Posts Tagged ‘Eating Authors’

Like so many of us, Joshua Palmatier started writing in his early teens and never managed to shake the habit. You probably know him for his fantasy trilogy (The Skewed Throne, The Cracked Throne, and The Vacant Throne), but he’s also making a name for himself as Benjamin Tate with a new trilogy (Well of Sorrows, Leaves of Flame, and the still-in-progress Breath of Heaven).

More recently, he’s started his own small press, Zombies Need Brains LLC, and is currently finishing up a KickStarter project to produce its first book, an anthology entitled Clockwork Universe: Steampunk Vs. Aliens. The project ends in just a few days, so after you read about Joshua’s most memorable meal, go back and click the link!

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Here at EATING AUTHORS we like to make a point of featuring the most memorable meals not only of the super famous, multi award-winning authors that you’ve loved for years and years, but also the newcomers as well. Those authors who have just had their first novel published and show the bright potential to be that next generation of writers that will go on to become your absolute favorite. It’s in that spirit that I welcome this week’s guest, Michelle Lowery Combs, a self-described book blogger whose new YA novel, Heir to the Lamp, debuted last month from World Weaver Press. It’s the first book in a promised series called the Genie Chronicles, and rather than wallow in the more obvious jokes about “three wishes” and “lamp rubbing” let’s move on instead to the question of the week!

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Rounding out the month of July here at EATING AUTHORS is Michael Jan Friedman, who in my opinion has written one of the best Klingon books in the grand and vast history of the hundreds of Star Trek novels that define such a huge segment of the media tie-in universe — and let’s just take a moment to acknowledge that he’s written several dozen of them! But that’s just one facet of Mike’s work.

With sixty-some books to his credit, Mike has landed on the New York Times Best Seller list eleven times. He’s written for comic books (nearly two hundred of them) and for television (an episode of Star Trek: Voyager, but I don’t hold that against him). He’s also one of the co-founders of Crazy 8 Press, and his contemporary fantasy, Fight The Gods, was one of their first releases back in 2011. More recently he’s been crafting mysteries set in the 21st century of the Aztec Empire of an alternate history. How’s that for mind-blowingly original?

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I don’t know about you, but today marks the start of a very exciting week for me, beginning with a trip up to New York to meet with literary agents and ending with my birthday on Saturday. Most of the middle portion will be spent in the company of Klingon speakers, who will be descending on Philadelphia from as far away as Australia for the 20th annual Klingon Language Conference (what we call the qep’a’ cha’maHDIch), and that’s especially exciting for me because it includes some of my favorite people in the world!

I tell you all of this by way of setting up a crude segue, as this week’s guest, Howard Tayler, also qualifies as one of my favorite people in the world. He’s the creative genius behind the webcomic space opera, Schlock Mercenary, a daily dose of fun that everyone should set up to load on their browser, phone, and/or tablet automatically. And it’s not just me that thinks so. Howard has nominations and wins in several categories from the Web Cartoonists’ Choice Awards, as well as Hugo Award nominations for Best Graphic Story for each of the past five years! As if that weren’t enough fame for one man, you may also know him as one quarter of the team that produces the Hugo-nominated pod cast Writing Excuses, with Mary Robinette Kowal, Brandon Sanderson, and Dan Wells.

The other thing you need to know about Howard is he’s also a marketing genius. Recently, he ran a kickstarter campaign that didn’t simply meet its funding goal, its 2600 contributors did so eighty-five times over! And yes, his webcomic comes out daily and for free, but about once a year he gathers up all those strips and publishes them in a book (because sometimes you just can’t access the web, you know?). The latest bound volume, number nine, Schlock Mercenary: The Body Politic is available for pre-order, directly from the Tayler Corporation.

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Welcome to the third and final installment of this year’s visits from the current fresh crop of Campbell Award nominees (I say “fresh” because, as noted two weeks ago, two of the five nominees were on last year’s ballots and had their most memorable meals featured here back then). Today we hear from Max Gladstone, who is a bit more traveled than most, as evidenced by the time he spent in Anhui (that’s in China) teaching English after graduating from Yale. Since then, he’s hit the fantasy circuit hard, beginning with his first novel Three Parts Dead (which was a “Massachusetts Must Read” book for 2013). The sequel, Two Serpents Rise comes out in October, and Max has at least two more books already written in this series, awaiting their turn in the publishing queue.

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As some of you know, I grew up in Culver City, CA, a small, independent city in the middle of Los Angeles. So it was that at the age of twelve I followed up on a flier I’d seen at my local library and convinced my father to drive me to the public library in nearby Palms where Ray Bradbury was speaking. That was the night I met my first author and also the night I found out about LASFS, the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society, which at that time held its weekly, Thursday night meetings in a recreation building belonging to the park that was right behind the Palms library. And so it was that the following Thursday I again prevailed upon my father to drive me to Palms and I attended my first LASFS meeting and met many wonderful people. Early that evening, some of the local teens who had earlier been shooting hoops on the nearby basketball courts began some hijinks that involved running up one side of the rec building’s slanted roof and down the other, stomping as loudly as they could. Several of the people in the meeting went out to deal with them, but I remember one person in particular, making him the second author I would ever meet, who strode out and engaged the punks with a ringing voice and the wisdom of Solomon. The tomfoolery stopped, nor at any point did he tell those damn kids to get off of his lawn roof. That man was Larry Niven. It was a magical experience, at least to me. And though I have no reason to expect Larry to remember that particular Thursday of more than forty years ago, I’d be remiss if I didn’t share the story by way of welcoming here to EATING AUTHORS.

I like to think there are two Larry Nivens, one who turns out amazing SF, both in novel-length and short stories, and another who is the quintessential collaborator in our field. That first Niven gave us Ringworld (a cornerstone of the field, possessing both one of the best hard SF concepts, the eponymnous artifact in space, and one of the best social science SF concepts, that luck is a trait that can be bred for), its sequels, and his Known Space series. The other Niven, working with various collaboraters has given us gems like The Mote’s in God’s Eye (with Jerry Pournelle), the Dream Park series (with Steven Barnes), and the Ringworld companion series (with Edward M. Lerner). Earlier this year, he and Gregory Benford (who you may recall dropping by a few weeks back) published Bowl of Heaven, and tomorrow will see the release of Larry’s latest collaboration, The Goliath Stone, with Matthew Joseph Harrington.

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