After three conventions in four weekends, I finally catch my breath to celebrate several important personal comic book anniversaries, sort through Marie Severin’s classic covers, realize my discovery of horror comics was topsy-turvy, fail to answer a question about how to break into comics, remember Stan Lee’s fear of the word “horror,” appreciate the increased respect professional writing organizations are now paying comics, look back at the day Jim Shooter stopped sharing original art with writers, wrestle with the morality of my original art collection, 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 to illuminate the topics I touched on during the episode —

Chatting with Joyce Carol Oates at Stokercon

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It’s time for you to take a seat at the table for the second of three episodes of Eating the Fantastic recorded during last month’s Balticon. You’ve already had lunch with Compton Crook Award-winning writer Kemi Ashing-Giwa — and now it’s time for breakfast with Silvia Moreno-Garcia.

Moreno-Garcia is the author of a number of critically acclaimed novels, including Gods of Jade and Shadow (winner of the Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic and the Ignyte Award), Mexican Gothic (which won the Locus Award, British Fantasy Award, Pacific Northwest Book Award, Aurora Award, and Goodreads Award), and Velvet Was the Night (a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Macavity Award), plus many others. She writes in a variety of genres including fantasy, horror, noir and historical. 

Her short stories have appeared in such magazines as Uncanny, Lightspeed, Nightmare, Giganotosaurus, and Shimmer, and in such anthologies as The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu: New Lovecraftian Fiction, New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color, Gods, Memes and Monsters: A 21st Century Bestiary, and others. She has edited several anthologies, including She Walks in Shadows (a World Fantasy Award winner, published in the USA as Cthulhu’s Daughters). Her most recently published novel is The Seventh Veil of Salome, set in 1950s Hollywood, and a new novel, the multigenerational horror saga The Bewitching, is due out next month.

We discussed how short stories helped her find her voice, the way a gross dream combined with a teen cemetery trip led to Mexican Gothic, her love for abandoned places, why she found Madame Bovary startling when she read it in high school, how to successfully write genres in which the reader is more aware of the tropes than the protagonist, the beauty to be found in flawed characters, how to make sure parallel storylines are equally interesting, one technique she admits doing which makes multiple types of reader angry, the difficulty of resisting branding, the reason the term magic realism is overused, and much more.

Here’s how you can join us for lunch at Baltimore’s Papermoon Diner — (more…)