odysseyworkshop

Odyssey Workshop Blog Now in Wordpress

2013-04-14T14:01:09Z

Hello friends,

Thank you all for sticking by us here on Live Journal. As of 2013, the Odyssey Workshop Blog has moved to Wordpress. Our LJ blog will be deleted by the end of April.

Find our upcoming posts, and all older entries--including guest writers, graduates’ news, and writing tips--at http:odysseyworkshop.wordpress.com. Check out our Sunday, April 14 interview with 2013 author and guest lecturer Patricia Bray.

If you have a Wordpress account, follow us there. Whether or not you're on Wordpress, we invite you to sign up via our Wordpress blog to receive notifications of future posts via email.

Thank you!

The Odyssey Writing Workshop Blog Team

REMINDER: Odyssey on Word Press

2013-03-10T20:04:53Z

I don't know how many of you are still lingering on LJ, but I just wanted to give you another reminder that the Odyssey Blog has moved to Word Press. In April, we will be closing the LJ format, and you don't want to miss out on any interviews or writing advice columns!

For March, read upcoming lecturer Adam-Troy Castro's interview here!

Odyssey Workshop Blog Has a New Home!

2013-02-10T19:33:00Z

Hello, readers!

Instead of posting our monthly interview, I wanted to first thank you all for sticking by us here on Live Journal. After much discussion, we've decided to move the Odyssey blog to a platform that's a little bit more user-friendly, especially for all of you readers who aren't on LJ. So to continue to follow this blog, to hear about upcoming guest writers, what our graduates are up to, and to of course get great writing tips, please visit us at Word Press:

http://odysseyworkshop.wordpress.com/

Today, we have an interview with the wonderful Holly Black, who will be a guest lecturer at this summer’s Odyssey Writing Workshop. You can catch her interview here: http://odysseyworkshop.wordpress.com/2013/01/30/interview-holly-black/

Thanks for all of your time and attention! The LJ version of this blog will be open for a few months, just to make sure stragglers know to head over to Word Press. However, this version of the blog will be closing in time. All old entries will be found at Word Press.

Thank you!

Interview: Jack Ketchum

2013-01-13T05:01:04Z

Jack Ketchum will be a guest lecturer at this summer's Odyssey Writing Workshop. Ketchum is the pseudonym for a former actor, singer, teacher, literary agent, lumber salesman, and soda jerk--a former flower child and baby boomer who figures that in 1956 Elvis, dinosaurs and horror probably saved his life. His first novel, Off Season, prompted the Village Voice to publicly scold its publisher in print for publishing violent pornography. He personally disagrees but is perfectly happy to let you decide for yourself. His short story "The Box" won a 1994 Bram Stoker Award from the HWA, his story "Gone" won again in 2000--and in 2003 he won Stokers for both best collection for Peaceable Kingdom and best long fiction for Closing Time. He has written over twenty novels and novellas, the latest of which are The Woman and I'm Not Sam, both written with director Lucky McKee. Five of his books have been filmed to date--The Girl Next Door, The Lost, Red, Offspring and The Woman, the last of which won him and McKee the Best Screenplay Award at the prestigious Sitges Film Festival in Germany. His stories are collected in The Exit At Toledo Blade Boulevard, Broken on the Wheel of Sex, Sleep Disorder (with Edward Lee), Peaceable Kingdom and Closing Time and Other Stories. His novella The Crossings was cited by Stephen King in his speech at the 2003 National Book Awards. In 2011 he was elected Grand Master by the World Horror Convention. You can learn more about Jack Ketchum at his website http://www.jackketchum.net.

What is it about horror that fascinates you? Is there a certain element or style that always has to be present for a story to be horror?

There's no rule about style except that it be engaging. Do not bore me. Other than that, anything goes. The main element, of course, is fear. There's a wide range to this. Everything from a growing dread to a sudden eruption of violence and all stops in between. Horror should disturb your equilibrium somehow, take you into places you really wouldn't want to go on your own. In that sense the writer stands between you and what scares and disturbs you, involves you but lets you keep a safe distance at the same time. He's your Beatrice for Dante's tour of hell.

You've talked about the importance of "knowing what to leave out of the paragraph or sentence" when creating a strong atmosphere of dread. Could you give an example of some details that you might include, and those you would exclude, to maximize the effect?

Really good suspense-and-horror writing's tight writing. Elmore Leonard famously said, when asked how he got his own writing so tight, was that he left out all the parts people tend to skip. If it doesn't feel absolutely necessary, if it doesn't advance character, theme or plot, get rid of it. Moby Dick's Ahab wouldn't be right without the wooden leg. Likewise Queequeg's tattoos. But do we really care at all if Ishmael's a blonde or a brunette? We don't. Leave that stuff out.

As a guest lecturer at this summer's Odyssey Writing Workshop, you'll be lecturing, workshopping, and meeting individually with students. Last time you taught at Odyssey, you spoke about the importance of strong openings. Can you describe some of the qualities of a good opening?

A good opening gets you right in there with no wasted words--it makes you need to read further. Example, from Christopher Buckley’s Thank You For Smoking. “Nick Naylor had been called many things since becoming chief spokesman for the Academy of Tobacco Studies, but until now no one had actually compared him to Satan.”

Consider how immediate that is. We’re smack in the now. This has just happened. And we’re given a lot of information about Nick. We know his job, that he’s been at it a while, that it’s an important job in his company--and we can even intuit something of his moral and ethical stance if he’s been called names before and is now being compared to the Biggest Bad Guy of all.

Immodesty be damned, I'll give you one of my own opening lines, from The Girl Next Door. "You think you know about pain?" I might have added the word smartass here, because I'm challenging you to continue in this one. I'm also implying right off the bat that my narrator knows a whole lot about pain. Makes you want to know why, doesn't it? Makes you want to read further.

You advise developing writers to "steal as many great licks from other writers as you possibly can." Can you share some techniques you learned/stole from other writers?

The long, discursive sentence from Faulkner and Henry Miller. The short punch from Hemingway. The art of the wisecrack from Raymond Chandler. Black humor from Robert Bloch. I could go on and on...

Why do you write under a pseudonym? Why do you use more than one?

I got used to pseudonyms writing for the men's magazines. There were times I'd have as many as three or four pieces--fiction and nonfiction--in the same issue. So I'd use my real name for one, Jerzy Livingston for another, and so on. Then, when I wrote Off Season, I sold it by making believe I was still dipping into the literary-agenting biz from time to time, and I'd found this really cool writer named Jack Ketchum. It got me off the slush-pile. The book sold well, so I kept it.

Your list of appearances on your Web site finishes in November of 2012. Where can we expect to see you in 2013?

Nothing definite except NECON in Rhode Island, which I do every year. But probably Rock 'n Shock in Massachusetts, Blood on the Beach in Virginia and KillerCon in Las Vegas.

You have an extensive bibliography. What's your secret for being so prolific?

I'm really not that prolific. Compare my output to Stephen King's. If you look closely you'll find that I'm lucky to get out a book a year, along with a handful of short stories and articles. Once I more or less established myself as a viable writer in my own eyes, I started to take it easy. I'm not particularly driven to write. For me, it has to be a pleasure, or I'd rather watch movies or read somebody else's book.

The reprint of Consensual in A Hacked Up Holiday Massacre came out recently. Do you get flak for mixing the holidays and horror in your writing? How do you deal with that?

I get flak for practically everything. So I'm used to it by now. Though the occasional death-threat does tend to give me pause.

What's next on the writing-related horizon? Are you starting any new projects?

Lucky McKee and I are talking about doing another project together. I've been asked to come up with a new novella. And I'm in the midst of compiling a small book of poetry. Yeah, poetry. Me. New and old. If I thought I was sticking my neck out with Broken on the Wheel of Sex, my men's mag pieces, I'm looking at the possibility of total dismemberment on this one.

For more information about Odyssey, its graduates and instructors, please visit our website at http://www.odysseyworkshop.org.

ODYSSEY WRITING WORKSHOPS CHARITABLE TRUST ANNOUNCES SUMMER 2013 WORKSHOP

2013-01-08T05:00:31Z

Make a quantum leap in your writing this summer! The Odyssey Writing Workshop for fantasy, science fiction, and horror writers will run from June 10 to July 19 in Manchester, NH. Participate in the program that has led 58% of graduates to professional publication, with their work appearing in top magazines and published by major publishing houses. Challenge yourself and pack two years of learning into six weeks of intense work. Four-hour classes five days a week, an advanced curriculum, daily writing and critiquing assignments, weekly stories/chapters due, in-depth feedback on your work, personal guidance from Jeanne Cavelos, former senior editor at Bantam Doubleday Dell and winner of the World Fantasy Award, and guests Nancy Holder, Holly Black, Adam-Troy Castro, Jack Ketchum, Patricia Bray, and Sheila Williams. The early action application deadline is January 31, and regular application deadline is April 8. Four scholarships and one work/study position are available. Read more here: http://www.sff.net/odyssey/workshop.html.

Interview: Sheila Williams

2012-12-09T05:00:53Z

Sheila Williams will be a guest lecturer at this summer's Odyssey Writing Workshop. She is the two-time Hugo-Award-winning editor of Asimov's Science Fiction magazine. She started at Asimov's in June 1982 and served as the executive editor of Analog from 1998 until 2004. She is also the co-founder of the Dell Magazines Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing (formerly the Isaac Asimov Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing). In addition, she coordinates the websites for Asimov's (www.asimovs.com).

Sheila is the editor or co-editor of twenty-five anthologies. The most recent are Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine's 30th Anniversary Anthology (Tachyon Publications, 2007), which received a starred review from Publishers Weekly and was on the 2007 Locus Recommended Reading list, and the 2010 Enter A Future: Fantastic Tales from Asimov's Science Fiction, which is exclusively available for Amazon's Kindle.

Sheila received her bachelor's degree from Elmira College in Elmira, New York, and her master's from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. During her junior year she studied at the London School of Economics. She lives in New York City with her husband, David Bruce, and her two daughters.

What is the most common mistake that writers make in their manuscript submissions to you? Most editors develop pet peeves as they encounter manuscripts that continually violate submission guidelines or make some other irritating mistake. Which one bothers you the most?

The most common mistake is not researching or knowing their markets. Anyone familiar with Asimov’s would know that a story featuring a medieval village is unlikely to sell to me unless the reader finds out pretty quickly that this is a virtual reality or time travel or some other SF-nal situation. I do publish some fantasy, but it’s usually the type that creeps up on you quietly and leaves you wondering about the nature of the story just read. If writers were more careful about where they targeted their stories, they would probably sell them more quickly.

Except for single-spaced manuscripts—which I loathe—I’m not particularly bothered by format mistakes. However, I think it’s wise for every author to check out a venue’s manuscript guidelines before submitting material to that market.

Is there one type of story that you see too much of, or not enough of?

I mostly tend to see too much of one kind of story when there’s a call for a theme anthology or someone starts mentioning a trend. Sometimes a news item will lead to a run on a theme, too. If “everyone’s doing” a certain kind of story it’s probably best to avoid it. Still, yours might be the best, so you can feel free to ignore this advice, too.

Also, I see far too many stories where the main character is bored. If the character is bored, I’m usually bored too. I won’t read past the first paragraph if the character is just waking up. If you write a story about a character getting out of bed and eating breakfast, go back and cut everything that happens before the action begins.

Like nearly every editor in this field, I don’t get enough well-thought-out hard SF. I’m always looking for the stories that integrate intriguing characters and clever plotting with well-developed science.

Is there a 'best before' date for some story concepts? Conversely, are there story themes that never die?

The opposite of the “sell-by” story is the political story. Politics can’t be avoided, and I publish stories from both ends of the spectrum and many points in between. However, these types of stories start showing up at a fever pitch right around major national elections. These tales can become polemical, sacrificing characters and interesting plotting for the ideas. They’re also likely to date themselves fairly quickly. If a writer is moved enough by a national election to come up with a story concept, I suggest waiting to write it until after the voting is over and trying to make the theme as universal as possible.

How has the slush pile changed over the years? Do you see a real growth, a maturity, in today's science fiction?

Line-by-line, writing styles consistently improve. Unfortunately, authors don’t tend to experiment enough with new ideas in science and technology. Authors need to apply the artistic lessons they’ve learned about writing to skillfully incorporating science into their fiction as well.

As a guest lecturer at Odyssey Writing Workshop next summer, what is the most important point you hope to impart to the students, that one key message that stands out above all else?

Although an author can learn a lot by writing fast and prolifically for workshops and creative writing classes, it’s important to take time crafting a story. I see too many stories that are just dashed off with little thought given to fleshing out believable characters, incorporating original ideas, creating satisfying resolutions, and avoiding predictable clichés and plodding plot lines. Writing for practice is a very good idea, but it’s important to take the time to buff up a story before submitting it for publication.

What advice can you give to those who might like a position as an editor with a magazine? How does one get started in the field?

