Most conversations you get to eavesdrop on here are recorded during my convention travels, but not this one … though it did take place because of a con. I met this episode’s guest, Robert Jeschonek, when I attended the Steve Ditko Mini-Con in Johnstown, PA in September of 2021, While there, I spontaneously decided late in the afternoon to wander the exhibit tables to capture the voices of four other attendees, getting them to share anecdotes about that legendary creator, and you can hear them in Episode 154. But Jeschonek, who’d recently completed a biography of Ditko with the family’s cooperation, had taken off before I could get to him. We agreed we’d someday catch up to chat, and that someday is now.

There’s so much else to talk about with Bob in addition to Steve Ditko, though. For one thing, he’s managed to have stories published in every issue so far of the revived Pulphouse — all 20 of them! (Me, I’ve only had two published there.) His  short stories have also appeared in Clarkesworld, Galaxy’s Edge, Fiction River, Pulp Literature, StarShipSofa, and many other publications. He has also written official Doctor Who and Star Trek fiction plus Batman and Justice Society comics for DC. His novels include the military scifi epic Battlenaut Crucible, the urban fantasy Earthshaker, the cozy mystery Death by Polka, and the young adult thriller Unbullied. He’s won a Scribe Award from the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers, and the grand prize in Pocket Books’ Strange New Worlds contest.

We discussed why when he a kid growing up in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, he dismissed any suggestion Steve Ditko grew up there as mere rumor, the differences in the way we each pants our stories, how to get writing done amid the pressures of life, the best way to approach assembling collections and anthologies, how he got his first gig writing comic books, dealing with the inevitable rejections, whether his fans follow his writing career cross his many genres, the many misconceptions people have about Steve Ditko, and much more.

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My conversation with this episode’s guest, Sheree Renée Thomas, didn’t take place because we were attending the same convention, which is the way most of these chats happen, but out of pure serendipity.

Over on Facebook, someone in the group devoted to Capclave — a con where I’ve harvested many conversations for you — mentioned Thomas was scheduled to speak at Maryland’s Rockville Memorial Library. When I checked the details and saw the venue was only a 90-minute drive away, I reached out to see whether she’d have time in her schedule to grab lunch — and luckily she did. So early the same day as her presentation titled “Afrofuturism & Diversity in Sci-Fi,” I scooped her up from her hotel and took her over to Commonwealth Indian Restaurant, where I’ve had many wonderful meals. Here’s how the event organizers described Thomas and her career —

New York Times bestselling, two-time World Fantasy Award-winning author and editor Sheree Renée Thomas has been a 2022 Hugo Award Finalist, and her collection, Nine Bar Blues, is a Locus, Igynte, and World Fantasy Finalist. She edited the groundbreaking Dark Matter anthologies that introduced a century of Black speculative fiction, including W.E.B. Du Bois’s science fiction stories. Thomas wrote Marvel’s Black Panther: Panther’s Rage novel (October 2022), adapted from the legendary comics, collaborated with Janelle Monáe on The Memory Librarian, and is the editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, founded in 1949 and Obsidian, founded in 1975. In 2022 she co-curated Carnegie Hall’s historic, citywide Afrofuturism Festival.

We discussed how to prevent being an editor interfere with being a writer (and vice versa), the way a serendipitous encounter with Octavia Butler’s Kindred caused her to take her own writing more seriously and a copy of Black Enterprise magazine spurred her to move to New York, how her family’s relationship with Isaac Hayes nourished her creative dreams, the advice she gives young writers about the difference between the fantasy and reality of a writer’s life, how realizing the books she thought were out there weren’t launched her editing career, the rewards and challenges of taking over as editor for a 75-year old magazine, why she reads cover letters last, and much more.

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Welcome to the third and final episode of Eating the Fantastic recorded during the 60th incarnation of Boskone, following my lunches with guests Walter Jon Williams and Annalee Newitz. My guest this time around is Theodora Goss, whose latest book, The Collected Enchantments, was released on Valentine’s Day by Mythic Delirium Books only a few days before the con began.

