Lawrence M. Schoen

If all has gone according to plan, it’s the Monday after Sasquan and you are reading this blog post while I am waking up in my hotel room in Spokane. I’ll be lingering here for a couple more days, recovering from the joy and madness that was the 2015 World Science Fiction Convention. I wish I could regale you with glowing accounts of all that happened there, but as I write this none of it has taken place yet. I’m banking this post a week in advance because hey, I’m at the Worldcon, when would I find the time to write it?

And while at the time of this writing I cannot tell you who won the Hugo, since this month is all about awards, I’m happy to use that as a shameless segue to introduce this week’s guest, Brian Staveley, who just a couple weeks ago won the David Gemmell Morningstar Award for Best Debut Novel for The Emperor’s Blades, the first volume in his Chronicle of the Unhewn Throne trilogy. Book two, The Providence of Fire, comes out mid-January, followed by the concluding novel, The Last Mortal Bond, two months later.

In addition to writing epic fantasy, Brian wears a few other hats, hats to give one pause. Depending on how you choose to parse it, he’s a poet who edits (in his case, for Antilever Press), or an editor who writes poetry. But don’t take my word for it, you’ll see the combination of both in the crisp sparseness of the following report of his most memorable meal.

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Would you look at that, it’s August already. Which means that my late-July birthday came and went last week. It was something of a disappointing birthday, owing to other circumstances such as flying in from a week away with Klingons and the fatigue such events always bring, the incessant itching caused by what seems to have been a poison ivy rash covering much of my torso, and the necessity of spending the morning taking my wife’s aged and ailing dog to the vet to be euthanized. So, yeah, not a great birthday. So much so that I granted myself a “birthday do-over” on Friday. Which is why, boys and girls, I have a time machine in my basement!

That said, tempus is very much fugiting, and so we are here once again at EATING AUTHORS with yet another rousing account of a memorable meal. This week, our guest is Lev AC Rosen. What can you say about a man who apparently eschews periods (and even a separating space!) on his middle initials? Were I a clinical psychologist — and I’m not, I’m a research psychologist — I’d doubtless reach for my copy of the DSM and find assorted case studies that fit this profile. Since that’s a different parallel world, let me instead tell you that Lev is the author of four books, two for adults (All Men of Genius and Depth) and two for middle grade readers (Woundabout and The Memory Wall, the former including a pet capybara, and latter due out in Fall of 2016). I’m willing to trade that capybara for sufficient points to suspend judgment on the whole initials question; it’s a question of priorities, you see.

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As I prepare this week’s EATING AUTHORS post, I’m far from home and surrounded by aliens. Which is to say I’m attending the 22nd annual conference of the Klingon Language Institute, as I warned you about last week. For days now we’ve been barking and spitting at one another, singing songs of battle, and telling uproarious stories. And we’ve done it all in Klingon. As always, it’s been glorious and alas ends all too quickly.

But it’s a fitting background for introducing this week’s guest, Sebastien de Castell, whose curriculum vitae reads like the description of an over-the-top action hero. Doubtless this lends a level of verisimilitude to the swashbuckling derring do to his The Greatcoats series, which presently includes Knight’s Shadow and Traitor’s Blade. So it’s hardly surprising then to discover — as you will when you read of his most memorable meal below — that the man is a romantic as well.

And I, for one, think that’s a good thing.

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For most of you, today is just another Monday in July. Not so for me. Today is the last Monday before I head to Chicago for the 22nd annual conference of the Klingon Language Institute (aka the qep’a’ cha’maH cha’DIch), several days spent in the company of people who gather from around the world to share their delight in the galaxy’s fastest growing language. I’ve been pushing Klingon since 1992, and some of the folk I’ll be seeing this week have been in my life that long. So, in some ways, the qep’a’ is like a family reunion. But instead of a three-legged race we have pain sticks.

So if I seem a bit distracted today, it’s only because there’s so much left to get done before I head off to the conference, not least of which is to switch into “Klingon-mode” because, honestly, other than this one week each summer I don’t spend a lot of time speaking or thinking in Klingon.

Okay, so with my excuses firmly in place (majQa’!) let’s move on and get to introducing this week’s EATING AUTHORS guest, Mary Rickert. Not that Mary needs much introduction as earlier this year her novella The Mothers of Voorhisville, landed her on the Nebula Award ballot, and this past June she took home a Locus Award for her first novel, The Memory Garden. And that’s just for 2015. In prior years, her short fiction has earned her the Crawford Award, two World Fantasy Awards, as well as other nominations for both the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards.

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