All Things Alice: Interview with Jendia Gammon

As an amateur scholar and die-hard enthusiast of everything to do with Alice in Wonderland, I have launched a podcast that takes on Alice’s everlasting influence on pop culture. As an author who draws on Lewis Carroll’s iconic masterpiece for my Looking Glass Wars universe, I’m well acquainted with the process of dipping into Wonderland for inspiration.

The journey has brought me into contact with a fantastic community of artists and creators from all walks of life—and this podcast will be the platform where we come together to answer the fascinating question: “What is it about Alice?”

For this episode, it was my great pleasure to have Jendia Gammon join me as my guest! Read on to explore our conversation and check out the whole series on your favorite podcasting platform to listen to the full interview. For the full transcript with exclusive content, please join our private Circle community.

A group of books by Jendia Gammon on a blue background. The Questrison Saga's "Accretion Book Three", The Shadow Galaxy and The Inn at Amethyst Lantern. This image is the title card for the All Things Alice Podcast by Frank Beddor, where he interviews Jendia Gammon, which is a pen name for Dianne Dotson.

I need to clarify something. Dianne Dotson, is that your real name?

I have two pen names. The self-published pen name is J. Dianne Dotson and I also have Jendia Gammon. Jendia is a combination of Jennifer and Dianne and Gammon is my maiden name. I had self-published under J. Dianne Dotson and I had a couple of book deals before I got an agent. Those books are out this year, The Shadow Galaxy and The Inn at the Amethyst Lantern, and are under J. Dianne Dotson but that will not be my name going forward. I have a lot of projects already out under Jendia Gammon. I have a story, “Copper”, in the latest Interzone Magazine, which is a wonderful magazine that everybody should subscribe to. I have stories in multiple anthologies coming out as well as magazines. My traditional pen name going forward is Jendia Gammon and I won’t be going back to Datson. But with the new release coming out, you can still find me under that name.

Let’s talk about the theory behind a pen name because it’s hard to get one’s name out there ever, let alone with multiple names. If you’re a super-famous writer, sometimes that happens, but what’s the thinking for you in using these pen names?

Doing the split from indie publishing to traditional is one factor, but it isn’t the only one. I have lost both my parents. My mother passed away earlier this year and I really wanted to dig back into my heritage, the Gammon family from East Tennessee with our Irish ancestry. In a way, I’m honoring my parents and their memories. I wouldn’t be the writer I am without my dad, who was a storyteller and indie-published author. My mother worked in publishing and it was sort of destiny that I would not only become a writer but I would also eventually form my own publishing company, which I am doing with my husband, Gareth L. Powell.

I really wanted to distinguish between those two phases of my life. I self-published The Questrison Saga and then got a couple of deals under my belt before moving forward with traditional publishing. I have books on submission right now with my agent, one of which is a high-fantasy dragon and the other is a sci-fi horror thriller. I’m also working on a very campy, Southern California-based horror novel due in December which is very raw and funny. I’m writing in multiple genres for multiple age groups.

For my purposes, changing my pen name was a split of meaningful life moments, and returning to my heritage and Jendia was an old nickname. I liked it for SEO purposes for the web because Jendia is more unique. I’m a content manager for a biotech career-related website so that’s at the forefront of a lot of my thinking. Also, I know a couple of British authors who have three pen names. One of them is John Courtney Greenwood. Then there’s the author Stark Holborn, who writes science fiction under that name but uses two entirely different names for two other types of books, one of which is historical fiction, and the other is for cozy mystery. I think it’s important that if you’re going to write something wildly different from your primary genre, you might want to consider a different pen name because you develop a certain persona for each one. But then again, I also do feel strongly that as Jendia Gammon, I want to be like Neil Gaiman and Stephen King, and write everything I feel like writing. I do feel though, that science fiction, fantasy, and horror are my brand. That is the Jendia Gammon brand.

Do you think of being gender-neutral when you’re picking a pen name? I’ve noticed some authors do that because they’re writing a lot of characters who are not their gender, or they’re writing in a sci-fi space that is historically prejudiced against certain genders.

