Posts Tagged ‘Eating Authors’

Coming in August, the Worldcon will descend upon the city of London, England, and amidst other acts of frenzy there will be an awards ceremony at which the Hugo Awards get handed out. Somewhere during the course of that evening one lucky and talented author will receive the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. I’ve had the pleasure of being short-listed for that prize, and as a consequence when I started the EATING AUTHORS blog series I made it a point to invite the nominees for this award and do my part to give them a bit more exposure, preferably with enough lead time for voters to get to know them and their work before sending in their ballots.

This year’s nominees are Wesley Chu, Max Gladstone, Ramez Naam, Sofia Samatar, and Benjanun Sriduangkaew. Wesley and Max have already been featured on the blog, but do click those links and re-familiarize yourself with who they are and what they do. Meanwhile over the next three Mondays, I’ll be bringing you the other Campbell nominees, beginning this week with Ramez Naam.

The first thing you should know about Ramez is that in 2005 he was the recipient of one of the coolest-sounding awards ever (the HG Wells Award for Contributions to Transhumanism). In addition to being an author, he’s also a computer scientist and a futurist. His specialties include collaboration, communication, and information retrieval; it would not surprise me to find that his site has the best optimization on the web (which makes me a little scared what effect this post will have on my own quiet domain).

Take some time to read about his most memorable meal, and then follow one or more of the links to read up on this nominee for the Campbell Award!

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My guest this week here at EATING AUTHORS is Jaye Wells. She has what must surely be the best possible pedigree any writer could ask for. Which is to say, she was raised by booksellers. And while all such children might not grow up to become authors, there’s a certain sense of predestination, a feeling of “coming home” that I imagine both she and her parents must have felt as she set out on her career.

Jaye is the author of the Sabina Kine series of novels and short fiction, as well as the Prospero’s War trilogy (book three due out next March), both published by the fine folks at Orbit. Her bio insists she likes to travel and drink good bourbon. As you’re about to find out, she also likes good food.

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Yesterday was Mother’s Day (and also my own mother’s birthday — a two-fer!), so by some small stretch of the imagination I think I can declare today to be Princess Day. This is especially convenient as today’s EATING AUTHOR guest is none other than the self-identifying princess Alethea Kontis.

I can honestly say I’ve known Alethea since before either of us had published a book (and yes, she was still both a princess and a force of nature, even back then). Her children’s books are a thing of wonder, literally and figuratively. There’s just something magical about anthropomorphizing the letters of the alphabet that must surely leave a young reader forever changed. Switching gears to non-fiction, she’s also the co-author (with Sherrilyn Kenyon) of the hugely popular The Dark-Hunter Companion, which just goes to show what can happen when you attend a convention, meet a best selling author and just start talking. She also has several collections of essays, and I encourage you to take a look at them because, seriously, how often do you get to see the world through a princess’s eyes?

But best of all (at least to me) are the books in her Woodcutter Sisters series. Reading them is like falling into the world of Andrew Lang’s Fairy Books, all mixed together into one enormous tale, with the consistent logic and worldbuilding you never get in fairy tales. In other worlds, sheer brilliance! The first two, Enchanted and Hero, have received Norton Award nominations (and we’ll find out the results for that second book in less than a week!), and the third volume, Dearest, will be out in February. Honestly, I don’t know how I’m going to wait that long.

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It’s May, and as often happens when I prepare one of my first blog posts in May, I have Julie Andrews and Vanessa Redgrave dancing and singing in my head. You know, the number from Camelot. Or maybe you don’t. Anyway, that’s neither here nor there as they say. I’m just glad it’s May and I can have a greater expectation of reasonable weather patterns.

None of which has anything to do with this week’s EATING AUTHOR guest, Tom Doyle, unless of course you want to make a stretch and conflate seasonal rebirth with tomorrow’s release of American Craftsmen, Tom’s first novel. Sure, that will work.

I have to tell you up front that I’m especially happy to see Tom’s novel coming out because I had the privilege to publish his first collection a couple years ago. And I had no choice. I had to publish him. I’d attended a reading he’d done at Capclave (a D.C. area convention that I heartily endorse) and the sheer intensity of his reading demanded that I do all within my meager powers to get his stories out into the world in a book. Tom packs more raw stuff into a short story than any other author I know, and I’m eager to see what he does with the greater elbow room a novel affords.

