Bubble and Squeek for 4 Dec 2013

I met Bryan at Origins 2012 and found him to be a generous, personable guy. He read the opening chapter of Operation: Montauk and I was immediately hooked. ~JLB *** My latest book, Operation: Montauk, started one night at bedtime. I was reading A Princess of Mars to my then 8 year old son at bedtime and we couldn’t get enough of it. “Just one more chapter, dad,” he’d tell me. “Just one more chapter.” It really got me thinking. I’d never really written anything for him. I couldn’t think of any fiction I’d written I’d be happy to have him read. That thought fueled me. Sitting here, reading these old pulp yarns to him, what kind of story could I tell that had all of the things we enjoyed together in a science fiction novel I’d be happy to read myself? That’s where Operation: Montauk came from. It tells...

Marsheila Rockwell and I share a TOC for the forthcoming Turning the Tied anthology that will benefit the World Literacy Foundation. Today, she tells me her thoughts on how Ozma connects her the Ojibwe.   The story I have in IAMTW’s upcoming Turning the Tied anthology is called “A Prisoner Freed in Oz” and features Ozma of Oz. For those not familiar with her story (as detailed in L. Frank Baum’s The Marvelous Land of Oz), Ozma was born a girl, but as a baby was magically transformed into a boy named Tip, and lived as a boy until her teens, when she was finally transformed back into her true self. Modern readers will no doubt see a parallel to the transgender experience, although the book was first published in 1904, before that word was coined and well before it was an acceptable experience to write about in a children’s...