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…)

Balticon 59 begins in a dozen days, and my weekend will be a busy one. In addition to participating in five programming items, I’m also scheduled to record three episodes of my Eating the Fantastic podcast.

If you’ll be in Baltimore as well, here’s where to find me —

All About That Tense
Friday, May 23, 5:30 p.m. (Mount Washington)
Don’t be tense about tense! There may be twelve different verb tenses, but our experts can help you sort them out.
with Virginia DeMarce (M), Sarah Avery, Mark L. Van Name, and Mark Painter

Howard the Duck Retrospective
Friday, May 23, 8:30 p.m. (Gibson)
Howard the Duck first appeared in Adventure into Fear #19 in 1973 and eventually got his own series in 1976. This irreverent character became so popular he received write-in votes for the presidential election of 1976. More recently the pants-less Anatidae made small appearances in several MCU films. Our panelists will discuss the evolution of the character over the years and his impact.
with Neil Ottenstein

Critique: Do’s and Don’ts
Saturday, May 24, 5:30 p.m. (Gibson)
It’s easy to have an opinion, but it’s hard to swallow other people’s. Conversely, it’s very easy to hear critique and internalize it as an attack. What techniques can we learn to give and receive constructive feedback?
with Rosemary Claire Smith, Sarah Pinsker, Micaiah Johnson, and Larry Hodges

In Defense of Short Fiction
Sunday, May 25, 10:00 a.m. (Mount Washington)
In the Golden Age short stories were the cutting edge of SFFH. Today, the short story in SFFH is still well represented in both print and online magazines, but often is considered the poor cousin to novels. What do short stories convey to the reader that is distinct from novels? What can you do with a short story that you can’t in longer fiction? And why do people want to read short stories? Our panelists will discuss the importance of short form fiction.
with Andy Love, Carolyn Ives Gilman, L.H. Moore, and Samantha Mills

Monday, May 26, Short Fire Readings
11:30 a.m. (St. George)
with Miguel O. Mitchell, Andrija “Andy” Popovic, Mark Painter, and Ian Randal Strock

If you’ll be there as well, please say hi!

Ever since Adeena Mignogna dared to eat a donut on the Capclave Donut Carnival episode of this podcast, I knew I’d eventually host her for a more in-depth conversation. And that time is now!

Mignogna is the author of the the Robot Galaxy series, which so far is a quartet, made up of Crazy Foolish Robots; Robots, Robots Everywhere; Silly Insane Humans; and Eleven Little Robots. As you’ll hear in our chat, there’ll be many more to follow. She’s also the author of Lunar Logic — the first novel in a series which doesn’t yet have an overarching title, though the second book will be titled Moonbase Mayhem, so who knows, perhaps there’ll be something alliterative there as well.

She’s also one of the hosts of the long running BIG Sci-Fi podcast. When not writing or podcasting, Adeena is a physicist, astronomer, and software engineer who’s worked for nearly three decades in the aerospace industry as a Mission Architect.

We discussed how Star Trek changed her life, which Trek character she used as her screen name on fan forums when she first went online as a young teen, why she never wrote fanfic, the feedback from a friend which saved her NaNoWriMo novel from being trunked, how she discovered she’s neither a plotter nor a pantser but rather something in-between, her favorite science fiction novel of all time (and the important lesson it taught her about her Robot Galaxy series), why she went the indie route and how she knew she had the chops to pull it off, the manner in which we gender robots, the reason writing each book in her quartet was more fun than the one before, why she remains hopeful about our AI future, how she finally learned she was a morning writer after years of trying to write at night, and much more.

Here’s how you can join us for lunch at Beans in the Belfry in Brunswick, Maryland — (more…)

Awesome Con is always a blast, and not just because it brings back memories of the first comic book convention I attended a lifetime ago when I was only 15. But also because I get to chat with creators I’d never encounter elsewhere on my more science fictional con circuit. This time around I got to dine with and you get to eavesdrop on Jarrett Melendez, author of the graphic novel Chef’s Kiss, which was a 2023 Alex Award winner as well as both an Eisner Award and GLAAD Award nominee. The sequel, Chef’s Kiss Again, will be released in 2026.

As a cookbook author and food journalist, Melendez has written countless articles and developed hundreds of original recipes for Bon Appetit, Epicurious, Saveur, and Food52. He’s written seven cookbooks to date, including My Pokémon Baking Book, RuneScape: The Official Cookbook, Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Official Cookbook, The Official Wednesday Cookbook, The Official Borderlands Cookbook, and others.

Melendez is currently working on Tales of the Fungo: The Legend of Cep, to be published by Andrews McNeel, plus Fujoshi Warriors, an action comedy comic miniseries, and a love letter to both fujoshis and magical girl anime and manga. Melendez has also contributed to award-winning and nominated anthologies, including Young Men in Love, All We Ever Wanted, and Young Men in Love 2: New Romances.

We discussed how his loves of food and writing combined into a career, the way running comic book conventions gave him the contacts he needed when it was time to create comics of his own, which franchise inspired his sole piece of fan fiction, the comics creator whose lessons proved invaluable, how he knew Chef’s Kiss needed to be a graphic novel rather than a miniseries, the way he balanced multiple plot arcs so they resolved in parallel, the magical pig whose taste is more trustworthy than any chef you’ve ever met, his early crush on Encyclopedia Brown, how he cooks up recipes connected with franchises such as Pokémon and Percy Jackson, the traumatic childhood incident which became the catalyst for his upcoming graphic novel, and much more.

Here’s how you can join us for lunch at Supra Georgian restaurant in Washington, D.C. — (more…)

Carolyn Ives Gilman was one of my earliest guests of the podcast, appearing all the way back on Episode 5. Nine years and two days later, the night she was taking part in the latest Charm City Spec, we decided it was time to chat and chew for you again.

Gilman’s books include her first novel Halfway Human, which has been called “one of the most compelling explorations of gender and power in recent SF;” Dark Orbit, a space exploration adventure; and Isles of the Forsaken and Ison of the Isles, a two-book fantasy about culture clash and revolution. Some of her short fiction can be found in Aliens of the Heart and Candle in a Bottle, both from Aqueduct Press, and in Arkfall and The Ice Owl, from Arc Manor.

Her short fiction has also appeared in Analog, Tor.com, Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, Fantasy and Science Fiction, The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Interzone, Universe, Full Spectrum, Realms of Fantasy, and others.  She has been nominated for the Nebula Award three times and for the Hugo twice. Gilman lives in Washington, D.C., and works as a freelance writer and museum consultant.  She is also author of seven nonfiction books about North American frontier and Native history.

We discussed the way her ideas aren’t small enough to squeeze into short stories, how she shelved a novel she’d written because she felt her imagination at its wildest wasn’t ridiculous enough to match reality, whether our personal archives will be trashed or treasured, the reason she doesn’t feel she can teach writing, why authors need to respect what the story wants, why she’s terrible at reacting to writing prompts and how she does it anyway, how she generally starts a story not with character or plot but with setting, the ethics and morality of zoos and museums, how she manages to makes the impossible seem possible, our shared inability to predict which stories editors will want, and much more.

Here’s how you can join us for lunch at Tamber’s restaurant in Baltimore, Maryland — (more…)