Ellen Datlow is one of the most award-winning, if not the most award-winning, editors in science fiction and fantasy. To date, she has won four Hugos, three Bram Stoker Awards, nine World Fantasy Awards, two International Horror Guild Awards, two Shirley Jackson Awards, and five Locus Awards.

Regular readers of Black Gate will remember her brief interview calling for backers for a Kickstarter Campaign, and readers delivered in a big way. Her campaign was funded and even reached a stretch goal, and that anthology, Fearful Symmetries will be open to submissions May 1, 2013, so if you have a horror story to submit, mark your calendar. Details will be on the Kickstarter campaign page.

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I had the privilege of meeting Sandra Tayler last year at the Nebulas and Howard online at the start of this interview. Famous as the team behind Schlock Mercenary, they’re a noteworthy example of how to build a creative business. What began as a hobby for Howard, doodling a space opera, has become the primary source of income for their family of six, and I really wanted to get a chance to talk to them about the process of moving from a corporate job to self employment. Their web comic has been nominated four times for the Hugo Award and the Taylers have branched out into print books, merchandise, and even a board game.

Howard originally did his degree in music and then went to work for Novell, the software company, for a decade. He and Sandra ran a small music production company for several years before Howard’s interest turned to drawing and comics.

Sandra earned her degree in humanities, which she says she chose, in part, because it didn’t require math. However, one of the first jobs she took on for the family business was the accounting, which she learned through her own study to do as well as a professional accountant. She also took on the book design portion of the business, again teaching herself how to use InDesign and manage the workflow.

In this interview, we discuss that whole journey, and even share a few anecdotes about our mutual faith. As coincidence would have it, all three of us are Latter-day Saints (aka Mormons), and religion also played a significant role in Howard and Sandra’s business decisions.

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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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