Good morning! Today we are interviewing Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Matthew Warner, and Gene Doucette!

Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Silvia Moreno-Garcia is the author of the novels Signal to Noise, Certain Dark Things, The Beautiful Ones; and the science fiction novella Prime Meridian. She has also edited several anthologies, including the World Fantasy Award-winning She Walks in Shadows (a.k.a. Cthulhu’s Daughters). Gods of Jade and Shadow is her latest novel. She is a columnist for the Washington Post and a reviewer for NPR.

Visit Silvia on their Twitter and website.

What is it about Boskone that makes this the convention you choose to attend each year?

Or if this is your first Boskone, what attracted you most to Boskone this year?

I lived for a while in the Boston area but never attended any cons there, so this is a chance to hopefully see some of the old sights around the city and discover what the convention is like. Also, I don’t like very huge events so this seemed more moderately sized, ha.

What was your first book event or literary convention? Tell us about it! Perhaps you even have a photo to share?

I think it was probably the HP Lovecraft Film Festival, which takes place in Portland every year. It’s a very small event and they screen all sorts of horror short films. I’ve also attended Necronomicon, which takes place every two years in Providence, and that’s a convention focused on the Weird and has an academic panel track, which is what I find the most interesting. There’s also a masked ball. I’ve gone twice to that. I won the World Fantasy Award editing an anthology inspired by the work of Lovecraft called ‘She Walks in Shadows,’ hence the focus on this sort of stuff.

What will you be working on in 2020? Any new releases or dates that fans should be looking forward to hearing about?

My first crime novel, Untamed Shore, is out February 2020 and in June Del Rey will be releasing Mexican Gothic, which is exactly what it sounds like: a Gothic novel. A Mexican socialite travels to the countryside to visit her cousin, who has recently married, and discovers nothing as it seems in the strange, old house in the mountains where she lives. Or, like the jacket cover more elegantly puts it: “a story about an isolated mansion in 1950s Mexico—and the brave socialite drawn to its treacherous secrets.”

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Matthew Warner

Matthew Warner is a website designer working with Deena Warner to create websites for authors and publishers. Additionally, he is a SF/F/H author with seven novels and three collections, and he is a martial arts enthusiast.

Visit Matthew on their Facebook, Twitter, and website.

What is it about Boskone that makes this the convention you choose to attend each year?

Or if this is your first Boskone, what attracted you most to Boskone this year?

Deena Warner and I will be guests concerning website design and online promotion. We learned about Boskone while redesigning the NESFA website (https://www.nesfa.org/), and we were invited to attend the convention. I’m also looking forward to attending as a writer, having had a few science fiction short stories published in the small press.

Looking back, what was the first piece of work (whether it be from literature, cinema, art, music, video game, toy, or whatever it may be) that first made you love science-fiction and fantasy?

The story that really affected me was 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. Once I read the Arthur C. Clarke novel, the Stanley Kubrick film finally made sense! Back in 2001, I even corresponded a few times with ACC, via snail mail to Sri Lanka. I sent him a copy of my high school short story about him, in which a Dave Bowman-like space entity plucks ACC’s spirit from his body at the end of his natural life in order to change him into a space baby like itself. ACC kept writing back. so I guess he liked it! He was my first, favorite author, and having the privilege of swapping letters with him reinforced that with some hero-worship.

What will you be working on in 2020? Any new releases or dates that fans should be looking forward to hearing about?

My next publication will be a short story in THE BIG BOOK OF BLASPHEMY from Necro Publications, coming in 2019 or 2020. I’m also writing short stories as time allows between designing websites.

If you could bring any object or device into the real world from fiction or film, and it would work perfectly, what would you choose? Why would you choose that item?

I would bring in the time viewer technology from THE LIGHT OF OTHER DAYS by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter. The time viewer is a wormhole through which you can observe any event and location from the past. It has profound societal effects as people are forced to confront the actual origins of their religions and mankind’s evolution. I would like to see this tech enhanced to allow for interstellar exploration — a kind of perfect clairvoyance to the entire universe.

