This week Nebula and World Fantasy award winner, Premee Mohamed, joins Gary and Jonathan from somewhere in the wilds of Canada to discuss writing, reading, building a career, and her fabulous new novella, The Butcher of the Forest. We also discuss the projects Premee has planned for the rest of the year, including forthcoming new novel The Siege of Burning Grass, which you can pre-order now.
As always, we’d like to thank Premee for making time to join us, and hope you enjoy the episode.
For our second episode of 2024, we’re joined by the inimitable Kelly Link, whose forthcoming first novel The Book of Love is already receiving stellar advance reviews (including one from Gary in Locus). Kelly explains how the novel evolved, it connections to various genres from romance to supernatural horror, the importance of valuable encouragement from friends such as Holly Black and Cassandra Clare, the challenges of shifting from short fiction to a long novel, managing multiple narrative viewpoints, and maintaining the balance between the interiority of the characters and the large-scale history and spectacle of the fantasy elements. She also updates us a bit on Small Beer Press and her own plans for future work.
As always, our thanks to Kelly. We hope you enjoy the podcast!
All round good guy Scott Edelman was at the recent World Fantasy Convention, and took Gary and Jonathan out for lunch and a chat. That chat became the latest episode of Eating the Fantastic, Scott’s terrific podcast.
If you’re interested, you can hear the episode here.
And just like that, our end-of-year hiatus is done and the Coode Street Podcast is back! Gary and Jonathan return from their annual break and kick off a brand new season with discussions of recent news events in science fiction, how our thoughts about books and ideas change over time, 50th anniversaries of famous books, the delightfully happy news that Gary got married(!!!), and the sad news about the passing of several friends of the podcast, including Howard Waldrop, Terry Bisson, and Rick Bowes.
As it always is at the start of a new year, it’s great to be back. We’re filled with optimism for the year ahead and plan to get at least our scheduled 26 episodes out this year, as well as some special episodes, and to travel to Scotland for the 2024 World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow.
For now, though, we hope you enjoy the new episode!
For as long as I can remember, my birthdays have been weird, a little fraught, a little difficult. I do not really enjoy them. Maybe it’s because I was born in a leap year, or maybe I’m difficult, or maybe I don’t get why everyone wants to make a fuss. Maybe it feels a bit like a test I’m going to fail. Who knows? But something usually goes wrong, someone or someones usually go away upset, and the whole thing feels stressful.
Even when I have a good birthday — and I’ve had good ones — they are complicated. Maybe it’s because I don’t really like to celebrate the things I do or make a big point of things that put me at the centre, but birthdays sort of make me uncomfortable.
So, it’s my 60th birthday tomorrow and there was a possibility of there being a huge fuss, which I was concerned about. Mostly it made me think about how everyone else would feel, how they would react, the chance for people to be hurt or offended. And so, a year ago, for the first time I took a little control.
I booked a place for lunch — a brewpub we like that isn’t special, but we’ve been to a bunch and is fine and not too expensive — and have mostly discouraged gifts (I honestly don’t want much at this age). Keep it low profile. Don’t make a big fuss. Don’t spend a lot of money on the whole affair. Make it something we can get through without too much drama. And that’s what I’m hoping for tomorrow — not too much drama. If I get through the day with that it’ll be ok.