An hour-long conversation with fantasy and science-fiction writer Marshall Ryan Maresca, author of the Maradaine Saga : four braided series set amid the bustling streets and crime-ridden districts of the exotic city called Maradaine.
Marshall Ryan Maresca is a fantasy and science-fiction writer, author of the Maradaine Saga: Four braided series set amid the bustling streets and crime-ridden districts of the exotic city called Maradaine, which includes The Thorn of Dentonhill, A Murder of Mages, The Holver Alley Crew and The Way of the Shield, as well as the dieselpunk fantasy, The Velocity of Revolution.
He is also the co-host of the Hugo-nominated, Stabby-winning podcast Worldbuilding for Masochists, and has been a playwright, an actor, a delivery driver and an amateur chef. He lives in Austin, Texas with his family.
Gail Z. Martin writes urban fantasy, epic fantasy, steampunk and more for Solaris Books, Orbit Books, Falstaff Books, SOL Publishing and Darkwind Press. Urban fantasy series include Deadly Curiosities and the Night Vigil (Sons of Darkness). Epic fantasy series include Darkhurst, the Chronicles Of The Necromancer, the Fallen Kings Cycle, the Ascendant Kingdoms Saga, and the Assassins of Landria.
Together with Larry N. Martin, she is the co-author of Iron & Blood, Storm & Fury (both Steampunk/alternate history), the Spells Salt and Steel comedic horror series, the Roaring Twenties monster hunter Joe Mack Shadow Council series, and the Wasteland Marshals near-future post-apocalyptic series. As Morgan Brice, she writes urban fantasy MM paranormal romance, with the Witchbane, Badlands, Treasure Trail, Kings of the Mountain and Fox Hollow series. Gail is also a con-runner for ConTinual, the online, ongoing multi-genre convention that never ends.
An hour-plus chat with Simon Rose, author of eighteen middle-grade novels, including the Flashback series, the Shadowzone series, and the Stone of the Seer series, plus eight writers’ guides and more than 100 nonfiction books.
Simon Rose graduated from university with a degree in history and is also a graduate of the Institute of Children’s Literature of West Redding, CT. Born in the UK, he moved to Canada in 1990 and has lived in Calgary, Alberta ever since.
His first novel for middle grade readers, The Alchemist’s Portrait, was published in 2003, and has been followed by many more novels and series, most recently The Stone of the Seerseries. He’s also the author of The Children’s Writer’s Guide, The Working Writer’s Guide, The Time Traveler’s Guide, and The Social Media Writer’s Guide, is a contributing author to The Complete Guide to Writing Science Fiction Volume One, and has written many non-fiction books.
Simon also offers a number of services for writers, including editing, manuscript evaluation, coaching, mentoring, and writing workshops, in addition to copywriting services for the business community. He’s an instructor for adults with the University of Calgary and offers online workshops for both children and adults. He also offers a wide variety of presentations, workshops, and author-in-residence programs for schools and libraries, as well as virtual author visits.
A regular presenter at conferences and festivals, Simon has served as a juror for the Governor General’s Literary Awards for Children’s Literature, the Saskatchewan Book Awards, the Parsec Awards, and the Sunburst Awards for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic. He’s the founder of Children’s Authors and Illustrators on Facebook, managed the Calgary Children’s Book Fair and Conference, served as the Writer-in-Residence with the Canadian Authors Association, is a member of the Calgary Association of Freelance Editors, and served as the Assistant Regional Advisor for SCBWI Western Canada.
An hour-long conversation with Edward M. Lerner, Canopus Award-winning and Locus, Prometheus, and Hugo Award-nominated author of space opera, near-future technothrillers, and non-fiction.
Edward M. Lerner worked in high tech and aerospace for thirty years, as everything from engineer to senior vice president, for much of that time writing science fiction as his hobby. Since 2004 he has written full-time.
His novels range from near-future techno-thrillers, like Small Miracles and Energized, to traditional SF, like Dark Secret and his InterstellarNet series, to (collaborating with Larry Niven) the space-opera epic Fleet of Worlds series. Lerner’s 2015 novel, InterstellarNet: Enigma, won the inaugural Canopus Award “honoring excellence in interstellar writing.” His fiction has also been nominated for Locus, Prometheus, and Hugo awards. His most recent novel is the SF adventure Déjà Doomed.
