Ekaterina Sedia: Guest-blogging at Ecstatic Days (Aug. 4-8)

I’m very pleased to introduce Ekaterina Sedia as this week’s guest blogger on Ecstatic Days. Ekaterina Sedia was born and raised in Moscow, where her parents and the rest of the family still reside. She teaches botany and plant ecology at a state liberal arts college, gardens, and writes books. Her last novel, The Secret History of Moscow, received extensive praise from the LA Times and Neil Gaiman, among others. The new novel, which has some steampunk elements, is The Alchemy of Stone, to be published this month. My short stories sold to Analog, Baen's Universe, Fantasy Magazine, and Dark Wisdom, as well as Japanese Dreams (Prime Books) and Magic in the Mirrorstone (Mirrorstone Books) anthologies. Sedia was a guest lecturer at Wofford College’s Shared Worlds workshop recently, and I got to check out her writing journal: