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.
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-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-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.
A long conversation with Noah Lemelson, author of the dieselpunk fantasy novel The Sightless City (Tiny Fox Press) and assorted short stories of the weird and fantastic.
A short-story writer and novelist based in Los Angeles, Noah Lemelson writes science fiction, fantasy, surreal horror, “insert-adjective-here”-punk and “all sorts of weird nonsense.” After receiving his B.A. in Biology from the University of Chicago in 2014, he made a hard pivot into the world of fiction, and in 2019 completed his MFA in Creative Writing at CalArts.
Noah’s debut dieselpunk fantasy novel, The Sightless City was released in July 2021, from Tiny Fox Press. He has also published short fiction in online magazines such as Space Squid, Literally Stories, Silver Blade, and Allegory.
An hour-long conversation with Lavie Tidhar, World Fantasy Award, Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize, Campbell Award, and Neukom Prize-winning author, speaker, and book columnist for the Washington Post, about his creative process, with a focus on his new novel The Escapement (Tachyon Publications).
Lavie Tidhar is the World Fantasy Award-winning author of Osama (2011), Seiun-nominated The Violent Century (2013), the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize-winning A Man Lies Dreaming (2014), and the Campbell Award and Neukom Prize-winning Central Station (2016), and Locus and Campbell award-nominatedUnholy Land (2018), in addition to many other works and several other awards. His latest novel is The Escapement (Tachyon Publications). Other recent novels includeBy Force Alone (2020) and debut children’s novel Candy (2018 UK; as The Candy Mafia 2020 US). He is also the author of the comics mini-series Adler..
Lavie works across genres, combining detective and thriller modes with poetry, science fiction, and historical and autobiographical material. His work has been compared to that of Philip K. Dick by the Guardian and the Financial Times, and to Kurt Vonnegut’s by Locus.
Lavie’s media appearances have included Channel 4 News, BBC Radio London and others. His speaking engagements have included a wide range of events, including for the Ministry of Defence, Cambridge University, English PEN, the Singapore Writers Festival and various Guest of Honour appearances in Japan, Poland, Spain, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, China and elsewhere. Occasional commissions include work for Conde Nast, Braingle/Puzzle Tales, I Speak Machine/Penguin Random House, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the Jewish Museum Berlin and New Scientist.
A professor of mathematics at SUNY Oneonta, Joshua Palmatier has published nine novels—the Throne of Amenkor series (The Skewed Throne, The Cracked Throne, The Vacant Throne) with DAW, the Well of Sorrows series (Well of Sorrows, Leaves of Flame, Breath of Heaven) with Baen and Zombies Need Brains, and the Ley series (Shattering the Ley, Threading the Needle, Reaping the Aurora) with DAW. He is currently at work on the start of a new series.
He has also published numerous short stories—“Mastihooba” in Close Encounters of the Urban Kind and “Tears of Blood” in Beauty Has Her Way (both edited by Jennifer Brozek), “The River” in River (edited by Alma Alexander), and “Daughter of the Sands” in Apollo’s Daughters (edited by Brian Young).
An hour-long conversation with David Liss, author of fourteen novels and numerous novellas and short stories, as well as a writer for numerous comics, with a focus on his newest novel, The Peculiarities.
David Liss is the author of fourteen novels, as well as numerous novellas and short stories. His previous books include A Conspiracy of Paper, which was named a New York Times Notable Book and won the 2001 Barry, MacAvity, and Edgar awards for Best First Novel. The Coffee Trader was also named a New York Times Notable Book and was selected by the New York Public Library as one of the year’s 25 Books to Remember. Many of his novels are currently being developed for television or film.
Liss has worked on numerous comics projects, including Black Panther and Mystery Men for Marvel, The Spider and Green Hornet for Dynamite, and Angelica Tomorrow.
