Eating the Fantastic

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Eating the Fantastic Eating the Fantastic replicates the great conversations over great food I've had during my years attending science fiction, horror, and comic cons.

Love is real on the latest episode of my Eating the Fantastic podcast! Join Chuck Tingle for tea and scones as we chat a...
26/07/2024

Love is real on the latest episode of my Eating the Fantastic podcast! Join Chuck Tingle for tea and scones as we chat about how existing is an arrogant act against the forces of the infinite, the differences between cathartic and grueling horror — and more. https://www.scottedelman.com/wordpress/2024/07/26/chuck-tingle/

A new workweek is about to begin, so if you need some ear candy to distract during your commute, I invite you to check o...
22/07/2024

A new workweek is about to begin, so if you need some ear candy to distract during your commute, I invite you to check out one of the 230 episodes of my Eating the Fantastic podcast. And look at the amazing guests who'll appear on the next six soon-to-be -released episodes! https://pod.link/1083737796

With Balticon behind us, it’s time to move on StokerCon, which took place the following weekend in San Diego. I captured...
12/07/2024

With Balticon behind us, it’s time to move on StokerCon, which took place the following weekend in San Diego. I captured four conversations for you there, the first of them with Ai Jiang. And the timing couldn’t have been more perfect — for we chatted with the Bram Stoker Awards ceremony a mere two days in the future, where she was nominated in the Long Fiction category for Linghun. And even though as you’ll hear she had doubts she had a chance of winning — she won!

And that’s not the only thing she won following our conversation, for a week later, her I am AI won a Nebula Award. I am AI is also currently on the final ballot for the Hugo Award, where she’s also up for the Astounding Award for Best New Writer. But that’s not all when it comes to Ai Jiang and awards. She won an Ignyte Award for her poem “We Smoke Pollution,” received a Nebula Award nomination for her short story ““Give Me English,” was part of the Strange Horizons collective nominated for a semiprozine Hugo Award, and has been nominated for a British SF Association Award and Aurora Award as well.

Her fiction has also appeared in the magazines Fantasy & Science Fiction, Interzone, The Dark, Kaleidotrope, The Deadlands, Planet Scumm, and others, as well as in such anthologies as Fighting for the Future: Cyberpunk and Solarpunk Tales, Step Into the Light: An Anthology of Daylight Horror, and Mother: Tales of Love and Terror. Her short story collection Smol Tales From Between Worlds was published last year.

We discussed why being nominated for multiple awards may actually have made her Imposter Syndrome worse, what the Odyssey workshop taught her which helped her finish her first novel (and whether that book might be too ambitious a debut), the novels which made her want to be a writer, what makes us power on in the face of rejection, how writing is like competitive badminton, the secret to writing successful flash fiction, the book she was given which turned her from a pessimist into an optimist, what she learned from her “soul-draining” career as a ghostwriter, how an editorial suggestion turned Linghun from flash fiction into a novella, the most daunting aspects of revision, and much more.

Here’s how you can join us at Friend’s House Korean restaurant —

https://www.scottedelman.com/wordpress/2024/07/12/ai-jiang/

Enjoy!

If you'll be at Readercon this weekend, I look forward to seeing you! But if you can't be there, perhaps you'd care to e...
09/07/2024

If you'll be at Readercon this weekend, I look forward to seeing you! But if you can't be there, perhaps you'd care to eavesdrop on one of the 23 program participants with whom I've shared a meal on my Eating the Fantastic podcast. Have a virtual Readercon right in your own home! pod.link/1083737796

Printed out a snapshot of all the guests who've appeared on my Eating the Fantastic podcast to take to Readercon, becaus...
08/07/2024

Printed out a snapshot of all the guests who've appeared on my Eating the Fantastic podcast to take to Readercon, because though I can rattle off their names without fail, what I can't do is correctly recall the episode numbers attached, and I want to be able to accurately refer to them. https://pod.link/1083737796

Ended the night editing the first 20 minutes of raw audio from my recent StokerCon chat with award-winning writer Ai Jia...
07/07/2024

Ended the night editing the first 20 minutes of raw audio from my recent StokerCon chat with award-winning writer Ai Jiang to eliminate any possible infelicities which might interfere with your enjoyment. Please eavesdrop on the next episode of Eating the Fantastic! pod.link/1083737796

Out in the real world, Balticon is around six weeks in the rearview mirror, but here at Eating the Fantastic, it’s not y...
03/07/2024

Out in the real world, Balticon is around six weeks in the rearview mirror, but here at Eating the Fantastic, it’s not yet time to check out of the hotel and head for home. You’ve had a chance to take a seat at the table with Alex Jennings and Elwin Cotman from that Baltimore event, but we still have one more meal to go — because now it’s time for an Italian lunch with Sally Wiener Grotta.

