Another episode of Eating the Fantastic … another helping of Kansas City BBQ.

As part of my quest to eat all the BBQ I could during this year’s World Science Fiction Convention, I ended up at Gates B-B-Q, since according to the word on the street (if the Internet can be considered the street), it’s one of the two best BBQ joints in Kansas, the other being Arthur Bryant’s.

Here’s a story of the difference between the two of them which may be apocryphal, but—I’ve heard that when candidates for political office come to town, they always head to Arthur Bryant’s for their photo ops—but the journalists, the crews running the cameras, the working stiffs following those candidates—they head to Gates. I have no idea whether that’s truth or fabulation, but it sure does make for a good story!

Joining me at Gates was the ridiculously talented Alyssa Wong, nominated at Worldcon for the The John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and winner of the 2015 Nebula Award for Best Short Story for “Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers” … which is also up for a World Fantasy Award. Whether or not she wins will be revealed at a banquet this Sunday in Columbus, Ohio.

Listen in as we chow down on BBQ and talk about what franchise inspired her to write fanfic, the exciting moment when she first encountered a character who looked like her, where she hopes to be 10 years down the road, how she encountered Faceless Ghost Grandma, why she said, “I hate being bored and I don’t like rules,” and more.

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When recording a podcast in a restaurant setting, sometimes you have to deal with the background chatter of other customers, and sometimes you have to deal with music pouring from overhead speakers … but I never expected I’d have to deal with a speeding locomotive!

That’s right—in an Eating the Fantastic first, my guest and I had to contend with a freight train. Actually, more than just a freight train—but many freight trains.

When it came time for dinner at Fiorella’s Jack Stack, we were given the choice of a table either in the main dining room or out on the patio, and because I was afraid the loud music combined with the conversation of other customers would create an ambient noise you’d find distracting, I decided we should eat al fresco … not realizing there were railroad tracks nearby, which meant an occasional locomotive would pass. But don’t worry—I think you’ll find the result more amusing than annoying, especially when (as you’ll hear) one overly loud engine caused my guest and me to break into song.

My guest this episode is Hugo, Nebula, and Stoker Award nominated writer Adam-Troy Castro. Adam has published more than 100 short stories, some of which I was privileged to buy back when I edited Science Fiction Age magazine, plus a story someone else had the honor of purchasing—my all-time favorite zombie story.

We talked about the epiphany caused by his first viewing of Night of the Living Dead, how he handled a heckler during his early days doing stand-up comedy, the history behind the novel he almost wrote spinning off from the classic TV show The Prisoner, and much more. We even, for reasons you will learn, had cause to sing a few bars of the Johnny Cash classic “Folsom Prison Blues.”

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As I told you before, I ate a lot of BBQ during this year’s Worldcon in Kansas City. Unsurprisingly, four of those meals became episodes of Eating the Fantastic. The first of those four, and one of my favorites, was recorded at Danny Edwards Blvd Barbecue. (Danny Edwards’ family, BTW, has been barbecuing in Kansas City since 1938.)

I was joined for lunch there by writer David D. Levine, who won the Hugo Award for his story “Tk’tk’tk,” and whose debut novel novel Arabella of Mars had been published the month more.

We talked about the things being a science fiction fan for so long taught him about being a professional science fiction writer, what it was like contributing to George R.R. Martin’s Wild Cards universe after having read the series since Day One, how pretending to live on Mars for two weeks helped him write his newly published novel Arabella of Mars, and much more.

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During Readercon, you got to share Thai food with Resa Nelson, eat a full Irish breakfast with Jeffrey Ford, and down donuts with a parade of 15 writers, editors, and fans. Now it’s time to say farewell to Readercon with a visit to The Lobster Stop in Quincy, Massachusetts for (what else?) lobster rolls … and F. Brett Cox.

Brett co-edited (with former Eating the Fantastic guest Andy Duncan) Crossroads: Tales of the Southern Literary Fantastic (which featured a story about Randy Newman by yours truly!), and has had fiction, poetry, essays, and reviews appear in Eclipse Online, War Stories, Century, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Postscripts, and many other venues. He’s also hard at work on a book-length study of Roger Zelazny for the University of Illinois Press.

Over lobster rolls, we talked of the debate we witnessed between Isaac Asimov and Harlan Ellison in 1974 at our joint first Worldcon, how the Connie Willis story “A Letter from the Clearys” made the scales fall from his eyes, why George Saunders is his “favorite contemporary American short story writer,” and more.

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I hate eating in hotel restaurants, but never more so than when I’m trying to record an episode of Eating the Fantastic.

Not only does the food there tend to rise only to the level of the merely edible (if you’re lucky), but breakfast during a convention means many interruptions as the usual tablehopping occurs, with people popping by to say hi. Plus you get no sense of place, as one hotel restaurant is pretty much like another, especially when it comes to breakfast.

So when it came time to seek out a good setting in Quincy, Massachusetts to chat during Readercon with six-time World Fantasy Award-winning and three-time Shirley Jackson Award-winning writer Jeffrey Ford, whose new short story collection A Natural History of Hell was recently published by Small Beer Press, I looked for something off-site and more authentic.

And found it in McKay’s Breakfast and Lunch. When I read a review about “a popular townie joint” that served food which was “simple and straightforward (no creme brulee French toast or maple ganache cinnamon bread here),” I knew I’d discovered a spot with some character. So that’s where I took Jeff.

