I last chatted with John Wiswell the same month he won a Nebula Award for his short story “Open House on Haunted Hill,” which had been published the previous year in Diabolical Plots. He’d only released highly regarded short fiction at that point, but oh, how his life has changed since then — for The Dragon Has Some Complaints, published just a few days before this followup lunch conversation, was in that brief span of time, his third.

His first novel, Someone You Can Build a Nest In, was nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula award, winning the latter, and his second novel, Wearing the Lion, was also a Nebula Award finalist.

We discussed why his book tour’s stop at the Strand was so meaningful, how publishing three novels has changed him, why he’s “a character guy first” before world-building, theme, or plot, the importance of getting out of your own way, how monstrosity is nothing more than a social construct, why his writing process includes only the most skeletal of outlines, the most fun thing about writing secondary world fantasies, how our lives being finite is both terrifying and good, why the original title of The Dragon Has No Complaints only lasted three days, the techniques it took to convince readers to believe in the book’s unique method of dragon flight, who he had to grow into to be able to pull off this novel, our shared love of ornate titles, how we felt about The Bear‘s final season, plus much more.

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

We’re in a transitional period here at Eating the Fantastic, not yet fully returned to the pre-pandemic premise of the podcast, which had you in restaurants, taking a seat at the table with me and my guests. A new normal is slowly making itself known, as you heard in two recent episodes with writer Karen Osborne and agent Joshua Bilmes, who were the first non-Zoom unmasked faces of people not members of my family I saw in around 15 months.

In this episode, though, we have another conversation recorded using my lockdown method of attempting to match meals with my guests so we can pretend we’re together even though there are hundreds, if not thousands, of miles between us. Over the past year, you joined me as I’ve baked and shared homemade scones and pizza, or ordered takeout weiner schnitzel and sushi, my guests and I doing our best to seize those moments of community COVID-19 tried to steal from us. In this case, John Wiswell and I pretended we were sitting across the table from each other during the Nebula Awards weekend.

John Wiswell won a Nebula Award earlier this month for the short story “Open House on Haunted Hill,” which had been published last year by Diabolical Plots. He’s also appeared in Nature, Uncanny, Weird Tales, Fireside, Daily Science Fiction, Flash Fiction Online, Cast of Wonders, Podcastle, and Pseudopod. In an astonishing show of prolificacy, he managed to posted fiction on his blog every day for six straight years, which I find astonishing. I found his Nebula acceptance speech astonishing as well; it was one of the best I’ve ever heard.

John and I were supposed to enjoy specialty hamburgers together this time around, only … something went wrong, as you shall hear. Why did I end up eating a chuck roast, brisket, and short rib burger while John only got to nibble on ice cream and carrots? For the answer to that question, well … you’ll have to listen.

We discussed his motivation for giving one of the greatest acceptance speeches ever, how he learned to build meaning out of strangeness, the way writing novels taught him to make his short stories better, his dual story generation modes of confrontation vs. escape, why what we think we know about the Marshmallow Test is wrong, the reason we’re both open online about our rejections, how the love of wallpaper led to him becoming a writer, why we’ve each destroyed our early writing from time to time, what he learned writing a story a day for six years, and much more.

Here’s how you can take a seat at the virtual table with us — (more…)