Plugs

April is no longer the cruelest month. Okay, sure, the weather (at least around here) has been crazy, with temperatures all over the place. But a week ago I heard back from my new oncologist with the results of blood work and biopsy from the end of March showing the efficacy of my bone marrow transplant could not be better. Short version: there’s no sign of bone termites in my blood! This means I move on to a maintenance regimen which will involve lower doses of Revlimid (lower relative to last fall’s chemo cycle), as well as ongoing vigilance in the form of regular blood tests and an annual bone marrow biopsy. Multiple myeloma is incurable (at least at present). My cancer will return some day. For now though, I’ve gotten a reset, and the chemo will help keep it at bay, and presumably slow its growth when it does come back.

None of which has much to do with EATING AUTHORS, other than to provide hope that I’ll be around to keep producing this blog for a good while. So, as we project into the future, let me segue into the past to tell you about this week’s guest, Melissa J. Lytton.

I first encountered Melissa nine years ago. They was doing layout and design for Hadley Rille Books, and Eric Reynolds had tasked her with my second novel, Buffalito Contingency. Email flew back and forth. We were working with some great artwork from Rachael M. Mayo, and Melissa applied her own skill and talent to lift it even higher. The end result was wonderful.

Melissa has her roots in Kansas, having done her undergrad work at K.U., where they were named the university’s first “Science Fiction Scholar” and took home the Edgar Wolfe Award in Fiction. They followed that up with an MFA from Goddard College in Vermont, and has since carved her own niche within speculative fiction addressing what they refers to as the realities of recovery (be it from addiction, trauma, or coping with disability), and all from a feminist slant. Yeah, this is not your typical, watered down stories of dragons or space ships, but rather a return to the use of the genre to make readers think.

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

MJL: Minot, North Dakota isn’t on most people’s radar, but it is known for a few things – a military base, a devastating flood, and a Wild West-style oil boom in the 2010s. The boom transformed the tiny college town into a competitive and cramped city, attracting thousands of people desperate to dig their way out of debt. People like my partner and I, whose bank accounts had slowly been bleeding out as we worked dead-end jobs in Kansas City. We leapt at the opportunity offered to us and struggled with the 14-hour workdays and San Francisco-esque rent hikes later.

During those four years of overwork, isolation, and negative-50-degree windchill, the meal that comforted me most was a bowl of hot Thai curry from Baan Rao. It was a major upgrade from the beans and rice I’d subsisted on prior to the move, but even compared to other curries, it was something special. It balanced its heat and tang without heavy amounts of sugar, something I’ve been hard-pressed to find in other restaurants, and the tofu was always perfectly cooked. My two go-to varieties were the Massaman and the red curries.

The Massaman was filling fare – chunky potatoes, carrots, and onions, swimming in a thick, spicy stew of peanuts and coconut milk. It was the perfect dinner the night the wind blew hard enough to slam a fast food sign onto the adjacent car dealership lot, Wendy’s smiling face pancaking several cars in the bitter cold.

The red was lighter, with basil, bamboo shoots, and bell peppers soaking in a thinner, but still satisfyingly rich, coconut broth. It made my nose run and burned out every tightness in my throat, be it from illness or rough emotion. Even in the middle of our hottest summer, I never turned down the chance for a bowl.

But it wasn’t just the food that made Baan Rao so special to my partner and I. As with most things, it was the people. We watched their business and family grow, cheered on as their delivery driver made his way through college, and marked every birthday and milestone with their warm-your-soul food. I celebrated my first university teaching position and the publication of my first book in that restaurant. When we missed a week due to travel, they asked after us. When we moved back to Kansas City, we said goodbye.

I miss that family-owned kindness just as much as I miss the curry. Especially now, when I’m following shelter-at-home orders and acclimating to a new course of treatment for a chronic illness, I crave human connection just as much as I crave good food. I daydream about chatting with my delivery driver and wrap myself in the sense-memory of a cleansing bowl of red curry, made just for me. Until that can be my reality again, I channel my anxieties into cooking new and comforting foods for the people I love.

After all, I know how much a good meal can mean during a tough time.

