Lawrence M. Schoen

One of the best things about attending the World Science Fiction Convention (aka WorldCon) is connecting with old friends whom I might otherwise not see for years and years. Also high on that list is meeting new people, names that I’ve known forever but never had the faces to attach to them before. This week’s guest, L. E. Modesitt, Jr., falls into that second category. A few days into the convention I happened to be having a chat with an editor and Lee’s name came up. Less than two hours later, I ran into him in the green room. When Fate pulls your strings like that it’s important to pay attention, and so I wasted no time and extended an invitation to EATING AUTHORS.

If you’re not already be acquainted with his work, you’re in for a great treat. Lee’s career has produced more than fifty novels and includes both science fiction and fantasy. With regard to the latter, his series The Saga of the Recluse spans eighteen books, and has sold nearly three million copies! His latest work, Solar Express, is a hard SF novel that releases tomorrow.

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The end of October is just around the corner, which means Halloween, eating candy that should really have been offered up to masked, marauding children, as well as a long drive up to Saratoga Springs for the World Fantasy Convention. It also means a mere two months until the release date of Barsk, and the emails and phone calls and interviews and reviews will continue to ramp up and devour my brain. It’s been a euphoric chaos so far, and November is going to be much more of the same.

But for a short while it’s still October, and today I must focus on this week’s EATING AUTHORS guest, Josh Vogt. He’s that bravest of souls, a fiction author who has shed the world of traditional day-jobbery to support himself by his craft. Or to put it more simply, he’s a freelance writer. I am in awe of such people. Seriously.

This past May saw the release of Josh’s first novel, Enter the Janitor, book one of his Cleaners series. He diversified and followed it up a month later with a novel in the popular Pathfinder Tales series, Forge of Ashes.

I’m also told that The Maids of Wrath (aka Cleaners book two) has been moved up from a 2016 release and is expected in just a few weeks. Unfortunately, as of the time of this post, I don’t have a firm release date or cover to share with you. But if you just keep clicking on Josh’s photo and follow the link to the list of his books, I promise you the particulars will show up there soon.

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People tell me that there are more SF & F novels being published today than ever before, and I certainly believe it. I make a point of reading fifty books a year (as part of my annual Goodreads challenge), but that’s not even close to being sufficient to read the new work coming out from friends and acquaintances, and that’s before I include books that up are for awards that I’ll be voting on or novels that I’ve been asked to consider providing a blurb for. Right or wrong, I’m mostly reading people I’ve already before.

Still, it’s not surprising that every now and then I stumble across an author that’s new to me, a name I don’t immediately recognize. Usually it’s a name that shows up on my social media feed, someone posting in response to something I’ve said, or a comment that’s been retweeted or shared by a friend. I tell you this, because it’s how I ran into this week’s EATING AUTHORS guest, Steve McEllistrem.

Steve’s Susquehanna Virus triology consists of The Devereaux Dilemma, The Devereaux Disaster, and The Devereaux Decision. In addition, he’s had a career that’s kept involved in other sorts of writerly work. He’s published several nonfiction volumes related to the law, and spent years as a radio producer and host, where he interviewed authors from around the world.

Since I use this blog to do something similar — talk to authors, not publish law books — it seemed to make perfect sense to invite him to stop by.

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I am officially declaring today to be “Normal Day,” because I’m a bit worn out from the previous handful of days that were crazy/wonderful/frenetic/heartwarming/exhausting, and I could, you know, benefit from a day of relative normalcy. So yeah, I’m going to relax a bit today, go to the DayJob, do some fairly typical research work, grab my usual lunch, and so on. Normal Day.

Please note, however, that today is very much not Normal Day for today’s EATING AUTHOR guest, Matthew Kressel . Matt’s first novel, (which is also the first book of his planned Worldmender Trilogy) is King of Shards comes out tomorrow. So yeah, nothing typical or ordinary about today for him.

If you don’t know his name, you should. His short fiction has showed up on the Locus recommended reading list and been nominated repeatedly for the Nebula award. His editorial work with the small press Senses Five has garnered him a World Fantasy award. And he’s also currently the co-host (alongside Ellen Datlow) of the Fantastic Fiction monthly reading series in New York City, which features some of the best and brightest speculative fiction to be found.

I have been waiting with no little impatience to read Matt at book-length since word first leaked that he’d sold a novel. That waiting comes to an end tomorrow. Tomorrow will not be a Normal Day.

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This past summer, as part of my experience at Sasquan, the 73rd World Science Fiction Convention, I was on a panel about food. This happens more and more frequently (as I’ve mentioned previously) and this blog series is probably a large part of why. Among the audience members that afternoon was this week’s guest, Loren Rhoads, who was so taken with the panel that she followed up weeks later with an email and introduced herself (and her books). Naturally, I sent her an invitation to EATING AUTHORS, and so here she is.

Loren spent a decade as the editor of Morbid Curiosity, described in her bio as a nonfiction cult magazine. It’s a short jump from there to her compelling Wish You Were Here, a book of essays about visits to some of the world’s most famous cemeteries. More recently though she’s the author of the In the Wake of the Templars space opera trilogy from Night Shade Books, with all three books releasing in 2015. The Dangerous Type launched in July, Kill by Numbers came out a month ago, and No More Heroes is expected in November.

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Over the weekend, while the Pope was visiting Philadelphia, I fled south to Maryland and took part in the Balitmore Book Festival. In many ways, that event marks the first point in the run-up to the release of Barsk: The Elephants’ Graveyard in three months, not least because I signed and gave away a small stack of ARCs. Between now and then I have innumerable blog tour posts and five conventions. First among that last is a day trip up to NYC for Comic Con in about a week and a half. If things go according to plan, the Fab Four (I think I’m Ringo) of Tor’s “Class of 2015” will recreate last Spring’s BEA performance and again join our moderator John Scalzi on stage. The star of the event is likely to be this week’s EATING AUTHOR guest, Ilana C. Myer, whose debut novel, Last Song Before Night, launches tomorrow. She’ll still have that “new book smell” and the audience will doubtless latch onto that, raise her up on their collective shoulders, and parade her around the Javits Center.

Or something like that.

I’ve heard stories about Comic Con, and I don’t know how many of them are true, so I may have things slightly off in that regard. On the other hand, something I’m completely certain of is that Ilana’s debut novel is an absolute delight. And I’m not just saying that because we’re classmates. Pick up a copy, read it for yourself, and then drop me a note apologizing for ever doubting me.

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