What more can I tell you about him? He’s won the WSFA Small Press Award, as well as the Writers of the Future Award. He can tell you anything you want to know about premillennialist apocalyptic fiction. And as you’ll garner from his remarks below, he’s been a lawyer. Best of all, I get to call him my friend.

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Welcome to another installment of EATING AUTHORS, the weekly blog features that answers the question can authors remember what they ate? Or… something like that. This time around our guest is Joanne Anderton, a resident Sydney, Australia, that big island/continent on the upside down half of the world over on the other side of the equator (hey, don’t blame me, I don’t make the maps).

I first came across Jo’s fiction in the Fall of 2012 when we were both nominated for the Washington Small Press Award. Alas, neither of us won. In that same year though, she did take home the Ditmar Award for Best New Talent, and earlier this month her most recent book, The Bone Chime Song and Other Stories, won this year’s Aurealis Award for Best Collection.

If you’d like to check out her novel-length work, Unbound, the third book of her Veiled Worlds trilogy is finished and coming soon. Meanwhile, the first two volumes, Debris and Suited are out there waiting for you to scoop them up.

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The 2014 Hugo ballot came out over the weekend and there is much hooplah in the streets of our genre right now. Congratulations to the many fine people who were nominated; I’m looking forward to seeing you in London. But that’s months away, and we need to focus on more immediate concerns, such as this week’s EATING AUTHORS guest!

Like me, Daryl Gregory was born in that city that led Carl Sandberg to wax poetic about its many aspects, and thus doom thousands of junior high students to painful memorization (I’m talking about Chicago here, in case that was too obscure or bizarre a reference). Unlike me, his parents didn’t haul him west. I’m sure there are other differences too.

And unlike some writers who find they can work at only one length or format, Daryl writes novels and short stories, comic books and graphic novels, and he does them all well. His first novel, Pandemonium, won the Crawford Award, and was short-listed for the World Fantasy Award, the Mythopoeic Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award.

Daryl’s latest novel, Afterparty, hits bookstores everywhere tomorrow. Go buy a copy, because there’s a good chance you’ll be seeing it on next year’s Hugo list!

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As I type this, it’s early Sunday morning and birds are chirping outside my office window. The weather forecast is for a bright and sunny day with the warmest temperatures of the year. Yes, my friends, it seems that Spring has come to my little corner of existence and all is right with the world. And with that chipper opening, let me introduce you to this week’s guest here at EATING AUTHORS, M. K. Hutchins, whose debut novel Drift comes out tomorrow from the fine folks over at Tu Books. I confess, I’ve not read it yet, but if books can be judged by their covers, than this one is going to be fantastic!

In the interests of full disclosure I should tell you that I published one of Megan’s short stories. It happened back in 2012 as part of the experimental anthology Cucurbital 3, in which all the authors wrote stories based on the same three prompts: Madness, Darkness, and Mattress. Hey, I said “experimental.”

The other thing I want to tell you about Megan is that she’s compiled histories of Mayan glyphs. Are you kidding me? Mayan glyphs are like kryptonite to me (if in addition to being Superman’s weakness, kryptonite also was a tasty and addictive candy with a rich nougat center and lots of chocolate throughout). So, knowing this, how could I not ask her to come here and tell us about her most memorable meal? And maybe some day she’ll let me take a peek at those compilations.

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I don’t know about you, but so far April has been unfolding into quite possibly the best month I’ve had for a long time. And having this week’s guest at EATING AUTHORS continues that trend. He’s Joe Haldeman, and if you don’t know who Joe is, then you probably shouldn’t be reading this blog. But no, everybody knows Joe. He’s just that approachable, both in person and in his fiction.

I’ve had the great pleasure to be on panels with Joe at the Worldcon, and to sit and chat with him numerous times over the years, dating back to my first meeting with him at the Nebula Weekend in 1999 (where he won the Best Novel Nebula for Best for Forever Peace).

Joe’s career in the field is long and glorious. He’s won five Hugos, five Nebulas, a LOCUS Award, a Campbell Award (not that Campbell Award, the other Campbell Award), a Tiptree, a World Fantasy, and three Rhysling Awards for his poetry. Oh yeah, and in 2010 the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America inducted him as a Grand Master.

But what I envy most about Joe is that he gets to spend half the year in Florida and the other half teaching at M.I.T. Speaking as a lapsed academician who misses that whole “life of the mind” thing, I can’t help but believe that he’s got it all.

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