With Balticon behind us, it’s time to move on StokerCon, which took place the following weekend in San Diego. I captured four conversations for you there, the first of them with Ai Jiang. And the timing couldn’t have been more perfect — for we chatted with the Bram Stoker Awards ceremony a mere two days in the future, where she was nominated in the Long Fiction category for Linghun. And even though as you’ll hear she had doubts she had a chance of winning — she won!

And that’s not the only thing she won following our conversation, for a week later, her I am AI won a Nebula Award. I am AI is also currently on the final ballot for the Hugo Award, where she’s also up for the Astounding Award for Best New Writer. But that’s not all when it comes to Ai Jiang and awards. She won an Ignyte Award for her poem “We Smoke Pollution,” received a Nebula Award nomination for her short story ““Give Me English,” was part of the Strange Horizons collective nominated for a semiprozine Hugo Award, and has been nominated for a British SF Association Award and Aurora Award as well.

Her fiction has also appeared in the magazines Fantasy & Science Fiction, Interzone, The Dark, Kaleidotrope, The Deadlands, Planet Scumm, and others, as well as in such anthologies as Fighting for the Future: Cyberpunk and Solarpunk Tales, Step Into the Light: An Anthology of Daylight Horror, and Mother: Tales of Love and Terror. Her short story collection Smol Tales From Between Worlds was published last year.

We discussed why being nominated for multiple awards may actually have made her Imposter Syndrome worse, what the Odyssey workshop taught her which helped her finish her first novel (and whether that book might be too ambitious a debut), the novels which made her want to be a writer, what makes us power on in the face of rejection, how writing is like competitive badminton, the secret to writing successful flash fiction, the book she was given which turned her from a pessimist into an optimist, what she learned from her “soul-draining” career as a ghostwriter, how an editorial suggestion turned Linghun from flash fiction into a novella, the most daunting aspects of revision, and much more.

Here’s how you can join us at Friend’s House Korean restaurant — (more…)

Out in the real world, Balticon is around six weeks in the rearview mirror, but here at Eating the Fantastic, it’s not yet time to check out of the hotel and head for home. You’ve had a chance to take a seat at the table with Alex Jennings and Elwin Cotman from that Baltimore event, but we still have one more meal to go — because now it’s time for an Italian lunch with Sally Wiener Grotta.

Grotta’s latest two books are Of Being Woman, a collection of feminist science fiction stories, and Daughters of Eve, a discussion workbook which uses tales of biblical matriarchs to explore the modern world. Her short fiction has appeared in anthologies and magazines such as the North Atlantic Review, DreamForge, Across the Universe: Tales of Alternative Beatles, and others.

Her previous books include Digital Imaging for Visual Artists (co-authored with Daniel Grotta), and the novels Jo Joe, which was a Jewish Book Council Network book, and The Winter Boy, which was a Locus Magazine Recommended Read. Sally is also co-curator of the Galactic Philadelphia Salon reading series. Plus she’s also an award-winning journalist and photographer who has traveled on assignment to all seven continents.

We discussed when we first met (and can’t quite figure out whether it was a third or a quarter of a century ago), how her first storytelling impulse began because she’d fall asleep while being read stories as a child, the importance of the question “what if?,” why she often finds horror difficult to read, the early experience which allowed her to have such a good relationship with editors, the story she wrote in Ursula K. Le Guin’s writing workshop which caused that Grand Master to say “what a darling monster,” when we should submit to editorial suggestions and when we should run screaming, and much more.

