If you’ve been following along, you know that last Monday I had a trifusion catheter installed in my chest. The next day was the first of three scheduled opportunities to harvest the desired eight million stem cells, with the plan being to arrive by 7:30am for bloodwork, then hooked up to the harvesting machine for fix or more hours, and then waiting around until 5:00pm for the an injection to facilitate the next day’s harvesting. Except, I blew it. My cells were working overtime, and the hospital harvested 15.2 million on the first day. So, not only did I get to go home early (no lingering for that injection), but I was done for the rest of the week and could stop various other meds that were all a part of the harvest regimen. Yay.

Today, I’m being admitted to the hospital and given the massive chemo (aka Poison). Tomorrow, last Tuesday’s cells will be reintroduced to my body, to jumpstart replacing all the bits killed off by the today’s treatment. This is not my idea of fun.

However, it’s a bit of a segue to this week’s EATING AUTHORS guest, because Bre Lockhart is the personification of fun. I met her last November amidst the chaos of the 20BooksVegas conference and from the moment she announced on social media something to the effect of “Find me, I’m wearing these red glasses!” I knew she was someone who would have an interesting meal to share.

Bre lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which doesn’t explain her aggressive dislike of cereal, but I’m not brave enough to inquire further. She’s making her fiction debut with her University of the Fae series. It’s your classic tale of sorority hijinks with the requisite bitchy mean girls, except that magic is real and the protagonist just found out she’s fey! The first book, Rush Week, came out last Thursday.

LMS: Welcome, Bre. So, what stands out as your most memorable meal?

BL: When you asked me this question, a specific memory immediately popped into my mind.

And then I read some of the previous answers to your question written by authors with backlists and accolades. I paused. My story was far removed from grand quests and world travels. My story was small town with zero Michelin stars.

My story was about coneys.

Heathens might call them chili dogs. Yep. Chili, cheese, hot dogs, and a bun. To be clear, not just any cheese; it has to be the kind that squeezes from a bottle. Judge me if you must.

We’ll pretend I don’t care about that while I tell this story.

When I was four or five, my grandfather would pick me up from daycare. He was a tobacco distributor for convenience stores — very glamorous — so he always had tons of boxes in his very uncool maroon van. Fortunately, at five, I didn’t yet care about cool. What I did care about was squeeze cheese. And he knew this.

Every few weeks, he would pick up an order from this fantastic place that had pealing particle board on the walls next to posters of Greek landmarks. He would hide the styrofoam container amongst the boxes in the back seat. My five-year-old nose would sniff out the treasure like a bloodhound. The game was to see how long it would take me to notice. Whether it was thirty seconds, or we made it all the way home, my grandfather was always equal parts excited. His eyes would light up the moment I asked, “Papa, did you get coneys?” in my tiny, innocent but thrilled voice.

Then we would laugh and eat hot dogs on something similar to bread topped with cheese that has no nutritional value and very few easily identifiable ingredients. It was heaven.

After I started driving and well into my twenties, I would pick up our usual and sneak it into the house, waiting for my grandfather to scent the greasy goodness. The dynamic had changed, but his eyes held that same mirth after all those years.

My grandfather might be gone, but that tiny location still serves a mean coney and a solid dose of nostalgia.

To summarize, my most memorable meal was a one-dollar hot dog eaten in the front seat of a cigarette box-filled 1985 minivan.

#SFWApro

I find myself racing toward my impending bone marrow transplant, or maybe it’s racing toward me. For several days now I’ve started my morning sticking myself with a pair of syringes, administering a med that should increase my stem cell production.

Today, I’ll have a trifusion catheter (as opposed to a port) inserted into my chest. I’ll test it out tomorrow when they start harvesting my stem cells. And over the next several weeks it will also spare me being stuck for blood draws, and stand in for any IV line I might otherwise need (and be a lot easier to deal with than a needle taped to my arm). That starts tomorrow. Still ahead this afternoon, I’ll get a dose of a drug to encourage my perky new stem cells to leave their happy home in my bone marrow and venture out in greater numbers into my blood stream, which will facilitate harvesting them tomorrow. Science!

