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Exclusive Interview: “Something, Not Nothing” Author / Artist Sarah Leavitt

 

We all deal in grief in our own ways. Some people retreat into themselves, others find solace in a bottle, still others turn to their friends and loved ones for solace.

For cartoonist Sarah Leavitt, the death of her longtime partner Donimo — who had chronic health issues, and chose to end her suffering in April of 2020 — her way of dealing was to write and draw the comics she’s now collected as Something, Not Nothing: A Story Of Grief And Love (paperback, Kindle).

In the following email interview, Leavitt explains what she wrote about in these comics, why she decided to release them for all to see, and whether doing all of this helped her deal with her grief.

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Exclusive Interview: “Rumor Has It” Author Cat Rambo

 

They say the third time’s the charm.

But that isn’t the case for the characters in Rumor Has It (hardcover, Kindle, audiobook), the third book in author Cat Rambo’s Disco Space Opera series.

As Rambo explains in the following email interview about this hopepunk- and military fantasy-infused science fiction space opera story, “things there don’t go as smoothly as they hoped.”

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Exclusive Interview: “Megacosmic Rift” Author Abby Goldsmith

 

With Megacosmic Rift (paperback, Kindle, audiobook), author Abby Goldsmith is presenting the fourth entry in her six-part science fiction space fantasy series Torth.

In the following email interview, Goldsmith talks about the origins of this series, and her plans for it moving forward, while also noting that Megacosmic Rift is, “…secretly my favorite of the series.”

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Exclusive Interview: “The Royal First Irregulars” Author Marshall Ryan Maresca

 

Since kicking off The Maradaine Saga with The Thorn Of Dentonhill in 2015, author Marshall Ryan Maresca has added more than a dozen novels to this epic fantasy series.

But he’s also included some shorter stand-alone novellas as well in a subseries he calls The Maradaine Saga Shorts, which he started in 2022 with The Mystical Murders Of Yin Mara.

In the following email interview, Maresca talks about the fourth novella in The Maradaine Saga Shorts series, The Royal First Irregulars (paperback, Kindle), including what inspired and influenced this shorter story, and why you don’t have to read the 19 previous books first.

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Exclusive Interview: “A Place Between Waking And Forgetting” Author Eugen Bacon

 

For her sixth and latest collection of short stories, A Place Between Waking And Forgetting (paperback), author Eugen Bacon has assembled a collection that — as she explains in the following email interview — “largely comprises black people stories exploring affection, dread, anguish, or hope.”

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Exclusive Interview: Francis Stevens’ “The Heads Of Cerberus And Other Stories” Editor Dr. Lisa Yaszek

 

When we think about the multiverse, we often think it started with that episode of Star Trek with evil Spock (1967’s “Mirror, Mirror”).

But the writers of that episode — and everyone else who’s ever written a multiversal story — owe a debt of gratitude to Gertrude Barrows Bennett who, under her nom de plume Francis Stevens, pioneered the way of the parallel realities in some of the stories she wrote between 1917 and 1923.

Now six of those stories, including her 1919 novel The Heads Of Cerberus, are being collected in the new volume The Heads Of Cerberus And Other Stories (paperback, Kindle), which was edited by Dr. Lisa Yaszek, the Regents’ Professor of Science Fiction Studies at Georgia Tech, who also wrote the rather appropriately titled introduction, “The Mother Of Modern Genre Fiction.”

In the following email interview, Dr. Yaszek talks about the significance of these stories, as well as how she decided which to include.

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Exclusive Interview: “Alien Clay” Author Adrian Tchaikovsky

 

Stories about prisons and prisoners are not new, and that’s as true in the realm of science fiction as it is in real world fiction (and horror, and fantasy…).

But in his sci-fi prison novel Alien Clay (paperback, Kindle, audiobook), author Adrian Tchaikovsky throws in the added wrinkle of having the central prisoner be a professor and xeno-ecologist (and, uh, political dissident) while the prison happens to be a place friendly to his area of expertise.

In the following email interview, Tchaikovsky discusses where he got the idea for this story, and the idea of making the main character a man of science.

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Exclusive Interview: “A Bucket Full Of Moonlight” Author Christopher J. Burke

 

Some writers are very intentional. They sit down each day with the intent of writing a story, one they intend to be published in a magazine or journal, and then collected in a book with their name on it.

But in the following email interview about A Bucket Full Of Moonlight (paperback, Kindle), his book with his name on it, author Christopher J. Burke says these short stories actually, “…started as a writing exercise…”

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Exclusive Interview: “Divided” Author C.C. Robinson

 

People often talk about our current political and social situation as being dystopian and a time when we have never been more divided, ideologically-speaking.

But in C.C. Robinson’s The Divided Series, the world actually is dystopian, and the divisions are not just social and political, but physical as well.

In the following email interview, Robinson discusses the first installment of this dystopian Y.A. science fiction series, Divided (paperback, Kindle), as well as her plans for the other books.