Barbara Ashford will be a guest lecturer at this summer's Odyssey Writing Workshop. She abandoned a career in educational administration to pursue a life in the theatre, working as an actress in summer stock and dinner theatre and later, as a lyricist and librettist. She's written everything from cantatas to choral pieces, one-hour musicals for children to full-length ones for adults. Her musicals have been performed throughout the world, including such venues as the New York Musical Theatre Festival and the Edinburgh International Festival.In 2000, after Barbara began writing fiction, she attended Odyssey. The workshop provided the supportive feedback and immersion in the craft of writing speculative fiction that she needed to create Heartwood, the first book of her Trickster's Game trilogy (written as Barbara Campbell). Published by DAW Books, Trickster's Game went on to become a finalist for the Mythopoeic Society's 2010 Fantasy Award for adult literature.
Barbara returned to her theatre roots for her most recent novel, Spellcast, a contemporary fantasy set in a magical summer stock theatre in Vermont. She is currently at work on the sequel—Spellcrossed—to be published in June 2012.
Her short fiction has appeared in the anthologies After Hours: Tales from the Ur-Bar and The Modern Fae's Guide to Surviving Humanity (March 2012). When she's not writing, she critiques manuscripts for the Odyssey Critique Service.
Barbara lives in New Rochelle, New York, with her husband, whom she met while performing in the play Bedroom Farce. You can visit her dual selves at barbara-campbell.com and barbara-ashford.com.
How would you compare your pre-Odyssey writing to your post-Odyssey writing? What changed the most for you?
Before Odyssey, I’d written one novel, and started and stopped any number of others. I’d start with a premise and plunge into writing without a clear idea of what the story was about. I’d go off in twenty different directions, lose steam, and eventually give up and move on to another project.
Odyssey gave me the essential storytelling tools I needed, especially in terms of developing a cohesive plot and using theme as the “net” that holds a plot together. I came away from the workshop with renewed confidence in myself as a writer and with the tools and determination to finish the novel that later sold to DAW.
Is there a lingering lesson you learned while attending the Odyssey Writing Workshop that you'd like to share?Write what you’re passionate about. Chasing a market that is always changing is a waste of time. It took me several years to write--and rewrite--Heartwood. But I loved that story and I was determined to make it the best that it could be. In the process, I learned a lot about putting a novel together--and pulling it apart and putting it together again.
As a guest lecturer at the upcoming Odyssey Workshop, you'll be lecturing, workshopping, and critiquing stories. What is the one piece of advice you really want to get across to developing writers?
I was watching the movie Finding Forrester the other day and one line struck me: “Write your first draft from your heart and the second from your head.” Don’t be satisfied with your first draft. Celebrate your accomplishment--and then put on your editing hat and examine what you’ve written with a critical eye. Some of the most powerful moments in my novels arose from digging deeper into the characters and strengthening the story’s thematic threads.
Do you still get involved in the critiquing process with your own work? Do you have a writer's group?
The opening chapters of the Trickster’s Game trilogy were critiqued at The Never-Ending Odyssey, which is a great forum for Odyssey graduates to review each other’s work. There isn’t a local writers’ group near me, but I usually attend one once a year where we critique the synopses of our proposed novels. And while my husband is always my first reader, I send an early draft of my novels to various writing pals--all Odyssey graduates--for feedback.
What is the most valuable thing you've learned from a critique?
I can’t pinpoint one critique and say, “Wow. That changed everything for me.” But the most valuable thing I’ve learned from the critiquing process is to look for common feedback. If one person has a problem with a scene or a character, it’s worth noting, but it may not be worth changing. Let’s face it--people have different tastes and you’re never going to please everyone. But if several people bring up the same concerns, you need to pay attention. Ultimately, though, it’s your book. You have to follow your vision or you’ll be forever tacking back and forth, driven by conflicting comments. That way lies madness!
How many stages does your work go through before you send it off to your publisher? Can you give us a window into what your novel's life schedule is like from idea to first draft birth to book in hand?
It usually takes me eight-nine months to write a novel. That’s neither the final product nor the first draft but somewhere in between, as I edit my work as I go along. I wait until I have a chunk of the book completed before sending it to my editor, but she’s always available if I need to bounce something off of her. We discuss the section she’s read, she raises any issues she might have, and we often throw around ideas for how to address them.
After I send her the complete manuscript--still a draft--I also send the files to my beta readers for feedback. I usually spend about a month on final edits. Those can range from cutting scenes and rewriting problematic ones to merely tightening/clarifying the prose. That’s when I read the entire book aloud to see how it flows. Then the final manuscript goes to Sheila [Gilbert, editor at DAW]. Unless she has changes, the book is “done.” I’ll do minor editing when I review the page proofs (which usually occurs about a month or so after the final manuscript is handed in). It’s another three-four months before the book is published. So from proposal to book-in-hand, it’s generally 16-18 months.
Congratulations on your stories in the recently launched books After Hours: Tales from the Ur-Bar and The Modern Fae's Guide to Surviving Humanity. You don't write a lot of short fiction. Many developing writers are more comfortable writing long rather than short. Can you tell us how you adjust your process to create a short work?Obviously, the focus is a lot narrower. You don’t have the time (or the word count) for subplots and endless complications. There’s generally a single POV, a single problem to be resolved. Since I was writing for themed anthologies, I also had the specific guidelines for each submission.
After I came up with the premise, I noodled about the scenes I needed to tell the story and the secondary characters required to help illuminate the protagonist’s journey. I knew where the story would begin and end; it was more a question of how to get to the ending. That’s not always the case when I write a novel. (And sometimes, when I think I know the ending, the story takes me somewhere else, which is what happened with Spellcast.)
We're looking forward to Spellcrossed, coming in June 2012. Can you tell us about the process of plotting and writing a sequel?
The process for me is pretty much the same regardless of whether it’s the first novel or a sequel. In some ways, it’s easier to write a sequel--you know the characters now, although you’ll be giving them new problems to solve that might reveal different aspects of their personalities.
Writing Bloodstone and Foxfire (the second and third books in the Trickster’s Game trilogy) was very different from writing Spellcrossed. For one thing, there was a gap of approximately fifteen years between each book in the trilogy. Each involved new settings and a lot of new characters (including the protagonist).
Spellcrossed begins a year after Spellcast ends. It’s told from Maggie’s POV once again. And once again, we’re back at the Crossroads Theatre with most of the same secondary characters on staff. So it was important for relationships to evolve. Some minor characters needed to come to the fore and new ones needed to be introduced to reflect the issues that Maggie was grappling with.
One of the trickiest parts of writing a sequel is figuring out how much backstory to include (especially in the early chapters) and when/how to introduce it without resorting to infodumps. I always find I need less than I think. In Spellcrossed, I used backstory to show the changes at the theatre as well as the changes in Maggie’s life since we saw her last.
What's next for you on the writing-related horizon? Are you starting any new projects?
I’ve got two books in the pipeline--another book in the Crossroads Theatre series and an offbeat paranormal romance. Those will definitely keep me busy for the next year!
For more information about Odyssey, its graduates and instructors, please visit our website at http://www.odysseyworkshop.org.