You might think this has nothing at all to do with this week’s EATING AUTHORS guest, but actually, you’d be wrong. Because of all this pesky bone marrow transplant stuff, I’ll be hospitalized for several weeks and miss the February session of Galactic Philadelphia, which will feature Sarah Kozloff. So it’s a real good thing I have her here now.

I don’t need to tell you Sarah’s backstory, she does that below as she talks about her most memorable meal. Instead I’ll let you know that she has a new Fantasy series, The Nine Realms. It’s coming out as a quartet of books, to be released over the span of the next four months. It’s the kind of rapid release that’s used by a lot of Indie authors, but this series is being published by Tor Books. This makes it great for the reader who gets hooked on the first book and doesn’t have to wait a year or more for the next installment. But after April, you’re on your own.

LMS: Welcome, Sarah. What stands out as your most memorable meal?

SK: My most memorable meal occurred about forty years ago, at the historic Clam Broth House in Hoboken, New Jersey.

Although I didn’t know it at the time, the restaurant was a NY area landmark, established in 1899/1900. I don’t recall the famous sign of a hand with a pointing finger, but I do remember that the wooden floor canted and the ceiling was low. We’d gone early and they’d seated us at a center table, covered with a red and white cotton tablecloth. The dining area was crowded enough to seem festive, but empty enough to converse and get good service.

I knew very little about New York history and even less about seafood. I was only twenty-two, recently graduated from college, and spending a few years working freelance in film production in the city, before graduate school.

Back in those days seafood was not as widely distributed as it is today. Growing up in Denver, rainbow trout—caught wild in Colorado streams—comprised the bulk of my previous exposure to fish.

But I’d met a man on a shoot a few weeks earlier. He was the gaffer, the person who designs and sets up the lighting. I was a production assistant, basically a “go-fer,” fetching coffee, keeping pedestrians out of the frame, watching the expensive gear to make sure nothing was stolen. The first thing Bob asked me to do was to “bulb the fluorescents.” I had never heard “bulb” as a verb (and I had no experience with these filaments and the way they had to be inserted) so I was just befuddled. However, I found someone else to ask: I didn’t want to show Bob my ignorance because he was so handsome.

Amazingly enough, he was just as smitten. He invited me to go hiking at the Mohonk Mountain Preserve. Actually, what he said was, “A bunch of us are going hiking on Saturday,” would I like to come along? When he pulled up in his van “a bunch of us” turned out to be only Bob.

I think the Clam Broth House was our second date. I found it so charming and exotic that out of the all the eateries in the New York area he was taking me to… Hoboken.

We started with steamed clams, which I had never had before. It was a big adventure to peel off the skin and dip them in broth and butter. For entrees we had crab legs. I had never cracked crabs and the work to pry out the sweet meat with the special little forks made it taste even better. I imagine there was also alcohol along the way; I know that something about the evening lifted it above prosaic reality.

You know where this story is headed. Reader, I married him.

In our lives together we have had kids, houses, pets, careers, tragedies and triumphs, and we’ve now, simultaneously, launched second chapters. After 30 years as film professor at Vassar College, I have re-invented myself as a novelist, with a four-volume epic fantasy, The Nine Realms, being released by Tor in monthly installments, January-April 2020. Meanwhile, after decades as a gaffer and then a director of photography, Bob has become a glass artist. You can see his beautiful work at rlechtermanglass.com.

For a long time I was the chief cook of the household because Bob was working longer hours or on the road. But some years ago I hung up my hot pads in a huff, declaring that cooking was tiresome and unrewarding. So Bob took over all the culinary duties. He chops much more deftly than I ever did; he bought more professional cookware and cookbooks; he stocks up on fresh herbs and exotic spices. Always open-handed, he’s willing to spend money on quality ingredients.

I was praising his cookery the other day and someone asked me what are his signature dishes?

I had to think a minute.

“Fish,” I answered.

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My days this past week have been very full. I’m done with my chemotherapy and I haven’t yet started the pre-treatments for the BMT. Nor did I have to run off to any medical appointments for a whole week. My cold has been slowly improving and I’m feeling pretty damn good. Basically I’ve been free to work on all the things I’m trying to get done before I head into the hospital in two weeks. The main contenders for the rest of the month include writing a short story for a Kickstarter anthology that I’m committed to, editing the third book in a series, and finishing the first book in a different series. It’s all very Whoosh!