Theodora Goss is a World Fantasy, Locus, and Mythopoeic Award-winning author of the short story and poetry collections In the Forest of Forgetting (2006), Songs for Ophelia (2014), and Snow White Learns Witchcraft (2019), as well as novella The Thorn and the Blossom (2012), debut novel The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter (2017), and sequels European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman (2018) and The Sinister Mystery of the Mesmerizing Girl (2019). She has been a finalist for the Nebula, Crawford, and Shirley Jackson Awards, and has been on the Tiptree Award Honor List.

Her short fiction has appeared in such magazines as Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and others, and anthologies such as Ghosts by Gaslight: Stories of Steampunk and Supernatural Suspense, Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells: An Anthology of Gaslamp Fantasy, and Miscreations: Gods, Monstrosities & Other Horrors. She has a Ph.D. in English literature from Boston University, and currently teaches writing and literature in the Boston University College of Arts and Sciences Writing Program. She also taught in the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing, the Odyssey writing workshop, the Alpha writing workshop for young writers, and in writing workshops at Readercon, Boskone, and Wiscon.

We discussed the ways in which being an immigrant is like living in a fantasy world, how she knows when a poem is a poem and a story is a story, the power of the specificity of prose, what Neil Gaiman once said about writing for theme anthologies which perfectly described her own process, our surprisingly similar  experiences with editorial suggestions, why so many fantasy writers love Middlemarch, her theories about the best way to moderate panels, how she knows when a story is truly done, and much more.

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It’s time to return to Boskone for the second of three conversations recorded there, following last episode’s chat with Walter Jon Williams. I invite you to take a seat at the table with my guest Annalee Newitz at Tony and Elaine’s, a casual, old school, Italian red sauce restaurant in the North End of Boston.

Annalee is the author of three novels — The Terraformers (just out in January), The Future of Another Timeline, and their debut novel Autonomous, which won the Lambda Literary Award, and was nominated for the Nebula and Locus Awards. Their short story “When Robot and Crow Saved East St. Louis” won the 2019 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award.  Their nonfiction books include Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age, which was a national bestseller and was praised in The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The New Yorker, and Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction, which was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize in science.

They’re also the co-editor of the essay collection She’s Such A Geek (Seal Press), and author of Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture (Duke University Press). They’re the co-host with Charlie Jane Anders of the Hugo Award-winning podcast Our Opinions Are Correct, and in addition to having been the founder of io9, served as the editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.

We discussed how difficult (and disappointing) it would have been to eat a trilobite, what writing their non-fiction books taught them about creating the arcs of novels, why their brain seems more suited for novels than short stories, how best to include a message in fiction without the soapbox overwhelming the story, the greatest bad review one of their books ever got (it involved creamed corn), how to inhabit characters who are hundreds of years old, fun facts they learned about moose which helped make their new book better, the music they blasted to rev up for one of the novel’s big action scenes, how to make the growth of a fictional romance believable to readers, the serendipitous way in which Ken McLeod rekindled their love of science fiction, and much more.

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Welcome to the first of three episodes recorded at the 60th incarnation of Boskone, which according to longtime attendees, offered up the warmest weather that con has ever seen. Considering past Boston Februarys have been brutal, going so far as to one year bring on a blizzard, stranding people at the con hotel, I was thrilled. I was also thrilled to be able to grab lunch with Walter Jon Williams the day Boskone began at Cafe Polonia, which has been serving traditional and gourmet Polish and Eastern European dishes in South Boston for more than 20 years.

Walter’s the author of more than forty volumes of fiction, in addition to works in film, television, comics, and gaming. He began his career by writing historical fiction, the sea-adventure series Privateers & Gentlemen. But after the market for historicals died, he relaunched himself as a science fiction writer.  He’s written cyberpunk (Hardwired, Voice of the Whirlwind, Angel Station), near-future thrillers (This Is Not a Game, The Rift), classic space opera (Dread Empire’s Fall), “new” space opera (Aristoi), post-cyberpunk epic fantasy new weird (Metropolitan and City on Fire), and the world’s only gothic western science fiction police procedural (Days of Atonement).