The bad news is that short-story editing positions with salary and benefits like mine are so rare that I hesitate to recommend any particular course of action. The good news is that with the advent of the Internet, it’s much easier to start your own nonprofessional publication to showcase the kind of work that you love. I think it would be best to find a good day job and view short-story editing, at least initially, as a hobby. If you’re not ready to start your own, there’re plenty of existing professional and nonprofessional online publications that would be happy to take on additional slush pile readers. You can learn a lot about how to write, how not to write, and how to help people with their writing, by reading hundreds of SF and fantasy submissions.

Considering how many submissions you receive from unknown authors in a year, and how many stories you publish by unknown authors in a year, can you give us an idea of what percentage of submissions by unknown authors ends up getting published? What makes the successful stories stand out for you?

I read stories nowadays before I see the cover letters, so it turns out that practically ever story has a pretty equal chance of catching my attention. I often find material from people I’ve never heard of (though, when that happens, more often than not it will turn out that they have had sales to other markets). It’s hard to say exactly how many stories by completely unknown authors will sell to me each year, but one or two stories in each issue of the magazine tend to be by authors who are appearing in Asimov’s for the first time. Authors whose work came out of my slush pile without previous credentials include Ted Kosmatka, Felicity Shoulders, and Gregory Norman Bossert. Successful stories usually start with an intriguing situation, one that makes me question What will happen next? What is the author withholding from me? Characters are often immediately compelling as well.

Have you ever gotten so tired of reading for a living that you've considered another line of work? If so, why? What happened?

Not really. I’d love to have more time for leisure reading, but I’ve always loved my job. I love just about everything about science fiction. I’m sure that if I ever left my job, I’d have to find work in something related to the field.

For more information about Odyssey, its graduates and instructors, please visit our website at http://www.odysseyworkshop.org.

ODYSSEY WRITING WORKSHOPS CHARITABLE TRUST ANNOUNCES WINTER 2013 ONLINE CLASSES

2012-11-29T03:00:23Z

For seventeen years, Odyssey has pursued its mission to help developing writers of fantasy, science fiction, and horror improve their work by holding its annual six-week, in-person workshop in Manchester, New Hampshire.

Three years ago, Odyssey expanded its mission, taking the teaching techniques that are so effective at the workshop and adapting them to create online classes. Director Jeanne Cavelos explains, "Technology allows us to hold live online class meetings, so students can ask questions and participate in the class. Each course is designed to provide intensive focus on a particular aspect of fiction writing, and challenging homework assignments help students to improve their skills. Feedback from the instructor and from classmates allows students to gauge their progress. Each student also has an individual meeting with instructor." Courses provide a supportive yet challenging, energizing atmosphere, with class size limited to fourteen students. While courses are designed for adult writers of fantasy, science fiction, and horror, interested writers of other genres are welcome to apply.

Last winter, Odyssey had a huge response to the three online courses offered. Writers from all over the world applied. This year, Odyssey is offering three different online courses covering some of the most critical issues for developing writers:

Three-Act Structure in Fantastic Fiction

Course Meets: January 2 - 30, 2013

Instructor: Jeanne Cavelos

Application Deadline: December 7, 2012

When we first offered this course in 2011, we received more interest than in any course taught before or since. So we're offering it again, to provide more writers the chance to learn the exciting possibilities inherent in this plot structure. One of the greatest weaknesses of developing writers is plot. One of the best tools for strengthening plot is the act. Plotting in acts creates a more suspenseful, unpredictable, and emotionally satisfying experience for the reader. This course will start by defining key units of structure--the scene, chapter, and act--and explore why we need acts. We'll discuss the effect of acts, the importance of acts, how acts work in short fiction and novels, and how acts are used in science fiction, fantasy, and horror. How does one identify an act? When are three acts appropriate? Why are three acts so popular and powerful? We'll learn how to plot in three acts. We'll explore what makes a strong three-act plot and what makes a weak three-act plot. We'll look at powerful methods and weak methods of ending an act. We'll explore how to create a causal chain that generates escalations and a strong climax, how subplots work within three-act structure, the connection between structure and character transformation, and the unifying role of theme.

Getting the Big Picture: The Key to Revising Your Novel

Course Meets: January 7 - February 4, 2013

Instructor: Barbara Ashford

Application Deadline: December 11, 2012

Barbara Ashford believes the most important skill a novelist needs is to be able to see the "big picture" of the novel, to understand where that big picture is lacking or weak, and to make the major changes necessary to create a coherent, complete, powerful, and unified novel. Barbara believes this skill made all the difference in her writing, transforming it from promising but unsalable to compelling and published. Writers often approach revisions as an opportunity to polish their manuscripts rather than to take a hard look at the story itself. If your plot meanders and your protagonist's goals are unclear, polishing your prose won't help. This course examines the "big picture" elements at the foundation of every novel: premise, promise, theme, world, character, and plot. Whether you've already completed your first draft, are still working on it, or are struggling with revisions, analyzing and strengthening those elements can lift your novel out of the slush pile and onto an agent's desk. Award-nominated author Barbara Ashford will examine each of these big picture elements and the ways that linking them can create a unified, compelling, powerful story. Through lecture, discussion, and writing exercises, students will analyze their premise, the promise that the novel is making to readers, the themes that arise from the novel, the world they have created, their protagonists' backstory, motivations, and goals, and the plot events they have chosen to lead the reader from the story's promise to its climax.

Bodies and Heartbeats: Crafting Character from the Inside Out

Course Meets: January 23 - February 20, 2013

Instructor: Elaine Isaak

Application Deadline: December 27, 2012

If you will try being fictional for a while, you will find that fictional characters are sometimes

more real than people with bodies and heartbeats.

--Richard Bach

In her critiques as a guest lecturer at the Odyssey Writing Workshop and as a critiquer for the Odyssey Critique Service, Elaine Isaak has become legendary for identifying weaknesses in character and suggesting brilliant yet simple ways to strengthen characters. This course will help you to develop a clearer sense of what makes a powerful character and will teach you the techniques you need to develop strong characters. The first duty of the fiction writer is to make the reader care about people that don't exist. In this course, we'll talk about how to create the core of a sympathetic character and bring that character to life through words so that the reader invests in the dreams and challenges of your imagined people. Students will study and discuss examples, perform exercises to practice creating sympathetic and believable characters, and write short-shorts that put these new skills into practice. Students will also provide critiques of their classmates' work.

More information about our online classes can be found here: http://www.sff.net/odyssey/online.html or by emailing jcavelos@sff.net.

