Lawrence M. Schoen

Welcome to the start of 2017. I’ll spare you the usual rant either for or against New Year’s resolutions because Yoda pretty much covered it all with “Do, or do not. There is no try.” Short and sweet, kind of like Yoda himself (and just to be clear, I’m talking puppet-Yoda, not CGI-Yoda; don’t get me started).

The place of first EATING AUTHORS guest year goes to Alexander Jablokov, a brilliant writer I’d never met prior to a quiet Sunday last June in New Mexico when I spent what seemed like hours searching an airport for him, racing up and down escalators, accosting innocent travelers in baggage claim, and annoying airline personnel, all while Rick Wilber kept circling the airport in his rental car and running afoul of the parking police. Eventually, we found Alex and drove off to a week long writing retreat, which is where I learned just how talented an author Alex is, both in terms of his own work, and his ability to provide critical insights into others’ fiction as well.

So, naturally, I invited him to drop by and talk about food.
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Welcome to the last week of the year. That span between holidays when no one wants to be at work, little gets done, and everyone is just getting by as best they can as the year breathes its last breath.

Tomorrow the trade paperback edition or Barsk comes out, two days ahead of the anniversary of the hardcover debut. And you have until the 29th to enter to win a free copy, if you’re into such things.

But now please turn your attention to Teresa Frohock, the 51st and last EATING AUTHOR guest of 2016. Teresa writes dark fantasy and horror and is probably best known for her book Los Nefilim, a collection of three related novellas set in 1930s Spain that plays with the conflict between angels, daimons, and the beings caught in the middle (and I don’t mean us regular mortal folk). If you haven’t yet sampled her work, I don’t know what more you need to know to convince you to give it a try.

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The last few days have been difficult ones in my home. My mother died in her sleep late last week, and though she had a full life and had spent the last few years in very poor health, still just now it’s hard to think that she is gone. Some might wonder why I didn’t take this week off from EATING AUTHORS, but others among you know that there is a welcome distraction found in focusing on routine tasks, and preparing this post has given me some peace. To the many readers out there who have expressed condolences over my loss, I thank you. Now let us move forward as though this were just another Monday.

Out guest this week is William C. Dietz, and I have to say one of the things I like best about him is he didn’t start writing his first novel until he was thirty-nine. That was back in 1984 and since then, he’s written more than fifty books, including his extremely popular Legion series, media tie-in books and game novelizations.

Bill’s latest work, Into the Guns, came out a couple months back from Ace and promises to be the first volume in his new America Rising series.

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I’m posting this week’s EATING AUTHORS from the road. I’m in southern California visiting family, and so it’s quite possible that I screwed up the scheduling with respect to the time zones. So don’t be surprised if this shows up three hours early, three hours late, or just right. However it happens, my guest this week is none other than famed author and equestrian, Judith Tarr.

You probably know her from her Avaryan Chronicles series, The Hound and the Falcon trilogy, her the White Magic series (written under the name Caitlin Brennan), the War of the Rose series (written as Kathleen Bryan), and more than a dozen other novels including collaborations with folks like Harry Turtledove, Jane Yolen, and S. M. Stirling.

Judith is a professional medievalist, used to teach Latin, and now breeds and trains Lipizzan horses. Her fiction has been nominated for the World Fantasy, Locus, and Sturgeon awards, and won the William Crawford award. Her latest work is Dragons in the Earth, available from the fine folks at Book View Cafe.

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My last convention of 2016 (though not my last author appearance) took place over the weekend. I spent Friday and Saturday at Philcon and among other delights, I found myself scheduled for a panel on Alien Language that had me sitting alongside Samuel “Chip” Delany — whose 1966, Nebula award-wining novel Babel-17, which I read probably read around 1972, was in large part responsible for sparking my interest in language and linguistics. So, yeah, a really nice weekend!

More recently in my career, the worldbuilding for Barsk (and its in-progress sequel) has had me reading more anthropomorphic work by other authors, including this week’s EATING AUTHOR guest, Renee Carter Hall. And for good reason. Renee’s earliest writing credit goes back to eighth grade as the co-author of a fan story that in one of the impossible Hollywood happenings ended up on the small screen as an episode of Tiny Toon Adventures (bonus points if you remember Buster and Babs). With an great origin story like that, she clearly had no choice but to become an author of anthropomorphic fiction.

Renee — known to many in the furry community as Poetigress — is comfortable writing both long and short forms. She’s been nominated for the Cóyotl Award six times, winning it four times (twice in the same year), for short story, novella, and novel. If you’re a traditional genre reader looking to expand your repertoire to more talking animals, Renee’s range of work is a great place to start.

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Online venues like Twitter and Facebook allow me an expanded community of authors whom I’ve never met, nor have much expectation to. Now and then, some international conference or convention provides an exception to that, as is the case with this week’s EATING AUTHORS guest, Mishell Baker.

We’d been trading tweets and I discovered she basically lives in my old stomping grounds in southern California. That led to more conversation and eventually an invitation to be a guest here. She sent in the meal below many weeks ago and it’s been working its way up the calendar. Meanwhile, we were both in Columbus, Ohio last month for World Fantasy and we shared a meal and wiled away several very enjoyable hours together. And in a hotel dedicated to Pepsi product, she graciously provided me with a bottle of Diet Coke!

Mishell writes strictly fantasy. She’s a Clarion graduate and has placed short stories with several of the list of well known magazines. Back in March, Saga Press published Borderline , the first volume of The Arcadia Project series, which features a protagonist who’s a double-amputee with borderline personality disorder and works with a secret border patrol responsible for the flow of traffic between our world and a magical one right next door. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking, “That? Again?” The sequel, Phantom Pains is coming your way next March. Go read the first and put in your order for the second.

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