If you believe the meatspace calendar, this year’s Worldcon is already in the rear view mirror, but as far as this podcast is concerned, the party isn’t over yet. That’s because it’s now time for you to take a seat at the table and eavesdrop on my third meal from Seattle, following Eugenia Triantafyllou and John Picacio.

My latest guest, Lara Elena Donnelly, is the author of the Nebula, Lambda, and Locus-nominated Amberlough Dossier trilogy, which consists of the three books Amberlough, Armistice, and Amnesty. Her most recent novel is the contemporary thriller Base Notes. Her short fiction and poetry have appeared in venues such as Strange Horizons, Escape Pod, Nightmare, and Uncanny.

Lara has taught in the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence College, as well as the Catapult Workshop in New York. She’s a graduate of the Clarion and Alpha writers’ workshops, and has served as on-site staff at the latter. She’s also one of four co-founders at Homeward Books, which currently has a Kickstarter running to fund the company’s first title, The Witch of Prague, by J.M. Sidorova — and if you’re visiting here within the first week or so of this episode going live, there’s still time to back the project, so please check it out.

We discussed the hot tub conversation which led to the sale of her first novel, why the contradictions of her Clarion experience were liberating, the reason her relationship to the writing process means she’s primarily a novelist rather than a short story writer, her complicated emotions about the conclusion to her debut novel, why she got sick of the word “prescient,” the gnarly origins of the perfumes we love (and the reasons she needed to learn about them), why she decided to start a service advising how to write better sex scenes, the novel she wrote without gendering a character (and the fun in following which readers assume which genders), how she and Sam J. Miller were able to collaborate without killing each other, and much more.

Here’s how you can join us at Mezzanotte — (more…)

It’s time to return to Seattle for the second conversation I captured at Worldcon, following my soup dumpling lunch with Eugenia Triantafyllou. Now it’s time to head out for BBQ with John Picacio, one of the most acclaimed American artists in science fiction and fantasy during the past decade.

Picacio is the winner of three Hugo Awards, nine Chesley Awards, five Locus Awards, two International Horror Guild Awards, the World Fantasy Award, and the Inkpot Award. He’s created best-selling art for George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Fire and Ice series, the Star Trek and X-Men franchises, as well as over 150 book covers. His body of work features major book illustrations for authors such as Leigh Bardugo, Rebecca Roanhorse, Michael Moorcock, Harlan Ellison, James Dashner, Brenda Cooper, Frederik Pohl, Mark Chadbourn, Sheri S. Tepper, James Tiptree, Jr., Lauren Beukes, Jeffrey Ford, Joe R. Lansdale, and many, many more.

He is the founder of the creative publishing imprint, Lone Boy, which has become the launchpad for his Loteria Grande cards, a contemporary re-imagining of the classic Mexican game of chance. He is the founder of The Mexicanx Initiative. He’s the co-author — with Leigh Bardugo — and illustrator of The Invisible Parade, which released September 2, 2025, by Little, Brown for Young Readers.

We discussed how he’d never have gotten where he is today without comics, why he initially turned down what ended up being his first science fiction book cover (and what made him change his mind), the reason he thinks of a book as a person he needs to introduce at a party, whether he pays attention to the artists who preceded him when updating the look of a book, why one of the most important skills for a cover artist is listening, the catalyst for his creator-owned, self-published projects, how his style and his skills have changed over the years, how his recent collaboration with Leigh Bardgo began, why he’d rather be a marathon runner than a sprinter, how to avoid getting caught up in the trope of the year when it comes to cover art, the reason he launched the Mexicanx Initiative, how stabilization isn’t the same as stagnation, and much more.

Here’s how you can join us at Jack’s BBQ — (more…)

It’s time to kick off a quartet of episodes recorded last month during the Seattle Worldcon, beginning with the award-winning writer Eugenia Triantafyllou.

Triantafyllou has been nominated for the British Fantasy, Hugo, Ignyte, Locus, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards, and was on the Hugo Awards ballot that weekend for her novelette “Loneliness Universe,” published last year in Uncanny. Earlier this year she appeared on the Nebula Awards ballot twice, for both “Loneliness Universe” as well as “Joanna’s Bodies,” the latter of which was published in Psychopomp. 

Last year, she won the Shirley Jackson Award for her novelette “Six Versions of My Brother Found Under the Bridge” which also appeared in Uncanny. In addition to those venues, she has been published in Reactor.com, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, Apex, Sunday Morning Transport, The Deadlands, and elsewhere. She’s a graduate of Clarion West Writers Workshop. 