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Gene Doucette

Gene Doucette is a hybrid author, albeit in a somewhat roundabout way. From 2010 through 2014, Gene published four full-length novels (Immortal, Hellenic Immortal, Fixer, and Immortal at the Edge of the World) with a small indie publisher. Then, in 2014, Gene started self-publishing novellas that were set in the same universe as the Immortal series, at which point he was a hybrid. When the novellas proved more lucrative than the novels, Gene tried self-publishing a full novel, The Spaceship Next Door, in 2015. This went well. So well, that in 2016, Gene reacquired the rights to the earlier four novels from the publisher, and re-released them, at which point he wasn’t a hybrid any longer. Additional self-published novels followed: Immortal and the Island of Impossible Things (2016); Unfiction (2017); and The Frequency of Aliens (2017). In 2018, John Joseph Adams Books (an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) acquired the rights to The Spaceship Next Door. The reprint was published in September of that year, at which point Gene was once again a hybrid author. Since then, a number of things have happened. Gene published two more novels—Immortal From Hell at the end of 2018, and Fixer Redux in 2019—and wrote a new novel called Apocalypse Seven that he did not self-publish; it was acquired by JJA/HMH in September of 2019. Gene plans to continue writing novels for both markets (traditional and self-published) as long as that continues to make sense. His current work-in-progress is Immortal: Last Call, and a large science fiction world-building project taking place on his Patreon site.

Visit Gene on their Twitter, Facebook, and website.

What is it about Boskone that makes this the convention you choose to attend each year?

Or if this is your first Boskone, what attracted you most to Boskone this year?

Proximity!

Last year was actually only my second visit to Boskone, and my first as a panelist, which is terrible considering I live just down the road. (Hopefully, the fact that I haven’t been going to any other conventions either makes this slightly less terrible.) So: it’s definitely true that I go to Boskone each year—but it’s a short streak—and I don’t go to any other conventions, for some reason.

But what makes it special? Well, I had a fantastic time last year, and I was overjoyed to have been invited back, and that’s all pretty special.

Looking back, what was the first piece of work (whether it be from literature, cinema, art, music, video game, toy, or whatever it may be) that first made you love science-fiction and fantasy?

I’m having a hard time deciding which came first. My father’s influence on my tastes was pretty substantial, because he was a big sci-fi fan. He used to hand me books all the time, with a ‘read this, you’ll like it’ recommendation that was always correct. So, early on, science fiction was just ‘this is the kind of fiction adults read for pleasure’. From that perspective, I’d probably pick something like Foundation, Lucifer’s Hammer or Inherit the Stars. But those probably aren’t the right answers.

I started reading fantasy (which my father didn’t care for) on my own. I don’t remember how or when I started, but every family trip to the bookstore ended up with me in the fantasy section. I read a lot of epic fantasy, but the first thing that springs to mind isn’t in that category: it’s the Xanth books by Piers Anthony. The second thing is The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, although possibly because I was in seventh grade and that trilogy scarred me deeply. But those probably aren’t the right answers either.

I think the answer might have to be The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Not because I fell in love with science fiction when I read it—I was already in love with science fiction by then. No, I mention it because this was the first book that made me want to write fiction.

What will you be working on in 2020? Any new releases or dates that fans should be looking forward to hearing about?

It’s going to be an interesting year because I have no idea what I’m going to be working on, and it’s been a long time since I could say that.
As I write this, I’m finishing up Immortal: Last Call, which is the sixth book in my Immortal series. It may be the last book in that series, but even if it isn’t, I’ll be looking elsewhere for a new project in 2020.

I’d like to return to Sorrow Falls for a third book (following up on The Spaceship Next Door and The Frequency of Aliens) but right now I’m not sure what that new story would look like, so I can’t promise anything.

I’ve also been busy doing some world-building on my Patreon site. The plan there is to create a planet with its own history and what-not, so I can set a series of books on that planet. I already have the beginnings of a plot for between three and seven books, but I’ll have to do a lot more world-building before I’m ready to start writing. That work will continue into 2020, but I don’t know yet if it will produce a book in 2020.

I will be doing a lot of work on what’s coming out in 2021. I wrote a novel called Apocalypse Seven in early 2019. It was part of a plan to develop into more of a hybrid author, which in this case meant I pitched it to John Joseph Adams Books (JJA Books is a Houghton Mifflin Harcourt imprint) rather than publishing it myself. JJA/HMH acquired it, and it’ll be coming out in the Spring of 2021.

That means I’ll be spending at least part of 2020 doing the editing and promotional work that comes with a new release with a traditional publisher. What does that mean? I don’t know yet, but I’m looking forward to finding out.

Register for Boskone 57 today!