I think traditionally, in the 19th century into the early 20th century, quite often you would have initials only if it was a woman writer so they could pretend to be a male writer because you weren’t given the same space. Although Mary Shelley, bless her, bucked the trend on that one, and without her, we wouldn’t have modern science fiction as we have it, and maybe not horror either. But then I think of one of my favorite authors, L.M. Montgomery. She didn’t have to be L.M., she could have been Lucy Montgomery. But, in the early 1900s perhaps it was more favorable for her and maybe she actually liked that. But I do feel that it isn’t necessary to do that today. I view the The Questrison Saga as a success and I was J. Dianne. The reason I picked J. Dianne was because I love L. Frank Baum.

Cartoon book pencil drawing from L. Frank Baum's "The Wizard of Oz", with Dorothy comforting the cowardly Lion, while two Scarecrows and Toto, the dog look on.

One of my favorites.

Those original Oz books had a huge influence on me and my wacky worlds. Lewis Carroll and Alice in Wonderland did as well. Those two definitely shaped me and my early reading history particularly.

Tell me about Alice and your early influences. Was it something that your parents introduced to you? They seem to have been very influential. I can feel how important that upbringing and your parents’ influences have been on you and how you want to honor that. You also seem to have really honored it in your work ethic and in the stories you’re telling.

Thank you. They were quite different people. I’m much more my father’s daughter, but at the same time, I certainly have my mother’s pragmatism. My father was the dreamer, the journeyman, and the writer. My mother was down to earth. She was the editor, the lineup type operator.

A lot of the mythology that I read was directly due to Dad’s love for mythology. But then again, while I don’t have the same attention to detail that my mother had, I know how important it is and I’m looking at everything that way. But they didn’t introduce Alice to me. My sister did. I’m the baby by almost 10 years. I had three older siblings who were teenagers starting in the 70s, so it was a hot mess when I was born. But my sister would read to me when I was a little bitty thing and she read Alice in Wonderland to me many times. I had crazy white blond hair so instantly I was like, “Oh, I’m obviously Alice.” It was also important for me to have adventures on my own, separate from these legendary older siblings, who are all dynamos in completely different ways. Of course, I identify with Alice in that regard, having your own adventures and being independent was huge to me. I loved Alice for that, and I loved the dreamlike and strange qualities of Wonderland and the Looking-glass world. I actually really love looking Through the Looking Glass. When I was in sixth grade, I performed “The Jabberwocky” in front of the entire class.

I was a super nerd and to be up in front of these kids and just be full of gusto was just absolutely horrifying but empowering at the same time because I was doing something related to something I loved. But that was absolutely the first moment of like, being a true dramatic person.

You talked about the whimsy of Alice in Wonderland, but a lot of people interpret the story as horror, because of what happens with Alice. You have the same interpretation I have which is, that there are all these creatures and there’s all this chaos but in the middle of it, Alice is keeping her head, as long as the Red Queen is not around. I did not read it as horror yet quite a few people have, what do you make of that?

The thing about Alice in both stories is that she’s finding out about herself and that can be very scary, no matter your age. Using the mirror, as a comparison, she’s looking in a mirror and reflecting upon herself. That’s her looking glass. A reader coming into that may not be quite ready to look in the mirror. There might be monsters on the other side of that glass that they haven’t slain yet or dealt with or escaped. I think that’s where the horror interpretation is coming from. How comfortable are you with yourself and your journey? Some of it is frightening on paper. The Jabberwocky is quite terrifying. You would not want to run into that fella in a dark alley. But at the same time, knowing there’s this allegory within the journey is what matters more to me. But not everybody is comfortable going into that space.

The journey of self-discovery in the story is really powerful and has always resonated with me.

It’s probably because of Alice that I channel that in a lot of my characters, who are going through a journey of self-discovery, at times, it is terrifying, and other times, it’s wonderful in ways they didn’t anticipate. Like in The Inn at the Amethyst Lantern, the main character has to become a leader. She’s a 14-year-old in this futuristic lunar punk society that is faced with a threat from our time that she has no point of reference for and she’s got to rally not only herself and her own insecurities, but an entire team of teenagers to stop another apocalypse.