Which is why it’s good to be able to pop in here and write up the introduction for this week’s EATING AUTHORS guest, because over the year’s Robert E. Waters and I have shared the ToC of several anthologies, most recently Chuck Gannon’s incredible Lost Signals.

Robert is likely best known for his work in gaming, a field he’s been working in for more than twenty-five years. He’s been the Managing Editor at Avalon Hill, back when it was The Avalon Hill Game Company. He’s also been a producer, designer, and writer for several computer game studios, and is currently a designer at Breakaway LTD.

But he’s no stranger to writing fiction, both short (as the reference above to our mutual anthologies indicates) and long. His most recent novel is barely two months old. You should pick up a copy.

LMS: Welcome, Robert. Let’s talk about your most memorable meal.

REW: My first “real” job out of college (circa 1991) was with AutoZone in their corporate office in Memphis. I worked as a document design tech and technical writer. One of the things that they used to do periodically is conduct these so-called “Travel Weekends” where groups of employees from the corporate office would go out to various regions of the United States and tour the AutoZone stores in that area. It was a way to connect with the workers and customers on the front lines, and to understand their needs and problems, etc., and then in our capacity as corporate heads, take their grievances back with us and solve their problems, or if we were lucky, solve their problems right on the spot.

In my time there, I went on two of these travel weekends: one to West Texas and New Mexico (God! Texas is a big place!), and one to New Orleans. It was on the New Orleans trip that I had my most memorable dining experience.

I was traveling with a couple guys from corporate and a couple local AutoZone managers. They took us to a restaurant near New Orleans (the name of the place escapes me at the moment). We sat in the corner of a very loud, very active room. Piles upon piles of crawfish were brought in and people were diving into them like crazed dogs. But the first dish they brought us was fried alligator. The alligator is a powerful beast that can roll you to death at the bottom of a muddy river, so it was kind of strange to see one cooked and fried on my plate.

Alligator is a greasy, chewy meat, kind of like a mushy rubber. Good but not great. I could have done without it. But all the while I was eating it, the AutoZone managers at my table kept saying, “You have to suck the head! Make sure you suck the head when the crawfish come.” WTF is ‘sucking the head’? Did I stumble into some perverted food/sex dungeon or something? Everyone at the table seemed to understand what they were talking about but me, and of course, they were not giving me the full story. They were just giggling and winking at each other at my expense. I was a country boy, you understand, but not a true country boy. I was from Tennessee. In their eyes, I might as well have been from New York.

Then the crawfish came, all steamy and covered in spicy juices. Basically, a crawfish is a small lobster, with a thimble-sized piece of meet in its tail, if that much. Most people just eat the tail and discard the rest, but not these guys at my table. No. they insisted that, after I ate the tail, that I needed to “suck the head.” One showed me how it was done. You put the so-called “head” of the crawfish into your mouth, and then take a long, hard suck. They did it and seemed to weather it just fine.

Now it was my turn.

So, I did. The next thing I experienced was what Jefferson Airplane was talking about in “Go Ask Alice”…

That rush of all that cayenne pepper, paprika, oregano and other herbs and spices went right to my nasal cavity and didn’t stop (quite frankly) hurting until about an hour later. To hell with over-the-counter drugs to clear sinuses: just suck the head of a well-cooked crawfish and you’ll know what I’m talking about. I never experienced a burn like that in my life.

I tried it again a couple more times, but that was all. This “country boy” didn’t need any further schooling. The meal concluded and we left, and I’ve never forgotten that trip or sucking crawfish head. It was, indeed, an experience.

But I think I’ll stick to less adventurous foods. Until, at least, I stumble into another well-disguised trap.

#SFWApro

Welcome to 2020, or as I like to think of it, the tenth year of EATING AUTHORS. Seriously, that’s a lot of meals under the bridge (or something like that). You’d think I’d have run out of people to invite, but no, I have plenty of folks lined up in the weeks and months to come, and every confidence that others will arrive as needed to share their tales of incredible repasts.

To kick off the new year, I invited Lisa Goldstein to drop by. Lisa has taken home quite a shelf of prizes including the National Book Award (for The Red Magician), the Mythopoeic Award (for The Uncertain Places), and the Sidewise Award. She’s also racked up multiple nominations for the Astounding, Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, and other awards besides. She’s also written two novels of high fantasy (Daughter of Exile and The Divided Crown) under the pseudonym Isabel Glass.

Her latest (and fifteenth) novel, Ivory Apples, came out back in October, a book about a book, or more specifically, the author of a book. And also magic, of course. She and her husband and their Labrador retriever live in northern California.

LMS: Welcome, Lisa. Thank you for starting the year for us. Please tell me about your most memorable meal.

LG: The most memorable meal I ever had was in Rome, at a restaurant called Grappolo d’Oro. I knew that food in Italy was good, of course, but I didn’t really know how good. I ordered ravioli with cheese and something called tartufi, which turned out to be truffles. Not only had I never had truffles before, I had barely heard of them; if you’d asked, I would have said it was a play by Moliere. They were deep, earthy, full of dark, delicious flavor. And the rest of the ingredients were great too, each one in perfect balance with the others, and tasting as if they’d been created just that morning.

After that, I ordered truffles at every restaurant that listed them on the menu. Another restaurant, in Perugia, had truffles in something called scamorza, a kind of baked cheese. This was my second-most memorable meal — the place was called Il Settimo Sigillo, which means “the seventh seal,” and had something of a Knights Templar motif. We never found out why.

When I got back I looked around for more truffles.

Unfortunately, they’re phenomenally expensive here. Black truffles, the kind I like, mostly grow in France and Italy, and they’re hard to farm; usually they’re hunted with truffle hounds. The only solution, I guess, is to go back to Italy.

#SFWApro

Christmas has come and gone, Hannukah ends tonight, and the year follows suit tomorrow. This is the last EATING AUTHORS post of 2019. I will spare you any retrospective summaries of the past twelve months, and I’ve long since already filled you in on what the next several weeks is bringing my way. Instead, I think I’ll simply encourage you to take a moment to reflect on what you hold dear, to treat yourself well, to leave the world a little better at the end of the day than when you began.

This blog series has had that last bit at its core from the beginning. Whether you call it “Paying It Forward,” or something else, it’s been my pleasure to use it not only to share with you some insight into many friends and colleagues (and their meals), but also to introduce you to new writers who are at the very start of their careers. It’s a nice thing to give a platform, however small my blog may be, to folks.

One of the quirks of social media is that I’m often stumbling across people I wouldn’t likely meet (or they stumble over me, it can be hard to tell which way the flow runs). Which is how I met this week’s guest, Marion Jones. It happened on some comment thread on someone’s post — the particulars are a distant blur to me now. But I remember thinking, “hey, why not invite him to talk about a meal?” and so I did, and he was kind enough to oblige.

His most recent book, Clipped Angels, continues his Golden Feather Saga.

#SFWApro

The year winds down. For me that has meant lots of medical appointments, a physical therapist kicking my ass twice a week, writing nonstop like I was Alexander Hamilton, and stealing hours and minutes from all of the above so I can still have time to spend with my wife. Stress levels have been high, but also productivity. And as others have noted, I’d rather have too much to do than too little.

Looking over his resume, I suspect the same can be said of Clark Thomas Carlton, this week’s EATING AUTHORS guest (by golly, that was a real segue this time). I invited Clark to share his most memorable meal here because he’s a novelist (check out his Antasy series, Prophets of the Ghost Ants and The Prophet of the Termite God), but he’s also a playwright (having won the Drama-Logue Critics Award for Self Help or the Tower of Psychobabble), a screen and television writer, a singer/songwriter (currently working on a pop opera about the Hanging Gardens of Babylon), and a painter.

None of which explains his current fascination with insects, but he’s on record as appreciating the use of science fantasy novels as the means of illustrating the human condition. Some folks do this going big (e.g., elephants), others take the opposite perspective. Go figure.

LMS: Welcome, Clark. What can you tell me about your most memorable meal?

CTC: Nine of the ten worst meals I have ever eaten were in Russia, and that includes the very worst and certainly the most memorable.