#SFWApro

I see it every year in social media, and it fills me with delight every time. It’s a simple image of two chocolate bunnies. One has a bite out of its tail and the other has had its ears eaten. The first bunny says, “my butt hurts” and the other replies “what? I can’t hear you.”

Such simple pleasures take on more meaning of late, when people are under so much stress and yet still celebrating and observing major holidays. I hope you’ve managed to find such joy as is available. It’s there if you look. And I say this as someone who has been medically sequestered since early February (longer if you count the 15 days in hospital that preceded it), and even amidst all the cancer complications I still consider myself blessed.

And sometimes too, there is joy in doing the things you always do, which for me includes this blog. The list of Hugo finalists has come out and I’ve reached out to this year’s Astounding Award nominees (well, not, as it happens, the two who have already appeared here). I hope they’ll respond soon. But that’s somewhere in the future. Here and now, let me introduce you to this week’s EATING AUTHORS guest, E. G. Bateman.

I first came to know Elaine from her presence on the LMBPN Slack channel, where she’s witty and wry and irreverent. Which is to say, she’s a hoot and a half. She’s also the author of the Faders trilogy. And she has a new book coming out on Wednesday, Legacy of the Shadow’s Blood, the first book of a new series co-authored with Michael Anderle.

Elaine lives in England and makes no apologies with regard to her fondness for chocolate. I wonder if she acquired any chocolate bunnies this past weekend and, if so, which part she bit into first.

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

EGB: Five years ago, my mum retired at 75 and planned a holiday she’d always wanted to take: A tour of Los Angeles, the Grand Canyon, and Las Vegas. Her health wasn’t great so she asked me to join her on the adventure. The tour included a sunset horse-ride, followed by dinner at the ranch.

We were collected from Caesar’s Palace and driven out to the ranch. They somehow got my arthritic, 75-year-old mother and her short-fat daughter onto horses, and we rode out for 90 minutes through the beautiful Red Rock Canyon.

Mum’s horse might have had a urinary tract infection because it peed fairly consistently throughout the ride. I’m not a horsey person but my horse and I came to an agreement whereby it would allow me to remain seated if I didn’t impose my Western imperialistic ways upon it, and just let it go wherever it wanted to. 90 minutes later, we were back at the ranch in one piece.

Mother and I supported each other and shared hip-related horror stories from the stable to the outdoor eating area. We filled our plates and staggered to a table. We enjoyed buttered corn-on-the-cob, giant baked potatoes and Jurassic-sized steaks. We chatted to our friends from the tour group, surrounded by walls peppered with tiny lights.

We moved from the chairs, out to a fire pit under the stars. We roasted marshmallows, made s’mores, and listened while two old cowboys played the guitar and sang country songs. One of them looked like John Wayne!

My mum’s no longer with us, but that meal, the horse ride and singing along under the stars in the Nevada desert, remain my fondest memory of her.

#SFWApro

This may sound odd to you, but nowadays when I’m working from home (to the extent that chemobrain allows me to write and edit) I tend to do so while lying on the couch in my office. Don’t misunderstand, I have a perfectly fine desk in my office. But my office chair sucks. I really should replace it. Just sitting at it for a few minutes gives me a back ache. And this from the guy who used to sit in a hard plastic booth at McD’s for hours at a time.

So, yeah, I lie on my couch. I balance the bottom edge of laptop on my chest, and I type at a vertical angle. I’ve done it for years. I first got into the habit of it while lying on my hammock (and this was back in the days before solid-state hard drives, so I burned out several forcing the thing to whir along at other than 90° angles). What can I say, it works for me.

Speaking of hammocks, what with all the money I’ve been saving by not going to McD’s and ordering a breakfast sandwich and soda every day (my medical convalescence/isolation runs for 100 days and started February 10th, you do the math), I’m going to buy a new one. The plan is to get one with its own stand so I can set it out on the deck and not have to go far. Spring hammock writing weather is just around the corner.

Which is no kind of segue at all to this week’s EATING AUTHORS guest, William Hatfield. Though, I get the impression that he’d enjoy a good hammock (maybe not for writing, but definitely for chillaxin’). You’ll find him down in Florida where, when not assaulting pianos in random bars, he divides his writing time between action/adventure science fiction (his Fists of Earth trilogy) and LGBTQ mysteries (the TNT series). As one does.

Bill kindly dropped in to share one of the most roundabout meals to ever grace this blog.

LMS: Welcome, Bill. Talk to me about your most memorable meal.

WH: Karen, my wife, is an environmental scientist. She worked in the water-sampling and testing industry for most of her adult life. Back around 2004, she heard about an opening at an environmental firm and water-testing laboratory in Savannah, Georgia. We decided to make a weekend getaway out of her interviewing for the job managing the lab.

We drove up there from Gainesville, Florida, and Karen did her interview, taking up most of Friday afternoon. By the time she finished, she was tired, and it was late afternoon, so we found a place that wasn’t anything special. In fact, it was so not special that I don’t even remember where it was, or what we ate. I think I had a steak.

#SFWApro

* * * Edited to add: I got it wrong below. Barbara’s mosaic novel is not forthcoming later this year, it’s been out since June of last year. Sorry about that. Or as the Klingons might say, HIvqa’ veqlargh. * * *

Today’s an exciting day. About the same time this blog posts hits the interweb, I’ll be getting ready for a bone marrow biopsy (my fourth in the past seven months or so). The purpose of this procedure is to check in on my new immune system and see if it worked and left me (at least for now) free of cancerous cells.

Naturally, I have a little anxiety about this, but only a little. Of bigger concern in our covid-19 world is that I have to go to a hospital for this and there will be sick people there. Likely not folks who knowingly have the corona virus, but who knows. I will have my N95 mask at the ready.

But let’s shift to a happier topic: As some of you will recall, last year I was among the authors invited to play in Chuck Gannon’s sandbox. The result was the anthology Lost Signals. I love reading books like this. It’s a chance to see the familiar from a number of fresh perspectives. That volume was my first opportunity to experience it for myself. And among the privileged authors whom Chuck had invited was Barbara Krasnoff, this week’s EATING AUTHORS guest.

Barbara is a past Nebula award finalist, and probably most known as a short story writer, but she’s also written YA nonfiction and pays the bills as a freelance reviewer and technical writer. Her forthcoming book, The History of Soul 2065, is a mosaic novel that follows two generations of Jewish families. It’s going to blow your mind.

If you’re within hailing distance of Philadelphia, you can see Barbara live in a few months. She’ll be one of the authors reading at Galactic Philadelphia’s June event (assuming that by then we’ve moved past the current constraints imposed by the Corona virus pandemic).

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

BK: I have always been a fan of 18th and 19th century British literature — Dickens, Austin, the Brontes, Collins — and so after I graduated college, I decided to save up my money so I could take a trip to Great Britain. I got a job as an editorial assistant at a travel magazine, lived with my parents, and saved up for two years. Then I bid farewell to my job, bought an airplane ticket, arranged to spend the first three nights at what sounded like a reasonably priced London hotel, and went off on my adventure. I was 23.

On the flight over, I met a young woman a little older than myself. We hit it off immediately, and since she didn’t have any place to stay (her boyfriend had split up with her the day before they were due to go, leaving her only with the plane ticket), we decided to share my room.

The plane landed in London early in the morning. We shared our cab with an older couple — a husband and wife — who, it turned out, had reservations at the same hotel. The woman, obviously the more outgoing of the two, chatted happily with us all the way.

The hotel turned out to be a large, run-down, old-fashioned building that looked as if it hadn’t been refurbished since Edwardian times. We were surrounded by scarred, dark wood, seats with stuffed cushions curved by years of use, and a few lamps unenthusiastically pretending to light the lobby. I wouldn’t have been surprised if we’d been greeted by a ghost; instead, the staff was made up of a group of not-quite-awake, resentful men who reluctantly showed us into what they called the tea room — equally dark, equally dusty. Our rooms, they told us, would be ready in about an hour. Maybe.

One problem: we were all famished. The food on the airplane (they were still serving meals on airplanes) had been practically inedible, and according to the staff, no restaurants in the area were open yet. The older woman waylaid one of the hotel staff and asked whether they had anything to eat. The kitchen is closed, he told us, but then admitted reluctantly that they could probably manage some sandwiches. Perfect! The woman immediately ordered enough sandwiches for all four of us.

About 15 minutes later, the man came out with a small tray of tiny finger sandwiches — thin slices of white bread with the crusts cut off, with some kind of fish paste spread so stingily that you had to squint to find it. My friend and I stared at each other, dismayed. I felt like crying. Was this my welcome to my great adventure?

Luckily, the older woman wasn’t at all fazed. “This is ridiculous,” she said loudly, apparently unashamed to act the pushy American. “We’re four hungry adults, and this won’t feed a flea. Where is your kitchen?”

I was astounded at her chutzpah, but obviously the staffer felt he wasn’t being paid enough to argue with an apparently crazy woman and led her to the kitchen. A few minutes later, the two of them came out pushing a cart laden with thick ham and cheese sandwiches and a large pot of tea.

They were the most delicious sandwiches I think I have ever eaten.

#SFWApro

All around me I see people freaking out as a part of their responsible efforts to self-isolate as they do their part to slow the spread of covid-19. As a professional extrovert, I can relate. Even though I have a very nice office here at home, historically I almost never used it. For the last few years I’d awaken around 6am, tend to my ablutions, and then drive off to park my butt at a McDonald’s and write for hours.

I knew back in mid-January that a consequence of my BMT was going to be several months of seclusion as my immune system grew back and stabilized. It wasn’t easy, but I made my peace with the knowledge there would be no restaurants, no travel, no congregating with friends. So for me, the requirements imposed by society in response to the Corona virus are old news; I’d already been doing them well before the WHO called it a pandemic. And yes, I also had long since stocked up on food, TP, and hand sanitizer.

Which is no kind of segue at all (just an update) to this week’s EATING AUTHORS guest, Roby James. Roby says she’s been writing since she was nine years old and she’s been busy. She written for television. She’s written nonfiction. She’s written blends of fantasy, romance, and historical. She’s written science fiction. She’s written for the Washington Post. She’s done desktop publishing, technical writing, and also taught fiction writing. By my count, she has ten books out, including her two volume Starfire Saga (see the covers below) and her three volume Warrior Wisewoman anthology series (Warrior Wisewoman, Warrior Wisewoman 2, and Warrior Wisewoman 3).

Roby’s most recent novel is Maelstrom , a Regency Romance.

LMS: Welcome, Roby. In these days when so many of us are staying home, we really need to read accounts of memorable meals. What’s yours?

RJ: There used to be a Moroccan restaurant in Los Angeles called Dharma Greb, and Keith and I ate there on special occasions both before and after we were married. It was one of those fancy places with a fountain in the tiled forecourt and belly dancers entertaining the diners. We loved it, and the food we liked best was the b’stiilla, which Feast Magazine called: “a spiced, savory and slightly sweet meat pie, layered with exotic flavors, encased in tender phyllo and baked to golden, buttery perfection.”

For some reason, Keith decided he wanted to make it at home.

Keith took over the cooking early in our marriage, after the third time I caused a fire in the kitchen, once by trying to boil water. I was awed by his determination to tackle something as fancy, even though he had proved himself to be a good and adventurous cook. Then we saw the recipe, and we were both taken aback. It had 25 ingredients, one of which was “10 eggs.” And since we noticed that the recipe ended with the words “Serves 12,” we picked a date and invited friends to dinner. No pressure.

We began to assemble the ingredients, both those Keith used often (chicken, eggs, butter) and those he’d never used before (dark rum, golden raisins, phyllo dough). I was intimidated, but then I wasn’t the one who was going to be responsible for the final product. He bought a spring-form pan, a piece of cookware I’d never even heard of, and I swallowed my impulse to call the friends we’d invited to tell them they were going to be the recipients of an experiment and to please be kind to my husband, no matter what.

We were planning dinner for 6:00 pm, but Keith said we should start cooking really early to make sure we were done in time. We started preparing the first step in the recipe at 10:00 am. Dinner was a half-hour late.

Keith barely sat down in any of that time. Usually, even when cooking something elaborate, there are moments when ingredients are on the stove or in the oven and the cook gets to take a bit of a break (or has plenty of sous-chefs, while Keith was stuck doing it all himself because I was the next thing to useless). With the absorbing enterprise of b’stilla, we discovered that the key – previously unnoticed – word in the recipe was “meanwhile.” It occurred over and over again, every time one thing was bubbling along, there was another thing to do. Before 2:00 in the afternoon, we discovered that the true meaning of “meanwhile” was “keep going!”

I helped with the phyllo dough, brushing on melted butter, but that and greeting our friends were my contributions to the evening.

The b’stilla was exquisite, better than it had been at Dharma Greb. But what I remember most about that meal was not the taste of the food – it was how proud I was of Keith for his ambition and his talent and the generosity with which he shared that wonderful dish with our friends.

#SFWApro

It’s fair to say that every day I’m doing a little bit better than the day before. It’s also true that the brain fog continues, and I’m still juggling each day’s few good hours to get things done. Which is why I recently put out a call asking for authors to reach out to me if they’d like to be on EATING AUTHORS. One of the writers who responded is Jean Lamb, and so here she is.

Jean lives in south-central Oregon and has retired from her DayJob, leaving her free to write. She’s also quite active in local politics and indulges in writing Harry Potter fanfic.

With regard to her own worlds, Jean thinks in terms of six book story arcs for each of her series, and moves forward with them simultaneously. Which means we can expect additional books in her Ghost Ship series, as well as her Chronicles of the Phoenix Empire some time soon. The Dragon’s Pearl is the second volume of her Tameron and the Dragon series.

LMS: Welcome, Jean. What’s your most memorable meal?

JL: Ah, the meal. My husband and I drive up to JR’s, once a restaurant in Klamath Falls, Oregon. As we enter, we are quickly seated and offered popcorn and water to tide us over while we look at the menu and our drink order goes back to the bar. We choose our customary meal, which is prime rib with baked potato and a few vegetables on the side.

We are then served onion soup, made with the drippings of Prime Rib Past and with a hard cheesy toast down in the bottom of the bowl. It’s accompanied by a small loaf each of fresh-baked bread (still warm) and a small dish of butter (not the hard little butter squares). Our drinks come then, too—my husband with a shot of Irish, neat, while I have a glass of cabernet (it doesn’t have to be a fancy one, as my palate has barely progressed beyond box wine). But the combination of wine, soup, cheesy toast, and bread and butter are almost a meal in themselves.

Oh, Leonard (a nice older gentleman) is playing the organ, softly, and will take requests for a dollar. My husband goes up and puts one and asks for “What Is A Youth?” from the Zefferelli ROMEO AND JULIET, a date movie back in the cheapo theaters when we were dating waaay back when. We pick at the salad (just served) as a place-maker while waiting for the main course.

And then it comes. The Klamath Basin is noted for its potatoes. They are grown mainly for fresh-pack and restaurant use—in fact, one article in Time Magazine decades ago said the perfect recipe for French fries started with a Klamath potato. I say this, because our platter contains a slab of prime rib cooked to perfection and almost tender enough for a fork, and a really large baked potato done just right—split open, dripping with butter, and with a small dish of butter to apply when you’ve eaten your way down to the skin. We apply ourselves to the potato first. Various condiments are available for the meat, like Worcestershire sauce, A-1, and spot of Tabasco for the adventurous.

There is silence save for the mostly quiet appreciation of the food. It soon becomes clear that we’ll be having prime rib for supper tomorrow, too, but that’s what take-out boxes are for. As the food is put into the boxes, we are offered strawberry ice cream with small peppermint candies scattered through it. Since it is well known that everyone has a small, separate stomach just for dessert, we nod our heads and enjoy it.

The check comes with a couple of wrapped peppermint candies. We pay, add a very good tip, and stagger out to the car, from thence to drive home and spend the rest of the evening like very happy beached whales.

Unfortunately, the restaurant isn’t there any more, at least not under that name. The owner was shot in a robbery by a burglar, who tried to cover his steps by setting it on fire. That actually saved the owner’s life, since the firefighters discovered him and made sure he had proper medical attention. He tried to keep the place going, but he just wasn’t able to after that. The older gentleman who played the organ had died prior to that.

So JR’s just isn’t there. The Mazatlan, which uses the same location, is a nice Mexican place, but just not what we remembered and loved.

#SFWApro

Without a doubt, the most frustrating aspect of my current convalescence is the daily reminder of how little I can actually get done. I can accept the weakness and fatigue — even when it’s to the point that the efforts involved in eating breakfast require an immediate postprandial nap — but the limitations imposed on me by brain fog (i.e., chemobrain) mean that most days I only have one or two hours when I can actually get work done. This has made it very difficult to hit deadlines and meet some professional obligations. Fortunately both my editors and my writing partners have been very understanding, more often than not responding to my apologies with notes of “Lawrence, don’t worry about it, just take care of yourself” which are both heartening and vexing because, again, I don’t want to be letting such kind people down.

Despite this, decisions I made a couple months ago (i.e., before my recent BMT) involving stream-lining my life still have me on track for my most productive year ever, recent medical adventures and the next few months of convalescence notwithstanding. We’ll see if it all works out as planned. Still, this has given me a greater appreciation for other authors who manage to do all the things, which is actually a pretty good segue to this week’s EATING AUTHORS guest, World Fantasy Award-winner C.S.E. Cooney.

In addition to her extensive (and award-winning) writing credits, Claire is a formidable narrator, with more than 100 audiobooks to her credit. She’s also a singer/songwriter and has produced three albums (Alecto! Alecto!, Headless Bride, and Corbeau Blanc, Corbeau Noir) under the name Brimstone Rhine.

Her new short novel, The Twice-Drowned Saint: Being a Tale of Fabulous Gelethel, the Invisible Wonders Who Rule There, and the Apostates Who Try to Escape Its Walls, will be out soon as part of The Sinister Quartet, a collection of long-form fictions by four different authors, coming from Mythic Delirium. I wish I had a link for you, because I think you’re going to want to pick up a copy.

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

CSEC: Life is long and banquets there are aplenty, and since I’m what my best friend calls “food-motivated,” many of my most extravagant celebrations center around a feast. There was the dinner we ate at Atera — a two star Michelin restaurant — two days before our wedding. There was the time I made all my friends dress up as ghost psychics, and we dined on Bailey’s chocolate cake before playing the game Mysterium. But most recently, there was the VR dinner at the James Beard House.

The occasion was, ostensibly, my birthday. My husband Carlos was going to take me to eat some fancy fine Italian food somewhere in New York City. But one day at our writing group, author Joel Derfner announced that he would soon be going to the Aerobanquets RMX, a “virtual and augmented reality art and dining experience in seven bites.” I saw the look on Carlos’s face — totally shining — and I said, “I want to go there for my birthday instead.”

We arrived at the James Beard House at about a quarter till one on a Sunday, eager to “eat a Dali painting,” as I think Joel had described it. We were given a choice of either champagne or seltzer in the lobby, and the hostess passed around what she called “the pedestal” or sometimes “the chalice.”

It was a small object, the size of a tea cup, but velveted and flat on top. It had a little lip or divot on one end, and on the opposite side of that, a button such as one might find on a video game controller. She explained that while we had the VR headset on, we would see, at some point in each of the seven scenes we would be experiencing, something like this pedestal/chalice shape come floating toward us. We were to put our hands out and reach for it. We could orient our mouths to the lip by feeling where the button was on the back; the lip was always going to be opposite the button.

When the other couple who had signed up for our same experience slot arrived (there were four seats open every hour or so), we were given a short tour of celebrated chef James Beard’s house — which was also a school for chefs, and is now his foundation. Up three flights of stairs we trundled, and then into a small, unprepossessing room. We sat in chairs that swiveled. Each of us was given a different VR headset, which was hooked up to a different operating system. We’d all be seeing essentially the same scenes play out, but we could go through the scenes at our own pace.

So much of that experience seems like a dream now. The vines and flowers unfurling all around me. The nebulae burning under my feet while a moon burned like a spotlight above me. The meat instruments that played discordant notes when we reached out to touch them: a ham hock guitar, a side-of-beef piano. My own hands — which were not at all like my hands — patterned in leaves or spots, reaching to pull the pedestal/chalice with its bite-sized bolus of food toward me, while the narrator said something calm about “the taste of your first regret.” The spices I associate with Indian cuisine — rose and pistachio and cardamom — and the different textural layers of the food: cool, warm, crunchy, silky, chewy, growing more complex as I chomped.

And last of all, a scene of sinking into a milk-white sea, or perhaps a cloud bank, while fallen colossi loomed all around me. All of us were sinking together, the giants and I, as that white wave rose up. I did not feel like I was drowning; it felt peaceful. But others confessed later to being uneasy, even mildly panicked. My husband was curious; he stood up from his chair to see if he could keep his chin above the milky wave. He did, but to do so meant he entered a space of blackness — where the credits came from as the show ended.

It wasn’t — in the end — quite as much like eating a Dali painting as I had hoped. But it was by far the weirdest, wildest, most wonderlandish meal I have ever eaten. And I’d do it again and bring all my friends — so long as VR was pleasurable, and not disorienting, to their senses.

#SFWApro

You will probably not be surprised to learn that pretty much all the news here involves my ongoing convalescence. Much of the past weak was spent in the pits of weakness and fatigue and brain fog. That last piece is the worst because I’m coherent enough to know I’m stupid and to feel frustrated about all the things I cannot manage to do. I joked to my wife one morning that my big achievement for the day was gazing down at my feet and announcing, “Look, I have both a right foot and a left one.”

But things are slowly improving and I am developing strategies (i.e., layered napping) which helps, and too my bloodwork came back a couple days ago and my numbers were outstanding. So, though it may take me months yet, I think I’ve got this.

Regrettably, I have yet to recover my ability to create graceful segues to introduce EATING AUTHORS guests. This week we have Parker Peevyhouse, who writes SF thrillers for young adults. I confess to being mystified by the marketing category, but that’s because I’m old enough to remember going to the library and having to sneak from the children’s side of the building into the adult fiction stacks at the other end. But times change, and I’m delighted that booksellers and libraries can now openly lure teens to reading, and Parker’s work is ensuring they will grow up to be addicts. She’s doing all other SF authors a great service. Give her work a try with either of the novels shown below, or start with Where Futures End, her collection of five interconnected novellas.

LMS: Welcome, Parker. Did I mention I used to go to school in Santa Cruz? But enough about me, what’s your most memorable meal?

PP: My first job was as a food server at a chain restaurant where you’ve probably eaten baby back ribs. It’s also the place I ate my most memorable meal, an ice cream pie I was forbidden to sell.

The back of the restaurant still lives in my memory: the greasy russet tiles that had to be swept clean of tortilla chips every ten minutes, the gleaming steel pass lined with plastic baskets of sharp-scented buffalo wings. I dreaded the moments when the line cooks would squirt oily water over skillets of fajitas to make them sizzle for my waiting customers—those skillets left burns all down my right arm, some so deep they had to be treated with silver nitrate.

In that steam-shrouded place, quick-moving food servers could make forbidden snacks by piling shredded cheese and pico de gallo from the soup station onto a tortilla, and then searing the whole thing between the hot plates of the tortilla warmer. Some of us would also sneak extra food for our cash-strapped school friends: cups of broccoli soup from the pass, baskets of oily chips from the warmer drawer… and ice cream pie from the walk-in freezer.

We were forbidden to serve the ice cream pie to paying customers. The ice cream had a habit of melting and re-freezing into a mishappen mess. Customers would complain. So the word came from corporate: don’t serve the pie, no matter how much of it you have stocked in the freezer. But also—don’t throw the pie out.

I’m not sure why we weren’t allowed to throw it out. Maybe the company needed time to decide whether they might solve the melting ice cream problem. But I liked to imagine more ridiculous justifications. In my 2016 novel, Where Futures End, a similar restaurant requires non-expired food to be donated instead of trashed if it can’t be served for aesthetic reasons. But in a confused attempt at social consciousness, it also forbids the donating of high-caloric food. The result is a freezer full of ice cream nuggets that everyone wants but no one can have.

Since I could neither serve nor toss the stack of pies wobbling in our walk-in, I decided to eat them. I’d pop into the freezer between orders and sneak ice cream and cookie crust. My friends weren’t happy—they wanted pie too, and they couldn’t understand why I was the only person in the whole restaurant who could eat it. So I finally broke down. I brought out an entire pie, a mountain of vanilla and toffee ice cream on a chocolate cookie crust, and shared a forbidden meal with my friends. “I can’t charge you for this,” I told them. “It’s against the rules. But you better leave me a good tip.”

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