Bite into Cheesy Pav Bhaji with Karen Heuler as we discuss how she found herself embraced far more by the science fiction community than the literary one, why she never consciously thought about craft until she had to teach it, the "dud" novels she wrote before she got to the good ones, the students in her writing classes who only wanted to learn how to write bestsellers, why Bartleby the Scrivener seems to have a superpower, the reason she ended up writing science fiction rather than any other genre, the way in which she considers her short stories to be kittens, which character took over control of her most recent novel, the influence of <em>The Master and Margarita</em>, our mutual dislike of writer branding, where we fall on shredding vs. saving our archives, and much more.

Slurp ramen with Mur Lafferty as we discuss the problems which come from being a discovery writer who sells a novel via a pitch,  how to play fair with readers of science fiction mysteries, the reason everyone's worried she wants to kill her agent, one major difference between Hollywood and publishing, why the character she often thinks will end up being the murderer doesn't end up being the murderer, how to deftly recap previous books in a series, whether going too weird might alienate a writer's audience, what keeps her continuing to podcast after 21 years, the importance of shrugging off rejections, and much more.

Rip into a lobster roll with Benjamin Rosenbaum as we discuss the perhaps true/perhaps whimsical reason he ended up in the science fiction field rather than literary publishing, why the story he found the most difficult to sell became his most-read work, how he gamified the submission/rejection process to get into Clarion, the way all stories set in the future are being read in translation, the reason he couldn't write for a while after his first Nebula nomination, the moral and aesthetic reasons the story of <em>Ghost and the Golem</em> ended up as a game rather than a novel, why he believes "I am very much a child of Chip Delany," the fascinating differences between the German and English versions of his novel <em>The Reckoning</em>, the intricacies of turning games into novels and novels into movies, and much more.