Eating Authors: Michael Livingston
Originally published at Lawrence M. Schoen. You can comment here or there.
November is winding down and time is speeding up. If you’re reading this on the day it posted, then I’ve just returned from a convention, the Thanksgiving holiday is just a few days off, and another convention lies just the other side of it. Despite the convention bookends, I’ll be spending this week in serious reflection of all the things I have to be thankful for this year.
Not least among them (he said in his best segueing voice) has been knowing this week’s EATING AUTHORS guest, Michael Livingston. Back in May of 2006, there was some serious discussion among members of Codex - an online community of authors - who had just returned from that year’s Nebula Awards Weekend. That conversation inspired my decision to edit a reprint anthology featuring some of the best work by Codex members and I announced my intention to the community with a call for submissions. Soon after, Mike contacted me, letting me know he’d been thinking along similar lines and I’d beaten him to the punch. My response was to offer to share the project with him, and he went on to become my co-editor for Prime Codex, as well as another project when that first book turned into my small press, Paper Golem.
Mike and I share other a few other similarities, both of us working as authors and editors and academicians, but we quickly diverge paths. He’s won the celebrated Writers of the Future contest, is an active outdoorsman, appears to have a disturbing amount of automotive knowledge (at least relative to me), and has a talent for making history live and breathe that I cannot adequately describe with a paltry word like “envy,” but there you have it.
I’m delighted to tell you that his first novel, The Shards of Heaven, comes out tomorrow from Tor Books, but even more that it’s but the first book of a trilogy. Because, as well all know, history repeats itself (sorry, I tried to edit that last bit out, and failed).
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