I was in Yeltsin’s Russia, a few years into Glasnost, and about to see Schindler’s List for the 400th time as a quality supervisor in Lucasfilm’s THX program. The first part of my stay was in Moscow at a modern hotel that had just been acquired by an American chain. The hotel’s restaurant served edible western dishes, but as someone who has worked in the industry, I know when I’m being served a boil-in-the-bag. Craving a pizza, I asked the waiter if they were any good and he assured me it was “the best in Moscow.” After serving it to me, he announced, “Your pizza by the Red Baron.”

Near Red Square, I found a Chinese restaurant, but it was Chinese in name only. A chicken dish featured some tiny bits of meat mixed through a mass of cooked cabbage. The dish was devoid of anything like spices or even soy sauce. Some spaghetti at a so-called Italian place was topped with a couple of teaspoons of tomato puree. Parmesan cheese was not a possibility much less fresh burrata or focaccia. I loathe McDonalds, but I came to understand why there were three new ones in Moscow with very long lines because food in Russia was terrible. Under Yeltsin, Western products were flooding the country and Russians were rejecting everything made by their state industries, even their own vodka. Bananas were the latest, exotic arrival, and every trash bin in the city was piled high with their peels.

The Russian film lab, also of poor quality, was an hour outside of Moscow in a woodsy village that was a mix of industry and farming. The one and only hotel was bleak and boxy and built in the Stalin era, but it was surrounded by izbas, the little country houses made of logs bound with river mud. These were on tiny family farms with livestock, vegetable gardens and a few fruit trees. Perhaps here I might eat some genuine native dishes. The Russian food I had enjoyed in New York and San Francisco included pelmeni, the Slavic cousin of the ravioli, as well as Veal Prince Orlov, and good soups like barley mushroom and root vegetables with dill. My own dinner parties had included blinis with creme fraiche and caviar as well as that standard go-to, Chicken Kiev, which was always a crowd pleaser with its gushing puddle of chive flavored butter.

The food served in this hotel was both strange and awful and was not selected from a menu. The restaurant was a barren hall with wooden chairs, wobbly tables and grease stained table cloths. My first meal was a breakfast that I shared with my interpreter, Vasily. At some other tables, we noticed men dressed in running suits that smoked Benson and Hedges as they counted piles of pink Ukrainian money. When I asked who they were, Vasily told me they were “gangsters” and we should not make eye contact with them. “Russia is now like your Chicago in the Twenties,” he said, referring to an epidemic of gun violence.

I was served my first of a daily bowl of milky gruel, the ingredients of which I never identified. The table had two kinds of sliced gummy bread, white and brown, neither of which had flavor or a crust. Unstrained tea, swirling with leaves, was poured from a pot into glasses instead of cups. I watched as the gangsters poured Swedish vodka into their gruel, stirred it, then ate it up. “They are drinking vodka in the morning,” I whispered, but the interpreter shrugged. “We have Russian expression,” he said. “A drink in the morning and you are free all day.”

Dinner that night was difficult. I was the only diner and arrived to find the gummy bread and a plate with a thick smear of ground mystery meat. Next to it were some hard, greenish tomatoes that were blemished and irregular, like troll noses. Beside them were some juiceless and stunted cucumbers, popping with rubbery warts. I tasted the mystery meat and found it gritty and greasy, a throwback to my high school cafeteria. I went back to my room and ate some of the Snickers bars I had been advised to bring as gifts for the Russian people.

On weekends, I was back in Moscow and my host and his lovely daughter, Nadia, were kind enough to show me Gorky Park. At that time, the park was a spectacular mess that had never seen the likes of a lawn mower. It stank from subterranean bathrooms with broken toilets that still had to be used for the usual reasons. My hosts had been informed that I wasn’t eating and tempted me into trying shashlik, the Russian version of shish kebab. They promised me it was delicious.

We picked a shashlik vendor whose grill and tables were in a circle of unkempt bushes. I offered to pay for the meal but never bothered to ask if it was lamb or beef. As we waited for our meat to cook, I saw the first of the feral dogs of Gorky Park. They weren’t a threatening pack, but were shy with sad eyes and they seemed in need of a handout. Nadia brought us paper plates of shashlik and on the side of each was a glop of sauce that stood on end that was the color of a fresh scab.

