This week has been full of excitement, by which we mean (a) tax preparation and (b) dental work, part 3 of my root canal aka road construction in the mouth. Due to the latter, I’ve been sleeping a bit more than usual (pain meds knock me out like whoa). So I’m a bit behind on editing posts for this blog, for which apologies.

Writer interviews

Silvia Moreno Garcia, whose short stories I first encountered in the Canadian superhero anthology Masked Mosaic and the post-colonial SF collection We See a Different Frontier. I went on to enjoy her luminous short story collection Love and Other Poisons. She works the horror end of the fantasy spectrum as editor and writes the unstable boundary where the magical and the mundane mix in unpredictable ways. Her novel Signal to Noise (magic, mixtapes, and Mexico City) will be released in March 2015 and can be pre-ordered now. An excerpt is available here. I’ve just pre-ordered this book (available as both e-book and print edition), so look for a review pretty much as soon as it comes out!

Thelonius Legend, whose first novel, Sins of the Father, I reviewed here. Thelonius is a community-builder on Twitter, hosting #BlackWritersChat and #BlackComicsChat. He’s an enthusiastic participant and promoter of #blerdbookclub, which meets tomorrow at 3pm Central on Twitter to discuss Into the Go-Slow by Bridgett M. Davis, with the author present for the conversation! Next month’s selection is Half Resurrection Blues by Daniel Jose Older. Blerd Book Club is a great example of diverse literary community on Twitter; check out their feed here.

Book Reviews

In breaking news, I just signed up with Netgalley to get pre-publication copies of upcoming books of interest. I’ll be noting the source of the reading copy in upcoming reviews; if not noted, it’s from my personal library.

Love in the Time of Starships

Monday’s review will discuss family bonds, from sibling friendship and rivalry through romantic and life-partner to parent and child, in Jacqueline Koyanagi’s novel Ascension and the short story collection Fierce Family from CrossedGenres.

More Writer Tech!

This Tuesday we’ll be doing a photo shoot for the Writer Tech series, covering the technology side of the fence, with inexpensive ergonomic setups for the traveling writer (and the writer who has to improvise work space). Look for the first Technology post soon!