If you've visited the Odyssey site recently, you may need to click REFRESH on your browser to see the new content.

PLEASE NOTE: Those application deadlines are coming up soon! If you would like to apply for more than one course, you must apply separately for each one.

Odyssey's Online Classes pack valuable content into each session, allow for significant interaction with the instructor, and provide assignments that challenge students. The classes provide the tools students need to improve their writing, along with feedback on their work that reveals whether they are successfully using those tools. Cavelos says, "If you're ready to hear about the weaknesses in your writing and ready to work to overcome them, you'd be welcome to apply to our online classes."

In addition, the Odyssey Web site, www.odysseyworkshop.org, offers many resources for writers, including free podcasts, writing and publishing tips, a writing blog, a critique service, and information about the six-week in-person workshop.

The journey to take your writing to the next level starts now!

Interview: Nancy Holder

2012-11-11T05:00:35Z

Nancy Holder will be the writer-in-residence at this summer's Odyssey Writing Workshop. She is an award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of adult, young adult, middle grade, and early reader work, both fiction and nonfiction. She has sold approximately 80 novels and 200 short stories, comic books, and essays in various genres. She has taught creative writing classes at the University of California at San Diego, the Maui Writers Retreat and Conference, and other conferences and colleges, and has been on the faculty of the Stonecoast MFA in Creative Writing for seven years. She has also served on the boards of Clarion (San Diego) and the Horror Writers Association. You can learn more about Nancy and her work at her website: http://nancyholder.com/

You are an incredibly busy and successful writer, writing in different genres, for different ages, in different formats. How do you keep up? Is there ever a danger of having too much on the go?

There is always a danger. The worst thing in the world is to turn in subpar work because you've bitten off more than you can chew. One thing I've learned about working a bit more speedily than some is that I have less time to second-guess myself, and as a result, I often write straight from the heart. Since that's the goal, that's pretty neat!

You talk about your teaching philosophy as giving kind, specific guidance. Did you have the benefit of this kind of help when you were starting out?

Yes and no. I did a lot of workshopping at UC San Diego and some of my fellow workshoppers were snarky and brutal. But I had one professor, Dr. John Waterhouse, who encouraged me to send things out. He wrote a moving letter of recommendation when I applied to grad school, in which he said he thought I could become a professional freelancer if I chose to. I was stunned. That letter changed the course of my life. I still have it.

As a writer-in-residence at the upcoming Odyssey Workshop, you'll be living with the students for a week, lecturing, workshopping, and meeting privately with students. What is the one piece of advice you really want to get across to developing writers?

Writers must read. Watching TV and movies is great for developing a sense of structure, but absorbing the written word is vital. Writers need to be able to punctuate sentences and keep their verb tenses straight. And they need to know when they're reinventing the wheel. It's important to remain teachable. But it's equally important to believe in yourself. Every single writer in the known universe started out unpublished. And that includes God.

Why do you think your work is so popular?

Well, I hope that it's popular. That's so kind of you to say. I try to be direct and honest (and kind, I guess, sometimes at least) and to say the things that people are thinking, but don't realize anyone else is thinking. I've had so many people come up to me and ask, "How did you know?" I also try to spread the word that even in the darkest place, there is hope. I think that's such an important message.

What is the biggest weakness you faced in your writing, and how did you overcome it?

Sometimes, because I write so much, I start repeating myself. I've really poured on the reading of late so that I'll be fresher. I'm falling in love with writing all over again. I drive 80 miles a day on school days now, because my daughter is attending a charter school, and I listen to audio books. When I hear a cool new turn of phrase, I chuckle. And take mental notes.

When Wicked was optioned by DreamWorks, what did you do to celebrate?

It was really weird, because my daughter got very upset by all the hoopla. We knew the option had been exercised, but we didn't know when the announcement would be made. One night I was surfing the net and the announcement started popping up all over the place. The phone was ringing. She got very cranky and said, "Now you'll be famous and you won't be around anymore." Once I realized what was up, my feelings were a little less hurt.

Debbie Viguié and I finally celebrated together by going to Disneyland. We're both Disney freaks.

Do you have any tales of caution for those anticipating this kind of offer?

They are few and far between, and the number of films that will actually get made is tiny. Since I live in Southern California, I knew that going in. So I was excited and happy (especially when my agent confirmed that Steven Spielberg knew who I was!).

How do you fit in time for short works between novel projects? Is it difficult to keep up on small stuff when you're deep in novel mode, or does it provide a break?

It take as much energy to write a short story as a novel. I find I keep doing new world building in short fiction, thinking, "Hmm, this would make a cool novel," and then I move on to the next shiny bright object. I shouldn't write as much short fiction as I do, but it is my first love.

Do you enjoy tie-ins as much as writing in your own world? What sort of differences do you find in the processes of each?

I love writing tie-ins. I would have been a good TV writer. Getting a tie-in assignment is like figuring out a big puzzle. I always try to fit into the logic and structure of the show, to write "more of" rather than "more than." It's not limiting to me because when you write tie-ins, you can write different kinds of books, just as there are different kinds of episodes on a show--one week the crew's using the holodeck to solve a 1940's murder mystery, and the next week, Buffy's dead. It's just a lot of fun to get to play, too.

You seem to really have a knack for capturing kids' attention. Any advice for those wanting to write for kids?

It's like having to read--you have to know kids. You have to hang out where you can see them and listen to them. You have to watch their shows and read the books and magazines they like. It's like writing a tie-in--you have to know that world. And respect it, and love it. Kids are trying to grow up to be good people, and I love them for it.

For more information about Odyssey, its graduates and instructors, please visit our website at http://www.odysseyworkshop.org.

Interview: Alex Hughes

2012-10-14T04:00:39Z

Alex has written since early childhood, and loves great stories in any form including science fiction, fantasy, and mystery. Over the years, Alex has lived in many neighborhoods of the sprawling metro Atlanta area. Decatur, the neighborhood on which Clean is centered, was Alex’s college home.

On any given week you can find Alex in the kitchen cooking gourmet Italian food, watching hours of police procedural dramas, and typing madly.

Alex is a graduate of the 2011 Odyssey Writing Workshop. You can learn more about Alex at www.ahugheswriter.com

Congratulations on the upcoming launch of Clean! It's been great to see so many success stories among the Odyssey alumni. Can you tell us about this dystopian thriller?

Thank you! It’s been a very exciting ride. The book is about a recovering addict telepath who works with the police in future Atlanta to solve a series of murders where the killer kills with the mind. James Knapp calls it “a fun blend of Chinatown and Bladerunner.”