Book Cover for "The Inn at the Amethyst Lantern" by J. Dianne Dotson, featuring a young girl, shrouded in purple light from the lighthouse, and holding a teal, aquamarine colored moth, with her back turned to the audience.

Do you think that’s why Alice has resonated for over 150 years? Thematically it is very adaptable to a new era and we keep re-inventing it to reflect what’s going on right now. For me, the world is so upside down and so chaotic. Facts are not facts and logic is not logic. So the illogical world of Wonderland and the adventure that Alice is on feels exactly like what’s going on.

Looking-glass too, because I’ve heard the phrase so many times in the past few years, “We’re really through the looking-glass now.” With any fracture point in human history where there’s been a massive event, such as a World War, political crisis, or pandemic, we have the instant reaction of wanting to cling to something familiar. But then we look at that thing and we suddenly see a new meaning in it. We see ourselves in it again, but not as children. Maybe we could see ourselves as children starting over again, because we’ve had to reboot and reboot and reboot, again through major loss on a big scale. A lot of people don’t want to look at it like that. They want to go back to their regular world, they don’t want to be in this weird new world again. Then other people thought their old world was crap and they want to be in Wonderland or make their own Wonderland. I think some people have really tapped into that, which is what I’ve been doing with my stories. We just were attaching meaning because we feel like we’re dangling so we need to grab for something. Finding all these different interpretations fascinates me but it makes sense in the context that we’re just trying to figure this out as a society and as individuals.

You hear Winter Wonderland a lot because it represents a magical, happy, beautiful cloud, the idea of escaping into a better place. You hear “down the rabbit hole” and “we’re all mad here all the time.” Interestingly, it finds its way into politics and pop culture. Alice seems to be a muse for us creators and writers. Mine’s pretty direct but in all the people I’ve interviewed, they’re often talking about just what you suggested, a time in your life where you were introduced to it and you took that inspiration, that theme and you put it into one of your stories.

Sometimes that wasn’t even intentional. Sometimes I look back and go, “Oh, my God, it’s obvious now.” There’s this sibling relationship. There’s this girl who has to go into an unprecedented situation with a lot of monsters and weird stuff. The line is right there. That template of having that at a young age is so interesting. I wonder what it must be like as an adult to discover Wonderland. It would be amazing to get that perspective.

I think people pull this collective history of Alice into their thinking, so you can’t separate all these years of influence. So usually people are, they’re trying to figure out the influence. Is it really the original? Or is it the Jefferson Airplane song plus the Beatles song plus The Matrix? It’s a tapestry.

You hear the phrase “red-pilled” all the time, right?

And it was “eat me” and “drink me” in the Lewis Carroll stories. So it’s gonna continue to morph and influence culture. You talked about The Wizard of Oz and Gregory Maguire’s Wicked was a big deal. I called Gregory when I started writing The Looking Glass Wars for advice and he told me to do a musical. Because, with the first novel, he had sold about 500,000 books, which wasn’t anything compared to what happened with the musical.

That was a true phenomenon. It’s interesting to think about how stories eventually become myths. It’s quite possible that Alice is starting to enter mythology, as is Dorothy. These are new myths, as is Luke Skywalker. These are our new fairy tales versus ones that are ancient. So, these become the new myths and the new fairy tales.

I’m glad you brought that up because I’m interested in myth and folklore in storytelling and I do like that idea of a new myth. One of the archetypes is obviously good and evil. But lately, I’ve been thinking about what people are looking for thematically. Yes, good and evil. But it seems to me that people are wondering what’s real. Because the world seems so fake and when facts are not facts, then what do you have to hold on to? What do you think?

I’ve seen both things going on, where people go back, but then it’s all fantasy because nostalgia tricks us. It’s the pill we take when we choose to not want to believe reality. Our own stream of reality, what we’ve been through in our lives and culture is itself a constantly evolving and nebulous thing. If we stopped the present, what are we now? But we often think in terms of, “Oh, that was a better time”. But if you really were there and you experienced it, was it really a better time? It’s a matter of kind of collectively wanting to forget, wanting to toss the sting and sip the honey. So there’s that coming into play. Now we have the “wonderful” A.I. coming on. Say nothing of taking some of our writers and artists’ jobs. But, like in Blade Runner, we’re very much questioning what makes us human. How do we retain our humanity in a world in which AI is increasingly prevalent? Technology has unified us in ways that would seem miraculous, but at the same time, it’s easier to split off into our own little pockets.

You have a deep background in science, you write science articles, and you work for a biotech company. You write space operas, I think of Star Wars or Dune, which is one of my favorites.

So how do you take that technology and cultural relevance and craft your worlds?

Book cover for "The Shadow Galaxy - A collection of short stories and poetry" by J. Dianne Dotson. This cover is a black and white mountain valley, with a dark red, starry sky, where the galaxy above looks like a human eye.

The Shadow Galaxy is a collection of short stories and poetry and there are sci-fi, fantasy, horror, and some fairy tales, set in Appalachia. One in particular is relevant right now, and it’s called “Roder” and it’s a heartbreaker story. It involves a human woman who discovers a robot she falls in love with, like the movie Her. But we become attached to these artificial people and science fiction, it’s often a trope, but it’s understanding our own humanity by considering the other of the artificial person. I think that building from the grounding of, you always want to appeal to someone’s humanity, no matter if you’re writing something that’s set in deep space, or underground in a cave, or in some strange realm that appears on a foggy night. But you also have to introduce that feeling of uncertainty and to do that you need to think ahead in terms of, what if this fantastic thing happened? Or what if this really terrible thing happened? How do we react? I always like to frame the science in everything that I write, because I like to insert ecology in fantasy, science fiction, and horror. In fact, in the dragon book that’s on submission right now, there’s a lot of ecology to it and there’s a lot of environmental interaction between different species. Frank Herbert’s Dune is a good example of using ecology. I don’t always stick to what I know but I like a grounding, just so a reader can connect with something that exists in the real world, even if they’re being transported to another place.

I like how you mix science fiction with fantasy. But how would you describe the difference between high fantasy and sci-fi? Obviously, there’s all the space and alien components but from a world-building perspective, in terms of whether it’s creating the magic or the technology behind the weapons or the science, what’s in your head? Do you do a lot of research?

It depends on how grounded you want to be. For example, I took a long sword class because there was a character who has to learn how to wield a sword and I needed to know how that feels and what you would need to do. So, there is research that you need to do if you’re doing a sword and sorcery story but the technology in most fantasy realms is magic. That is the main form of technology but you do have other forms of tech. You have swords and staffs and things like that. It depends on what level you want to play in. Is it a magic sword or just a regular sword?

A lot of times people like to say that magic is technology we haven’t invented yet, and there’s something to that. We’re often inspired by these fantastical stories to come up with something that would have seemed like magic 100-200 years ago. That was one thing that I thought Star Trek did really well because on the face of it, it seems like science fiction but they were doing some pretty fantastical things. But it’s nice to come around the world thinking that way. I’ve got technology and physics, or the skewering of physics depending on how hard sci-fi it is, versus introducing any fantasy element into the sci-fi. The spectrum of strictly adhering to science as we know it, versus projecting something that could be that we just don’t know yet.

Because I have a science background, I have a bias toward wanting to get more of that into my work no matter what genre it is. However, my husband, Gareth L. Powell, does not have a science background, and he writes science fiction novels so you can do some research. I do encourage it because scientists love it when you ask. For the thriller I just recently finished, I had to talk to somebody at NASA about something they’ve been working on because I needed to have a real-world parallel or at least a comparison and I wanted to make sure that I had some things right. So they don’t mind at all, reach out to them. It depends on your level because I do know some sci-fi writers who have never done the research and that’s gutsy. I wouldn’t be able to do that. But at the same time, they might be coming up with things that project their other perspective onto something that could potentially help us in the future that scientists could then take.

What about the characters’ dialogue? If it’s a sci-fi story and you’re dealing with scientific topics or eccentric things that are going on, you’re going to be putting words in their mouth. Then in a fantasy world, it could be a language or terminology that you completely invent. But at the heart of it, how do you pierce the humanity in the magic and the technology? That’s what people really care about in the melodrama of the space opera.