Craig Shaw Gardner will be a guest lecturer at this summer's Odyssey Writing Workshop. He sold his first short story in 1977, and began writing full time in 1987. He has published over thirty novels ranging from his first, A Malady of Magics, to the Changeling War fantasy trilogy, written by "Peter Garrison," to the horror novel Dark Whispers, written by "Chris Blaine." Along the way, he's done a number of media tie-ins, one of which--the novelization of Batman--became a New York Times bestseller. He's also the author of more than forty short horror and fantasy stories, which have mostly appeared in original anthologies. Gardner has also served as both President and Trustee for the Horror Writers Association.You write a lot of horror, but you also write humorous and epic fantasy. How do your techniques and approaches change when you write in these different genres?
Every story I write has its own "voice." I need to find that special approach in order to make that story work. Even with a fully-formed idea, this can be one of the most time consuming aspects of writing just about anything.
I have to find a way to clue the reader into what universe they are entering. I can do this by something as simple as prefacing every chapter with a humorous quotation (as I did in all the Ebenezum books and stories). I can plunge the reader into the middle of an action scene (Never a bad idea--especially with a short story) that hopefully pulls the reader into the story. I can present a character with an internal dilemma. This often works well in a short horror story, getting the reader to identify with the protagonist's situation before the story opens up to show the larger "reality" of the universe I'm creating. I have to figure out how to juggle the writer's toolbox--character/plot/point-of-view/seYou have used several pseudonyms in your career. You wrote The Changeling War fantasy trilogy under the name Peter Garrison. Do you recommend up-and-comers prepare themselves for possibly needing a pen name? What are the business reasons for taking on a pen name?
The writing marketplace is constantly changing--at this point, I don't think anybody knows where it's going. The traditional publishing POV was to establish a "brand," so that readers will come back, looking for more of what you have to offer. I have managed to work in four different sub-genres of the fantasy field: (1) humorous fantasy, (2) epic fantasy, (3) horror, and (4) media-related. (I've also written some sf and mystery stories, but short stories are read by so few people that they don't seem to effect that "brand" thing.) Sometimes, this crossover stuff has helped me. The fact that I had written both humor and horror got me the opportunity to write the novelization of the first Batman movie, which became a New York Times bestseller and got me on the Today show. It also got my regular books to sell really well. But when I decided to make the shift into more traditional fantasy, I think that a certain number of my readers became disappointed that these new books weren't in the mold of the dozen that had come before, and my sales suffered. So I became Peter Garrison, to get away from any preconceived notions of what my books might be.
As a beginning writer, I would concentrate on developing a brand under a single name--unless you were breaking into two fields with very different audiences--say science fiction and romance.
Many writers struggle over how much description to include, which things to describe, and how to describe them. Can you talk about how you make these decisions?
Readers always want to be transported to other places, and these places need a certain amount of description to make them real. But too much description can bog a story down. The simplest compromise is to show description through your character's point-of-view. The things you show will be more important to the reader because they are important to your protagonist.
Your career spans more than three decades. How have things changed regarding the actual style of writing that editors are buying?I actually don't think it has changed all that much. Editorial fads come and go, but I believe a well-written story will sell eventually.
How has the business of books changed in that time?
Once upon a time, everybody thought they could write a book. Now everybody thinks they can publish a book. So the Internet is crowded with a lot of unknown, self-published stuff, most of which is also unedited and unreadable. Writers still need to find ways to differentiate themselves from the masses. Working through traditional publishing is still the easiest method to give yourself validity And by traditional publishing, I mean short story and novel markets that pay professional rates.
Your agent is Jennifer Jackson, and we interviewed her last month. What advice do you have regarding finding the right agent and building a solid work relationship?
Find an agent who knows the markets that you write for. Talk to that agent about what is and isn't selling. And use that agent to get as much money as you can out of a publisher. You also need to strike up ongoing relationships with your editors whenever possible.
As a guest lecturer at the upcoming Odyssey Workshop, you'll be lecturing, workshopping, and critiquing stories. What is the one piece of advice you really want to give to developing writers?
You are your own first reader. You have to enjoy what you are putting on paper before anybody else can.
What's next on your writing-related horizon? Are there any new projects in the works?
My second collection of stories, A Cold Wind in July, has just been released. This is a book of my horror stories this time around, and it's the first thing I've done to come out as an e-book!
I have a new humorous fantasy under submission to a publisher, and am putting the finishing touches on a longish YA fantasy novel. I am also beginning to put eighteen of my earlier books online as e-books, starting with A Malady of Magicks, which should be available in a month or so.
For more information about Odyssey, its graduates and instructors, please visit our website at http://www.odysseyworkshop.org.
Jennifer Jackson will be a guest lecturer at this summer's Odyssey Writing Workshop. She is Vice President of the Donald Maass Literary Agency, which she joined in 1993. Growing up reading science fiction and fantasy led naturally to a concentration in that genre, which she continues to champion. After pioneering the expansion of the agency into the areas of romance and women's fiction, she is now developing her list in the mystery and suspense genres. She is also looking for YA fiction, both literary and commercial, in all genres.Her current roster includes New York Times best-selling fantasy writer Jim Butcher, Hugo Award-winning science fiction author Elizabeth Bear, USA Today best-selling author Anne Bishop, Anthony Award finalist Chris F. Holm, and Nebula and Hugo finalist Cherie Priest. Previously, she worked as a bookseller for Waldenbooks, and also for Forbidden Planet, the retail division of London's Titan Books. She maintains a personal website at http://www.jenniferjackson.org/ and blogs at http://arcaedia.wordpress.com/.
What is the one thing you would like to convey above all else to authors who are preparing to submit material to you? Is there one particular requirement in your submission guidelines that authors tend to overlook or ignore?
I think the most important thing is not to rush into submissions. Make sure that what's getting sent really is the best work it can be. As for the guidelines, sending the right number of pages with the initial query seems to be the most often neglected item. Our guidelines call for the first five pages of a novel. I'm not a rules-lawyer about it, but the number of people who don't include pages at all or include fifty pages or more is surprising.
You mentioned in your blog that approaching an agent at a convention is acceptable behavior (especially if you offer to buy the agent a drink!), but the reality is that you are a busy woman at conventions, and sometimes writers feel shut out. Any advice?
Be genuine. One of my newest clients met me at a convention. As it happened they were sitting with a writer-friend of mine who isn't a client, and when I stopped to say hello, they invited me to join them. It was purely social and a really nice time. That author didn't pitch me then, but I knew of their work and remembered them when their query came later. So, if you're at a convention, spend time with people and take opportunities as they occur. But don't take it personally if someone is on a schedule--just try to make a good impression and say hello again if you see them later on.
As you think about some of the new writers you have taken on recently, what qualities made them or their work stand out to you?
I have a weakness for what I call prose-ninjas. These are talented language-smiths who make beautiful sentences and evoke a depth of setting and articulate characters and their emotions in a striking way. I also find that I'm drawn to those stories that bend or transcend their genre. The conversation of literature that's going on in speculative fiction right now is fascinating.
What advice can you give to the writer who has an offer from an editor/publisher but is not yet represented by an agent?
Ask the editor for time to consult agents and get a reasonable deadline. Then, email your top agent choices, being sure to put something in the subject line about having an offer. Don't forget to follow the guidelines even at this stage. And give the agents enough information to be able to get back to you quickly, including information about the publisher. An example of what not to do is to send a one-line email such as "offer received from un-named publisher--need help fast." It's an exciting time. Enjoy it. But remember to always have a professional approach which will benefit you long term.