What made you decide to write about a telepath?

There’s something both creepy and comforting about the idea of someone being able to read your mind. It would allow for a lot of opportunities for intimacy and understanding, but also lead to a lot of mistrust and abuse in the real world. And just because you know what someone is thinking at this moment doesn’t mean you know that person. The implications of telepathy go pretty deep, I think.

Clean is set in a dark future Atlanta. Is this because Atlanta is home, or is there more to the story?

Well, Atlanta is home, and I was living in Decatur when I started the project. I was fascinated by the mix of old and new, gritty and bright in that area of the city, and Atlanta as a whole is like that. It’s big, with the busiest airport in the world, which means sooner or later everyone comes to (or through) the city. This leads to a lot of problems and a lot of benefits both--and both will be around for a long time, I think.

What is the most important thing you learned at the Odyssey Writing Workshop? How did Odyssey influence the writing of this novel?

When it comes to writing, the lesson that sticks out to me the most from Odyssey is the day Jeanne brought out a section from a Stephen King novel and proceeded to turn everything I knew about suspense on its head. In a big, important action scene, I’d always been taught you needed to write small--short sentences, small paragraphs, with hard-hitting action verbs. Get in, get out, go home. But Jeanne argued that King’s method, of slowing down the action and adding visceral detail, was actually more effective. That idea--and her detailed examples--crawled into my brain and wouldn’t let go.

Clean was written before I came to Odyssey--I actually got The Call from the editor the first afternoon I was there! But when it came down to revision afterwards with the editor, I ended up rewriting most of the novel’s ending from scratch. It’s now more detailed, more suspenseful, and much more successful, I think. I have Odyssey to thank for the tools to do it.

You're also big into history. How does that help you write a dystopic future?

When you study history, you study how people behave under incredible pressure and change over time. You also study consequences--everything has a backstory, and you can’t start in the middle without dealing with the consequences of what came before. History taught me to pay attention to that kind of backstory, and to deal with social attitudes and social change carefully.

You sold Clean to Roc through an unusual series of events. Can you recount that for us? What do you say to those who claim an author first has to establish herself through short story sales?

I applied to Odyssey and submitted Clean to the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards on the same week in January. The intention was to add more writing credits to my resume, since (as you point out) I hadn’t really been able to establish a history of short story sales. I watched with baited breath as, over a series of months, my novel rose higher in the ranks at the ABNA--until finally, it made the Semi-Finalist round (top 1%). I was overjoyed--that had always been my goal, and now I had it! The Finalists were always mainstream and thriller writers, so I was pretty sure that’s as far as I would get. When an agent contacted me as a result, I thought I’d reached the moon. Then, that fateful summer, an editor called. Turns out Penguin reads all the Semi-Finalists from the contest--and wanted to buy my book and a sequel. I thought I might have a heart attack… I hadn’t even realized they read the books! And getting that call at Odyssey only made the experience that much more surreal.

I’d always been told you needed to establish yourself in short stories, and that’s what I was at Odyssey to learn how to do. But the truth is that novels and short stories (especially in the speculative fiction realm) are very, very different creatures with different audiences. I’ve been told most agents and editors know this; while they’d love to see a track record from you, they’re far more concerned with the quality of the work. If what you write well is novels, write the best damn novel you can and send it out. Novels are where most of the money and audience is anyway, and if your work is good enough, no one will care about your lack of credits.

You had to go through the process of evaluating literary agents and choosing an agent very quickly. What advice would you give to developing writers who are looking for the right agent? What particular elements should they look for in the agency, the agent, and the agency agreement?

The right agent makes a world of difference, not only to sell your work for the most money possible, but also to negotiate the right terms. You want somebody passionate about your work, someone whom you work well with, but most of all you want someone who has a proven track record of selling. You can approach a lot of editors directly--if you spend the percentage on the agent, he or she needs to do better than you would on your own.

Ask lots of questions in the process of auditioning an agent. Ask about their track record, and how they work with their authors. If possible, fly to New York and have lunch with the person; you can get a feel for someone in person better by far than you can over the phone. Talk to several people, and talk to them about their plans to sell your book. Choose carefully; an agency relationship can be like a marriage--you want it to be harmonious, not a source of stress.

The last thing I would say is to make sure you understand what role your agent wants to play in your work. I think I was expecting an agent like my friend’s--an agent who’s very hands on with the work. She made his book hugely better… but it still hasn’t sold. My agent, on the other hand, has rarely told me anything more than “this is great,” or “this will work well.” She doesn’t give a lot of editorial input. But she’s great with contracts and negotiations; she got me some fantastic contract terms and is already thinking about how to sell the next project. She sells. And that’s ultimately what I really need. When it comes to picking your own agent, you should pick someone who will fit the role you most need, and who fits your personality and your goals. Be careful and make the right choice for you.

What are you working on now? Will it be with the same editor/publisher?

I just turned in the manuscript for Sharp, the sequel to Clean. Sharp will be out April 2013. My next project--after I finish promotions for the launch of Clean--will be working on a novella to be released as an eSpecial sometime this winter. Yes, both the sequel and the novella will be with Roc, under the editor who acquired Clean.

How many stages does your work go through before it goes off to the publisher? Can you tell us about the process of revisions and edits?

Personally, I always do at least two revisions on my own before I send it anywhere. At that point--if I’m comfortable--it goes to the editor, who sends me back an editorial letter with suggested changes. I make the changes I agree with (which is usually the vast majority), revise again for my own purposes, and send the manuscript back. Usually there’s one more round of that before the publisher is happy and “accepts” the manuscript, but it could be more or less.

Somewhere in there we talk cover art ideas and titles, although recently we’ve been doing this step much earlier. I’ve been lucky enough to have my opinion requested for cover art pretty consistently--something I take very seriously, and spend some serious time thinking about.

Then, after the final round of edits, the copyediting round arrives. Copyediting gives me hives. I choose my words carefully, even (and sometimes especially) when they’re grammatically incorrect. I also obsess about small things like whether dumpster (Dumpster?) is capitalized and whether I’ve kept everything consistent from scene to scene, even in tiny details. Going over every line with the copyeditor’s notes is… well… it’s a lot of work.

Then comes proofing, where you make sure that the final typeset text is correct. We did this step in marketing; I always catch things here, but it’s not a lot of stress for me. On the other hand, I’ve had author friends not be able to read the book one more time after all this work. They really struggle here.

After all of this, you sit back, take a break, and get ready for the next project--if you’re not working on it already.

What's your biggest struggle with your writing these days, and how do you cope with it?

