For the August Fringe meeting we were delighted to welcome G.V. (Gemma) Anderson whose first professional sale, “Das Steingeschöpf”, is a finalist for the World Fantasy Awards. Naturally we are all very proud of her. Because she had an early train to catch I did some quick Q&A after her reading, focusing on her sudden success and the crowdfunding campaign to get her to San Antonio for the World Fantasy Convention.

Our headline guest for August was Lucy Housom whose second novel in her Worldmaker series, Heartland, was published that week. The series will conclude with Firestorm next year and we have already booked Lucy to come back and read from it.

Much of the Q&A involved covers and marketing. Lucy’s books have recently been re-launched with dramatically different covers. Because she works for a well known major bookstore chain, Lucy has a special insight into how books are marketed. Lucy also discussed her podcast, Breaking the Glass Slipper, which is nicely feminist but seems to need more cake. There was also some mention of gin theft.

As we still had some time before Gemma had to leave for her train, we were able to do a joint Q&A with both readers. We continued to address issues of covers and marketing, including why Gemma writes under her initials but Lucy does not. We also talked about use of foreign and invented languages.

We seem to have got the audio working much better now that the microphone feeds directly into the recorder. However, this does mean that when people shout questions from the audience the recording will not capture them.