Guest Posts, Interviews, and Retreats

2014 has gotten off to a busy start for me. The new edition of The Roads to Baldairn Motte was officially released in e-book format on January 1, and co-authors Craig Comer, Ahimsa Kerp and I have been busily at work writing guest posts and doing interviews to help get the word out.

Our first guest piece to come out is an article at the very cool SF Signal, called "Mosaic Novels and Eschewing Traditional Narrative."


The second piece came out today—a fun interview at Dab of Darkness, where the three of us chat about influential fantasy books, the best movie adaptations, why tattoos are cooler than cos-play, and lusty pirates. Arrr!

And speaking of interviews, I had the great opportunity to interview spec-fiction author Bruce McAllister this week. He's a fascinating man and I highly recommend both Dream Baby and his newest novel, The Village Sang to the Sea. My interview should hopefully be coming out soon at Black Gate. (Update 1/26/14: interview is live here.)

The only other exciting new for me is that I went on a great weekend writing retreat with my writing group, the Biscuits. I built up a good head of steam on the Dreamwielder sequel, which has once again become untitled (I had a name, but was told by my writing group that it made them think of masturbation, which isn't what I'm going for, not with this book at least...).


-Garrett Calcaterra

The Man Behind the Podcasts: Patrick Hester

If you hang out in the online SFF community much, you’ve likely run across Patrick Hester before. The guy is nutty busy. He blogs, tweets, writes a column on graphic novels for Kirkus Reviews, and runs three podcasts, the most notable being the SF Signal podcast, which has been nominated for a Parsec award and twice nominated for a Hugo Award. In addition to all that, Patrick is an emerging SFF author himself, and—oh yeah—he works a full-time day job! I had the great pleasure of interviewing Patrick for a new article I wrote at Blackgate, but since I could only use a small portion of our conversation and Patrick had so many great things to say, I decided to run with the full interview transcript here. Enjoy!

GC: Welcome, Patrick! Could you please describe your writing career up to this point in a nutshell.

In a nutshell, I got serious about writing in 2000 and spent the rest of the decade trying to write something I felt was worthy of publishing. I'm pretty obsessive about that part and didn't begin shopping a novel series and selling short stories until 2009. I now have a couple short stories out in anthologies, and have pushed some other stuff out myself as part of a hybrid/indie model I've been developing for myself. Still trying to sell the novels, though.

GC: How do you make ends meet?

I stand on street corners with a sign that reads: "Will write for money."

Kidding… I only do that at conventions. The rest of the time,

An Annotated Bibliography for Science Fiction and Climate Change

So, I just finalized a magazine article I've been working on for the last couple of weeks called "Can SF Save the World From Climate Change?" Hopefully, the article will be coming to a science fiction magazine near you soon, but seeing as how my research led me to some great reading material on the subject, I figured it'd be helpful to share my sources here and now. Below you'll find the annotated bibliography I included with my article, everything from the most up-to-date prognosis on our planet to the newest trends in literature dealing with climate change. I'd like to give a very special thanks to Bill McKibben of 350.org for taking the time to provide me with some of these great resources and for weighing in on the idea of SF inspiring creative solutions for dealing with climate change. Likewise, I'd also like to give a special thanks to John DeNardo of SF Signal. Thanks, gentlemen!

Climate Change: The Reality of the Situation

McKibben, Bill. “The Reckoning.” Rolling Stone. Issue 1162, August 2012. The popular article that drove home the notion that we’re already experiencing the effects of global warming. In addition to laying out the

WonderCon Notes and Dreamwielder News

It's almost been a month now since Dreamwielder came out, and as you might expect, I've been a busy bee. I capped the month off yesterday w/ a quick visit to WonderCon, which is essentially ComicCon Lite. I did a quick run through of the main exhibit hall where I witnessed everything you might expect—crazy costumes, a boatload of comic books, and these cool R2 droids—and then it was off to the panel discussion I really wanted to see, "A Story is a Story." Patrick Rothfuss was one of the panelists and he was hilarious and insightful. All in all, it was a good time.

I came home to find that Dreamwielder has moved up into the top 300 bestselling ranks for Barnes & Noble Nook books. This is in large part due to the book's selection as a Nook First Look book, which I'm very proud to be included in. The boost in sales rankings means Dreamwielder is now on page 2 of the best sci-fi and fantasy novels under $4. It's pretty amazing to see my book right alongside major hits from John Scalzi, Robert Jordan, George Orwell, and Edgar Rice Burroughs.