Drinking With Authors

Some interview shows sand every conversation down to a clean arc. This one leaves the seams in. Nick Savage, an author and artist himself, hosts each episode of Drinking With Authors as a late-evening hangout with a working novelist, and the first real question is always about the glass. Guests have answered with hibiscus ginger orange tea, a strong earthy black tea, cheap club-brand soda, and Prana Chai from Sydney at ten in the morning while nursing a head cold. From there the talk turns to the book. J.R. Blaine walks through Portraits of Decay, a horror novel rooted in New Orleans, and explains inventing a composite voodoo shop from three or four real ones so it could hold both the actual religion and the Hollywood version. He talks about riding the train through the bayou and picking up Cajun and Creole language to keep the setting honest. Lou Kemp lands on an elevator pitch for a steampunk adventure whose lead is an immortal magician with a weird sense of humor and a crew of players around him. That episode detours into time machines, and the answer involves an entity rather than a machine, the 1800s at sea, and a peek twenty years into the future. Linda Royal joins from Australia with A Star on the Grave and a prequel in progress, and Savage notes she is his first international guest. Cheryl Pena talks about carrying the title The City That Disappeared around since her early twenties, knowing only that she wanted an Earth city on a foreign planet, with Void Pirates coming next. Lucas Lamont returns to discuss the Chronicles of Fate series and explains omegaverse and mpreg plainly for anyone unfamiliar, noting how a targeted genre finds its readers. Janice Summers and Leslie Summers appear together for the Amulet series, then slide into a long family story about a lie involving hamburgers and fries. Savage lets those detours run. He apologizes cheerfully for how random the topic list gets, and thanks guests for keeping up with him. Craft talk and gossip sit at the same table here. The register is casual, occasionally blunt, and the questions tend to bundle several ideas before landing. Episodes are sponsored by Four Horsemen Publications, which Savage credits with a joke about otherwise talking to himself. Every installment opens with an adult-content advisory and closes the same way, with a reminder that it costs nothing to be kind.