Posts Tagged ‘Eating Authors’

A couple days from now my life gets a bit crazy. I’ll be starting a period of time (let’s call it five weeks) in which I attend four conventions (the qep’a’ cha’maHwejDIch, Confluence, GenCon Writer’s Symposium, and after a week’s break, the WorldCon). Or to put it another way, I’m looking at 23 days away from home out of 35, and that’s a bit much for me.

But have no fear, EATING AUTHORS will still be here for you, bright and early each Monday. As proof of that, even though I’m frantically packing and preparing Klingon certification exams, here’s N. S. Dolkart, this week’s guest. His first novel, Silent Hall debuted just last month from Angry Robot. It’s a fantasy that begins with a plague, and goes on to include wizards, gods, and a dragon. Seriously, he had me ay plague. Better still, Noah (yes, that’s what the N stands for) is already at work on a sequel.

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I generally attend several conventions a year, and as I’ve been doing this whole writer thing for a while now, I’ve had opportunity to meet a lot of authors. Some I see maybe once a year, on a panel or during a party. Some I manage to enjoy the occasional meal with here or there. And every now and then circumstances come along that involve an extended time with one or more writers. This week’s EATING AUTHORS guest and I took that to new levels last month, as we shared a condo for a week of intense critique and culinary exploration as part of the Rio Hondo writers’ retreat. But, while it was memorable for me, I don’t think that’s something that will be showing up on David D. Levine‘s wikipedia page. And besides, what happens in New Mexico stays in New Mexico, right?

More notably, David’s been shortlisted for the Campbell, Nebula, and Sturgeon Awards for his short fiction, and he’s taken home a Hugo. Ask most anyone, and they’ll tell you he’s an incredible short story writer. Which makes me all the more excited that his first novel, Arabella of Mars, comes out tomorrow from Tor Books. It reminded a great deal of those old Jack Vance planetary romances, updated to modern sensibilities, and then thrust backward into the world of steampunk. So, yeah, go get a copy, you’ll like it.

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Welcome to the first Monday in July, which if you’re in the USA you very well may have off from work as it’s what we like to call Independence Day. Which is as good a reason as any that this week’s EATING AUTHORS guest is from the UK.

Adrian Tchaikovsky is known far and wide for his popular (and currently ten volume strong) Shadows of the Apt series, which can be (poorly) described as a universe with assorted human-like races that differ from one another on the basis of various insect properties as well as whether or not they can wield magic. You know, that old trope.

He’s since started a new fantasy series, Echoes of the Fall (which begins with The Tiger and the Wolf), as well as a more traditionally SF novel (Children of Time). Meanwhile, his newest work, Spoils of War, comes out next week, the first book in Tales of the Apt, a companion series which will doubtless thrill fans of the earlier decalogy with a range of short stories addressing questions, events, backstories, and more that weren’t covered in the original novels.

Reaching out to new fans while managing to keep the old ones happy. Does it get any better than that?

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As you know, Bob, the world is a very small place. In evidence of this fact, I present this week’s EATING AUTHORS guest, Liz Braswell. I don’t think we’ve ever met, (or if we did, it was amidst the blur of meeting many many people at a convention or room party), but I vividly remember our first email exchanges.

Liz was working at Simon & Schuster Audio, and I was providing support on the world’s first (and I’m pretty sure, only) Klingon Language CD-ROM game. It was a rollicking, complicated thing that involved me flying into Boston to record deliberately mispronounced Klingon phrases (to help train the speech software) and getting stuck there when snow closed the airport, leaving me unable to return to Philadelphia to hand out a final exam.

I don’t think I ever told Liz about this, but I had to phone the assistant to the president of the small, liberal arts, Catholic college, and explain that she needed to have someone else proctor the exam (which I’d left sitting in a neat stack on my office desk). She insisted it was my responsibility to somehow get back. I explained that snow counted as an “act of God” and we were off to the races.

I didn’t get tenure there, but that’s not Liz’s fault.

In any case, it was more than a decade ago, and the game executive I knew back then was secretly (or, okay, maybe not so secretly) writing books. Which is awesome, and I’m really happy to have her here!

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As this week’s installment of EATING AUTHORS goes live, I should be on a plane flying home from a long and amazing week at Rio Hondo, a writers’ retreat which this year was held at an elevation of some 8,400 feet in Angel Fire, NM. Please believe me when I tell you I am eager to get back to sea level.

Meanwhile, because it’s a Monday, I asked Micah Joel to drop by and share a few words about his most memorable meal.

There’s a good chance you’ve not encountered any of Micah’s work yet. Over the past five years or so he’s sold about a dozen stories. Last month he self-published his first novel, Broken Tablet, book one in a proposed series, the Ixion Revolution. Described as “Bronze Age Time Travel,” he had me at the elevator pitch: a Silicon Valley engineer gets trapped in the ancient Sumerian city of Ur. Seriously, what more do you need?

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I’m preparing this week’s post from New Mexico, where I am ensconced at a writers’ retreat and working hard to up my craft (while also enjoying great company, fabulous meals, and some truly awesome leisurely walks through nature). But such things cannot stop the juggernaut that is the EATING AUTHORS blog! Which is about as much of a segue as you’re going to get this week by way of an introduction for my latest guest, Naomi Novik, who should already be known to you for her Temeraire series which blends fantasy and alternate history (or, as it’s more commonly described, the Napoleonic Wars with dragons!).

She’s a past Hugo nominee, and has won the Campbell Award as well as the Compton Crook Award. And just last month, Naomi took home the Nebula Award for Uprooted. So, if by some fluke you’ve not already read her work, seriously, what can you possibly be waiting for?

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So there’s this thing, let’s call it “June,” and it’s supposed to be the time when summer begins (I’m writing only for northern hemisphere folks at the moment, sorry). Except… during the last week in May temperatures climbed into the 90’s like, you know, summer. Not surprisingly, June is a little upset with this and it’s anybody’s guess how it will all pan out. As for me, I’ve already turned on the A/C here at home.

As to whether any of this is a problem for Adam Rakunas, this week’s guest here at EATING AUTHORS, I could not say. He lives waaaaay over on the left side of the country in that rainy Pacific Northwest place you keep hearing about. But we do have a couple things in common, as we were both raised and educated in southern California. Yeah, we have that going for us.

Adam also has another thing going his way. His new novel, Like A Boss (the second book in his Windswept series), come out tomorrow from the irascible automatons at Angry Robot Books. Pick up a copy, it might help improve the robots’ mood.

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Hello and welcome to the second and last of this year’s special Campbell Award nominee editions of EATING AUTHORS. This is scheduled to post on Memorial Day, arguably the busiest convention day of the year (as I type this, I’m away at BayCon), so I’ll understand if you don’t read this today, but maybe come by later in the week after you’ve recovered from your own travels.

As detailed last week, of the five authors nominated for this year’s award, Sebastien de Castell has already shared his memories of a meal (back on July 27th of last year), Andy Weir was too busy with other projects, Pierce Brown could not be reached, and Brian Niemeier was featured last week. Which brings us to this week’s guest, Alyssa Wong, who likely may already be known to you, as her short fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, the Bram Stoker Award, the Locus Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award. Oh, and earlier this month she took home the Nebula Award for Best Short of 2015.

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