It’s time to settle in for another lunch during the Washington, D.C. pop culture festival Awesome Con. Last episode, you eavesdropped on my meal with Patrick O’Leary, and this time around you get to take a seat at the table with Sam J. Miller.

You first heard me chat and chew with Sam 5-1/2 years ago in Episode 24, and when I noted he’d be at the con to promote his debut short story collection Boys, Beasts & Men, I knew it was time for us to catch up.

So much has changed since I last shared him with you in late 2016! His first novel, The Art of Starving, was published the following year and was a finalist for the 2018 Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book, and won the 2018 Andre Norton Award. Blackfish City, published in 2018, won the 2019 John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and was named a best book of the year by Vulture, the Washington Post, and Barnes & Noble, as well as a must-read for Entertainment Weekly and O: The Oprah Winfrey Magazine. His second young adult novel, Destroy All Monsters, was published by HarperTeen in 2019, and his second adult novel, The Blade Between, was published by Ecco Press in 2020.

We discussed the 1,500 short story submissions he made between 2002 and 2012 (as well as the one story which was rejected 99 times), the peculiar importance of the missing comma from the title of his new collection Boys, Beasts & Men, his technique for reading collections written by others, why the Clarion Writing Workshop was transformative, how Samuel R. Delany gave him permission, the way his novels and short stories exist in a shared universe, the impossibility of predicting posthumous fame, the superpower he developed via decades of obscurity, the differing ideas of what writers block means, and much more.

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Welcome to the first of two episodes recorded during the massive pop culture event Awesome Con, held each year in Washington D.C. My first guest of the weekend was Patrick O’Leary, whose debut novel, Door Number Three (1995), was named a best book of the year by Publishers Weekly.

His second book, The Gift (1997), was a finalist for both the World Fantasy Award and the Mythopoeic Award. The Impossible Bird (2002) was selected as one of Locus’s top novels of the year. His new novel, 51, was just published in February. His short stories have appeared in such magazines as SCI Fiction, PostScripts, and Electric Velocipede, and anthologies like Mars Probes and We Think, Therefore We Are. Many of them have been collected in Other Voices, Other Doors (2000) and The Black Heart (2009). And even if you’ve never read Patrick O’Leary, you’ve certainly heard him, because he wrote the poem “Nobody Knows It But Me,” which was used in the 2002 advertising campaign for the Chevrolet Tahoe and recited in the commercial by James Garner.

We discussed the way his new novel 51 is similar to The Great Gatsby, why he believes his books will crumble if he attempts to describe them, the perils and pleasures of pantsing (and how his stories often don’t get any good until the 15th draft), the tragedy of being an invisible creature, our mutual fears of what aging might bring, his love for Marvel Comics (and especially the Silver Surfer), how Laura Ingalls Wilder introduced him to literature, the way reading Kurt Vonnegut taught him there were no rules, the two science fiction greats who literally left him speechless, and much more.

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