Lerner’s short fiction has appeared in anthologies, collections, and many of the usual SF magazines and websites. He also writes about science and technology, notably including Trope‑ing the Light Fantastic: The Science Behind the Fiction.
An hour-and-a-half interview with Sarah A. Hoyt, Prometheus- and Dragon Award-winning author of more than 30 novels of science fiction, fantasy, mystery, and historical fiction.
Sarah A. Hoyt was born in Portugal and raised her family in Colorado. In between, she has held some improbable jobs – she thought it was a requirement to write science fiction – ranging from dishwasher to multilingual scientific translator, and she’s published more than thirty novels in science fiction, fantasy, mystery and historical fiction.
Her first published novel, Ill Met By Moonlight was a finalist for the Mythopoeic Award. Her first space opera, Darkship Thieves won the Prometheus. She also won a Dragon for Uncharted, an alternate Lewis and Clark expedition (Now with magic, and oh, yeah, Coyote) co-written with Kevin J. Anderson.
Arguably her best-selling book is Guardian, co-written with Larry Correia.
She’s currently writing the script for the latest comic book iteration of Barbarella.
Her plans for the next thirty years consist of writing a lot more.
An hour-long chat with Michaelbrent Collings, internationally bestselling author of thriller, fantasy, science fiction, mystery, romance, humor, young adult, and middle grade works.
While he is best known for horror (and is one of the most successful indie horror authors in the world), Michaelbrent Collings has also written internationally-bestselling thriller, fantasy, science fiction, mystery, humor, young adult, and middle grade works, and romance.
In addition to being a bestselling novelist, Michaelbrent has also received critical acclaim: he is the only person who has ever been a finalist for a Bram Stoker Award, a Dragon Award, and a RONE Award, and he and his work have been reviewed and/or featured on everything from Publishers Weekly to Scream Magazine to NPR. An engaging and entertaining speaker, he is also a frequent guest at comic cons and on writing podcasts like Six Figure Authors, The Creative Penn, Writing Excuses, and others.
An hour-long chat with Mark Leslie Lefebvre, author of the Canadian Werewolf Series as well as many non-fiction books drawing on his quarter century of experience in writing, publishing, and bookselling.
Although he is still afraid of the monster under the bed, Mark Leslie (Lefebvre) regularly writes about ghosts, monsters, and other things that go bump in the night with speculative fiction that has been described as fitting on an episode of The Twilight Zone. He has been writing since the mid 1980s and had his first short story published in 1992, the same year he graduated from university and started working in the book industry.
His first published horror story, “Phantom Mitch” received Honorable Mention in The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror and his first non-fiction paranormal exploration, Haunted Hamilton earned him a nomination for a Hamilton Literary Award.
Mark is the author of more than thirty books, the editor of a number of anthologies, a series of books about the business of writing and publishing, and, most recently, the “Canadian Werewolf” series of novels. He lives in Waterloo, Ontario where he splits his time between writing and as a book industry representative and consultant.
An hour-plus chat with James Kennedy, author of the speculative thriller Dare to Know and the YA fantasy The Order of Odd-Fish, and founder of the 90-Second Newbery Film Festival.
James Kennedy is the author of the speculative thriller Dare to Know, which the Guardian praised as “a fascinating, compulsively readable thriller” and SFX Magazine called a “superb piece of storytelling: vivid, thought-provoking and unsettling.”
James is also the author of the young-adult fantasy The Order of Odd-Fish and the founder of the 90-Second Newbery Film Festival, in which kid filmmakers create short movies that tell the entire stories of Newbery-winning books in about 90 seconds, which screens annually in a dozen cities nationwide. He also co-hosts the Secrets of Story podcast with Matt Bird. James lives in Chicago with his wife and two daughters.
Mercedes Lackey, recently named the 38th Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA), was born in Chicago Illinois on June 24, 1950. The very next day, the Korean War was declared. It is hoped that there is no connection between the two events.
She was raised mostly in the northwestern corner of Indiana, attending grade school and high school in Highland Indiana. She graduated from Purdue University in 1972 with a Bachelor of Science in Biology. This, she soon learned, along with a paper hat and a nametag will qualify you to ask “would you like fries with that?” at a variety of fast-food locations.