He’s been nominated for many literary awards, and for a number of years was science fiction’s “Bull Goose Loser” — that is, the person who had the most award nominations without having actually won anything — a streak which ended when he won a Nebula Award in 2001 for his novelette “Daddy’s World.” His short fiction has appeared in such magazines as Omni, Fantasy and Science Fiction, Asimov’s, and others, as well as such anthologies as Alien Crimes, The New Space Opera, Songs of the Dying Earth: Stories in Honor of Jack Vance, plus George R.R. Martin’s Wild Cards project. He’s also been involved in the gaming industry, having written RPGs based on Privateers & Gentlemen and Hardwired, contributed to the alternate-reality game Last Call Poker, and written the dialog for the Electronic Arts game Spore. In 2017, he was the Guest of Honor at the 75th World Science Fiction Convention, held in Helsinki.

We discussed why when he started out he didn’t think he was good enough to make it as a science fiction writer, how if I were to read his first drafts they’d terrify me, the con at which Gordon Dickson wandered around trying to sell one of Walter’s novels to editors, why the ’50s was the Golden Age of historical fiction in America, the way in which his first science fiction novel was an inversion of all the historical fiction he’d written before, which issues of Fantastic Four got him so angry he quit reading comics for 20 years, how deep he was into his career before he finally realized he might actually make a go at this writing thing, the most frequent problem found when teaching Taos Toolbox, what he learned about his Hugo and Nebula Award-nominated “Surfacing” by leaving it untouched in a drawer for six months, his motivation for the one time he had to say no to an editorial suggestion, what his extremely rare bouts of writers block — lasting only a few days — were really about, and much more.

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Earlier today, the Chengdu Worldcon opened nominations for the Hugo Awards, the Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book, and the Astounding Award for Best New Writer. If you’re eligible to nominate this year, I hope you’ll take my 2022 short story publications into consideration — but I’d ask that you please consider Eating the Fantastic in the category of Best Fancast as well.

Last year, I invited you to eavesdrop on 27 meals with amazing creators, welcoming you to the continual culinary conversation I’ve been having since I attended my first convention at age 15.

Here are links to all 2023 episodes so you can decide whether the podcast — which I launched in February 2016 — is to your taste. Pick a guest who calls to you and join us at the table!

Breakfast on Eggs Benedict with Fonda Lee in Episode 162 of Eating the Fantastic

Dig into duck with Usman T. Malik in Episode 163 of Eating the Fantastic

Nibble noodles with Daryl Gregory in Episode 164 of Eating the Fantastic

Brunch with two-time Hugo Award nominee Natalie Luhrs in Episode 165 of Eating the Fantastic

Eat enchiladas with Bram Stoker Award-winning writer Paul Tremblay in Episode 166 of Eating the Fantastic

Share deep-fried wontons with Library of Congress curator Sara Duke in Episode 167 of Eating the Fantastic

Pig out on pork BBQ with Paul Witcover in Episode 168 of Eating the Fantastic

Chow down on butter chicken with Paul Kupperberg in Episode 169 of Eating the Fantastic

Uncover Alex Segura’s secret identity in Episode 170 of Eating the Fantastic

Join John Appel for a dry-aged burger in Episode 171 of Eating the Fantastic

Brunch with writer Steven R. Southard on Episode 172 of Eating the Fantastic

Share sushi with the award-winning writer Wen Spencer in Episode 173 of Eating the Fantastic

Grab dinner with Gwendolyn Clare during Episode 174 of Eating the Fantastic

Join David Gerrold for a breakfast buffet on Episode 175 of Eating the Fantastic

Dig into dumplings with Patrick O’Leary in Episode 176 of Eating the Fantastic

Catch up with Sam J. Miller over khachapuri in Episode 177 of Eating the Fantastic

