Posts Tagged ‘Eating Authors’

Hello and welcome to another installment of Eating Authors, where every Monday I ask a different author to talk about some fondly remembered bit of eating. If you came here because of a Google search involving literary cannibalism or recipes for writer tartare you’re apt to be disappointed.

I’m back from the turmoils and triumphs that were this year’s Worldcon, and it seems only appropriate that my guest this week is Genevieve Valentine whose novel, Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, was placed in my hands as I was leaving last year’s Worldcon in Reno, Nevada. If you’re not familiar with this work and need another push to go pick up a copy, allow me to mention that it was nominated for a Nebula Award and won the 2012 Crawford Award. Her short fiction has garnered a good deal of attention as well, including nominations for the World Fantasy and Shirley Jackson awards.

Earlier this year Genevieve was at the center of some strenuous discussion involving harassment and safety at conventions, and my only comments on that topic here will be to applaud her for her strength of character in coming forward and to express my hope that our community wakes up and not only acknowledges the true scope of the problem but stops putting up with it.

But to me, she will probably always be, first and foremost, one of the authors of Geek Wisdom, a magnificently fun and funny book that was long overdue (though I don’t think there’s enough Klingon in it).
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Welcome to the World Science Fiction Convention edition of the regular Monday morning feature of this blog, Eating Authors. It’s the WorldCon edition for two reasons. One, today is the last day of Chicon 7, this year’s convention and even though I prepared this post weeks in advance, I know I’m exhausted this morning because I spent last night celebrating with the Hugo winners and commiserating with the crop of Hugo losers. Phew! But, this is also the WorldCon edition today because our guest is none other than the Guest of Honor at next year’s WorldCon, James Gunn!

I’d be hard pressed to imagine a better GoH for a convention, because he’s a triple threat — not only an author, but also a scholar and an educator. Full disclosure: I had the great good fortune to be a student of Jim Gunn’s for two weeks back in the summer of 1998 when I participated in his annual Writers’ Workshop, at the end of which the core idea that eventually turned into the first Buffalo Dog story was born. So, in a very real sense, Jim bears partial responsibility for a large part of my own career as an author. But let’s look at some of his other accomplishments: He’s won national awards for his work as an editor, the Byron Caldwell Smith Award in recognition of literary achievement as well as the Edward Grier Award for excellence in teaching. He’s also the only person to have been both president of the Science Fiction Research Association and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. The former presented with their prestigious Pilgrim Award for lifetime achievement backin 1976, and the latter inducted him as a Grand Master in 2007. He’s won the Eaton Award and the Hugo Award, chaired the the Campbell Award jury to select the best SF novel of the year, as well as the Sturgeon Award jury to select the year’s best short SF. James Gunn is the real deal, and he’s still going strong.

In addition to numerous plays, screenplays, radio scripts, articles, verse, and criticism, Jim’s also edited 13 anthologies (including the critically acclaimed Road to Science Fiction series) and published more than 100 short stories and 29 novels, including such classic works as The Listeners, The Joy Makers, and The Immortals.

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Hello and welcome to another Monday morning visit with an author and her most memorable meal. Our guest today is Rebecca Roland, whose first novel, Shards of History, has just debuted from World Weaver Press.

Rebecca admits to having addictions to both chocolate and coffee, at least one of which must surely be a requirement if one wishes to be a successful writer. Of course it probably doesn’t hurt that she’s an alumna of the Odyssey Writing Workshop either. By day she’s a physical therapist in New Mexico (when she’s not eating chocolate or slamming down the java).

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Welcome to another session of Eating Authors, the weekly blog feature where I ask an author to share with readers an account of his or her most memorable meal. My guest this week is the peripatetic Alma Alexander. Alma was born in Yugoslavia, and grew up traveling throughout Africa, did some of her schooling in the United Kingdom, and somehow ended up in New Zealand and began turning out books, including her YA trilogy “Worldweavers” (Gift of the Unmage, Spellspam, and Cybermage), the popular The Secrets of Jin-shei and its sequel The Embers of Heaven, as well as her recent Midnight at Spanish Gardens with its very special spin on the end of the world coming on December 20th, 2012.

