All Things To All People
When you send a short story to a magazine, it probably doesn’t go directly to the editor. Instead, it ends up in what’s called the slush pile–the pool of unsolicited work waiting for review. Who reviews it? Weirdos like us.
The changing of the guard in the early 2000s and the euthanization of the reactionary Sad Puppy movement in the early 2010s should have ushered in a new era of speculative fiction, an era of creative freedom and experimentation.
“Here’s my new novel, A Groan of Stone and Bone. It has enemies to lovers, a chaotic bisexual, BIPOC representation, elemental magic, and tons of ‘Buffy’ references!”
Bram Stoker Award-winning author John Langan joins us to talk about cosmic horror, his novel The Fisherman, upstate New York, how much money writers make (none), and how hard it is to get published when you’re a little too literary for the genre crowd but a little too genre for the literary crowd.
A story is a type of conversation with the reader. If you don’t leave room for the reader to speak, you’re a terrible conversationalist.
In today’s sci-fi/ fantasy community, it’s fashionable to dig up H.P. Lovecraft and put him on trial as the avatar of everything wrong with speculative fiction.
What makes a writer? Is it coffee and cats? Is it a good author photo? Is it having a screenname like @JaneDoeWrites?
Filthcore queen Gretchen Felker-Martin returns to talk about unlikable female characters. What makes a woman unlikable?
SFF author and professional translator Mário Seabra Coelho talks to us about the art of translation. Writing translations, even only as an exercise, can open a writer’s eye to new perspectives, new devices, and new poetic turns of phrase.
In this episode, Mistress Snow, PhD joins us to talk about sex work in writing. What do writers get wrong? How do writers promote inaccurate and harmful stereotypes about sex workers? How can writers do better?