What prompted you to blog with the tag "Letters from the Query Wars"? Does it feel like a war to you some days? All days?
At the time that was a tongue-in-cheek title after "Letters from the Front." The battle back then seemed to be finding a way to respond in a timely fashion and still give everyone professional and fair consideration. Then the title just stuck.
What about your entertaining tag "Agent Manners"? Is there a story behind starting these posts? Are they making a positive difference?
Those were a spin on the classic "Miss Manners" columns--an old family friend had given me a copy of the book as a gift. I haven't posted that column in a while but I hope to start them up again sometime in the future as they seemed to get a good response.
You're coming up on twenty years with the Donald Maass Literary Agency. Are you planning to do anything special for that? Will there be a celebration? Ice cream?
For my ten year anniversary at the Donald Maass Literary Agency, the whole agency went out to Jean Georges for dinner. It was the best meal of my life and still is (with apologies to Michael Mina). It's sure going to be hard to top.
In that twenty years, how many authors have you signed? Is there a limit to how many you can represent at one time?
Of course there has to be a limit. There are only so many hours in a day. As for how many authors, there are a lot of variables involved. For instance, some authors write quite quickly and do more than one book per year but others take more time and may produce a novel every few years. It also depends on how much support an individual author needs in developing their work or planning their career or even how much subsidiary rights activity they might generate. So, in short, there's no simple answer to this one.
You wrote about the pleasures of agenting on your blog. Do you have a favorite moment or story you can share?
Wow. Well, that's tough to narrow down. There are some great milestones: Like the first time I held a finished book in my hand written by an author that I represented. Or the first time one of my clients hit the New York Times List. Or sitting next to a client at the Hugo Awards when their name was announced as the winner. I get a lot out of being a part of the author's journey, and if I could go back in time and tell younger me this was what I'd be doing, I think she'd really be looking forward to it.
For more information about Odyssey, its graduates and instructors, please visit our website at http://www.odysseyworkshop.org.
Paul Park will be a guest lecturer at this summer's Odyssey Writing Workshop. He has written a dozen novels in a variety of genres. His most recent work includes a steampunk story in an upcoming anthology, an apocalyptic science-fiction Icelandic Edda, and a Forgotten Realms novel called The Rose of Sarifal, to be published under the pseudonym Paulina Claiborne. His novella Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance, nominated for the 2010 Nebula and Sturgeon Awards, will soon appear in an expanded, illustrated version from PS Publishing. He teaches writing and literature at Williams College in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, where he lives with his wife and two children.Your books often deal with religion. What fascinates you about the subject? Do you have specific themes in mind when you begin working on a piece?
I feel that I've moved away from religion in my recent books, but you're right--there's a way in which the three Starbridge books are about religion, and of course The Gospel of Corax and Three Marys, which are retellings of the story of Jesus of Nazareth. I guess I'm interested in failure, and what happens when you take genuinely transcendent spiritual ideas and use them to animate a human construct like a church or a temple or a social movement, which, like all human constructs, will quickly sink into a stew of money, and hatred, and power, and sex. It is the combination of the highest strivings of the individual with the inevitable corruption of the institution that makes religion so poignant.Themes--not so much. I don't worry about themes until the book is done, then [sometimes] I . . . bury them. Themes are what English teachers look for. I usually proceed from flashes of images, landscapes, emotions.
Why do you choose to write about religion within the genre of science fiction instead of fantasy or some other genre?
Well, I'm not sure that's what I do. I was never convinced the Starbridge books were science fiction in a classic sense. The problem is, I think "fantasy" as a marketing category is narrower than it should be. There's no magic in the Starbridge books, no supernatural events. But does that make them science fiction? I'm not sure.
Once you started writing seriously, how long did it take for your writing to sell? What changed for you that made the difference?I quit a job in advertising to write a mystery novel, which never sold. Soldiers of Paradise was my second book. I wrote it in India and Southeast Asia, and it took me about a year. Then I came back and scrounged around for an agent. Once I found one, the book sold in about two weeks. What changed was that I figured out enough about the industry to direct my book to people who had a chance of liking it and publishing it.
As a guest lecturer at this summer’s Odyssey Workshop, you’ll be lecturing, workshopping, and meeting individually with students. What do you think is the most important advice you can give to developing writers?
Half of writing is blundering forward on your own, and not listening to anyone. The other half is as technical and uncreative as plumbing, or electrical engineering. There's a lot to learn.
In the Roumania Series, The Hidden World is book number four. Is there more to come? Did you know when you began the series that it would have four books? How do you handle the plotting of multiple books? Do you plan your plots in advance?
I originally hoped to write one big thumper of a book, and my rough draft was A Princess of Roumania plus most of The Tourmaline. It was really long, and still didn't come to an end. So David Hartwell told me to break what I had into manageable lengths and keep on going. Most of my books I don't plot in advance--I guess I plotted out Celestis and the two Jesus books. The rest, I write behind a moving front--maybe forty pages out. Or I write toward a sentence, or an image.
What’s next on the writing-related horizon for you?
I'm working on a series of interlocking meta-fictional novellas--I suppose you'd call the genre "pseudo-memoir"--that I want to work as a short novel. One of them is a novella called Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance, which came out from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 2010. If you're familiar with that, the novel will include more of the same, a mixture of made-up and "real" events, a character named "Paul Park" who is not me, though his life has overlapped with mine in various places, especially in the future.
After that, I think I'm going to write a YA fantasy.
For more information about Odyssey, its graduates and instructors, please visit our website at http://www.odysseyworkshop.org.
Jeanne Dillard Kalogridis will be the writer-in-residence at this summer's Odyssey Writing Workshop. Jeanne is the New York Times bestselling author of more than thirty books, including historical novels (The Inquisitor's Wife, The Devil's Queen, The Borgia Bride and others), dark fantasy (The Diaries of the Family Dracul trilogy), and novelizations (The Fugitive, the Star Trek movies and others). She's also written several nonfiction titles. The New York Times called her Family Dracul trilogy "authentically arresting"; Robert Bloch, author of Psycho, called it "terrifying." USA Today called The Scarlet Contessa "a guilty pleasure of a novel," while Publishers Weekly called it "[a] vividly rendered historical . . . plenty of intrigue and conspiracy in the lusty plot." Her historical novels are renowned for their detail and evocativeness; according to Publishers Weekly, "Kalogridis nails the palace intrigue and lush pageantry of the Renaissance." She specializes in writing about remarkable women who have been ignored or maligned by history.Born in central Florida, Jeanne earned a B.A. in Russian and an M.A. in Linguistics at the University of South Florida. Afterwards, she escaped to Washington, D.C, where she taught English to foreign students at The American University for eight years. During that time, she was fired for unionizing and used her period of unemployment to write her first novel. Happily she was rehired with full back pay before eventually retiring to write full-time.
She now lives in northern California with an enthusiastic if stinky Labrador named Django. Visit her website (jeannekalogridis.com) or blog (historyisabitch.com) or catch her on Twitter at @jkalogridis. You can also find her on Facebook.
You’ve mentioned on your blog that you miss teaching. Why? What is your favorite part of teaching?
The incredible energy shared by student and teacher when the teacher has something to offer and the student "gets" it and is eager to learn more. I've worked out of my house for some thirty years now, and I miss the ability to "talk shop" about writing or language with others. I genuinely care about each student and nothing makes me happier than to be of real use to him or her.
Tell me about writing historical fantasy. What fascinates you about following history instead of making up your own worlds?History is written by the victors, yes? And most of those victors were male. I enjoy writing about women who have been reviled by history--such as Catherine de Medici, whom I wrote about in The Devil's Queen--and portraying what I think their point of view might have been.
To my mind, writing engaging historical fiction can be harder than writing pure fantasy, because certain events MUST be included in the plot; it's the writer's job to look beneath the history and focus on creating a character who grows and learns and experiences conflict because of those historical events. There's less freedom for the author. At the same time, the great joys of writing historical fiction are the challenge and the learning. In most cases, I knew nothing about my protagonists' era and loved the research involved. And when learning about one period, country, and person, I always came across other exciting eras and historical figures to write about.
Some people say there is no market for historical fantasy. Do you run into this misconception sometimes? How did you carve out a distinctive, original area for yourself in this sub-genre?
Well, it's news to me because I've done well with historical fantasy and love reading it. In terms of carving out a niche: It wasn't intentional. I just can't seem to keep from writing the dark and fantastic. Theoretically, I write for a line of "straight" historicals, but I've never been able to avoid injecting a dark fantasy element.
When does The Inquisitor’s Wife come out? Can you tell us a bit about it?
The Inquisitor's Wife is scheduled to come out in either late 2012 or early 2013. It's the story of a young woman with a mixed heritage--half Jewish, half Christian, a conversa--who lives in Seville during the Spanish Inquisition's first auto da fe. At the beginning of the story, she hates her Jewish heritage. By the end of the novel, she has taken up the converso cause and risks her life for it.
I understand you’re still pretty new to Twitter (as am I). What is your opinion of this social media format, and are you enjoying it?
What I love about Twitter is its ability to enable the formation of on-line communities; I've met some very dear friends (writers and others) through Twitter. And it's nice to occasionally help them out by tweeting about their work.
What I hate about Twitter are the spammers, and those people who miss the whole on-line community concept and think that the point is to tweet the title and link to their novel every five minutes, instead of engaging in real on-line conversation.
You wrote a blog post last spring about the hard work that is writing...and rewriting. You said that Indie writers seem to ‘get’ this better than many print-published authors, yet many others claim that Indie authors will fail miserably in the department of proper revision and editing. Do you think Indie publishing will continue to grow, or will the traditional gatekeepers once again take over the industry?
I was wrong if I implied that all Indie writers share that attitude. But I've met a number of Indie writers who take their work extremely seriously and worry about the lack of a "real" editor's hand. They therefore work harder than some print-published authors I know.
At the same time, of course there's an ocean of careless people who slap anything up in print. I use the term Indie to refer to those non-traditionally published writers who are serious about craft and professional in their attitude. That narrows the field a bit.
As for proper revision and editing; the unprofessional Indies will indeed fail miserably at revising and editing, because they don't care. (I'll say right here that I have purchased an Indie title from a print-published author and was horrified to find it was a disjointed unedited collection of notes.) Those who do care and have the good luck to find a fellow writer-editor with some talent, or a critique group with at least one person with some writing chops, will succeed.
I think that the traditional gatekeepers are already moving in. But there's too much freedom and too much profit for authors for Indie publishing to languish. I think it'll continue to grow for some time.
What advice do you have for those seeking to publish their first book-length work in today’s e-book world? Should they still hold out for legacy publishing to build credibility, or dive in to the self-publishing world, or a bit of both?
My advice: Shoot first for legacy publishing. For one thing, the publisher has a far more powerful marketing department than an individual using only Twitter and Facebook. It will take a long, long time for the prejudice against the self-published die away, if it ever does.
But if attempts at legacy publishing fail, then I say go Indie.
For more information about Odyssey, its graduates and instructors, please visit our website at http://www.odysseyworkshop.org.
Jeanne Cavelos is the director of the Odyssey Writing Workshop. She was a senior editor at Bantam Doubleday Dell, where she worked for eight years, editing the fantasy/science fiction program, the Abyss horror line, and other fiction and nonfiction. Jeanne is also the bestselling author of seven books and numerous short stories and articles. She has won the World Fantasy Award and twice been nominated for the Stoker Award.
You don't care about my protagonist? You don't find my plot to be a page-turning masterwork of suspense? You think my sentences are awkward and my point of view inconsistent? Writers are often quite surprised by the feedback they receive on manuscripts. They are so close to the work they've created that they can't experience it the way a reader experiences it. When they look at their manuscript, they don't actually see the words on the page; they see the images in their head that inspired those words. Unfortunately, when readers read the work, they see only the words and are left to form their own images, which are often radically different than the author's--or just murky or even blank. In working with many writers over the years, I've discovered that very few of them know how to revise, and even fewer are willing to put major time and attention into revising. Generally speaking, you should be putting at least as much time into revision as you put into the draft, probably much more.
Say you are willing to revise. How do you start? Getting feedback is usually a good first step. Learning how readers experienced your work will help to reveal how your vision of the work differs from the words you actually wrote on the page.
But to figure out exactly what changes to make, and to know whether those changes will solve the problems, you need to take the next step. You need to try to see your work with new eyes, as a reader sees it. Revision is literally re-vision: seeing your work anew. You need to see the actual words written on the page and experience them the way a reader might, rather than having them draw you back into your vision of the story, which is not what is written on the page.
To accomplish this difficult task, you need to gain distance from your manuscript. The easiest type of distance to gain is distance in time. Put the manuscript in a drawer, pull it out in a month, and you will probably notice things about it that you never noticed before.
Typeface and medium are other ways to gain distance. You've written the whole piece in a particular typeface, and you've gotten used to it. You're comfortable seeing the words this way. They look right to you. Well, now is the time to make your words like strange and different; it's time to be uncomfortable with them. Change the typeface on the piece and print it out. Printing out is critical. The computer screen hides a mountain of writing weaknesses. Things look neat and nice on the screen. Print it out, and now you not only have to face your work in a different typeface, but in a different medium. Paper reveals weak writing. Paper reveals story problems. If you are open to seeing what is there, if you are looking at your work anew, you will discover many areas that can be strengthened. Look for them, seek them out, don't excuse them, and don't get sucked back into your original vision, and you will find many ways to improve your piece. Make notes all over your paper copy.
Another invaluable way to gain distance involves switching to yet another medium. Rather than viewing your work on the screen or reading it on paper, hear your work. Read it aloud, or have someone else read it aloud to you. Listen to the words, the sentences, the rhythm. This will immediately reveal an abundance of problems: repeated words, repetitive sentence structure, inconsistencies in voice, unrealistic or inappropriate dialogue, excessive exposition, weak description, and more.
If you are successful at gaining distance, weaknesses will jump out at you. Why did I think this character was sympathetic? How did I ever believe this scene was suspenseful? This sentence is horribly awkward! Once the problems are clear, half the work is done. Now all you have to do is find solutions. Which is a topic for another day.
So gaining distance from your manuscript is a critical part of revision. One note of caution, though. If you're not careful, distance can lead to laziness. This happens to me sometimes. I read a paragraph, or a sentence, and I don't know why it's there. I have gained sufficient distance that I don't remember the impulse that made me write the passage. After some thought, I decide I must have had a good reason for putting it there; I must have understood the needs of the scene better when I wrote it than I do now. I tell myself that, and I tell myself to leave it and move on. Sometimes I actually do move on, lazy author that I am. Yet if I force myself to linger, to try to figure out the "good reason" for putting it there, I eventually realize what that reason was: I didn't know any better. The passage was basically a placeholder, filling that spot with my best guess of what needed to go there. Yet it was only a guess, the guess of someone who hadn't written the rest of the manuscript and didn't know exactly what needed to be set up or what was coming. Then I realize that this passage is not the best possible thing to put in this place, that it could be better, much better, if only I am willing to realize that, and to revise.
Gaining distance from a manuscript is key to revision, but make sure you don't use that distance as an alibi to excuse weaknesses. Instead, it should be a tool to provide new perspective and insight, and to point the way toward improvements that will strengthen the work.
To all of you out there revising, alternating between the elation of solving a problem and the despair of finding you've created ten new problems for yourself, keep the faith, and know that revision is the path toward improving the work. Remember that you have something worthwhile to say, and it will only get said if you finish the manuscript. You have created this story, something special and unique. It deserves to become the best you can make it, and with revision, it can reach its full potential and deliver the power and emotion that you envisioned.
For more information about Odyssey, its graduates and instructors, please visit our website at http://www.odysseyworkshop.org.
You don't care about my protagonist? You don't find my plot to be a page-turning masterwork of suspense? You think my sentences are awkward and my point of view inconsistent? Writers are often quite surprised by the feedback they receive on manuscripts. They are so close to the work they've created that they can't experience it the way a reader experiences it. When they look at their manuscript, they don't actually see the words on the page; they see the images in their head that inspired those words. Unfortunately, when readers read the work, they see only the words and are left to form their own images, which are often radically different than the author's--or just murky or even blank. In working with many writers over the years, I've discovered that very few of them know how to revise, and even fewer are willing to put major time and attention into revising. Generally speaking, you should be putting at least as much time into revision as you put into the draft, probably much more. Say you are willing to revise. How do you start? Getting feedback is usually a good first step. Learning how readers experienced your work will help to reveal how your vision of the work differs from the words you actually wrote on the page.
But to figure out exactly what changes to make, and to know whether those changes will solve the problems, you need to take the next step. You need to try to see your work with new eyes, as a reader sees it. Revision is literally re-vision: seeing your work anew. You need to see the actual words written on the page and experience them the way a reader might, rather than having them draw you back into your vision of the story, which is not what is written on the page.
To accomplish this difficult task, you need to gain distance from your manuscript. The easiest type of distance to gain is distance in time. Put the manuscript in a drawer, pull it out in a month, and you will probably notice things about it that you never noticed before.
Typeface and medium are other ways to gain distance. You've written the whole piece in a particular typeface, and you've gotten used to it. You're comfortable seeing the words this way. They look right to you. Well, now is the time to make your words like strange and different; it's time to be uncomfortable with them. Change the typeface on the piece and print it out. Printing out is critical. The computer screen hides a mountain of writing weaknesses. Things look neat and nice on the screen. Print it out, and now you not only have to face your work in a different typeface, but in a different medium. Paper reveals weak writing. Paper reveals story problems. If you are open to seeing what is there, if you are looking at your work anew, you will discover many areas that can be strengthened. Look for them, seek them out, don't excuse them, and don't get sucked back into your original vision, and you will find many ways to improve your piece. Make notes all over your paper copy.
Another invaluable way to gain distance involves switching to yet another medium. Rather than viewing your work on the screen or reading it on paper, hear your work. Read it aloud, or have someone else read it aloud to you. Listen to the words, the sentences, the rhythm. This will immediately reveal an abundance of problems: repeated words, repetitive sentence structure, inconsistencies in voice, unrealistic or inappropriate dialogue, excessive exposition, weak description, and more.
If you are successful at gaining distance, weaknesses will jump out at you. Why did I think this character was sympathetic? How did I ever believe this scene was suspenseful? This sentence is horribly awkward! Once the problems are clear, half the work is done. Now all you have to do is find solutions. Which is a topic for another day.
So gaining distance from your manuscript is a critical part of revision. One note of caution, though. If you're not careful, distance can lead to laziness. This happens to me sometimes. I read a paragraph, or a sentence, and I don't know why it's there. I have gained sufficient distance that I don't remember the impulse that made me write the passage. After some thought, I decide I must have had a good reason for putting it there; I must have understood the needs of the scene better when I wrote it than I do now. I tell myself that, and I tell myself to leave it and move on. Sometimes I actually do move on, lazy author that I am. Yet if I force myself to linger, to try to figure out the "good reason" for putting it there, I eventually realize what that reason was: I didn't know any better. The passage was basically a placeholder, filling that spot with my best guess of what needed to go there. Yet it was only a guess, the guess of someone who hadn't written the rest of the manuscript and didn't know exactly what needed to be set up or what was coming. Then I realize that this passage is not the best possible thing to put in this place, that it could be better, much better, if only I am willing to realize that, and to revise.
Gaining distance from a manuscript is key to revision, but make sure you don't use that distance as an alibi to excuse weaknesses. Instead, it should be a tool to provide new perspective and insight, and to point the way toward improvements that will strengthen the work.
To all of you out there revising, alternating between the elation of solving a problem and the despair of finding you've created ten new problems for yourself, keep the faith, and know that revision is the path toward improving the work. Remember that you have something worthwhile to say, and it will only get said if you finish the manuscript. You have created this story, something special and unique. It deserves to become the best you can make it, and with revision, it can reach its full potential and deliver the power and emotion that you envisioned.
For more information about Odyssey, its graduates and instructors, please visit our website at http://www.odysseyworkshop.org.
Elaine Isaak is the author of The Singer's Crown (Eos, 2005), and sequels The Eunuch's Heir (Eos, 2006), and The Bastard Queen (Swimming Kangaroo, 2010). Her short fiction has recently appeared in Live Free or Undead and Escape Clauses. A graduate of the Odyssey Speculative Fiction Workshop, Elaine writes traditional fantasy in a mythic and historic vein, harrowing tales of complex human relationships in the realms of fantasy. Magic may offer the choice of transcendence--or tragedy--and the quest never leaves you untouched. Above all else, know this: you do not want to be her hero. She has written how-to articles for the Writer Magazine, and authored the Lady Blade fantasy writing column at AlienSkin magazine for three years. Her speaking engagements have included local chapters of Romance Writers of America, the World Science Fiction and World Fantasy conventions.I am a strong advocate for the abuse of imaginary people--not because I am, by nature, cruel and wicked (at least--I hope not), but because it will make your characters stronger, your stories better, and you--a better writer.
It's been shown in a series of depressing studies that people don't fundamentally care about strangers. We can be told over and over about a war in a foreign land, or refugee camps, or starving children . . . and we are briefly sad or outraged, but that's the end of our investment in the story.
Fantasy worlds represent the most distant possible of nations. Not only are they faraway places that readers have never visited (and thus have no personal connection to), but they don't (sorry, guys!!) actually exist. There's no real reason for the reader to care what happens there. Until you give them a character to care about. Once you put a name and a face on that starving child, once you tell the personal story of an individual in the refugee camp or reveal the life of a particular soldier, the reader is engaged. It is the relationship of the character to the conflict that makes the reader want to read more.
