Posts Tagged ‘Eating Authors’

One of the best things about attending a new convention is the likelihood of experiencing new people, and during the handful of days I spent at Chessiecon after Thanksgiving, I did just that. Among them was this week’s EATING AUTHORS guest, Cathy Hird, whom I met during the mass signing. Naturally, I invited her here.

Like so many authors who have shared their meals here, Cathy wears a lot of hats. In addition to her work as both a novelist and writer of short stories, she’s a weaver, minister, and a sheep farmer. I’ll spare you the obvious puns about weaving words as well as wool, or tending to both types of flocks. You can thank me later. For now, let’s move on to her most memorable meal.

Read the rest of this entry »

November is winding down and time is speeding up. If you’re reading this on the day it posted, then I’ve just returned from a convention, the Thanksgiving holiday is just a few days off, and another convention lies just the other side of it. Despite the convention bookends, I’ll be spending this week in serious reflection of all the things I have to be thankful for this year.

Not least among them (he said in his best segueing voice) has been knowing this week’s EATING AUTHORS guest, Michael Livingston. Back in May of 2006, there was some serious discussion among members of Codex — an online community of authors — who had just returned from that year’s Nebula Awards Weekend. That conversation inspired my decision to edit a reprint anthology featuring some of the best work by Codex members and I announced my intention to the community with a call for submissions. Soon after, Mike contacted me, letting me know he’d been thinking along similar lines and I’d beaten him to the punch. My response was to offer to share the project with him, and he went on to become my co-editor for Prime Codex, as well as another project when that first book turned into my small press, Paper Golem.

Mike and I share other a few other similarities, both of us working as authors and editors and academicians, but we quickly diverge paths. He’s won the celebrated Writers of the Future contest, is an active outdoorsman, appears to have a disturbing amount of automotive knowledge (at least relative to me), and has a talent for making history live and breathe that I cannot adequately describe with a paltry word like “envy,” but there you have it.

I’m delighted to tell you that his first novel, The Shards of Heaven, comes out tomorrow from Tor Books, but even more that it’s but the first book of a trilogy. Because, as well all know, history repeats itself (sorry, I tried to edit that last bit out, and failed).

Read the rest of this entry »

We’re midway through November, and things are picking up here at home. By which I mean the early reviews have begun trickling in, and I seem to be spending more and more time writing guest blog posts that will be springing out at an unwary reading public through the many avenues of social media in about a month’s time. This is all part of the build-up to the release of Barsk, and so getting to write about someone else and their books is a wonderful distraction.

Stepping into the role of much needed distraction is this week’s EATING AUTHORS guest, Sara Stamey. By day she appears to be a mild-mannered instructor on the faculty of Western Washington University, but a quick glance at her extra-curricular activities (including such obvious research excuses as teaching scuba diving in the Caribbean, backpacking around New Zealand, and owning a farm in Southern Chile) marks her as a writer. As does the Chanticleer Paranormal Suspense Award she received for Islands and the Cygnus Award she won for The Ariadne Connection.

All of that travel may also explain why Sara offers some of her writing courses at WWU online and to the general public (here’s a link). It’s always a good thing when you don’t have to choose between adventures in distant lands or pursuing your craft.

Read the rest of this entry »

Timing, as has been observed, is everything. It’s also exceedingly relativistic and has been known to bleed a bit along the edges. Case in point: this week’s EATING AUTHORS guest, Daniel Polansky, and I just last week saw a collaborative story published over at Tor.com. The reason behind that collaboration was the realization of some editors that both Daniel and I had books coming out featuring anthropomorphic animals (his novel, The Builders, was released last week, a couple days before our collaboration appeared). So, naturally, we should write something together. And, not surprisingly, it involved food (as well as talking animals).

Daniel’s also the author of the popular Low Town trilogy and the more recent Empty Throne duology. And while neither series contains talking animals, you should still check them out all the same.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »