I’m no stranger to the power of community, or the power of the internet as it affects community, but sometimes it still creeps up on me and takes me by surprise. Case in point, a few weeks back when an author I know put out a call for help because an aged relative was in danger of being put out of the house she’d lived in for decades. All at once, a vast list of authors came together and began contributing to an anthology, Hellcats, some sending in reprints and others writing new works just for the anthology. The plan: sell the book for bushels of cash, all of it earmarked to keep an old woman from being turned out onto the street.

I sent in a story, and readily agreed to boost the book’s signal via social media, but then wondered what else I might do. The solution was obvious: feature some of the other contributors here on EATING AUTHORS. That wasn’t quite so easy an idea though, as many of them (including Craig Martell, A.M. Scott, Julia Huni, E.G. Bateman, and R.R. Virdi) had already put in an appearance here.

But I reached out and in classic win-win spirit, authors began reaching back. Which is why I get to introduce you today to Jamie Davis. In addition to being an author, Jamie is also a nurse, a retired paramedic, and a nationally recognized medical educator who started out teaching emergency responders. Among readers, he’s probably best known for his six volume Huntress Clan Saga, his Accidental Traveler trilogy, and his ongoing Extreme Medical Services series (currently up to seven books)

Jamie lives with his wife and three kids in Maryland woods, combining his interests in medicine, gaming, and writing with seamless ease.

LMS: Welcome, Jamie, and thanks for contributing to the Hellcats anthology. Now, tell me about your most memorable meal.

JD: The most memorable meal I ever had has to be the breakfast at Brennan’s Restaurant in New Orleans famous French Quarter. My wife and I were on our honeymoon and this was the one place she wanted to eat so we’d made brunch reservations for our fourth day in the city. Now Brennan’s is fine dining, the full 5-star meal in every way. It was a lot for two young people in their twenties to appreciate. Up until that point, we’d had some wonderful meals consisting of PoBoy sandwiches, raw oysters and fried shrimp brought in that day from the Gulf of Mexico, and beignets fresh from the fryer and dusted with just the right amount of powdered sugar.

So, when the two of us kids dressed up and wandered down to Brennan’s, I don’t know what I was expecting, but given what we’d had so far, I knew it would be a lot fancier. My wife ordered a mimosa to start and Eggs Benedict for her meal. I ordered steak and eggs, a ribeye if I remember correctly, along with two fried eggs over medium. We wrapped it all up with my wife’s order of Bananas Foster, a flambé dish prepared table-side by our waiter.

All in all, it was a pretty decent meal. The wait staff attended to our every need, and the chefs prepared everything perfectly. The meal was excellent over all, but it wasn’t the food I remember the most. The most memorable part of the meal was the check. This was 1990. It was breakfast, for God’s sake. Which was why I couldn’t wrap my brain around the bill. It was $115.42 before the tip. My jaw dropped. I don’t think we’d spent that much for two of us over an entire day before. I tried to hide my shock and pulled out my shiny plastic credit card, paying the man with a smile (I think).

Ever since, when asked about our honeymoon in New Orleans, I mention the breakfast at Brennan’s right at the top. It wasn’t to protest the price so much as time went by. I’ve grown accustomed to some pretty expensive fine dining establishments over the last thirty years. No, it’s more to talk about the wide-eyed country kid who had to pay for his first “big-boy” bill as a married man. In the end, I can’t complain. I must’ve done something right. We’re still together thirty years later with three wonderful kids, a grandson, and our health. Oh, and a great story from the beginning of our lives together to kick things off.

#SFWApro

In the middle of last week I had a crash and burn moment. I’d been pushing myself too hard, both physically and mentally, and even though the result has been insane levels of productivity and accomplishment, by late afternoon when the fatigue comes rolling in, I get frustrated as I imagine how much more I could do if my body would just get over the need to keep playing recovery games.

But timing is everything, and I recalled a moment of serendipity from four years ago which helped restore my mental/emotional balance. I’d had a story idea that involved plankton. Yeah, you heard me. But… I knew that I didn’t no much about plankton, and the particular notion I had in mind wasn’t something that I was going to be able to research with my limited biology background. So naturally, I reached out via social media for someone who might know a little bit about the subject. And almost instantly I was in contact with this week’s EATING AUTHORS guest, Darcie Little Badger, a doctoral candidate in oceanography who was a day or so away from her defense and an expert in, you guessed it, plankton. I have a lot of serendipity in my life, so much so that I don’t question it any more. So I probably shouldn’t be all that surprised that when I had my crash and burn moment, I was already primed with the memory of magical plankton conversations because Darcie’s first novel, Elatsoe, was due out on Tuesday.

As she has hauled me back from the brink (all unknowingly) last week, I now get to tell you a bit more about Dr. Darcie Little Badger, Lipan Apache, oceanographer, and author. That debut novel? It’s both a New England Book Award finalist (young adult category) and a BookExpo 2020 Young Adult Buzz Finalist. Darcie also co-writes Strangelands, a comic series in the Humanoids H1 universe. And if that’s not enough to impress you — and let me be clear, you should have been satisfied with just her plankton bona fides — she’s had her short fiction featured in an episode of the podcast LeVar Burton Reads.

LMS: Welcome, Darcie. It’s wonderful to get back in touch with you. Please tell me about your most memorable meal.

DLB: My most memorable meal (for all the wrong reasons) involves a boat trip with my boss, a heavy Italian breakfast, and seasickness. The story’s an amusing comedy of errors, but I don’t want to ruin anybody’s appetite, so I’ll describe a more pleasant meal instead.

I’m engaged to a veterinarian named T, and during the 12+ years we’ve known each other, T and I have eaten lots of tasty stuff. I’m talking everything from a multi-course Gudetama-themed dinner at a Curry House in California (it was almost too cute to eat) to coffee, warm cookies and sandwiches at the Austin Alamo Drafthouse Cinema. But my most memorable meal has to be a hash brown, egg, and pancake combo from Denny’s. Here’s why:

After earning my PhD, I moved to Connecticut to be close to family. In contrast, T lived on the Californian coast. Because it’s possible to write anywhere — even on a plane — I visited T every couple months, spending half the year (take a bit) on the west coast and half the year (give a bit) on the east coast. (This was pre-pandemic, by the way; I haven’t seen my fiancé since March, and we’ve sadly had to delay our 2020 wedding ’till 2021.)

Here’s the thing. Remember how I mentioned seasickness earlier? Well, I get other types of motion sickness, too. Sometimes on a plane. Because of that, cross-country flights can be miserable experiences. Once, before I found the right medicine, I alternated between fainting and writhing with nausea for five hours.

So, yeah. Plane rides are less than relaxing on a good day. And although I haven’t experienced severe motion sickness in years, it’s always a fear I carry in the back of my mind.

Anyway, the second time I made the big cross-country trip, my flight was delayed an hour. Then — I kid you not — my bag was the absolute last thing to slide onto the baggage carousel. By the time I called T to tell them, “I’ll be waiting outside,” it was well past midnight, and I couldn’t wait to curl up under a warm blanket and sleep.

“On the way,” they said.

Seven minutes later, they pulled into the pickup zone and loaded my exactly-forty-nine-pound bag into their SUV. With a grateful “Thank you,” I slid into the passenger-side seat. That’s when I noticed the Denny’s take-out bag at my feet. “It’s for you,” T said. “There’s extra syrup in the bag. I also got you a Shirley Temple.”

While waiting for my flight to land, T had camped out in a Denny’s near LAX. That’s where they bought me hash browns, scrambled eggs, and pancakes.

