Eating Authors: Chris Kennedy

The last week has been a blur. You’d think that I’d be entitled to recovery time after spending the previous week hanging out with fifty Klingon speakers from around the globe, but no, too many deadlines coincided with this end of the month. Most of them were publishing related, including releasing three books: the Klingon translation of Sun Tsu’s The Art of War, the fourth volume of the novella anthology Alembical, and book two of my collaboration with Jonathan Brazee entitled Scorched Earth.

That last provides a segue to this week’s EATING AUTHORS guest, Chris Kennedy. Ever since my collaboration began, I’ve been getting educated on military SF, and as a result inviting more military SF authors to talk about there meals. And so here we are. Chris is a former naval aviator which probably goes a long way to account for the realism in even his most far future military epics. Somewhere in there he also picked up a doctorate in educational leadership and has been a school principal, which probably goes a long way to account for the realism in his fantasy novels (that’s supposed to be a joke, please laugh here; thank you). Nowadays, he’s a full-time indie author, building an empire, publishing not only his own work but that of eleven other authors as well!

He released his latest book kicks off a new series, the Worlds at War Saga. Book one, The Replicant War was released last Friday.

LMS: Welcome, Chris. So, what’s the best meal you’ve ever had?

CK: The best meal I’ve ever had? It would have to be a dinner I had in Key West, Florida, in the summer of 2005. At the time, I was an officer in the U.S. Navy, and I was stationed at a NATO command in Norfolk, Virginia. As part of my duties, I was on a NATO working group, where we helped develop policy for technology that the NATO nations were implementing. Each of the members of the group took turns hosting the quarterly working group meetings, and it was my turn. I took a poll of the members, and they decided they’d like the meeting to be held in Key West.

In addition to the “nuts and bolts” part of the meeting, including a number of face-to-face conferences where the actual policy was hammered out, at these types of meetings the host normally arranges an evening social engagement, where all the delegates to the conference can come together and get to know each other in a less-formal environment. As we were having the meeting in Key West, I put together a deep sea fishing trip one of the afternoons, and we had enough participants to fill two boats. We went out, had a great afternoon, and returned with a huge amount of fresh fish.

The rest of the attendees met us at the restaurant located at the docks, where we turned over all of our fish to the waiting server, who asked how we’d like them prepared. When told to use his best judgement, he said they’d fry certain ones, grill some of the others, and blacken the rest. They would then serve them with hush puppies and a couple of sides. We sat down with a number of pitchers of beer to await our feast–and boy, was it a feast! Everything was incredible! I’m not a big fried fish fan, but it was the best I had ever tasted, as were the rest of the dishes. Everything was perfect, the camaraderie was awesome, and the weather was perfect to sit in the open-air portion of the restaurant as the sun set.

Many friendships were made that night, which would help smooth the way forward with our meetings both then and in the future. The word “perfect” is often overused, but that evening, that day, and that meal were just that. Perfect.

#SFWApro