At the moment my biggest struggle is juggling all the promotions and non-writing stuff; it eats up a lot of time and headspace. But I still have deadlines, and the writing and revising has to happen. Up to this point I’ve been doing one thing at a time, but I think I’m going to have to learn to do them at the same time, perhaps by setting aside specific time for one thing and then specific time for the other. I don’t know. When I write I have to devote a lot of headspace and focus to the project; I still need to play around with different ideas and formats to get to the non-writing work without ruining that headspace.

For more information about Odyssey, its graduates and instructors, please visit our website at http://www.odysseyworkshop.org.

Interview: Meagan Spooner

2012-09-09T04:00:50Z

Meagan Spooner grew up reading and writing every spare moment of the day, while dreaming about life as an archaeologist, a marine biologist, an astronaut. She graduated from Hamilton College in New York with a degree in playwriting, and has spent several years since then living in Australia. She’s traveled with her family all over the world to places like Egypt, South Africa, the Arctic, Greece, Antarctica, and the Galapagos, and there’s a bit of every trip in every story she writes.

She currently lives and writes in Northern Virginia, but the siren call of travel is hard to resist, and there’s no telling how long she’ll stay there.

In her spare time she plays guitar, plays video games, plays with her cat, and reads.

Meagan Spooner is the author of Skylark, the first in a young adult fantasy trilogy available from Carolrhoda Lab in August 2012. She is also the co-author of These Broken Stars, the first in a young adult science fiction trilogy forthcoming from Disney Hyperion (Fall 2013). She is a 2009 graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop. More information about Meg can be found at http://www.meaganspooner.com.

Congratulations on the publication of Skylark! Can you tell us what inspired this YA fantasy?

I was actually listening to NPR at the time, but with only half my attention--they were discussing the energy crisis, and alternative sources of energy. I pretty much always have some part of my mind on fantasy and science fiction, so while they were talking about solar and wind farms, I thought "magic." The rest of the word fell into place after that initial thought--a world where technology runs on magic, and what would happen in that world if humankind abused that power the way we're abusing energy sources in ours. If you want to hear the whole story of where I got the idea, I talk about it a bit in this podcast interview from Book Expo America, as well as in this "Big Idea" post on John Scalzi's Whatever blog.

You talk about extensive world travel and many moves during your upbringing on your website. How has this affected your writing?

Well, I actually lived in the same house my entire life until adulthood--my parents live there still. But after college I lived in Australia for about two (non-consecutive) years, and I have traveled a lot, thanks to a travel-loving family. Travel, for me, is necessary for creativity. Changing the routine, experiencing new things... even if they don't factor directly into the story. Skylark, for example, is set practically in the backyard of my childhood home (DC, Northern Virgina, etc.). But I get my best ideas on the move, whether it's flying to Africa or driving to the grocery store.

In reference to the above question, how do you maintain a good writing schedule? Any advice for those struggling to find the time to write?

You're not going to like it! Really, there's only one way, as far as I'm concerned. You have to train yourself to write every day. Try setting a daily minimum word count that you MUST hit every day. Make it small, so it's not overwhelming, and so it's easy to do. Mine was 500 words every day. Even on a bad day, I could do 500 words in under an hour. Usually it's more like 15-20 minutes. The point is that it gets you in your chair, it gets you writing, and it gets your brain focusing on your story. Once you get there, you end up doing a lot more than 500 words. You just have to trick yourself into thinking that all you need to do is write a page or so. The first few weeks can be hard, but I guarantee that once a month has gone by, it'll be habit.

Even though these days I don't write (at least, not on a draft) every day, because of other author biz commitments, I've still got that training and so when it IS time to write, I can sort of "click over" into that mindset relatively easily.

You also have a book coming from Disney Hyperion in 2013 that you co-authored, entitled These Broken Stars. Can you tell us about working with Disney Hyperion?

So far it's been great! Though really, this far out from publication, your only experience is with the editors. Marketing and even cover design and so forth won't kick in for a while, so we've only got our editor and her assistant (while our editor was on maternity leave) to look at. But we've loved working with them, and we're really excited to see how it goes from here on out.

What made you decide to co-author a book instead of going it alone? What writing process did you and your co-author use?

It wasn't ever really a decision. Amie and I have been writing together for six years, but we'd just never considered doing it publicly or professionally. For us, it was playing. We'd come up with pairs of characters and intriguing situations, and just have fun with it. It wasn't until I signed with my agent for Skylark that we realized that our current "project" would probably make a pretty good novel. We'd been playing with these characters for about a year, so we knew them like the backs of our hands. It was never that one of us got an idea and sought the other out to work with... it was both of ours, from the very beginning.

As far as process is concerned, the novel is told through alternating perspectives, so we each took one POV. That's putting it a bit simplistically though, because we always "play" through the characters first, each writing our "own" character's dialogue. So even though, for example, I may have written a given chapter, the dialogue in it would have been written by both of us, in turn. So really, the chapters are inextricably both of ours.

Authors must struggle through the submission process. What is your philosophy on rejections? Do you still receive them now?

Rejection was actually much more of a roadblock before I ever submitted anything. I was scared of querying because I was worried rejections might dampen my enthusiasm for writing. And because I love writing so much, that prospect was pretty terrifying. What I ended up doing was making a plan. I had about a hundred agents researched, and at least 50 individual, personalized query letters written before I ever sent out the first one. The plan was that the very same day I got a rejection from one, I'd send out the next letter on my list. The tendency is to fall into despair and lose momentum. So I'd send out the next letter and give myself 24 hours to feel sad, and then pick myself back up again. (You can read more on my querying journey here, if you're interested!)

And as far as rejection these days is concerned, I don't face rejection in the sense of submitting things that editors turn down. With two series going, I haven't done any submitting of manuscripts since then. But what I do face is negative reviews! So far I have the good fortune of having mostly positive reviews, but that doesn't lessen the heartbreak when you get negative ones. And these days, particularly in the YA field, there are a lot of bloggers and online reviewers who take great delight in being particularly nasty. So in many ways that form of rejection can be pretty harsh, because it's not the professional form rejection you get from agents and editors. It's rejection someone labored over!

How did you hear about the Odyssey Writing Workshop?

I met my good friend Sarah J. Maas, whose book Throne of Glass also just came out, back in a college creative writing class, where we both bemoaned the sad and sorry state of the creative writing department there. I know I'm not alone in my experience--a lot of "genre fiction is pointless, you must be literary!" I knew that I didn't want to do an MFA and waste more time being told that fantasy has no substance, but I didn't have the faintest idea of how to get published. So Sarah told me about Odyssey, and I put off applying for years... until one day I woke up in the middle of the night (literally) and KNEW I had to do something to get moving with writing.