As I dug into the hash browns — they were deliciously salty and crispy, cooling but not yet cold — I imagined my fiancé sitting, alone, in a diner booth. Still wearing the scrubs from work. Drinking coffee refills — they’d ask for soy milk or oat milk in each cup; they always do — and checking their phone for updates about my flight. Maybe, when I finally landed at half past midnight, they thought about the one-hour drive ahead of us. Maybe they thought about how little sleep they’d get before another day of surgeries and consultations at the veterinary clinic. I don’t know. But what I do know is this: they thought of me. Thought of how hungry I’d be, of how much I love hash browns (I really, really love hash browns).

That realization is why one Denny’s meal (devoured in a car, with heavy metal screaming from the radio and the skyline of LA twinkling in the rearview mirror) is more memorable than all the others. It’s so often the little things–everyday, gentle gestures of love–that make an impact.

In conclusion: my darling, I can’t wait until our next meal together. <3 To everyone else: thank you for reading. 🙂

#SFWApro

Although I was one of the founders of the Codex online writing community, I haven’t checked in there much these last few years. Recently, I’ve tried to do better. In particular, because it’s a means of holding myself accountable. There’s a quarterly topic thread where novelists check-in on their progress over each three month span. It’s one of the few Codex threads that I visit. I like to hit it with a listing of my ambitions, month to month, and then follow-up to see how well/badly I’ve hit/missed the mark. I do not use it to compare my progress to anyone else’s because 1) we’re all at different points in our respective writers’ journeys and 2) the only one I should be in competition with is myself. That said, I do enjoy seeing the reports of other writers’ successes, both old friends and folks I haven’t met yet.

Recently, there was a post from someone I didn’t know. He had mentioned that his first novel was about to have its Covid-19 delayed release. My first reaction was to congratulate him. My second was to reach out and invite him to EATING AUTHORS, which is how Gautam Bhatia comes to be here today.

In another world, Gautam is a lawyer. His focus is on Indian constitutional law and philosophy, and he has published extensively. He’s a Rhodes scholar, studied at Oxford, and earned his law degree at Yale. In 2018, ForbesIndia listed him among their “30 under 30” (he was 29 at the time). Nowadays, Gautum lives in New Delhi, India. When not working as a lawyer or legal academic he has been known to put in time as a reviewer and editor with Strange Horizons.

The ebook of his first novel, The Wall, was released four days ago and the paperback comes out next week.

LMS: Welcome, Gautam. Please tell me about your most memorable meal.

GB: SFF has shaped my life. So, predictably enough, my most memorable meal had something to do with SFF. Growing up, I loved the historical fantasy novels of Guy Gavriel Kay. My favourite was The Lions of Al-Rassan, that is set — in part — in Moorish Spain. As with all good books, the novel triggered a lifelong fascination with Andalusia. Many years later — in the summer of 2019 — when my taste in SFF had moved on, but my long-distance love affair with Andalusia had not, I was able to plan an actual trip to the region. My final destination was Granada, whose squares I had dreamed of not only because of Kay’s novel, but also because of Mahmoud Darwish’s heart-stopping poem, “I Want from Love only the Beginning.”

I spent a lovely day wandering around the old city’s mountainous, winding streets. As evening wore on, I called my mother, who insisted that I eat dinner at a restaurant called Estrellas de San Nicolas, which she had uncovered after careful research: nestled into the hillside, it was supposed to have the best views of the Alhambra Palace (a landmark featured in Kay’s novel), from anywhere in Granada. I went hunting for the restaurant, but it proved notoriously difficult to find, and — being the penny-pincher that I am — I had decided not to pay for an international roaming on my phone, and rely only on hostel and city WiFi. There was, of course, no WiFi on the mountainside, and I was reduced to walking up and down the streets in the general area, peeling my eyes for the restaurant’s sign. I spent an hour or two this way, with the Alhambra — across the valley — seeming to mock my fruitless quest. On my fourth or fifth pass along a street, I finally did manage to uncover the restaurant (it is genuinely well-hidden), by a stroke of great good luck, found a vacant table despite having failed to make a reservation, for want of a functioning phone.

I ordered paella, which everyone had told me was the dish to eat when in Andalusia. The view of the Alhambra was everything I had been promised: I watched the fortress change colour with the sunset, the outer walls turning golden, dark red, pale red, and then grey, as the sun went down. It was also, I realised, the ideal place to finish that I had kept pending: I had to write the Epilogue of my novel — its last page — and I had been putting it off for a special occasion. This, evidently, fit the bill: so, next to my plate of paella and my glass of orange juice, with the Alhambra across the valley, I scribbled the final scene of my novel — which is due to be in print in one week from now.

#SFWApro

The first ever virtual WorldCon has come and gone. It was by all accounts a Herculean effort and kudos to everyone who contributed to making it happen. In preparation, the organizers tried to get all the participants vetted on the necessary tools (e.g., Zoom, and in some cases also Discord). My calendar at the end of July was tight, but I had been scheduled for a panel and a kaffeeklatsch, which meant that well before the con began I had to sign up for a Zoom training. If memory serves, I latched onto a 9am slot, which would have been right after my morning walk so my blood would be pumping and I’d be at my best. This also corresponded to 1am of the next morning in Wellington, and I felt bad for the poor trainer who would have to run things at such an hour (and deal with up to nine other potential students) .

As it turned out, the trainer was actually in the UK, where it was a much more reasonable 2pm. Also, the class only had one other person. Which, as it turned out, was how I met this week’s EATING AUTHORS guest, Fiona Moore.

Fiona is a Canadian academic who currently works in London as a Professor of Business Anthropology, where her professional writing delves into issues of culture, gender, ethnic identity, transnationalism, and globalization. In the broader world of science fiction, she’s apt to slip in these same themes. She’s probably best known for her guidebooks to television series (such as The Prisoner and Battlestar Galactica) and for her short stories (for which she’s been shortlisted for a BSFA Award). She also writes stage plays, and a couple years back she published her first novel, Driving Ambition.

She received her doctorate from the university of Oxford for a thesis on ethnic identity among German expatriate bankers in the City of London, which I just think is a very cool thing and something you should all try to work into the conversation at your next cocktail party. You know, if we ever get to attend such things again.

LMS: Welcome, Fiona. Now that the worldcon is behind us, tell me about your most memorable meal.

FM: I’m an eat-to-live type, not a live-to-eat type. Not that I don’t like a good meal, but I go for “tasty and nutritious” (or sometimes, “tasty and really not nutritious,” but never mind) rather than “clever, subtle and gourmet.” I can cook — but the reason is that, during my second year of graduate school, I realised that 1) I was spending all my money on takeaway, because 2) when I cooked for myself, I just made the same two meals over and over. So, 3) the obvious solution if I wanted to stay fed and not run out of grant money, was to learn how to cook, and specifically how to cook like a takeaway.

However, I’m also a traveller, and make a point of eating the local food as much as I can. It’s part of the experience. When I was on a visiting fellowship in Taipei, my research assistants liked to amuse themselves by trying to find out if there was any food Doctor Moore wouldn’t eat (the answer turned out to be “duck, but that’s about it”). In sum, I like trying new things foodwise, but I’m not a connoisseur. Ask me what food I enjoyed on my last trip to Paris, and I’ll tell you about this amazing little place with movie posters on the walls where you could get authentic crêpes Bretonnes, rather than talking about what makes Maxim’s better than anywhere else. And if I go to restaurants, it’s mostly to be with friends or, if I’m on my own, to enjoy the atmosphere, rather than for the food.

Until, one day, I achieved culinary enlightenment. In 2016, in New Orleans.

Prior to an academic conference, I was knocking around the city being a tourist, enjoying the hot weather, beautiful houses, copious amounts of alcohol, amazing music and exposure to aspects of North American history I’d never known that much about before.

I’d been told beforehand that one of the things one has to do in New Orleans is eat good food, so I’d been dutifully trying all the local dishes: fried oyster po’boys, gumbo, jambalaya, the beignets at the Café du Monde. I’d certainly enjoyed everything I’d eaten, but that was about all I could say for it.

So, a few days into my visit, I was wandering around the French Quarter looking for someplace to have dinner. A creole restaurant caught my eye. It seemed nice but not fancy; the prices on the board seemed to confirm this. So, just fine for the adventurous budget traveller.

I went to the door and asked the maître d’ if there was a table for one.

“There’s a minimum twenty-minute wait,” he said.

OK, reasonably-priced food you had to wait for? This was news. I said I was fine with that and sat down to read a book while I waited.

About ten minutes later the maître d’ came back out and said that there was a seat available right now, if I didn’t mind sitting at the bar.

Well, of course I didn’t. But I was even more interested by a nice restaurant where people would sit at the bar as well as the tables to eat. I mean, wasn’t going to restaurants about socialising, about being with friends?

So, I sat at the bar and ordered a crayfish étouffée. Because I’d never had one, and it sounded like the sort of thing I should try.

It arrived.

I tasted it.

I had never eaten food that made me involuntarily exclaim “mmm!” Up until that point, I’d never even known that could be a thing.

It was absolutely perfect.

Suddenly I understood why gourmets make such a fuss about getting the right ingredients, the right spices, the right cooking time.

Also why people would go to a restaurant for the food more than for the company.

Why adventure in food can be about more than just looking for exotic or authentic dishes or testing the boundaries of what Doctor Moore won’t eat.

I had plenty of culinary excitement in New Orleans after that—I tried all different kinds of creole food, Southern food, French food. Nothing that was as good at that crayfish étouffée, though I sure tried to seek it out. I’ve also pursued that elusive “mmm!” in the years since, generally finding it not in the fanciest places, but in the places where, fancy or not, they really care about the food (I can recommend, if you’re interested in such things, the Hainanese chicken-rice at the City Satay open-air stall on Orchard Road in Singapore).

But that was the first time I got a glimpse into the world of live-to-eat.

And now I understand.

#SFWApro

And lo, we have achieved August. And it’s a good thing, because the second half of July was really kicking my ass, albeit in a good way with a glorious birthday celebration and the release of Ace of Corpses (book one of a new spinoff series set in the universe of the Amazing Conroy).

We’ve also seen the coming and going of the first ever completely virtual Worldcon. With everything else going on, and because of the massive time zone difference between here (just outside Philadelphia) and Wellington, I had minimal presence at ConZealand. I appeared on one panel, held court at a kaffeeklatsch, and attended a couple of author readings. In addition, I probably spent all of ninety minutes spread out over several days chatting in a side room (aka a Discord channel) with some old friends. But that was the whole of my Worldcon experience this year.

Convention talk makes the perfect segue for this week’s EATING AUTHORS guest. Steven H Silver only recently published his first book, but he’s been involved in running conventions for many years (including three stints as chair of Windycon and vice-chair for the 70th Worldcon). He’s also been a leader in the world of fannish publications, having racked up seventeen Hugo nominations, twelve for Best Fan Writer and five for Best Fanzine. He’s written reviews and edited several anthologies, been editor and publisher of a small press, and written more than a dozen short stories. Somewhere in there he also found time to appear on Jeopardy!

But let’s get back to his first book. After Hastings is an alternate history novel. It’s hardly surprising that he’d choose this genre for his debut book. Back in 1995, Steven founded the Sidewise Award for Alternate History and has continued to serve as a judge for the award ever since. Is it any wonder then that he warped history by defeating William the Conqueror, thus ensuring the English language would never be the same again. The irony being that his book would read very differently in the resulting timeline.

LMS: Welcome, Steven. Please share your most memorable meal, and do not answer in the form of a question.

SHS: Honestly, there are a lot of things I don’t remember about my most memorable meal because it sticks out not because of the food or the company or even the location, but rather because of an incident that occurred during the meal.

When I was fifteen, my grandmother and a couple of her cousins decided to go on a tour of Scandinavia, seeing the sights of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. The tour was double occupancy, so my grandmother invited my mother to join her. While that should have solved the roommate problem, my father decided that he also wanted to go to Scandinavia. Still in need of a roommate, I was invited to join them.

The most memorable meal was one we ate in a restaurant in Stockholm. There is no reason this meal, one of the last of two weeks’ worth of meals eaten with my parents, my grandmother and my grandmother’s cousins, should have been memorable. I couldn’t tell you the name of this restaurant, although I could tell you that it was located in Gamla Stan, the Old Town of Stockholm.

I can tell you what I ate. It was the first time I tried reindeer. That actually was pretty memorable. It is good, I recommend it, although it is a little gamy. What I certainly can tell you is that even in Stockholm people will give you strange looks if you are eating a reindeer steak and humming “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”

So, what made that meal so memorable? The restaurant’s owner, whose name I couldn’t tell you.

In the middle of our meal, the restaurant owner came out of the kitchen and looked around the dining room. She saw us and hurried over to our table, speaking rapidly in a language I didn’t understand, but knew wasn’t Swedish.

When she got to our table, she very excitedly grabbed my grandmother’s left arm and started to pull up my grandmother’s sleeve, all the time speaking in his foreign language.

My grandmother always wore long sleeves. The temperature didn’t matter. It was more important to her to cover up the fading numbers that had been tattooed onto her arm when the Nazis wanted to keep track of humans as if they were cattle.

Upon seeing my grandmother’s tattoo, the woman rolled her left sleeve up to show my grandmother her left arm. A similarly faded tattoo was on her arm.

Eventually, my grandmother was able to tell us what was going on.

As we had already surmised, the restaurant’s owner was also a Holocaust survivor. Although my grandmother didn’t recognize her at first over a distance of four decade and 1,000 kilometers, the woman had quite clearly recognized my grandmother.

It turns out that they were in the concentration camps together. When the restaurant owner fell ill, my grandmother made she sure had enough food and kept her out of the eyes of the guards so she would have a chance to survive. Over the years, she remembered my grandmother’s name and the number on her arm, and when she saw her, she recognized her.

Their conversation was brief, it was in Polish, so I couldn’t tell you anything that was said, even if I wanted to. My grandmother later admitted not having remembered the woman whose life she saved in the camps.

It doesn’t really matter than I was eating with my parents and cousins. It doesn’t really matter than we were in a forgotten restaurant in Stockholm’s Old Town. It doesn’t really matter that I was introduced to reindeer steak and received strange looks. It was a memorable meal because a stranger interrupted our meal to thank my grandmother for saving her life under deplorable conditions forty years earlier. And I can’t think of a better reason for a meal to be interrupted… or memorable.

#SFWApro

July is winding down, and it’s been quite eventful, with the promise of still more to come.

• My replica Neanderthal skull arrived and is now mounted on its custom stand and seated upon a marble pillar in my dining room, because where else does one put such a thing?
• One of my oldest friends in the world is organizing a birthday event for me, to honor the past year’s battle with cancer, and has set up a site where people can record 30 seconds of video to send me birthday greetings.
• This year’s 27th annual Klingon Language Conference has shifted to an online venue and gets underway in four days, and promises to bring in many more speakers from across Europe and other distant realms.
• And today is my dog’s eleventh birthday. He’s still chipper and spry, just received a check-up and clean bill of health from the vet and a major shearing from the groomer. Later today I’ll present him with a shiny new chew toy (a rugged fabric moose). Dogs make everything better.