Here’s how you can join us at Sabatino’s Italian restaurant — (more…)

Readercon 33 kicks off 10 days from now in Quincy, Massachusetts, and if you’ll be there, too, here’s where you can track me down — when I’m not off on early morning donut hikes or recording new episodes of my Eating the Fantastic podcast, that is —

Writing Hope and Optimism
Thursday, July 11, 9:00 p.m., Salon B
Hopeful and optimistic fiction are having a moment in genre spaces, but what of hopeful and optimistic characters? Cynical ones never go out of style, but is optimism really so uninteresting? What factors contribute to characters’ hopes being perceived by the audience as believable and inspiring rather than naive or cliched? In what ways are notable portrayals of hope across subgenres—including romance, dystopias, and horror—in conversation with each other, and how can a narrative offer hope independent of its characters’ opinions?
with Andrea Hairston, A. T. Greenblatt, John Wiswell, Randee Dawn

I Don’t Know Why I’m on This Panel!
Friday, July 12, 4:00 p.m., Salon 3
In this new take on those dreaded words, all the panelists on this panel have been selected for reasons unknown to them. Will they discover what they have in common? Will they take turns ranting about subjects the others have never even considered? Will they have taken what little advance notice they received to prepare a group song-and-dance number? There’s only one way to find out!
with Katherine Crighton (m), Natalie Luhrs, William Alexander, Zin E. Rocklyn

Meet the Pros(e)
Friday, July 12, 2024, 10:15 p.m., Salon 3
At the Friday night Meet the Pros(e) party, program participants are assigned to tables with a roughly equal number of conferencegoers and other participants, and then table placements are scrambled at regular intervals so that everyone gets to meet a new set of people in a small-group setting. Think of it as a low-key sort of speed dating where you need never be the sole focus of anyone’s attention, and the goal is just to get to know some cool Readerconnish people. Please note that this event will include a bar and is mask-optional, unlike most other programming.

How to Read Like a Writer
Saturday, July 13, 2024, 10:00 a.m., Salon A
Most of us learn how to compose stories through an osmotic process, soaking in influences as we grow as readers, but how can writers looking to hone their skills get the most out of their reading? Panelists will share tools and approaches for active reading, including which fiction and non-fiction books they have found most helpful for improving their craft, from story structure to dialog to perfecting POV and more.
with E. C. Ambrose (m), Chris Rose, Jeanne Cavelos, Storm Humbert

Imaginary Book Club
Sunday, July 14, 2024, 10:00 a.m., Salon 3
Panelists discuss the most interesting books they’ve read in the last year, even though those books (technically) do not exist, and regale the audience with learned commentary designed to persuade them to give some of their precious reading time for these nonexistent classics. Perhaps we will discuss a newly discovered 19th-century werewolf romantasy, or the Complete Goosebumps as annotated by Thomas Pynchon. Maybe the baseball horror anthology “If I Never Get Back”?
with David G. Shaw, Graham Sleight, Greer Gilman, Zin E. Rocklyn

Reading
Sunday, July 14, 2024, 11:00 a.m., Blue Hills

Kaffeeklatsch
Sunday, July 14, 2024, 1:00 p.m. Basalt

If you’re there, please say hello!

It’s time to return to Balticon for another conversation with a fascinating writer, following last episode’s chat with Alex Jennings. This time around my guest is Elwin Cotman, with whom I slipped away for dinner at the nearby R&R Taqueria.

Cotman’s short story collection Dance on Saturday, published by Small Beer Press, was one of the finalists for the 2021 Philip K. Dick Award. His latest short story collection, Weird Black Girls, was released two months ago as this episode goes live.

He’s also the author of three other books: the poetry collection The Wizard’s Homecoming, plus the short story collections The Jack Daniels Sessions EP and Hard Times Blues. His writing has appeared in Grist, Electric Lit, Buzzfeed, The Southwestern Review, and The Offing, plus many others venues. He’s worked as a video game consultant and writer for Square Enix. His debut novel The Age of Ignorance will be published by Scribner in 2025.

We discussed why forcing science fictional elements into non-science fictional stories can weaken them, the interdimensional cross-genre story cycle he hopes to write someday about a wrestling family, the way the novella is his natural length, why he loves Robert E. Howard’s Hyborian Age stories, how to create compelling metaphors and similes, the way rereading Tama Janowitz’s Slaves of New York helped him with the connective tissue of his own sentences, the reason Mary Gaitskill is the world’s greatest living writer, and much more.

Here’s how you can join us at R&R Taqueria — (more…)