Why did you decide to attend, and what surprised you most about what you learned there?

I'm a little embarrassed to admit it, but I actually applied to Odyssey with the mindset, "I already know how to write, I just need to know how to get published." So I decided to attend in order to learn more about selling stories and the publishing biz. I think that lasted about half a day. That first week, that "Odyssey shock" pretty much floored me! There was just SO much to absorb, and I discovered that talking craft is absolutely the most fun thing to do after writing itself. I realized I had a LOT to learn from both Jeanne and my classmates. And in hindsight it's hands down the best thing I ever did for my writing career.

How much time do you spend on drafting new work, as opposed to taking care of 'business'?

Oh, this is the sad news. I'd say these days it's probably 90% business and 10% actually writing. I admit I was pretty shocked at how much time the business stuff takes up. I kind of always thought authors had to be exaggerating about that. But there's all the stuff that goes with working from home/being a small business owner as well as promoting your books, and if you work through social media to promote as well, that takes up a LOT of time even if you aren't trying to follow other people. But this just makes it all the more important to make sure that you set aside time to write every day, when you've got a draft to write, because it's all too easy to justify NOT doing it. Because you're still working, and often working very hard all day long. You're just not getting the actual CRAFT done.

What's next on the writing schedule for you? Are you starting any new projects?

Well, Skylark and These Broken Stars are both books one of three book deals, so I've got five more books on top of Skylark contracted. That's pretty much consuming my immediate future. That said, I have a third of a novel written, a retelling of Beauty and the Beast, that I began work on while I was querying Skylark (so that I'd have a new project in case it didn't get representation). I haven't been able to spend much time with it since, but it's a story I love with every fiber of my being, so it's coming out in little drips and dribbles. The soonest that would come out, though, would be 2015!

For more information about Odyssey, its graduates and instructors, please visit our website at http://www.odysseyworkshop.org.

Interview: Jason Heller

2012-08-12T04:00:31Z

Jason Heller is an author, editor, and journalist whose nonfiction has appeared in many publications, including Clarkesworld (where he’s currently the nonfiction editor), The A.V. Club (where he served as Denver City Editor and is currently a regular contributor), Weird Tales, Fantasy Magazine, Alternative Press, and Tor.com. His writing on popular culture appears in Scribner's A.V. Club book, Inventory. He’s a 2009 graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop, and his science fiction/fantasy/horror short stories have been published in Apex Magazine, Sybil's Garage, Polluto, Expanded Horizons, Farrago's Wainscot, M-Brane SF, the anthology Descended From Darkness, and others. Quirk Books released his debut novel, the satirical alternate-history Taft 2012, as well as his Pirates of the Caribbean tie-in, The Captain Jack Sparrow Handbook. He can be found at www.jason-heller.com.

Congratulations on your debut novel Taft 2012! What sort of feedback are you getting?

Thanks! The feedback has been great so far. That said, I’m too chicken to read the negative reviews on Amazon (although I have noticed there are a few of them…). I have received some constructive criticism from some friends whose opinions I value, but I hope whatever strengths the books possesses outweighs the negatives! Luckily, Odyssey helped give me a thicker skin in that regard.

How has this sale impacted your life? Has it changed your writing process or schedule?

In one sense, it hasn’t significantly impacted my life. I still spend most of my week doing various freelance writing, and I’ve been working on my next novel (or five) in my off-time. The freelance work is far less rewarding, of course, but it’s where the instant paychecks come from. So I’m still learning to balance the (potential) sale of future novels with the here-and-now, day-to-day grindstone of freelancing.

Can you tell us a bit about the publisher, Quirk Books? How did you get involved with them?

Quirk is probably best known for Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and its various spinoffs, although it’s begun to publish a wider range of fiction recently (including The Thorn and the Blossom by Odyssey Graduate Theodora Goss). Former Quirk editor Stephen H. Segal approached me about writing a satirical alt-history novel featuring William Howard Taft, and it kind of took off from there. I’d previously done freelance nonfiction work for Stephen during his tenure at Weird Tales, but initially I tracked him down at a convention and asked if he needed writers. I’ve also recently become the nonfiction editor of Clarkesworld, and meeting Clarkesworld publisher Neil Clarke at Worldcon last year definitely played a part in that. Let that be a lesson, I guess: Don’t be afraid to pipe up and offer your services. You never know when someone will be crazy enough to say yes!

Taft 2012 is very political and quite funny. Do you have a particular philosophy about humor? How does an author create something funny?

Heck, I don’t even know if I have a particular philosophy about philosophy! I’d say humor is all about timing (and how to use bad timing to your advantage) as well as appropriateness (and how to use inappropriateness to your advantage, usually in collusions with artful placements of bad timing). Or something. Really, as with my political views, I’m just winging it. That said: Shooting from the gut is probably the best recipe for laughter. If you find yourself thinking too much about how to come up with a joke, may I suggest banging your forehead against the floor?

You are also a journalist. How does your journalistic experience influence your fiction writing? Do you think it has helped in any way? Do you have any advice for journalists who want to write novels?

Journalism is an immense help when it comes to writing fiction. Reviewing sundry media and interviewing people from all walks of life about various topics (which is what I do as an arts-and-entertainment journalist) is a great way to expand your vocabulary of potential characters, speech patterns, subject matter, and so forth. It also gives you discipline: Journalists usually have very tight deadlines, and getting into that kind of rhythm builds momentum than can be transferred to fiction-writing. I’d advise every journalist to write a novel (or twelve). Not only do you have chops and velocity, you likely have an online platform as a journalist that makes you look more attractive to an agent and publisher. Even a modest platform such as mine can be a big help when convincing someone that, yes, you just might be able to sell some books.

What made you decide to attend the Odyssey Writing Workshop?

I’d been an editor for The Onion’s A.V. Club for three years immediately prior to attending Odyssey. I was burned out. I spent upwards of seventy hours a week editing other people’s writing (and doing spreadsheets and compiling payroll and wrangling with marketing folks and wrestling a CMS). I wanted to write. So I quit my job, and two days after my last day in the office, I was on a plane to Odyssey. I’d applied months before that, of course, but I knew the end of my salary job was imminent, and felt Odyssey would be a great way to immerse myself in fiction-writing and kickstart this new leg of my career.

Do you feel your writing process changed as a result of having attended Odyssey? What surprised you most about what you learned there?