After spending time in jobs ranging from artist’s model to lab technician at the Mosquito Genetics Project to short-order cook, she took training and became a computer programmer. About this time she discovered science fiction conventions and the Society for Creative Anachronism, and began attending functions of both, more often in costume than not.
She had always written from her early teens, and developed this hobby by writing fan-fiction for various amateur magazines. In the 1980s she took a job programming computers for a major airline and as a consequence moved to Oklahoma, where she continued to write. At this time she met both Marion Zimmer Bradley (author of The Mists of Avalon, and .C J Cherryh, both of whom helped mentor her from the ranks of the amateur into those of the professional writers.
In 1985 her first book was published. In 1990 she met artist Larry Dixon at a small dcience giction convention in Meridian. Mississippi, on a television interview organized by the convention. They began working together from that time on, and were married in Las Vegas at the Excalibur chapel by Merlin the Magician (aka the Reverend Duckworth) in 1992.
They moved to their current home, the “second weirdest house in Oklahoma” also in 1992. She has many pet parrots and “the house is never quiet.” She has 144 books in print, and publishes between five and six books a year, alone or in collaboration. Some of her foreign editions can be found in Russian, German, Czech, Polish, French, Italian, Turkish, and Japanese. She is the author, alone or in collaboration, of the Hunter, Heralds of Valdemar, Elemental Masters, Secret World Chronicles, 500 Kingdoms, Diana Tregarde, Heirs of Alexandria, Obsidian Mountain, Dragon Jouster, Bedlam Bards, Shadow Grail, and other series and standalone books. In November 2021 she was named the
She has continued her hobby of costuming. She also does art-needlework and beadwork, sometimes combining these hobbies with her doll-making, usually sending these as gifts or to charity auctions as well. She always has several of these projects going at any one time, because they give her the opportunity to think about her stories while her hands are busy. Occasionally she costumes porcelain dolls as one of her characters to be sent as charity auction pieces. Her current project is a set of Secret World Chronicle dolls.
A night owl by nature, she is generally found at the keyboard between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m.
An hour-long interview with Brendan Wilson, former Army ranger and paratrooper and NATO defense planner and diplomat, master martial artist, and author of The Achilles Battle Fleet, Book 1 in the Mei Ling Lee Trilogy.
Following 25 years of military service as a US Army ranger and paratrooper, Brendan Wilson retired as a lieutenant colonel and then joined NATO where he served as a defense planner and diplomat for the next 15 years. During the course of his 40 years of work as a soldier and diplomat, he saw service in war-torn Libya, Ukraine, Kosovo, Bosnia, and Iraq. A former coach and team captain for a military martial arts competition team, he holds master ranking (8th Dan) in three different martial arts, and won the silver medal in the 2009 US Open for Taekwondo.
In retirement Wilson turned his efforts to filmmaking. He wrote and produced two award-winning short films (Doug’s Christmas, A Child Lies Here) and served as executive producer for ten episodes of the award-winning web series, Greetings! From Prisonstarring SNL’s Chris Redd. Moved by seeing human lives upended in war-torn areas, Wilson is earning his law degree and, once qualified as an attorney, plans to volunteer to help refugees. A former assistant professor who taught military history and the Univerity of Colorado, Wilson holds a Ph.D. in international relations and has about a dozen publications on defense-related topics. He is the father of two adult children.
Wilson lives a quiet life in Sycamore, Illinois. He spends his days writing, hiking, studying law and practicing his martial arts. The Achilles Battle Fleet, the first book in the Mei-Ling Lee Trilogy, is his first novel.
The First Novel of the Mei-Ling Lee Trilogy
Naval Academy martial arts champion Lieutenant Mei-Ling Lee serves in a backwater assignment as an aide to the inspector general of a rag-tag group of starships thrown together as a convoy evacuating civilians from a contested area of the galaxy. When the convoy is attacked, she finds herself thrust into the center of a galactic struggle as the chief of staff for the newly formed Achilles Battle Fleet. As the conflict continues, Lee is forced to draw upon her martial arts skill and her inner strength as she fights alongside the Fleet’s marine commando unit. Struggling with budding romance, new friendships and startling betrayals, Lee becomes the warrior she was meant to be.