Conflict exists on a variety of levels, from the intimate psychological problems of a character in conflict with himself, to the scene we so often picture for fantasy novels: the massed battle on an epic stage in which kingdoms shall be won or lost, worlds destroyed, and heroes made. And it's the making of heroes I want to talk about today. It is the task of the hero to confront trouble head-on. To ride into conflict, however reluctantly, and take it upon himself to make the world better--often through a physical intervention in a dangerous situation. We want the reader to cheer for our hero, yes, but we NEED the reader to fear for him. Without that fear, there is no urgency to the book. The battle may be lost--so what? The person we really care about is not at risk.So we put our characters at risk. Not only that, but we recognize that escalating conflict over the course of a story, book or series, calls for a similar escalation of risk for the hero. In order to draw the reader in to an imagined world, we provide an individual to care about, but in order to keep that reader on the edge of her seat, we make bad things happen to that person. The reader can easily dismiss this likeable hero and his imaginary world, if the bad stuff doesn’t stick--that is, if there are no consequences to the risks he takes.
The earlier you begin to add layers of risk and consequence, the earlier the reader feels confident that you mean what you say. You say that the villain is a great swordsman. If they see the hero take a hit, and they continue to feel the effects of his injury chapters later: they will believe in your world, and they will trust you as a writer. Each time something bad happens--a significant risk, followed by a serious consequence--it accrues reality for your work.
Characters do not just risk bodily harm, but also psychological damage--carrying the weight of events and of the terrible choices we force them to make. The greatest works draw these risks together, sending waves of stress crashing on the character from within and without, building tension for the reader as she wonders how the hero will survive.
I don't want my books to be a walk in the proverbial park. I want them to be a breathless, headlong ride into a dark forest, full of monsters, where, at any moment, you just might lose your head. I want the reader to be clinging to the back of that horse, desparately afraid that the hero's wounded hand will let go, and they will both be plunged into a fight for their lives. I want the reader so invested in these people that don't exist that they want to throw themselves between me and my hero, just to stop me hurting him again. . . . I want them to put down my book, trembling, thinking, "What a ride!" and longing for the next adventure.
For more information about Odyssey, its graduates and instructors, please visit our website at http://www.odysseyworkshop.org.
A Nebula Award winner, Hugo Award nominee, and winner in the Writers of the Future Contest, Eric James Stone has had stories published in Year’s Best SF 15, Analog, Nature, and Kevin J. Anderson’s Blood Lite anthologies of humorous horror, among other venues. Eric is also an assistant editor for Intergalactic Medicine Show.One of Eric’s earliest memories is of an Apollo launch on television. Thanks to his father’s old science fiction collection, Eric grew up reading Asimov and Heinlein.
Eric attended Orson Scott Card’s Literary Boot Camp and the Odyssey Writing Workshop.Eric lives in Utah. His website is www.ericjamesstone.com.
Congratulations on your Nebula win for That Leviathan Whom Thou Hast Made! Can you tell us a bit about the experience of being nominated and winning the award?Thanks. Getting nominated was a great honor, and I really did not expect to win because I was up against such fantastic writers. So before the event, people kept asking me if I was nervous, and I could honestly reply that I wasn’t. However, as Gordon van Gelder read the nominees for the category before mine, I realized my palms were sweating. So I was nervous after all, but I was still shocked when John Kessel announced I was the winner. I was in a happy daze the rest of the night--and for most of the next couple of months.
Did you use any of the lessons or techniques learned at the Odyssey Writing Workshop in writing this novelette?
Of course. A lot of what I learned at Odyssey came into play, but the particular thing that Jeanne Cavelos taught me that helped shape this story was to figure out what the main character's desires and fears were.
When and how did you make your first sale?
When I attended Orson Scott Card's writing workshop in the summer of 2003, he encouraged us to enter the Writers of the Future Contest, so I committed to entering every quarter. Before the September deadline, I sent off the best story I had. In December, they told me I was a finalist in the contest. In January, I found out I was not a winner, but then in February I found out that they wanted to include my story in the anthology as a published finalist. And that was my first sale. I highly encourage new writers to submit to the Writers of the Future Contest, because that was my first big break.
How many stages does your work go through before you send it out to market?
It varies, but the following is typical: (1) Come up with an idea and maybe outline the story. (2) Write the story. (3) Submit it to my writing groups for feedback. (3) Maybe let it sit for a while. (4) Polish it up after taking the feedback into account and send it out. (Note that my stories tend not to go through multiple full redrafts. That's because I have difficulty turning off my "internal editor," so I tend to redraft paragraphs as I'm writing. As a result, my first drafts take a while, but are fairly clean.)
Collecting rejection slips is part of the process of being a writer. Can you tell us some rejection stories? What is your philosophy on rejections?
I have a rejection story that I often share with new writers: Back when I was in college, I wrote some stories for a creative writing class. I thought one of them was good enough to submit, so I submitted it. It got rejected. I submitted it someplace else. It got rejected. And so, after two rejections, I got discouraged and pretty much gave up on writing fiction for over ten years. DO NOT FOLLOW MY EXAMPLE. If I had stuck with it, I would be much farther along in my writing career than I am now.
While most of my published stories sold to one of the first several markets I sent them to, one of my stories sold to a professional market on its 17th submission and another sold on its 15th. One of my unpublished stories is currently on its 24th submission, because I still believe in it. That's my philosophy about rejections: if I still believe in the story, I keep submitting it to markets I'd be proud to see it in.
How do you feel your writing and process changed as a result of attending Odyssey?I already had several professional sales under my belt when I attended Odyssey. I felt like I was a competent writer, but I was looking for ways to move up a level. While at Odyssey, I wrote what I still think is my best story, "The Robot Sorcerer," and that one developed the way it did thanks to Jeanne's advice about figuring out my main character's desires and fears. Before Odyssey, my characters tended to be playing pieces put into the story because I needed someone to take the actions in my plot. After Odyssey, my characters tend to be instrumental in determining what the plot is.
Among your Odyssey classmates, your critiquing skills are legendary, and you are now a critiquer for the Odyssey Critique Service. When you read the work of developing writers, what weaknesses do you most often find?
Most of the stories by developing writers that I see nowadays is through my position as an assistant editor for Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show. What I look for in a manuscript is (1) intriguing characters (2) facing interesting challenges, leading to (3) a satisfying conclusion. Many of the manuscripts I see by new writers tend to lack at least one of those three elements.
E-publishing is big news right now. How is this affecting your views or plans for the future?
I've put up reprints of some of my stories as ebooks, and I tried an experiment with e-publishing a novel, although I shut that down after I got an agent. At this point, while there's a lot of excitement about e-publishing, I think finding a publisher still holds many advantages over self-publishing. I don't know if that will still be true in five to ten years.
What are you working on now, and when can we expect to see it?
I'm working on revising one of my novels for an editor who's interested. If all goes well, it may get published in the next few years.
For more information about Odyssey, its graduates and instructors, please visit our website at http://www.odysseyworkshop.org.
Photo Copyright © 2008 by Eric James Stone.
