Join Jo Walton for a seafood lunch as we discuss how Harlan Ellison's fandom-slamming essay "Xenogenesis" caused her to miss three conventions she would otherwise have attended, why Robert Silverberg's <em>Dying Inside</em> is really a book about menopause, the reason she wishes George Eliot had written science fiction, the ways in which during her younger days she was trying to write like Poul Anderson, her technique for getting unstuck when she's lost in the middle of writing a novel, why she loathes the plotter vs. pantser dichotomy, how she developed her superstition that printing out manuscripts is bad luck, the complicated legacy of the John W. Campbell Award (which she won in 2002), how she managed to write her upcoming 116,000-word novel <em>Lent</em> in only 42 days, and much, much more.

Savor a steak dinner with comics legend Paul Levitz as we discuss why even though in a 1973 fanzine he wrote he had "no desire to make a career for myself in this industry" he's spent his life there, how wild it was the suits let kids like us run the show in the '70s, the time Marv Wolfman offered him a job over at Marvel (and why he turned it down), what he learned from editor Joe Orlando about how to get the best work out of creative people, the bizarre reason Gerry Conway's first DC Comics script took several years to get published, how he made the Legion of Super-Heroes his own, which bad writerly habits Denny O'Neil knocked out of him, the first thing you should ask an artist when you start working with them, why team books (of which he wrote so many) are easier to write, our shared love for "Mirthful" Marie Severin, how glad we are there was no such thing as social media when we got started in comics, why Roger Zelazny is his favorite science fiction writer, and much, much more.

Taste tiramisu with Vina Jie-Min Prasad as we discuss why she didn't start writing any fiction until the release of J.J. Abrams' <em>Star Trek</em> reboot, the reason food has such a prominent place in her fiction, why she might never have become a writer if the Internet hadn't existed, the lessons she took away from her fan fiction days, what she meant when she wrote in her bio that she’s "working against the world-machine,” why her multi-nominated story "A Series of Steaks" was her first submission to a speculative fiction magazine, her fascination with professional wrestling and wrestling fandom, why her story "Pistol Grip" needed a warning for sexual content but not violence (and what Pat Cadigan called her after reading that story during the Clarion workshop), the reason she likes working in the present tense, and much more.