Brunch on Eggs Benedict with Michael Jan Friedman in Episode 178 of Eating the Fantastic

Join writer David Ebenbach for cheesecake in D.C. on Episode 179 of Eating the Fantastic

Meet Max Gladstone for a Mexican meal in Episode 180 of Eating the Fantastic

Chow down with Wesley Chu in Episode 181 of Eating the Fantastic

Come to Chicago for lunch with Carol Tilley in Episode 182 of Eating the Fantastic

Dig into dim sum with the Nebula Award-winning Eileen Gunn in Episode 193 of Eating the Fantastic

Munch Carnitas Benedict with the award-winning Michael Swanwick in Episode 184 of Eating the Fantastic

Eavesdrop on Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki in Episode 185 of Eating the Fantastic

Bite into blood sausage with Tim Waggoner in Episode 186 of Eating the Fantastic

Dive into dim sum with Randee Dawn in Episode 187 of Eating the Fantastic

Take a seat at the table in Little Italy with Al Milgrom in Episode 188 of Eating the Fantastic

Should your eavesdropping entice you to listen to future episodes, subscribe at the iTunes store or via the show’s RSS feed of http://eatingthefantastic.libsyn.com/rss to download them to the device of your choosing.

Thank you for your consideration!

I attended Boskone last weekend, where I recorded three new conversations I’ll be sharing with you, but before we get to those, let’s pay a visit to the previous weekend’s Farpoint, where I had lunch with Jennifer R. Povey at the Ashland Cafe in Cockeysville, Maryland, which offers excellent diner food and great pie.

Povey has made numerous appearances in Analog, and her short fiction has also appeared in such magazines and anthologies as Daily Science Fiction, Bards and Sages Quarterly, Zombiality,  99 Tiny Terrors, First Contact, You’re Not Alone, and many others.  Her novels include the four books in the Lost Guardians series — Falling Dusk (2016), Fallen Dark (2017), Rising Dawn (2017), and Risen Day (2018) — as well as the stand-alones Transpecial (2013), Araña (2019), The Lay of Lady Percival (2019), Firewing (2020), and The Friar’s Tale: A Novel of Robin Hood (2020) She also has a number of credits in the RPG industry, having written or co-written supplements for Fat Goblin Games, Rite Publishing, Dark Naga Games, Flaming Crab Games, Avalon Game Company, and others.

We discussed how the pandemic altered the timing of her newly begun five-book science fiction series, why she once had to rethink a novel after getting 20,000 words in, the reason series detectives are rarely the true protagonists in their own stories, our differing reasons for taking issue with J. K. Rowling, her Star Trek fan fiction origins, how to avoid sequel fatigue when writing long series, techniques for avoiding self-rejection, her unusual journey to getting published in Analog, how 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea changed her life, the  Doctor Who episode which altered her existential understanding of the universe, how her archeological training helped her fiction, what writers get wrong when depicting horses, how it’s possible for pantsers to write novels, the time she horrified a Klingon in a convention bar, the divisive nature of “ship wars,” and much more.

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Anyone who’s listened to more than a few episodes of Eating the Fantastic already knows — collaboration confuses me. Tell me two writers have managed to work together on the same project without blood on the floor and a lifelong feud and I’m baffled. So when I learned previous guests of the show Brian Keene and Mary SanGiovanni had collaborated on the short story collection Things Left Behind, released last year by Thunderstorm Books, I knew we’d have to chat about it.

We met for breakfast at Martinsburg, West Virginia’s Blue White Grill, which has been serving diner food since the ’50s.

Brian’s published more than 40 novels, including the best-selling The Rising, and he’s the winner of the 2014 World Horror Grand Master Award, while Mary is the author of The Hollower trilogy, the first volume of which was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award. There’s a whole lot more to know about each of them, as you’ll learn if you listen to those two earlier episodes.

