Last month’s Balticon was one of the best I’ve ever experienced, due to a combination of good programming, good friends, good food (including visits to two spectacular bakeries which were new to me), and what’s most important as far as you’re concerned — good podcast guests. Kemi Ashing-Giwa, an author and scientist-in-training based in Palo Alto, is the first of three on whom you’ll get to eavesdrop.

Her work includes the USA Today bestselling, Compton Crook Award-winning novel The Splinter in the Sky, the novella This World Is Not Yours, and the forthcoming novel The King Must Die, due out in November. Her short fiction, which has been nominated for an Ignyte Award and featured on the Locus Recommended Reading List, has been reprinted in The Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction Volume 3, Some of the Best from Tor.com: 15th Anniversary Edition and 2024, and The Year’s Top Tales of Space and Time 3. She studied organismic and evolutionary biology with a secondary in astrophysics at Harvard, and is now pursuing a PhD in the Earth & Planetary Sciences department at Stanford.

We discussed her conscious decision to not take any creative writing courses in college, the eight never-to-be published novels she wrote on her way to The Splinter in the Sky, how COVID-19 led her to take a deep dive into tea (and how tea then inspired her debut novel), her evolution from pantser to plotter, her outreach to 200 agents before she found the right one, how to craft compelling opening sentences, her tips for writing successful fight scenes, why she was able to handle attending Harvard and writing a novel at the same time, how best to deal with editorial revision suggestions, her love of reading debut novels, and much more.

Here’s how you can join us for lunch at Baltimore’s Thames Street Oyster House — (more…)