Justin Gustainis grew up in northeastern Pennsylvania and is now a college professor living in upstate New York. Prior to his career in academe, he was, at various times, a soldier, garment worker, speechwriter and professional bodyguard. He earned Bachelors and Masters degrees from the University of Scranton (a school that figures prominently in several of his novels) and a Ph.D. from Bowling Green State University in Ohio.Justin began writing fiction in the mid-1990s while maintaining his academic job. He focused initially on short stories, and won prizes in a number of writing contests, including the prestigious Raymond Carver story competition. His stories won the Graverson Award for Horror twice, in consecutive years. In 2008 he was accepted for and attended the Odyssey Writing Workshop.
His books include the novels The Hades Project (2003), Black Magic Woman (2008), Evil Ways (2009), Sympathy for the Devil (2011) and Hard Spell (2011), as well as an anthology he edited, Those Who Fight Monsters: Tales of Occult Detectives (2011).
He was married to Patricia Grogan from 1997 until her death in 2007. He misses her very much.
To learn more about Justin and his work, please visit his website: http://www.justingustainis.com/
How would you compare your pre-Odyssey and post-Odyssey writing? What changed the most for you?Of the many things I learned at Odyssey, one is that it’s important to get inside your characters’ heads. Don’t just describe what they do--understand why they do it. And if you can’t understand why a character is doing something you’ve just written, it may be time to rethink either the behavior or the character. Oh, and although I didn’t realize it at first, I came to Odyssey with a serious case of White Room Syndrome. Critique Circle cured me of that.
Is there a lingering lesson you learned at the Odyssey Writing Workshop that you'd like to share?
Yes--sleep is for wimps.
Congratulations on your recently launched books Hard Spell from Angry Robot Books and Sympathy for the Devil from Solaris Books. Can you tell us a bit about them?
Hard Spell is the first book in what I call my “Haunted Scranton” series (for which I have two more books under contract with Angry Robot). It’s set in an “alternate universe” Scranton, PA, where supernatural powers and creatures really exist--and everybody knows it. My protagonist is Stan Markowski, who’s a Detective Sgt. on the Scranton P.D.’s Occult Crime Unit, which everyone (including him) calls the “Supe Squad.” If a vampire puts the bite on an unwilling victim, or some witch casts the wrong kind of spell, Stan is the man who gets the call. Hard Spell had its genesis as a story that I wrote at Odyssey called “Demons Don’t Die”--in fact the story, with some changes, is part of the book.
Sympathy for the Devil is the third book in my series featuring occult investigator Quincey Morris and his partner, “white” witch Libby Chastain. In this one, Quincey and Libby find out that a contender for the Presidency is possessed by a demon (as part of Hell’s plan to destroy humanity). Any resemblance to actual political candidates, past or present, living or dead, is unintended and purely coincidental. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.
I am pleased to report (who am I kidding--I’m ecstatic) that Sympathy for the Devil has been optioned by a Hollywood production company, with a view to a possible TV series. The odds of the series ever being produced are slim, of course. To paraphrase Scripture, “Many are optioned, but few are chosen for a pilot. Fewer still are ordered to series.” But still . . . pretty cool, no?
The sub-genre of urban fantasy is very popular these days. How have you been able to carve out a distinctive, original area for yourself in this crowded field?
I don’t know how distinctive or original my area is, really. I write about what are loosely called occult detectives, because that’s what I like to read. There are a number of very good writers who have their own occult investigator character(s). I ought to know--I buy every new book as it’s released. Quincey and Libby are a bit different from the usual urban fantasy protagonists (although I didn’t write them the way I did just to be different). In this male-female pairing, the female is the one with occult powers, and the man has none (although he has several abilities and talents of the human variety). Also they’re not lovers, which some readers have told me is refreshing. As for the other series--how many urban fantasy novels do you know of that are set in Scranton? I mean, really.
But there are no new stories under the sun (or the full moon, for that matter). Jeanne made that clear during the first week of Odyssey. That’s the bad news. The good news is that it doesn’t matter--what’s important is how you tell your version of the story.
Can you tell us about the process of selling your two recent novels to Angry Robot and Solaris?
The story with Angry Robot is fairly simple. Marc Gascoigne, who’s the Editor-in-Chief there, was at Solaris when I wrote the first two Morris/Chastain novels for them. Then Marc left to start Angry Robot, and he sent me (and doubtless a number of other writers) an email letting me know about his new publishing venture, and inviting me to submit any novels (or plans for same) that I might have lying around. I told him that I had a partial manuscript about a cop investigating supernatural crime in Scranton. We were both planning to attend World Fantasy in Calgary (this was in 2008), and arranged to get together there. I had just finished taking part in a panel on urban fantasy and was on my way to lunch with Marc to make my pitch when I had my infamous impromptu experiment with the force of gravity off the back of the speaker’s platform. I ended up making my pitch some time later, by email. Fortunately, it worked. Maybe he felt sorry for me.
The real story with the Morris/Chastain books involves the first one, because the contracts for the others all flowed from that. I’d written a novel called Black Magic Woman about this guy descended from a character in Dracula and his witch partner who go about fighting supernatural evil. I’d sent queries to all the publishers that didn’t require agented submissions (I didn’t have my wonderful agent, Miriam Kriss, at that time), and been turned down by them all. One day, I was reading Realms of Fantasy magazine and saw an ad for a novel about some woman carrying out a covert war against vampires. That’s the sort of thing I like, so I circled the ad to put the book on my want list. Then I noticed the name of the publisher: Solaris Books. I’d never heard of them. My thought process went something like this: “These guys publish the kind of stuff I like to read; I also write the kind of stuff I like to read; ergo, these guys publish the kind of stuff I write! Holy shit!” All very Aristotelian, apart from that last bit.I went to the Solaris web page and saw that it was a relatively new, but legitimate (i.e., not a vanity press) British publisher. So, okay, I send them an email query (the usual letter plus three chapters). Three days later, I get an email asking for the whole manuscript. Four days after that, I answer the phone and some dude with an English accent says, “Hello, is this Justin? This is Christian Dunn from Solaris books. We’d like to offer you a contract for Black Magic Woman.” I’d made it from slush pile to sale within a week--if you don’t count the two years I’d already spent trying to sell the book elsewhere.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but Solaris had decided to open a one-month window to consider new material; then they weren’t going to look at new stuff for about two years. I hit them right in the middle of that window.
This story illustrates what I believe are the three keys to getting published: persistence, luck and (if I may flatter myself) talent. And it’s my opinion that if a writer has the first and last, the middle one will eventually fall into line for you.
When and how did you make your first sale?
The first time I received money for my fiction was in a contest--I don’t remember which one. I went through a period in which I entered a bunch of them (and won prizes in several). Most didn’t charge an entry fee, and you can enter the same story in a slew of contests, if you like. Sometimes you get helpful critiques, too.
My first sale was a short story called “Bargain” to something called Futures Mysterious Anthology Magazine. It was a crime/suspense story, as were the next few that I sold. I didn’t get into supernatural territory until I wrote my first novel, The Hades Project.
Everyone is talking about how much the publishing industry is changing. What is your opinion of these changes?
I hate the fact that so many bookstores are going under, especially independent, specialty bookstores that specialize in science fiction, fantasy, or mystery. Even the chains are coming apart. The Borders in my town (like Borders stores everywhere) is going out of business, and although there are some good bargains to be had, it’s sad to watch a bookstore die (even if it’s a soulless corporate clone of all the others). Particularly since it was the only real bookstore in town.