We discussed how being intimidated by each other helps their collaborative process, their different tolerances for writing gore (and how that’s changed over time), the romantic reason (up until this episode known to only one of them) their collaborative short story collection came about, which of them once wrote 45,000 words in a day, how they came to agree on a joint dedication, who gives each story its final polish (and who get the final say on sending it to market), how Brian attempted to bleed all over Mary’s upcoming Alien novel, the way they approach their own deaths, their honeymoon book tour hitting every state but Alaska and Hawaii, their upcoming collaborative novel, and much more.

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My guest this episode is Cory Doctorow, recorded not — as most of these conversations are — while on my convention travels, but when he was in Washington, D.C. to receive an award from the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation, a brief pause while on his book tour promoting Chokepoint Capitalism, which he wrote with Rebecca Giblin.

We met for lunch at the Laotian restaurant Laos in Town, just a few blocks away from Union Station, partly because Cory had to leap a train immediately after for Baltimore that night, and so needed to be close by, but also because of Tom Sietsema’s rave in the Washington Post.

Cory is a science fiction writer, journalist and technology activist who in 2020, was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame. In the years since I published his first professional fiction sale in Science Fiction Age magazine (though I didn’t buy his first professionally sold short story, a distinction we get into during our chat), he’s won the Locus, Prometheus, Copper Cylinder, White Pine and Sunburst Awards, and been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula and British Science Fiction Awards.

His novels include Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003), Eastern Standard Tribe (2004), Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (2005), Little Brother (2008), his most recent, Walkaway (2017), and others. His most recent short story collection is Radicalized (2019). He’s also a special consultant to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit civil liberties group that defends freedom in technology law, policy, standards and treaties.

We discussed how different D.C. seems to him now that he’s a U.S. citizen, the way his remarkable evening hanging with both David Byrne and Spider Robinson put things in perspective, the lessons we learned (both good and bad) from Harlan Ellison, our differing levels of hope and despair at the current state of the world, the major effect Judith Merril had on the direction of his life, how an ongoing column he wrote for Science Fiction Age magazine predicted the next 20 years of his life, our differing opinions as to what it means when we say stories are didactic, how to continue on in the face of rejection — and then once we do, how not to become parodies of ourselves, the best piece of advice he didn’t follow, our differing views on spoilers, what he recently came to understand about the reactionary message of traditional hardboiled fiction — and how he used that in his upcoming trilogy, knowing when to break the rules of writing, and much more.

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They say breakfast is the most important meal of the day — and that’s especially true when it’s a breakfast with Ron Marz at Miss Shirley’s Cafe during Baltimore Comic-Con weekend! Conventions are a busy place for comic book creators, and stealing them away for meals considering all the things they need to get done while there is nearly impossible, which is why I’d scheduled last episode’s dinner with Al Milgrom Thursday night before the con, and this one Friday morning just a few hours before the con was to begin.

Ron Marz is perhaps best known for his writing of the characters Silver Surfer and Green Lantern, but also for his work on the Marvel vs. DC crossover and Batman/Aliens. He also worked on the CrossGen Comics series Scion, Mystic, Sojourn, and The Path. At Dark Horse Comics, he created Samurai: Heaven and Earth and various Star Wars comics. For DC Comics, he’s written Ion, a 12 part comic book miniseries that followed the Kyle Rayner character after the One Year Later event, and Tales of the Sinistro Corps Presents: Parallax and Tales of the Sinestro Corps Presents: Ion, two one-shot tie-ins to the Green Lantern crossover, The Sinestro Corps War.

We discussed how the letter he wrote to Marvel when he was a kid suggesting a Justice League/Avengers team-up predicted his future comics career, which side his childhood self fell in the Marvel vs. DC war, the difficulties of surprising readers when the publicity machine is always running, how early encounters with Bernie Wrightson and Jim Starlin led to him giving up journalism, why it was better he broke in first at “collegial” Marvel rather than “corporate” DC, how the thick skin he developed in newspapers helped him when he took over Green Lantern, why comic book companies like poaching each other’s creators, the ironic conversation that led to him writing Superman, what he still considers the best part of the job after 30 years in comics, our memories of George Perez and Neal Adams, and much more.

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