Grotta’s latest two books are Of Being Woman, a collection of feminist science fiction stories, and Daughters of Eve, a discussion workbook which uses tales of biblical matriarchs to explore the modern world. Her short fiction has appeared in anthologies and magazines such as the North Atlantic Review, DreamForge, Across the Universe: Tales of Alternative Beatles, and others.

Her previous books include Digital Imaging for Visual Artists (co-authored with Daniel Grotta), and the novels Jo Joe, which was a Jewish Book Council Network book, and The Winter Boy, which was a Locus Magazine Recommended Read. Sally is also co-curator of the Galactic Philadelphia Salon reading series. Plus she’s also an award-winning journalist and photographer who has traveled on assignment to all seven continents.

We discussed when we first met (and can’t quite figure out whether it was a third or a quarter of a century ago), how her first storytelling impulse began because she’d fall asleep while being read stories as a child, the importance of the question “what if?,” why she often finds horror difficult to read, the early experience which allowed her to have such a good relationship with editors, the story she wrote in Ursula K. Le Guin’s writing workshop which caused that Grand Master to say “what a darling monster,” when we should submit to editorial suggestions and when we should run screaming, and much more.

Here’s how you can join us at Sabatino’s Italian restaurant —

https://www.scottedelman.com/wordpress/2024/07/03/sally-wiener-grotta/

Enjoy!

Happy birthday to the Bram Stoker Award-winning writer Paul Tremblay! Celebrate his natal date by eavesdropping as we ea...
30/06/2024

Happy birthday to the Bram Stoker Award-winning writer Paul Tremblay! Celebrate his natal date by eavesdropping as we eat enchiladas on an episode of Eating the Fantastic — and learn about his legendary hatred of pickles, our shared love of ambiguity in fiction — and much, much more. http://www.scottedelman.com/2022/03/04/paul-tremblay/

Congratulations to all the winners of the 2024 Locus Awards! I'm particularly pleased to note three of those creators — ...
23/06/2024

Congratulations to all the winners of the 2024 Locus Awards! I'm particularly pleased to note three of those creators — Phenderson Djèlí Clark, Neil Clarke, and Charlie Jane Anders — have been guests on my Eating the Fantastic podcast. To learn more about them, here's how to eavesdrop as we break bread. https://pod.link/1083737796

It’s time to return to Balticon for another conversation with a fascinating writer, following last episode’s chat with A...
21/06/2024

It’s time to return to Balticon for another conversation with a fascinating writer, following last episode’s chat with Alex Jennings. This time around my guest is Elwin Cotman, with whom I slipped away for dinner at the nearby R&R Taqueria.

Cotman’s short story collection Dance on Saturday, published by Small Beer Press, was one of the finalists for the 2021 Philip K. Dick Award. His latest short story collection, Weird Black Girls, was released two months ago as this episode goes live.

He’s also the author of three other books: the poetry collection The Wizard’s Homecoming, plus the short story collections The Jack Daniels Sessions EP and Hard Times Blues. His writing has appeared in Grist, Electric Lit, Buzzfeed, The Southwestern Review, and The Offing, plus many others venues. He’s worked as a video game consultant and writer for Square Enix. His debut novel The Age of Ignorance will be published by Scribner in 2025.

We discussed why forcing science fictional elements into non-science fictional stories can weaken them, the interdimensional cross-genre story cycle he hopes to write someday about a wrestling family, the way the novella is his natural length, why he loves Robert E. Howard’s Hyborian Age stories, how to create compelling metaphors and similes, the way rereading Tama Janowitz’s Slaves of New York helped him with the connective tissue of his own sentences, the reason Mary Gaitskill is the world’s greatest living writer, and much more.

Here’s how you can join us at R&R Taqueria —

https://www.scottedelman.com/wordpress/2024/06/21/elwin-cotman/

Enjoy!

Since writer William J. Donahue was scheduled to read as part of tonight's Charm City Spec quartet, I took the opportuni...
15/06/2024

Since writer William J. Donahue was scheduled to read as part of tonight's Charm City Spec quartet, I took the opportunity to record an episode of my Eating the Fantastic podcast with him at Mt. Washington Pizza & Subs & Indian Cuisine — where we opted for the Indian side of the menu.

