comics panels?

Checking out the menu—all of it!—at Pineapple and Pearls

Our opening night dinner at Voltaggio Brothers Steakhouse

Fun in the sun with Marie Severin

My Mother: January 14, 1936-December 30, 2015

Announcing a new podcast: Eating the Fantastic with Scott Edelman

How deep was the snow in Glengary, West Virginia? So deep the BBC interviewed me about it!

Hope you keep coming back to discover what I share during the next 12 months!

My novella “After the Harvest, Before the Fall” is in the January/February 2017 issue of Analog, which went on sale December 20th, and though I took note of that event over on Twitter and Facebook, I made no mention of it here, because I thought I’d said everything I want to say back when I’d made the sale, which was 44 years in coming.

Apparently not.

Holding the issue in my hands, peeling back the cover, and seeing my name at last on the Table of Contents, I wondered … what would 17-year-old me have felt if given a peek into the future, and allowed to peer over my shoulder at his name there?

I suspect he would have said something like, “What took took so long, old man?” (more…)

Otto Soglow, whose comic strip The Little King ran for 40 years and entertained me when I was a kid, was born December 23, 1900—though I wasn’t to meet him until April 23, 1973 at that year’s Reuben Awards banquet held at the Waldorf Astoria. Which was apt, since he was a co-founder of the National Cartoonists Society, host for that event.

Annoying kid with a sketchpad that I was, I wheedled sketches out of Garry Trudeau, Curt Swan, Paul Fung, Jr., Roy Crane … and, of course, Soglow as well, who drew for me the famous character whose newspaper strip he would continue to create until his death in 1975.

I have no special memories of that encounter, only this wonderful souvenir.

But happy birthday! And thanks for making me smile.

For the 25th episode of Eating the Fantastic—which is also the final episode of 2016—my guest and I brunched at Aggio during a break from the Baltimore Book Festival. Aggio is a restaurant from Chef Bryan Voltaggio which the Baltimore City Paper recently dubbed as offering the Best Modern Italian in town.

I’d eaten at Aggio before, but that was when it was still a pop-up within a different Voltaggio restaurant, Range, in Friendship Heights—where, by the way, I recorded an earlier episode of Eating the Fantastic with Carolyn Ives Gilman, which I hope you’ll be moved to download for dessert once you’re done with the entree of this episode.

My guest for this meal was the always entertaining Nalo Hopkinson, winner of the 1999 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. And she’s more than lived up to the promise of that award, winning the World Fantasy Award for her short story collection Skin Folk, as well as winning the Sunburst Award, the Prix Aurora Award, and many others. Plus her novel, Sister Mine, won my own personal award for being one of my favorite novels of 2013.

Over gazpacho and fried chicken cacciatore, we discussed how knowing Nobel Prize winner Derek Wolcott when she was young affected her future, why Samuel R. Delany’s The Motion of Light in Water is “a lifesaving book,” the Lemonade Award, which she launched to encourage generosity within the science fiction community, that time she cosplayed as Lt. Uhura at her first convention, and much more.

Here’s how you can take a seat at the table— (more…)

As you might have noticed if you’ve visited here before, I enjoy reading obituaries. And not just those of the famous, but also those unlikely to make the front pages.

The obituary for Virginia Durr, which appeared in a recent issue of the Washington Post, was particularly fascinating. Here’s why—

I found it odd for the notice to mention within its first paragraph that Durr died “on the 61 anniversary of the arrest of Rosa Parks.” After all, many people die on the anniversaries of famous events. So I was curious why that particular event would be a fact worth bringing up.

The second paragraph provides an explanation … managing at the same time to make me even more curious.

It turns out that Durr’s parents were the ones who “bailed Rose Parks out of jail after she was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus on December 1, 1955.”

Was the date of her death a coincidence? Or something more?

Because apparently, this action by Durr’s parents, who were civil rights organizers, “took a toll” on her, as the obituary put it, and led to her being “shunned,” taken out of school, and sent to a private school “up north.”

Was the date so infused with emotion for Virginia Durr that considering the anniversary this year caused her fatal heart attack? The obituary doesn’t make that connection, and the Internet provides no answer.

But I wonder …

There are very few things which would cause me to drive two hours to a casino on its opening day—but one of those very few things was in play yesterday, because I’d managed to reserve a table for the opening service of Voltaggio Brothers Steakhouse, the first collaboration between Bryan Voltaggio, whose hospitality I’ve experienced many times before at Volt, Range, and Family Meal, and his brother Michael, who’s made his name on the West Coast, and is therefore an unknown entity to my palate.

As you know, I love being present as a restaurant begins—I was also at the opening nights of both Range and Pineapples and Pearls—but as it turned out, there were issues surrounding this particular opening we hadn’t anticipated.

Voltaggio Brothers Steakhouse isn’t a standalone restaurant, but rather one within the MGM Grand National Harbor casino, which proved so crowded once its doors opened that within an hour, it had reached capacity, and the venue began advising folks via its Twitter feed that perhaps they should consider coming by some other time. (more…)

Still have the meat sweats thanks to my recent run of episodes centered around Kansas City BBQ? Then you’ll probably welcome a break for Eating the Fantastic’s first vegetarian episode, recorded at Baltimore’s One World Cafe during the Baltimore Book Festival.

My guest who stole away from the Inner Harbor to join me this episode is Sam J. Miller, a writer who’s been nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Awards, and who won the Shirley Jackson Award for his short story “57 Reasons for the Slate Quarry Suicides.” And who last shared a meal with me during the 2015 Nebula Awards weekend at Alinea, considered to be one of the Top 10 restaurants in the world. His debut novel, The Art of Starving, will appear from HarperCollins in 2017.

We discussed the value of community within the science fiction field, the transformative piece of advice he received from Ted Chiang while attending the Clarion Writers Workshop, how one deals with reviews that are more politically than artistically motivated, the way 9/11 changed horror movies, the importance of the life and works of the great Thomas M. Disch, and more.

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