Bite into blueberry pancakes with Silvia Moreno-Garcia as we discuss how short stories helped her find her voice, the way a gross dream combined with a teen cemetery trip led to <em>Mexican Gothic</em>, her love for abandoned places, why she found <em>Madame Bovary</em> startling when she read it in high school, how to successfully write genres in which the reader is more aware of the tropes than the protagonist, the beauty to be found in flawed characters, how to make sure parallel storylines are equally interesting, one technique she admits doing which makes multiple types of readers angry, the difficulty of resisting branding, the reason the term magic realism is overused, and much more.