None of which has anything to do with this week’s EATING AUTHORS guest, but I hope something on that list will have caught your fancy enough that you don’t notice I don’t have a proper segue to my introduction of David Drake.

Dave’s probably best known as the author of the Hammer’s Slammers series, with his Republic of Cinnabar Navy series, coming in as a close second. He’s been credited with creating the Military SF genre as we know it today. Like many authors producing Space Opera and Military SF, he brings a veteran’s perspective to the topic, tempered in his case by his study of law.

His bibliography is incredibly extensive and ranges from multiple series in multiple genres that he’s written on his own, other series he’s co-authored or created outlines for with folks like Eric Flint and S.M. Stirling, and a long list of anthologies he’s edited.

You can sample some of his work over at the Baen Free Library. Check it out.

LMS: Welcome, Dave. Thanks for accepting my offer to talk about your most memorable meal.

DD: My first thought was to pass on your offer because I’m not very interested in food. My mother was a terrible cook (though she baked well), and food was to me simply something necessary for life.

I then realized that a meal is much more than just food and drink; and this in turn reminded me of my dinner the first night of the first World Fantasy Convention in 1975.

I was an SF reader and had recently begun writing SF, but I had never been a fan. My first con had been the 1974 Worldcon; it was a stressful and unpleasant experience. (I’m a Nam vet with a degree of PTSD.)

My agent Kirby MacCauley said he was starting a completely new sort of con: WFC — and I had to try that. Against my better judgment I did.

I was in correspondence with another of Kirby’s clients, Ramsey Campbell, and he was coming over for WFC also. My wife Jo and I agreed to drive him in Jo’s 1965 Mustang from Chapel Hill where we lived to Providence, RI, for the con.

Jo and I had room in the convention hotel (the Holiiday Inn) but we’d made no other arrangements for the con. After we dropped Ramsey off we found a Ford garage and had a new trunk key made because the key chain had broken while Jo was closing the trunk, locking the key inside with all the luggage. It was late afternoon by then and we decided to find something to eat.

We got into the lobby and were heading for the front door when we saw Manly and Frances Wellman, our friends from the Triangle, looking around in puzzlement also. We joined them and had decided the hotel restaurant was probably very full (WFC was only about 300 that year, but there were two other conventions in the hotel), when another elevator opened and a group of people got out including L. Sprague de Camp and his wife Catherine. The de Camps were old friends of the Wellmans but the couples had become estranged in the ’50s. Manly called and went over to Sprague. They immediately agreed that they didn’t remember what they’d been arguing about way back then — and it didn’t matter at all now.

The de Camps were with about four other people who were going to dinner; they had reservations. They and the restaurant were fine with merging the two groups, so we all went in together.

I didn’t know all of the de Camps’ group but one of them was Forrie Ackerman, the famous fan (and editor and agent). Somebody in the group mentioned having seen a porn paperback by L Sprague de Camp. “Not me,” said Sprague. General consensus at the table that it was probably by Sam Merwin, long-time editor and writer for Standard Magazines, who was now doing porn.

We ordered and ate. I have no memory of what anyone had. Sprague de Camp was probably the author on whom I had most modeled my work when I first started writing fiction, but I’d never met him before. It was wonderful to chat with him.

At the end of the meal, Forrie handed Sprague a list which he’d written on his napkin. Sprague read it out aloud. It was a series of Sprague de Camp titles slightly modified (one letter or word changed) to make them porn titles. I don’t remember a single one of them now, but they were hilarious; and Sprague laughed as hard as the rest of us.

That was far the most memorable meal I’ve ever had.

#SFWApro

We’re almost midway through July and I am swamped. Or not, depending on whom you ask. My wife is agog with all that I am doing and accomplishing, both in terms of how far I’ve come with my recovery from the after-effects of my bone marrow transplant (lo these five and a half months now), but also with regard to the outpouring of creativity and productivity in my writing. Me, all I tend to see if that there’s so much left to do and I’m not as far along as I want to be. It’s a sickness, I tell ya.