On the other hand, I really like Kindle. I don’t own a reader myself, and might never buy one --but right now my two new books are selling better in Kindle editions than in hard copy. Ergo, I love Kindle.
What are you working on now, and when can we expect to see it?
I’m currently working on Evil Dark, the second “Haunted Scranton” book, which is due out at the end of February. I’m also fooling around with a script for a Sympathy for the Devil pilot. You never know . . .
For more information about Odyssey, its graduates and instructors, please visit our website at http://www.odysseyworkshop.org.
Carrie Vaughn is the bestselling author of a series of novels about a werewolf named Kitty who hosts a talk radio advice show. The ninth book in the series, Kitty’s Big Trouble, has just been released from Tor Books. She’s also written young adult (Voices of Dragons, Steel) and stand-alone fantasy (Discord’s Apple, After the Golden Age). Her short stories can be found in many publications and anthologies, and one of her short stories has been nominated for the Hugo Award in 2011. She graduated from Odyssey in 1998, and returned as writer-in-residence in 2009. Visit her website at www.carrievaughn.com.
I never made a conscious decision to transition from writing short stories to novels or vice versa. As a teenager, I started writing very short stories. Over time, my stories got longer and longer, until I suddenly realized my work in progress was nearly 30,000 words and wasn't finished yet. I was in the middle of it before I realized I was writing a novel. By the way, I highly recommend working in ignorance, as this removed much of the anxiety surrounding the writing of a first novel.
I know a lot of people consider themselves either novel writers or short story writers, and have either never written in a different format, or have had trouble with it. Their stories always expand into multi-volume epics, or they never get past a few thousand words. I'm a great advocate of working in as many different formats as possible--being able to do so gives you more tools in your toolbox. If you get an invitation to an anthology, you'll be able to deliver. If you want to dive into the prestigious (and more lucrative) novel market, you can take that plunge.
How do you tell if a story idea is a 5,000-word story, or a 10,000-word story? How do you keep it from sprawling into novel length? How do you know if an idea is a novel? Like just about everything else in the business, it takes practice. After ten years of writing every possible length, I've developed a sixth sense about how long I think a story is going to be, based on the number of characters and how many scenes a story needs.
My very first collection comes out on August 16th: Kitty's Greatest Hits contains most of the stories related to my series of novels about werewolf Kitty Norville that have come out over the last few years. It's got everything from true short stories to a 23,000-word novella. Here's a representative breakdown , in terms of structure:
"Kitty's Zombie New Year," 3300 words: three major characters, several minor. Takes place over the course of a few hours, with only one event driving the plot.
"Conquistador de la Noche," 12,000 words: three major characters, four minor. Several scenes over a stretch of time.
"Long Time Waiting," 23,000 words: two major characters, many minor. Takes place over months, with a flashback to a century previous. Many scenes with a slow, progressive, building plot.
A short story may have just one scene, or a series of scenes surrounding the same event, with only a few characters to manage. A mid-range piece may have more of an arc, take place over a stretch of time, and involve a series of events. Novella length and longer--go to town! You're not just telling a story about one event, you're building a world and its history. Many events and threads come together to tell the story.
Here's an exercise: Take a short story, any short story, and think about what you would need to do to expand it into a novel. Take "Kitty's Zombie New Year," for example: Right now, the story has one zombie interrupting a party. Once Kitty figures out where she came from and what happened to her, the story's over. But what if the one zombie is part of a pattern? What if similar zombies start showing up all over the city? What if the guy who bought the zombie powder that turned his ex-girlfriend into a zombie is only one of many people who bought the powder, and the real villain is the person making and selling the powder? Suddenly, this starts to look like a novel idea--many isolated episodes are actually connected, and the novel involves figuring out how.
Conversely, take a novel and figure out how to get a short story out of it. Perversely, I made my Odyssey class in 2009 look at The Lord of the Rings. The answer is: you can't tell the story of The Lord of the Rings as a short. You just can't. But maybe you can take a small piece and go in a different direction. The innkeeper at Bree--what's his story? Does a survivor of the battle at Helm's Deep have a story you want to tell? Limit the scope, and learn something new about your novel's world.
For more information about Odyssey, its graduates and instructors, please visit our website at http://www.odysseyworkshop.org.
I never made a conscious decision to transition from writing short stories to novels or vice versa. As a teenager, I started writing very short stories. Over time, my stories got longer and longer, until I suddenly realized my work in progress was nearly 30,000 words and wasn't finished yet. I was in the middle of it before I realized I was writing a novel. By the way, I highly recommend working in ignorance, as this removed much of the anxiety surrounding the writing of a first novel.I know a lot of people consider themselves either novel writers or short story writers, and have either never written in a different format, or have had trouble with it. Their stories always expand into multi-volume epics, or they never get past a few thousand words. I'm a great advocate of working in as many different formats as possible--being able to do so gives you more tools in your toolbox. If you get an invitation to an anthology, you'll be able to deliver. If you want to dive into the prestigious (and more lucrative) novel market, you can take that plunge.
How do you tell if a story idea is a 5,000-word story, or a 10,000-word story? How do you keep it from sprawling into novel length? How do you know if an idea is a novel? Like just about everything else in the business, it takes practice. After ten years of writing every possible length, I've developed a sixth sense about how long I think a story is going to be, based on the number of characters and how many scenes a story needs.
My very first collection comes out on August 16th: Kitty's Greatest Hits contains most of the stories related to my series of novels about werewolf Kitty Norville that have come out over the last few years. It's got everything from true short stories to a 23,000-word novella. Here's a representative breakdown , in terms of structure:
"Kitty's Zombie New Year," 3300 words: three major characters, several minor. Takes place over the course of a few hours, with only one event driving the plot.
"Conquistador de la Noche," 12,000 words: three major characters, four minor. Several scenes over a stretch of time.
"Long Time Waiting," 23,000 words: two major characters, many minor. Takes place over months, with a flashback to a century previous. Many scenes with a slow, progressive, building plot.
A short story may have just one scene, or a series of scenes surrounding the same event, with only a few characters to manage. A mid-range piece may have more of an arc, take place over a stretch of time, and involve a series of events. Novella length and longer--go to town! You're not just telling a story about one event, you're building a world and its history. Many events and threads come together to tell the story.Here's an exercise: Take a short story, any short story, and think about what you would need to do to expand it into a novel. Take "Kitty's Zombie New Year," for example: Right now, the story has one zombie interrupting a party. Once Kitty figures out where she came from and what happened to her, the story's over. But what if the one zombie is part of a pattern? What if similar zombies start showing up all over the city? What if the guy who bought the zombie powder that turned his ex-girlfriend into a zombie is only one of many people who bought the powder, and the real villain is the person making and selling the powder? Suddenly, this starts to look like a novel idea--many isolated episodes are actually connected, and the novel involves figuring out how.
Conversely, take a novel and figure out how to get a short story out of it. Perversely, I made my Odyssey class in 2009 look at The Lord of the Rings. The answer is: you can't tell the story of The Lord of the Rings as a short. You just can't. But maybe you can take a small piece and go in a different direction. The innkeeper at Bree--what's his story? Does a survivor of the battle at Helm's Deep have a story you want to tell? Limit the scope, and learn something new about your novel's world.
For more information about Odyssey, its graduates and instructors, please visit our website at http://www.odysseyworkshop.org.
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