Last month’s Balticon was one of the best I’ve ever experienced, due to a combination of good programming, good friends, good food (including visits to two spectacular bakeries which were new to me), and what’s most important as far as you’re concerned — good podcast guests. Kemi Ashing-Giwa, an author and scientist-in-training based in Palo Alto, is the first of three on whom you’ll get to eavesdrop.

Her work includes the USA Today bestselling, Compton Crook Award-winning novel The Splinter in the Sky, the novella This World Is Not Yours, and the forthcoming novel The King Must Die, due out in November. Her short fiction, which has been nominated for an Ignyte Award and featured on the Locus Recommended Reading List, has been reprinted in The Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction Volume 3, Some of the Best from Tor.com: 15th Anniversary Edition and 2024, and The Year’s Top Tales of Space and Time 3. She studied organismic and evolutionary biology with a secondary in astrophysics at Harvard, and is now pursuing a PhD in the Earth & Planetary Sciences department at Stanford.

We discussed her conscious decision to not take any creative writing courses in college, the eight never-to-be published novels she wrote on her way to The Splinter in the Sky, how COVID-19 led her to take a deep dive into tea (and how tea then inspired her debut novel), her evolution from pantser to plotter, her outreach to 200 agents before she found the right one, how to craft compelling opening sentences, her tips for writing successful fight scenes, why she was able to handle attending Harvard and writing a novel at the same time, how best to deal with editorial revision suggestions, her love of reading debut novels, and much more.

Here’s how you can join us for lunch at Baltimore’s Thames Street Oyster House — (more…)

Join me and Neil Ottenstein for a rambling panel about Howard the Duck in which I share the Marvel Comics chaos which caused me to be hired there in 1974, my regrets over having written an issue of Omega the Unknown, my ethical queasiness about owning original art, what it means when I say I knew Stan Lee before he had hair, my terrifying Bullpen encounters with “Jumbo” John Verpoorten, why Howard the Duck was the Silver Surfer of the ’70s, my Times Square street theater with Steve Gerber, the time Howard the Duck had to be hatched instead of laid, how immaturity cost me Captain Marvel, the only time I ever saw Stan Lee get flustered, 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 relating to some of the topics I touched on during the episode —

The Omega the Unknown panels I regret writing

How the Comics Code Authority censored my Omega the Unknown panel
with more info here

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This episode, which invites you to take a seat at the table with Craig Laurance Gidney, captures a meal which could have taken place during AwesomeCon — but didn’t. If you want to know why — you’ll have to join us!

Gidney’s short stories have been collected in Sea, Swallow Me and Other Stories (2008), Skin Deep Magic: Short Fiction (2014), and The Nectar of Nightmares (2022), the first two of which were Lambda Literary Award finalists — as was his 2019 novel A Spectral Hue (2019). He received the Bronze Moonbeam Medal and Silver IPPY Medal for his 2013 novel Bereft. In 1996, at the start of his career, he was also awarded the Susan C. Petrey Scholarship to attend the Clarion West Writing Workshop.

From 2020-2023 he co-edited Baffling Magazine with Dave Ring, and he’s also the co-editor — with Julie C. Day & Carina Bissett — of Storyteller: A Tanith Lee Tribute Anthology, published this month.

We discussed how meeting Samuel R. Delany led to his attending the Clarion Writing Workshop, the influence of reading decadent writers such as Verlaine and Rimbaud, why he kept trying to get published when so many of his peers stopped, the many ways flaws can often make a story more interesting, our shared love of ambiguity, the reason there must be beauty entwined with horror, why he’s a vibes guy rather than a plot guy, the time Tanith Lee bought him a pint and how that led to him coediting her tribute anthology, what he learned from his years editing a flash fiction magazine, and much more.

Here’s how you can join us for lunch at the Unconventional Diner in Washington, D.C. — (more…)