I’m sure other writers know what I’m talking about. I’ve never subscribed to the notion that “I have to write, I have no choice.” I don’t need that kind of drama. But when I make plans, when I commit myself, I want to see things through, no matter if my expectations are outrageous or improbable.

I suspect that this week’s EATING AUTHORS guest can relate. Raven Oak wrote her first novel (a 320 page Pern-inspired fantasy) at age twelve. Yeah, seriously. What were you doing at that age?

Some thirty years later she’s living in Seattle and still writing. She seems just as comfortable with Fantasy as Science Fiction, novel length work as well as short stories. When not writing, she describes herself as “a geeky, disabled ENBY who enjoys getting her game on with tabletop games, indulging in cartography and art, or staring at the ocean.” Actually, elements of that describes everyone I know in Seattle; maybe there’s something in the water.

Amaskan’s Honor, the third book in her Boahim fantasy trilogy, is due out later this year. If you start reading the first two now, you’ll be well-positioned to put in your pre-order.

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

RO: Thinking about memorable meals is a challenging topic for me as my husband and I both grew up poor — the kind of poverty where parents skip meals so that the children can eat. For us, Thanksgiving was no different from any other day meal-wise, as we didn’t have the money for anything fancier than hot dogs and mac and cheese. Be it new friends or new foods, my husband and I set out to make every Thanksgiving meaningful.

Both of us dreamed of fleeing Texas for the Pacific Northwest, an opportunity that arrived the week of Thanksgiving in 2012 by way of a new job. On Monday, we resided in Texas. Two days later, we lived in Seattle in temporary corporate housing. After the plane touched down the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, we settled into our temporary abode with zero local friends and no plans for the morrow.

With the Internet to our rescue, we placed a Thanksgiving reservation at a small, vegetarian restaurant called Café Flora. Why here? First because I’m vegetarian, and second, their employees worked the holiday on a volunteer basis only. We weren’t wrong to pick this restaurant. Our table was tucked between a window and a fireplace, giving us the perfect view. Outside, rain drizzled from gray skies, while indoors, a warm fire crackled as cheerful staff served customers a four-course meal.

The first course consisted of foraged mushroom soup, garnished with a dollop of horseradish mascarpone, and served with walnut crostini. I love mushrooms, so I was excited about the soup. I wasn’t sure about the horseradish mascarpone, but if there’s one thing Café Flora excels at, it’s their ability to blend flavors. You will enjoy tastes you never imagined you’d enjoy, as was the case with the mascarpone. Our second course was hazelnut-sage pesto, rich cornbread, butternut squash, and Honeycrisp apples in a creamy corn custard, served with Brussels sprouts, roasted parsnips, wild mushroom gravy, and apple-cranberry chutney. I’d never had chutney before, but this meal made me a life-long fan. For us, this course was the perfect replacement for turkey, stuffing, and gravy, which is saying something as my meat-eating husband lives for his traditional turkey dinner. Next, we were served green bean and fennel salad with Marcona almonds, pomegranate seeds, and herbed mustard-maple vinaigrette. Because of the sometimes drastic change in flavors, palette cleansers were provided between each course, ranging from small crackers to whipped puddings. The last course, being dessert, was a choice between vegan pumpkin pie and chocolate roulade with clove pastry cream, poached black plums, and cacao nib brittle.

I don’t like to say that I’m a picky eater, but I am. I’ve been a vegetarian for over twenty years, suffer from several food allergies (including tomatoes), and have issues with certain food textures, yet, I loved this meal. We weren’t rushed through it, despite it being a busy holiday, and it gave me an opportunity to explore some new tastes in a new city. Between the food and the ambiance, Seattle didn’t feel so lonely and new.

When people come to visit us or we meet people new to the Seattle area, we always make a point to visit Café Flora as we know it will be a warm welcome to Seattle.

#SFWApro