This is a very brief interview – I’ll be doing a longer one with Ellen in the next few months. I wanted to catch up with her, though, about her Kickstarter campaign for Fearful Symmetries, an unthemed horror anthology she will edit, published by Chizine. As of right now, the campaign is underway and not yet fully funded. I thought it worth calling people’s attention to it because:

1) Ellen edits amazing anthologies, mixing work by seasoned pros and promising newcomers (and no, she’s never bought anything from me, and likely won’t for this anthology either. She only takes the very best).

2) This campaign was one Ellen purposely undertook the hard way. She could have partnered with a publisher and raised only the amount of money needed for author’s advances, but decided this was a poor precedent to set.

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Readers with an eye for detail will note that this interview with Ian Tregillis was conducted in July, but not posted until now, and one might wonder why I waited so long. This one took a lot of sound editing because the interview covers two topics that are so intermeshed that we jumped back and forth in the actual interview, but I’ve re-edited it so that it’s got what I hope is a more logical progression. We discuss Ian’s trilogy, The Milkweed Tryptich, which includes: Bitter Seeds, The Coldest War, and the yet to be released Necessary Evil, which I cannot recommend highly enough. And while we discuss how these books came to be, we talk at length about our time in Critical Mass.

Critical Mass is a writers group that has been around for nearly two decades. During the time I lived in New Mexico and was attending meetings, the membership included: George RR Martin, Walter Jon Williams, S.M. Stirling, Melinda Snodgrass, Victor Milan, Yvonne Coats, Sally Gwlan, Terry England, Daniel Abraham, and Ty Franck, among others who came and went. (And now readers will cease to be the least bit impressed by whom I’m able to get interviews with, I know.) When Ian joined this group, I’d already been a member for about five years and he and I shared the distinction of being the youngest and only unpublished members. We were also the only members from Los Alamos and the meetings were always in Santa Fe or Albuquerque, which meant either a one- or a two-hour commute, so we carpooled. That probably gave us way too much time to form in-jokes.

This interview isn’t with just a fantastic writer, though he is that; Ian’s also a comrade in arms with whom I shared an important period of my career. The story of how his first novel trilogy came to be is inextricably connected to his tenure in Critical Mass and the high-powered, dynamic group it was and is.

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I’ve had the privilege of knowing Melinda Snodgrass for over ten years now through the writers group, Critical Mass, which is based in our mutual home state of New Mexico.

While home this summer, I sat down with Melinda and Ian Tregillis for high tea before the opening ceremonies of the London Olympics. Okay, so we weren’t in London and we later watched the ceremonies on television, but you won’t necessarily be able to tell that from the recording.

In the course of this interview, we discuss Melinda’s long career in fiction, both as a novelist and a screenwriter.

Tune in to hear her explain, in her own words, how she decided to become a writer after an evening with Fred Saberhagen, Roger Zelazny, and others; wrote the historic Star Trek: The Next Generation episode: Measure of a Man on spec; produced her own television pilot; and wrote three series of groundbreaking novels from legal science fiction to socio-political urban fantasy.

This interview is approximately forty-four minutes long, so sit back, relax, and listen to a longtime pioneer explain how it is she always manages to find new trails to blaze.

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