We talked about how being edited by Jennifer Brehl made him a better writer, what it was like to be taught by the legendary John Gardner, why he admitted “I don’t really know dick about science fiction or fantasy,” and much more.

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I arrived home late last night from the Kansas City Worldcon, where I visited seven BBQ joints and recorded five more episodes of Eating the Fantastic. But before we get to any of those, it’s time for the first of three episodes captured during last month’s Readercon.

My guest and I wandered off from the con hotel to Quincy’s Pad Thai, from which Deval Patrick, the former governor of Massachusetts, seems to have ordered takeout a lot.

Joining me was Resa Nelson, whose story “The Dragonslayer’s Sword” I published in the first issue of Science Fiction Age. My decision to purchase the story was validated when at the end of our first year, I tabulated thousands of subscriber surveys and discovered readers had voted that tale their second-favorite story—and their #1 fantasy.

We discussed how the short story of hers I’d published in Science Fiction Age grew into not just a single novel, but a series of novels, why she watches the Japanese movie The Mystery of Rampo before beginning any new writing project, what she learned from the hundreds of film interviews she did for Realms of Fantasy magazine, and more.

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And so Eating the Fantastic says farewell to Balticon … by saying hello to writer, editor, publisher, foodie, baseball enthusiast (and more!) Cecilia Tan.

Cecilia is the publisher of Circlet Press, the author of the Slow Surrender trilogy and the serialized Darron’s Guitar Chronicles, the cowriter of The 50 Greatest Yankee Games and The 50 Greatest Red Sox Games … but that’s just a partial list of her accomplishments, as this episode will reveal. We broke away from Balticon for lunch at Family Meal (the site of my earlier chats with Sarah Pinsker and Fran Wilde), as the restaurant’s not only good, but extremely close to the con hotel.

Cecilia and I discussed how her self-published Telepaths Don’t Need Safewords gave birth to the Circlet Press empire, the advice she received from Tor publisher Tom Doherty, her love for the Legion of Super-Heroes, the lesson you should learn from the fact mass market publishing finally caught up with what she’d been doing all along, and much more. Plus a few things you might not know about her, such as her teen presidency of the largest Menudo fan club in the English-speaking world!

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For the latest episode of Eating the Fantastic, I broke away from Balticon for lunch with Fran Wilde at a restaurant extremely close by, and in doing so ended up replicating for you an aspect of con-going I’d yet to bring to you before—the fact we sometimes get so busy at these events that it’s impossible to squeeze in a leisurely meal.

And so this is an Eating the Fantastic first—an episode recorded not just during lunch at Family Meal, but also later, back at the con over cookies from Vacarro’s (because there had to be food involved, of course), in a room set aside for kaffeklatches.

Fran is the Nebula Award-winning and Compton Crook Award-winning author of Updraft, plus the host of the Cooking the Books podcast, which has a writers + food focus just like mine.

We talked about what she lost the night she won her Nebula Award, her love for Anne McCaffrey’s The Ship Who Sang, the power of poetry, why she tries to do one thing a month that scares her, her Cooking the Books podcast, and much more.

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Readercon, which concluded its 27th incarnation yesterday in Quincy, Massachusetts, is consistently my favorite convention of the year. Since it’s always been special to me, I thought I’d do something special in return. And once I learned that back in 1950, Dunkin’ Donuts was born just a few miles from our hotel, and the first restaurant still stood, I knew exactly what that something would be.

I paid a visit to that original location—which is decorated with a retro flair—

—and returned to the con with a fresh dozen.

I planted myself in the lobby (as captured in the photo below by Ellen Kushner), where I offered free donuts to the first 12 random passersby willing to give brief interviews about their favorite Readercon memories.

I had no idea who might wander over, but knew that something entertaining would surely come out of this sugary experiment. And it did! I ended up with 15 guests digging into those 12 donuts—the differential being because there were three who eschewed—in a “lightning round” 13th episode I’ve decided to call the Readercon Donut Spectacular. Surprise visitors included Greer Gilman, Maria Dahvana Headley, Rajan Khanna, plus a dozen more.

Guests—some of whom had attended nearly every Readercon, and some for whom this was their first—shared their peak Readercon moments, many of which revolved around Samuel R. Delany.

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For the fifth and final episode of Eating the Fantastic recorded in Las Vegas during StokerCon, I headed out to Hash House A Go Go, one of my favorite restaurants—at least in its San Diego incarnation. My breakfast there is always one of my favorite Comic-Con meals. But alas, there turned out to be more than a 90-minute wait that Sunday morning in Vegas, so I moved on to Yard House at the recommendation of my guest, Gene O’Neill, who’d eaten there earlier that weekend.

Gene, with whom I attended the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth, has been nominated 11 times for the Bram Stoker Award, and has won twice, in the categories of Long Fiction and Fiction Collection.

We reminisced about our shared Clarion experience way back in 1979, our reaction upon seeing a stack of Jack London’s rejection slips, the personality trait he shares with Harlan Ellison, what he learned from Carol Emshwiller, what he and Kim Stanley Robinson taught each other during their eight-hour drives to Eugene, Oregon for workshops with Damon Knight and Kate Wilhelm, and much more.

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