I like to tap into characters who are trying to figure out who the heck they are. So I keep going back to that well and asking each character who they are. A friend of mine will set up a fake interview of each of his characters to ask them what their favorite things are, and what scares them. I think that’s a brilliant idea for building characters because it really grounds them as part of the world, that is world building is making a great character. You could have the most incredible setting out in the stars or another fantasy realm, but it does not matter if the characters don’t capture the imagination. You have to add that human element and the interactions with other species or people depending on your worlds and give tension or distrust, or friendship or love, or whatever it is. It’s so incredibly crucial to any story that you write.

That’s what we humans crave. That’s what we relate to.

We met in 2017. We talked on the phone and I don’t recall how we met each other but I do recall you asking for advice. I want to tell my listeners that as a writer who’s been published and who traveled a lot, I have a lot of aspiring writers who’ve asked me for advice and told me about their books. And I never heard from them again. But for me to see your books start to come out over the years and you build up your portfolio of work and your readers has been really quite delightful and a joy. So, what were those words of wisdom that I shared that motivated you to this deep level of writing?

Image of all 4 book covers for the "Questrison Saga", featuring fantasy and sci-fi imagery of grand spaceships and space ports in other galaxies. Heliopause, Ephemeris, Accretion, Luminiferous are each of the 4 book titles.

I had written the bones of The Questrison Saga when I was a young teen. After years of tumult in moves and then becoming a parent, I finally came back to it and finished it. But then I was floundering. What do I do with this thing? How do I get this out there? So then a mutual friend of ours was like, “Oh, you might want to talk to Frank Beddor.”

I had no idea of your history at all, so here we are having this conversation, and you said, “Tell me about Heliopause.” So I just tell you about it and you go, “That’s the best verbal pitch I’ve ever heard.” I was like, “Oh, cool.” But then I realized, “Oh my God, he’s a producer. He hears pitches all the time.” So that was a real confidence boost. I felt boosted anyway, but then coming back around and realizing that you hear pitches all the time, it was really wonderful. I really thank you for that because it did give me confidence and you read it in a very rough state. You encouraged me. You said there was a good story here and to get it polished and get it out there.

I originally wanted to self-publish because I knew we were at a state in which we could have a very high-quality self-published book and I knew nobody would want the saga the way I wanted it. But I did, after much cajoling, go through the court process and became close with several agents. But finally, I decided, “Not with this series. This is too close to me. I have to do this my way.” And I didn’t realize how much work that would mean and how much self-promotion but I’m glad that I did it because I got myself out there. You have to get yourself out there for readers to find your work if you don’t have a big publishing house behind you. So it was a lot of work and very satisfying. It taught me a lot about publishing which will be essential in starting my own imprint.

But you gave me such a great push at the right time and I thank you forever for that. Then we reconnected in 2019 when I was attempting to get some work in Hollywood and, at that time, we were talking about show bibles and that was good practice to come up with those things. It helped me think differently about making characters and describing them. That became relevant for making synopses for being on submission with an agent.

The process of creating a synopsis and a mini-bible for a TV show is almost exactly the same for a book and a publisher or an agent. There are all these things that they want you to do on spec to get their attention. I’m happy I steered you and was one of the many people influencing your success.

But let’s go back to that first book, Heliopause. What were the choices in terms of being an independent publisher of your own books? I was really struck by the quality of your cover and the way that you dealt with the fonts and the title. These are really delicate, important issues that help people choose your book and publishers get really anal about their influence on that because I ended up using a lot of the artwork that I had commissioned and Penguin had to license the art for me to put it on my cover. But I was so thrilled because I love the artwork and I thought it was better than anything they could have come up with. But they’re also really good at it and I’ve made a few bad mistakes by trying to influence covers, especially in Germany, where I saw their artwork and I told them that can’t be the best artwork you could come up with but turns out, that’s what Germans like.

Fantastic science fiction painting of a very large space port, with spaceships docking and taking off, hovering in orbit over a blue planet.

Tapping into culture is a really good point and something that I have to consider when I start publishing other authors’ books. For my purposes, I already had a very defined sense of what I wanted. I wanted to give a nod to Vincent Di Fate and John Berkey, classic sci-fi covers that looked painted. I didn’t want them to look too CGI. I wanted a classic look that was really vivid and gorgeous. The artist Leon Tukkar did the front and the back of these paperbacks. It’s a wonderful spread of art.

What you want is you want it to look like something you would go and pick off the shelf at a bookstore. You want it to look as though someone else did it. I see a lot of people started to use AI art, which I’m not fond of, for multiple reasons, because I like to pay artists for their work.

Was it digital only to start with or did you print them as well?

I did paperback and ebook through IngramSpark Lightning Source because they have global distribution and it’s print on demand for the paperbacks, so it’s freshly printed and shipped off from the distributor directly each time it’s ordered. Then they upload multiple forms of ebooks, everything from Kobo to Kindle and all the other formats to all the major booksellers. It’s slick. Really straightforward and simple.

It’s so satisfying to have the finished book and, now for you, the finished series. How was this experience? Was it primarily for the love of the series, the creative part of it? Or were you able to make enough money that you would do it again? Or is that why you’re going to a publisher now? Tell me about your thinking and the financial realities of something like this.

The financial reality is that you will spend a lot more doing this than you would have imagined unless you’re only doing ebooks, and the royalties are better if it’s an ebook only because you don’t have to deal with the supply of paper and that sort of thing. All the costs that go into making a physical book have jumped significantly in the past couple of years. The benefit of self-publishing is that you do have complete creative control and that’s highly appealing. I don’t just slap stuff up, though. I had two editors and I paid them, which is not cheap either. I think it is the most worthy expense aside from the cover art because you need somebody to read through it and offer advice and copy edits, and then you need a proofreader.

Then beta readers for sure. Because they’re gonna find something that none of the rest of us found because we all have looked at it too many times. Usually, I like to send them the manuscript pretty early, once I have edited it a few times and read through it. You need BETA readers because when you’re doing it yourself, you don’t have this whole team working on getting these books out. It’s only you and you need to invest in the right people to help you make these books the best they can be because people will absolutely respond if it’s poorly made or if there are glaring errors.

Now that you have a traditional publisher, having that experience, will you ever go back to self-publishing?

That’s a good question, and a little complex, considering I’m starting my own imprint, which is primarily meant to publish other authors but theoretically I could put my own book out on my own imprint at some point.

The Shadow Galaxy came out on March 3 and was published by Trepidatio, which is an imprint of JournalStone and then The Inn at the Amethyst Lantern is out from Android Press. Lantern is my first young adult novel and it’s sci-fi fantasy mixed and Shadow Galaxies is cross-genre. I have a short story collection related to The Questrison Saga. I need to decide if I want to self-publish but to be honest with you, the goal now, having an agent, is to get a pretty big publishing deal and get global reach because it’s just a different world. I don’t have a publicity team and even if I did, it wouldn’t match Big Five publishing. It depends on what you want to do. If you’re doing this just for the joy of it and you want to do the small circuit and go to all the cons and have a table, there’s beauty in that. You can sell a decent amount but you will be capped in your potential for the audience and potential for income, and, of course, you have your own expenses to add in. So you have to think about that. Also, you’re more likely with traditional publishing to have someone discover it and perhaps option it.

FB You have a big sales team that visits the independent bookstores regularly and they talk up the book. But even that pales in comparison to what they ask the author to do in terms of building a community of readers and fans, whether it’s through schools, comic cons, or speaking engagements. That is really the most crucial thing. Because once you have that community, and those early adopters and those people that really love your work, you already have your foot soldiers when you release a new book. They’re your beta readers. They’re out there spreading the gospel.

Image of J. Dianne Dotson, or Jendia Gammon sitting in a book store at a book signing event.

That’s something that you can do even if you’re not like me. I’m an extrovert writer but I know a lot of writers are introverts as well and there are still avenues to build that community. What’s really interesting to me is people discovered The Questrison Sage in multiple ways. I had some discover me at a table at a con and just literally selling, throwing out my pitch every other minute. You have to have that sales pitch down.

How did you come to rent a space or a table at a ComiCon? Who inspired that? Because that’s something that I did in 2005 and I was blown away by how many people wanted to buy books because I thought it was a comic book convention only. People loved reading and I thought, “This is the place to launch novels. I don’t know why all the publishers aren’t there.” How did you realize that was such a sweet spot to get your book out?

I’m a nerd myself and I have been to some conventions, also, I just asked other writers what worked for them. So looking to people who are successful and constantly gathering that information because it changes with time and we have to adapt. Obviously, in 2020, we couldn’t have in-person events so we had to quickly pivot to online. That actually turned out to be pretty great and those online events are continuing. People from all over the world will join and they’re paying to see different writer’s perspectives and to learn how to write books and publish and promote and all these different things.

I take notes at every convention I’m at and I haven’t had a table in a few years, but I’ve been a panelist and that’s another way of getting support. You’re gonna have a huge audience that has never heard of you or your work before. I’ve been on Star Wars panels. I’ve been on panels about how to write psychologically rich characters. I made a panel for the Nebula Awards, based on an article I wrote called “The Ecology of World-Building” for the Science Fiction Writers Association. I’m gonna be part of a pretty impressive writers’ workshop at a university this coming spring and I will be leaning into ecology for genre fiction. So you lean into whatever your specialties are. But in terms of the actual boots-on-the-ground sales you have to decide if you want to invest the money to be there because it costs a lot depending on the convention. I started out small and CondorCon in San Diego was intimate and there were a lot of book-buying visitors. Honestly, splitting the cost of a booth or table with another writer is the best thing because not only does it save you both money, but you also have a booth buddy.

I’m a fan of the smaller cons. They’re creator-driven and they’re more exploratory and they’ll take risks and try things, especially when it comes to selling. But what you said about the pitch is so true. You have to get that pitch down to 30 seconds.

You also need your display to be very visually interesting. It also doesn’t hurt, in my case, to have my double chocolate brownies. But you can have a poster made of your book cover so it captures attention. That’s how I’ve sold a lot of books. First, you draw them in and then you give your pitch. They go with it or they don’t, but that visual is essential.

I normally ask people, if they were a character from Alice in Wonderland, who they would be and why. But since you and I are both fans of the 14 Wizard of Oz books if you were one of the Wizard of Oz characters, who would you be?

That’s really hard because I love so many of them. I love Ozma a lot. I loved it when she was kidnapped. That sounds terrible but she seemed too powerful at that point. She had been tipped and went back and forth, been the boy and then the girl, and then took her role as leader of Oz and she seemed a little too locked up in herself. Then she gets kidnapped. A powerful fairy queen gets kidnapped. Pretty incredible. I actually loved that because you saw more of her humanity than her fairy side. Of course, I love Dorothy.

Advertisment for the book, "Copper" by Jendia Gammon, Illustrated by Vinayak Varma. Featuring a fish-shaped robot, about to get prodded by the silhouette of a female protagonist.

I also love Tik-Tok, one of the first robots in literature. He was a wind-up copper round bowl of a fella and influenced one of my short stories. “Copper,” the short story, is about a robot in the near future who develops an interesting ability after his person undergoes tremendous grief. It’s a touching story and it’s kind of wacky, just like the Oz books and Wonderland. Copper is a very interesting character. I love riding robots. There are robots in a lot of my writing. Even The Inn of the Amethyst Lantern has some really interesting house bots that perform multiple functions depending on the time of day or night. I’ve always been fascinated by robots so Tick-Tock is one of my favorites, although the Sawhorse is pretty great, too. I’ve always loved the dynamic between the Tin Man and Scarecrow, and, as flawed as she was, Eureka was fascinating. I have actually illustrated Ozma and Billina, by the way, in the Art Nouveau style. I love illustrating the Oz characters.

I’ve really enjoyed this. I’m a huge fan of Carl Sagan and he has a quote about imagination – “Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it, we go nowhere.” You have used your imagination to carry us off in many different directions and stories, and I think my readers and listeners are going to enjoy discovering you and your work. I hope they’ll pick up some of your novels and enjoy them as much as I have. So, thank you for being on All Things Alice. It’s been a real pleasure.

Thanks so much. It’s been great talking to you.

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