If you need a way to soften the pain of your commute as the new work week begins — or a distraction during your trip hom...
09/06/2024

If you need a way to soften the pain of your commute as the new work week begins — or a distraction during your trip home from the Nebula weekend — may I suggest sampling one of the 227 episodes of my Eating the Fantastic podcast? There's nothing like ear candy to make the hours fly by! https://pod.link/1083737796

In a different world, I’d be in Pasadena right now for the Nebula Awards conference, but in this world, I’ve just surviv...
07/06/2024

In a different world, I’d be in Pasadena right now for the Nebula Awards conference, but in this world, I’ve just survived two consecutive weekends of conventions — first Balticon, then StokerCon — and there’s such a thing as too much fun, even for an extrovert like me. So instead, I’m at home, inviting you to take a seat at the table with the first of three guests I hosted while in Baltimore — AAlex Jennings

Jennings is the winner of the 2023 Compton Crook Award for his debut novel, The Ballad of Perilous Graves. His writing has appeared in Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, Electric Velocipede, Strange Horizons, Uncanny Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, New Suns, and Current Affairs, and many other venues. Some of his short fiction was published in the 2012 collection Here I Come and Other Stories.

He also writes a regular speculative poetry review column for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction titled “Chapter and Verse.” In 2022, he was the inaugural recipient of the Imagination Unbound Fellowship at Under the Volcano, a writing retreat held annually in Tepoztlan, Mexico. He is also an instructor of fiction and popular fiction at The University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast MFA program.

We discussed his dream which commanded him to move to New Orleans (plus his brother’s dream which supported that decision), how writing his debut novel transformed him into the kind of person he needed to be in order to write his debut novel, how Octavia Butler invited him into the field, which artist he wishes would draw the comic book adaptation of his novel The Ballad of Perilous Graves, what China Miéville taught him at Clarion about the deadly nature of “second order cliches,” how joy is revolutionary in and of itself, the way his experience as a standup comedian helps him help you care about the multiple POVs of his novel, which issue of Uncanny X-Men was the first comic book he ever read, the nature of his quasi-mystical approach to writing, and much more.

Here’s how you can join us at Thai Arroy —

https://www.scottedelman.com/wordpress/2024/06/07/alex-jennings/

Enjoy!

It took until tonight before I'd finally recovered enough from StokerCon to tell the Patreon supporters of my Eating the...
07/06/2024

It took until tonight before I'd finally recovered enough from StokerCon to tell the Patreon supporters of my Eating the Fantastic podcast about the episodes I recorded with Ai Jiang, Chuck Tingle, Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam, and Cynthia Pelayo. https://www.patreon.com/posts/105735619

Happy birthday to my Marvel Bullpen pal Jim Salicrup, whom I've known for nearly 50 years. Celebrate by eavesdropping as...
29/05/2024

Happy birthday to my Marvel Bullpen pal Jim Salicrup, whom I've known for nearly 50 years. Celebrate by eavesdropping as we chat and chew on a nostalgia-filled episode of Eating the Fantastic — where you'll learn about his late-night mission to secure Stan Lee’s toupee! http://www.scottedelman.com/2021/04/23/jim-salicrup/

This episode’s dinner didn’t come about due to a convention, but rather because I attended another installment of Baltim...
29/05/2024

This episode’s dinner didn’t come about due to a convention, but rather because I attended another installment of Baltimore’s Charm City Spec reading series, and invited one of the participants, Tobias Carroll, to join me for an early dinner beforehand, the same as I did with Episode 218’s guest Jo Miles three months earlier.

Carroll is the author of the novels Ex-Members, Reel, and In the Sight, the short story collection Transitory, and the nonfiction book Political Sign. His essays and journalism have appeared in The New York Times, InsideHook, Literary Hub, Tor.com, the Portland Press-Herald, Tin House, The Collagist, The Paris Review Daily, Necessary Fiction, Bookforum, The Collapsar, Joyland, and many other publications. He writes a column on notable books in translation for Words Without Borders. Plus he has a podcast of his own — Framed & Bound, in which bookish people discuss movies set in the literary world.

We discussed which punk rock music made him a fan, why his heart belongs to novella-length works rather than massive epics, the artistic motivation for sometimes not giving readers what they’ve been taught to expect, the reason Ann Nocenti’s run on Daredevil was meaningful to him (and why he believes it aged so well), his fascination with deteriorating physical media, why Edward Hopper’s classic painting Nighthawks would have made the perfect cover art for one of his books, how you know when you’ve stuck the landing with a short story, and much more.