I tried to bite through the first chunk of meat and could not — it was like trying to chew through a bicycle tire. I gripped one end of the chunk with my fingernails then tugged the other with my teeth, and still it would not tear. “This shashlik is not fun,” said Nadia, a frown on her face, as she gave up. We had been served lumps of gristle that none of us could eat much less enjoy. The dogs, looking at us longingly, were waiting for just this moment. They gently took the meat from our fingers and quietly wolfed it down. As I wiped my fingers clean, I pondered that Communism had been a noble, maybe even necessary experiment in human progress, but clearly it had failed as badly as our shashlik.

A few days later, I learned what kind of meat we had eaten when I picked up the English language newspaper and read the headline: Shashlik Vendors in Gorky Park Arrested for Serving Dog Meat.

#SFWApro

The year is winding down, but the pressure to “do all the things” continues unabated, and if anything is ramping up as the specifics of next month’s hospital stay solidify. Last week I lost a day to about ten hours of medical tests (who needs to draw twenty vials of blood? Seriously?) including having my third bone marrow biospy of the season. Also a long and very informative conversation about how the transplant process will go, what to expect during my time in hospital, and what to prepare for after discharge. It’s all taking on real weight. There’s the list of possible but unlikely complications as well as the list of likely and unpleasant side effects associated with procedure. So, in that sense, busying myself with the push to finish another book right now is probably a very good thing. As is the diversion of bringing you regular installments of EATING AUTHORS.

So, a big thanks to this week’s guest, Anthony Fucilla, for proving some much needed distraction. And yes, that was your official segue.

I confess, I was completely unfamiliar with Anthony’s work until just a few weeks ago when a social media post about his next book, Androids and the Gods, purported to “redefine metaphysics.” So, yeah, that caught my attention and fueled my imagination. Alas, that book won’t be out until next year, but I was hooked. Naturally, I reached out to him to learn more.

He’s primarily known for his short stories, which have appeared in collections such as Quantum Chronicles In The Eleventh Dimension and Silent Earth. But what really caught my attention is that he approaches his fiction from a perspective of philosophy, focusing on questions of metaphysics and epistemology, A.I. and theology. Seriously, all he needs are elephants.

Start with his short fiction but don’t stop there. His latest novel, The Mars Time-Project, came out from Swirl two months ago.

LMS: Welcome, Anthony. Tell me about your most memorable meal.

AF: To be honest it is so very difficult to come up with a single most memorable meal. I’ve travelled all over the world extensively, Europe, Asia, America, South America, Australasia and experienced many magical moments when it comes to food. I love food and enjoy a vast array of different cuisines. However, one memorable meal was after the 2014 LONCON-3 72nd World Science Fiction convention in London, my home town. After a very busy day at the convention (book signing / talks… etc) my wife and I went to central London and found a fabulous Chinese restaurant. One that we had never heard of… Upon entering you instantly felt as if you had just been teleported to China. The classy oriental decor, Chinese ornaments and soft sounds of China – the music, create a unique atmosphere. In the dim light of the resturant you immediately feel relaxed. The soft lights create a warm inviting ambience and the background instrumental music was enchanting to say the least. The delightful aroma of food was rich and constant.

As for the staff, they were very gracious, all dressed in traditional Chinese costumes. This in turn added to the atmosphere greatly. The restaurant itself was very large, elegant to say the least, with neatly arranged tables positioned accordingily. As for the drinks menu, they had a large selection of soft drinks and alcoholic beverages to choose from; Chinese beer galore like Tsingtao, Yanjing Beer, etc… Now for the food! Well the food was simply sublime, absolutely exquisite. The menu itself was a mini-book. It had a vast array of dishes to choose from: sizzling King prawns in black bean, crab in oyster sauce, lobster with ginger and spring onion, crispy seafood balls with sweet and sour sauce, traditional Chinese drunken Chicken, and every type of noodle dish you could possibly think of and of course, dim sums galore! In the end we ended up ordering a mixed selection of dishes, seafood, chicken, noddles, rice, dim sum etc! As for the service… well, it was fantastic! They were all so polite, precise and efficient. All in all, it was one of the best Chinese restaurants we’d been to, simply majestic in every sense… a memorable meal indeed after a wonderful day.

#SFWApro