In addition to her fiction, Alma is known for her many book reviews, travelogues, essays, and poetry, which have been published in books and magazines throughout the world. This whirldwind of an author has, at least for the moment, settled in the United States’ Pacific Northwest where she very kindly took the time to answer a critical question.

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Another Monday has had the temerity to show its face and while we might like very much to complain about it, we must nonetheless accept and embrace it, else we’ll never manage to come around to Friday again. One thing that make Mondays a bit more bearable is a visit from a talented writer who will entertain us with a tale of a particularly memorable meal

For this Monday we turn to Alastair Reynolds, easily one of Britain’s best hard SF authors. He comes by this distinction honestly, not merely because of his doctorate in astronomy, but also having worked as an astrophysicist at the European Space Research and Technology Center. I confess, I’m particularly enamored of his series of novels and short stories that begins with Revelation Space, which is probably the best example of space opera without resorting to the magic of FTL drives, wormholes, and other technologies built on hand-wavium (you know, the stuff that I do). If that’s not enough to convince you that you should be reading his fiction, then be aware that he’s also written a Dr. Who novel; it’s scheduled for release next year in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the series. Now that’s versatility!

Time now for a minor confession: I had the pleasure of being on a panel with Al a few years ago when he was the Guest of Honor at Boskone, and I played a small prank on him that involved a mock-up of a book cover and the insinuation that he needed to heed my advice if he had any hope to be a success in the field. Mind you, this is the man who in 2009 signed a ten year, ten book deal worth worth £1 million. So, not only is he a fine writer, but he knows how to take a joke.

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Welcome to another Monday here at Eating Authors. August 2012 is turning out to be a very busy month. I’ve just returned from a brief appearance at a media convention and the launch of a new anthology, next week I’m traveling to help ease an old friend into the start of the second half of his personal century, and soon after I’ll be heading to Chicago for the KLI’s 19th annual conference, followed immediately by the 70th World Science Fiction Convention. None of which really concerns you, you’re here for this week’s author and to learn about her most memorable meal.

And so, let me present Cate Gardner, a British horror and fantasy author whose writing has been described as otherworldly. I’ve never met Cate, and so in preparing to write these introductory remarks I read through some of the many interviews she’s had. If I learned anything it was that she likes to play with her interviewers, giving entertaining answers that have just enough truth in them to be believable but then again, maybe not. Which, when you think about it, may be the best thing to say about a writer anywhere. You can judge for yourself by reading her stories in the collection Strange Men in Pinstripe Suits, or her novellas Barbed Wire Hearts and Theatre of Curious Acts.

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Welcome to another Monday installment of the weekly blog feature that asks writers about their most memorable meals. Joining us today is fantasy author Melissa Mickelsen whose powerful first novel, Nightingale, tells the story of a young girl raised and trained to be an assassin by the man who killed her true family. Melisa’s own upbringing in Georgia seems simple by comparison, culminating in a degree in Art History. She currently lives in Germany with her husband and a couple of cats. I was tempted to ask her how she got from this background to the story in Nightingale, but that’s not the purpose of this blog feature, and so restrained myself. But clearly, it’s a question for another day.

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Hello and welcome to another taste-tantalizing treatment of one author’s recollections of her most memorable meal. Our guest today is Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Award nominee N. K. Jemisin. More specifically, she was nominated for all three of those award for her first novel from 2010, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. Most writers would be stunned into insensibility by such a debut, but she followed it up with the brilliant sequel The Broken Kingdoms later that same year, and polished off the trilogy in 2011 with The Kingdom of the Gods.

You’d think that would be enough for a bit, but no. With that trilogy out of the way, she contracted for the two book Dreamblood series consisting of The Killing Moon and The Shadowed Sun, the latter of which came out last month. So now, if you’re like the rest of us, you’re asking yourself, “wowza, what’s she going to do next?”

And, if that wasn’t enough to recommend her to you, I’ll add that her undergraduate major in college was psychology (okay, so I’m biased, but the membership of the psychologists-writing-speculative-fiction club is pretty sparse).

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