Here’s how you can join us at Tamber’s restaurant —

https://www.scottedelman.com/wordpress/2024/05/29/tobias-carroll/

Enjoy!

Lovely lunch with Sally Wiener Grotta today at Sabatino's in Baltimore's Little Italy, discussing her new collection Of ...
25/05/2024

Lovely lunch with Sally Wiener Grotta today at Sabatino's in Baltimore's Little Italy, discussing her new collection Of Being Woman, and so much more. I hope you'll join us to take a seat at the table on an upcoming episode of my Eating the Fantastic podcast. https://pod.link/1083737796

Began my Balticon by lunching with Alex Jennings over duck, duck, and more duck at Thai Arroy, where we discussed his Co...
24/05/2024

Began my Balticon by lunching with Alex Jennings over duck, duck, and more duck at Thai Arroy, where we discussed his Compton Crook Award-winning novel The Ballad of Perilous Graves and much, much more. Join us at the table on a future episode of Eating the Fantastic! https://pod.link/1083737796

Balticon begins tomorrow, and if you'll be there, I hope we can connect. But if you won't be able to make it, let my Eat...
23/05/2024

Balticon begins tomorrow, and if you'll be there, I hope we can connect. But if you won't be able to make it, let my Eating the Fantastic podcast be a Balticon for your ears, as 22 program participants have been prior guests. Why not find your favorites and pretend you're there? https://pod.link/1083737796

This episode of Eating the Fantastic came about due to a serendipitous convergence of guest and venue. I drive through B...
17/05/2024

This episode of Eating the Fantastic came about due to a serendipitous convergence of guest and venue. I drive through Berkeley Springs, West Virginia quite a bit, and one day discovered a restaurant there called Mythical Pizza. When I checked the menu, I found everything they served was cryptid-based, with pizzas and decor inspired by Bigfoot, Mothman, and other monsters. So I of course had to check the place out.

But I didn’t want to do it solo, and with a theme like that, it seemed the perfect place to record an episode of a podcast devoted to the fantastic. Luckily, writer/editor Lesley Conner, with whom I’ve been trying to arrange a chance to chat and chew, was just as enthusiastic about the concept as I was.

Longtime listeners will have heard Lesley’s voice way back in 2017 on Episode 53 when she took part in a Horror 101 roundtable. Back then, she shared the microphone with five other creators, but a lot has changed for her over the past seven years, and now that she’s the Chief Editor at Apex magazine, I thought she deserved a spotlight of her own.

You’ll understand why Lesley was the right dining companion for such a place just from the titles of the anthologies in which her fiction has appeared — all horror-focussed such as Mountain Dead, Dark Tales of Terror, Big Book of New Short Horror, Ruthless, and A Hacked-Up Holiday Massacre. Her horror novel The Weight of Chains was released in 2015. In addition to being the Chief Editor over at Apex magazine, she’s also co-editor of the anthologies Do Not Go Quietly and Robotic Ambitions, as well as of the upcoming The Map of Lost Places.

We discussed why horror is where she feels the most comfortable as a writer, how her role at Apex magazine grew from Social Media Manager to Chief Editor, her “Price is Right” method of filling out an issue’s word count, why she hardly ever reads cover letters, the trends she’s seen in the slush pile and what they mean, the key difference between editing magazines vs. anthologies, her longtime obsession with serial killers, how to go on writing after one’s writing mentor passes away, and much more.

Here’s how you can join us at Mythical Pizza —

https://www.scottedelman.com/wordpress/2024/05/17/lesley-conner/

Enjoy!

Ended the night editing 15 more minutes of raw audio from my recent lunch with Apex Magazine Chief Editor Lesley Conner ...
12/05/2024

Ended the night editing 15 more minutes of raw audio from my recent lunch with Apex Magazine Chief Editor Lesley Conner to remove any infelicities which would interfere with you ingesting her wisdom on next week's episode of my Eating the Fantastic podcast. I do hope you'll join us! pod.link/1083737796

Happy birthday to the magnificent Meg Elison! Celebrate by joining the award-winning writer for sushi on an episode of ...
10/05/2024

Happy birthday to the magnificent Meg Elison! Celebrate by joining the award-winning writer for sushi on an episode of Eating the Fantastic — where we discuss the way rereading taught her to be a writer, our dual fascination with diaries — and more. http://www.scottedelman.com/2021/06/18/meg-elison/

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