We discussed the online prompt which caused her to write her first short story, why she ended up as a fantasy writer rather than a comic book creator, what it was like being nominated for two Nebula Awards the same year in the same category, the two types of naysayers who thought she’d never be able to write artfully in English, how she terrified Stephan Graham Jones with a tomato, why she never outlines, the reason voice is so important to her process, how a pantser handles world building, why she feels writing mysteries is easy, how her mother’s memories helped teach her storytelling, why writers shouldn’t steal ideas, but ambition,  and much more.

Here’s how you can join us at Din Tai Fung — (more…)

Capclave kicks off five days from now, where in addition to recording several episodes of my Eating the Fantastic podcast, I’ll be on five programing items.

If you’ll also be in Rockville next weekend, here’s where you’ll be able to find me … when I’m not out on the patio sharing donuts, that is!

Writing at Different Lengths
Friday, September 19th, 4:00 p.m., Monroe
How does an author approach writing a short story from writing a novella, to writing a novel? Do you know what length a piece of writing will be when you start? Or does this change in the editing? What can you do in a short story that you cannot in a novel and vice versa?
with D.H. Aire, Larry Hodges, Leslye Penelope, and Lawrence M. Schoen

Mixing the Genres
Saturday, September 20th, 11:00 a.m., Washington
Mixing Fantasy with Romance and Science Fiction with Mystery are very common crossovers. What makes them work? What are some less frequently used crossovers and why are they less common? Why when science fiction or fantasy crosses over with another genre, are the works shelved in the sf/fantasy sections of bookstores and libraries, but not the other genre? Or does it make a difference if the author is better known in the other genre? And what happens if a writer known for one genre decides to write in another? How does their experience in the other genre affect how they approach their SF or Fantasy?
with Randee Dawn, Nicole Glover, Joshua Benjamin Palmatier, and Diana Peterfreund

Appeal of Horror
Saturday, September 20th, 9:00 p.m., Jackson
Horror fans know the thrill of being scared. But horror can also explore how we cope with grief and tragedy or play out the extreme consequences of ill-advised choices. What makes horror so compelling? What does flirting with the dark side tell us about being brave and confronting our own fears?
with Zack Be, Randee Dawn, Andrija Popovic, and Hildy Silverman

Author Reading
Sunday, September 21st, 12:00 p.m., Adams
I’ll read from an upcoming short story … while costumed as a fish.

Genre vs Literary Fiction
Sunday, September 21st, 2:00 p.m., Washington
Genre is mostly a marketing tool, yet for many years, reviewers and academics saw genre fiction as inferior. They even denied that literary oriented SF was SF (such as 1984 or The Handmaid’s Tale). Is this still true? Has this changed since many respected literary authors are incorporating science fictional and fantasy elements? Is SF/Fantasy still in the literary ghetto?
with Sarah Avery, Somto Ihezue, Naomi Kritzer, Mark Roth

I hope to see you there!

It’s time for Eating the Fantastic to say farewell to Readercon, as I invite you to take a seat at the table for the third and final conversation recorded for you there. You’ve already shared ramen with Mur Lafferty and Indian food with Karen Heuler, and it’s now time to tear into seafood tacos with Richard Butner.

Richard Butner’s short fiction has been published in such venues as Uncanny, The Deadlands, F&SF, Electric Velocipede, Crossroads: Tales of the Southern Literary Fantastic, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and others. Many of those stories have appeared in Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror, been shortlisted for the Speculative Literature Foundation’s Fountain Award, and nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award. Those stories have also been collected in his books Horses Blow Up Dog City & Other Stories (2004) and The Adventurists (2022). He runs the Sycamore Hill Writers’ Conference, a long-running invitation-only workshop for writers of science fiction, fantasy, and related work, which was started by John Kessel, Mark Van Name, and Gregory Frost.

But fiction isn’t his only focus. He’s also written articles and reviews of hardware, software and websites for technology magazines such as IBM Think Research, Wired, PC Magazine, Yahoo! Internet Life, and Windows Sources, has written for and performed with the Little Green Pig Theatrical Concern (where he was a Writer-in-Residence), Aggregate Theatre, Bare Theatre, the Nickel Shakespeare Girls, Urban Garden Performing Arts, CAM/now, and Lost Immersive, and played in several bands, including the Angels of Epistemology, and/or, Etheroid and the Sacred Cows, and the Aqua Mules.

We discussed the early influence of Harlan Ellison, the time he went through the same trapdoor as Harry Houdini, which creative career he decided at age nine he was already too old to pursue, the paragraph from his recent collection I adored the most, the ways in which setting can be a character, why he defines his writerly self as being neither gardener nor architect but explorer, how he’s attracted to writing about the type of  characters Bruce Sterling once described as “criminally unemotional,” what ambiguity truly means and why it matters, how meeting John Kessel changed his life, and much more.

Here’s how you can join us for tacos at Burlington’s Border Cafe — (more…)