Absolutely, my writing improved by a magnitude of many after attending Odyssey. It was a life-changing experience. Everything I thought I knew about writing—or that I’d been surfing on instinctually—was disassembled, reexamined, and rebuilt. The thing that surprised me most was how utterly plotless my previous writing had been. I mean, I can write pretty, but I didn’t aspire to be a poet! I learned that pretty writing is all well and good, but priorities are priorities. Tell a story first, spruce it up only if and when it needs it.

You mentioned a couple of new projects in the works in a recent interview. Can you share a bit more with us?

Sigh. Well, the middle-grade series I was going to do for Quirk fell through, but perhaps that was all for the best. It was going to be under a pseudonym, and I had been writing it under very strict deadlines, concepts, and plot outlines that had already been established. It was a great learning experience, though, and I completely respect Quirk’s marketing acumen and aggressiveness. The other upside is that I’m now working on two other projects that are much dearer to my heart: a YA trilogy and a standalone novel for adults. Both are involved, to varying degrees, with biomechanics in a post-apocalyptic setting. Exciting stuff (at least for me!). Hopefully I’ll be selling one or another of them shortly…

Your agent, Jennifer Jackson of the Donald Maass Agency, is renowned in her field (and an upcoming guest lecturer at Odyssey). How did you connect with her? Do you have advice for those seeking an agent?

I approached Jennifer after I’d been offered a contract from Quirk. She and I had some great, long conversations over the phone, and she looked carefully at the partial manuscripts for the abovementioned, post-apocalyptic novels I’d been working on. Things sparked, and there you go! I’ll admit, Jennifer had been at the top of my dream list of agents for a while; she represents SF/fantasy authors of both the literary and commercial bent, and that was important to me. My advice for seeking an agent would be simple: Do your research, make a list of agents you’d most like to work with, list them in order, and query them in that order (in strict accordance to their guidelines). Oh, and I guess, finish that novel first!

For more information about Odyssey, its graduates and instructors, please visit our website at http://www.odysseyworkshop.org.

Graduate's Corner: When Is It Time to Move On? by James Maxey

2012-07-15T04:00:57Z

James Maxey attended the Odyssey Writing Workshop in 1998. He's gone on to publish stories in a score of magazines and anthologies, and eight novels to date. His currently available novels are the superhero tales Nobody Gets the Girl and Burn Baby Burn, and two fantasy series, the Dragon Age trilogy of Bitterwood, Dragonforge, and Dragonseed, and the Dragon Apocalypse series that debuted in 2012 with Greatshadow, Hush, and the soon to be released Witchbreaker. For more information on his writing, visit dragonprophet.blogspot.com.

I never sold the first novel I wrote. I worked on it for over two years, tweaking and polishing and redrafting. I probably tossed out and rewrote the first chapter at least a half dozen times. From a prose standpoint, it doesn’t suck. I had a good feel for building scenes, and there’s enough action to create the illusion of forward momentum. Unfortunately, taken as a whole, it’s now easy to see there were serious structural flaws. My protagonist doesn’t really do anything meaningful to drive the plot. He’s just in the middle of a long chain of unlikely coincidences. My villain is charismatic and creepy, but his actions have no real logic behind them. He enjoys hurting people, but I never really gave him a satisfying motive. An even larger problem is that the book doesn’t know what it wants to be. The first part of the novel is a character study, the middle part of the book is a crime novel, and the last third of the book is pretentious literary fiction that deliberately ignores what little plot there was that came before it.

Writing that book taught me many important lessons. First, I learned that I did possess the discipline needed to place my butt in a chair and type week after week until I’d produced a novel length manuscript. Second, I learned that a manuscript needed more than sixty thousand words and a title to make it a real novel. Third, I learned that my close friends were overly protective of my feelings, willing to tell me that what I was writing was really good when it actually stank. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I learned when to give up and move on. There’s a crude but honest saying that applies to bad stories: You can’t polish a turd.

This didn’t stop me from going on and writing another deeply flawed novel, plus dozens of seriously defective short stories. Luckily, each of these proved valuable in moving my writing and storytelling skills forward. For the vast majority of them, I went through multiple drafts trying to get them right before calling it quits and focusing on a new project. Sticking with a project long enough to improve your skills is vital. The danger is getting stuck. If you’ve met other self-identified writers, chances are you’ve met one who’s been working on the same story for a decade or more. There’s a point where stubborn dedication becomes a trap.

These days, I sell almost everything I write. This is partly because I’ve gotten better at writing. More importantly, I’ve gotten better at not writing. I don’t waste my time starting a story unless I’m confident it’s going to find a home. Rather than writing iffy stories and waiting for editors to pass on them, I’ve gotten very good at rejecting my own weak ideas before I ever start typing. It’s possible that by ruthlessly winnowing my own fledgling ideas, I’m preventing some ugly ducklings from growing into swans. On the other hand, my current career goal is to produce two novels a year. In fact, in the space between August 1, 2011 and July 31, 2012, I’ll have written three novels and produced a sample chapter and a pitch for a fourth. With this schedule, I don’t have time to waste on projects of dubious viability.

While I rely mostly on instinct in choosing which books to write, these instincts have been honed by years of practice. If I had a list of formal criteria I use in deciding to embrace a project, it would look something like this:

Is there a market for this story?

I used to reject ideas because I felt like they’d been done before. Did the world really need another zombie tale? Aren’t people sick of dragons by now? There’s a reason some of these ideas seem a little familiar. Readers keep reading them, editors keep buying them, and Barnes and Noble keeps displaying them prominently in their stores. Your odds of getting published are much higher if you’re writing a book that fits into an established category.

Do I have something new to say?

Just because you’ve decided to write about vampires or teen wizards or alien planets doesn’t mean you have to produce something trite or clichéd. In all my novels, I take a familiar category—dragons, for instance—then figure out how to twist the concepts to make them mine. With my Bitterwood novels, I took a scientific approach to world building to produce a fantasy series that obeyed science fiction rules. With my current Dragon Apocalypse series, I’m using the backdrop of myth to explore very real questions about man’s relationship to the natural world. I never write about dragons just to be writing about dragons.

Is there symmetry?

I don’t know if other writers worry much about this, but these days I never start writing if I don’t have an end in mind. One thing that’s important to me is that I can look at the shape of a story and see that its main thread comes full circle. Without revealing spoilers, in the first scene of my novel Greatshadow, a character is falling from a great height. Since the book started with a character falling, the book ends with a character flying. I doubt that readers are even aware that the beginning and end are mirrors of each other, but once I saw the overarching structure, I knew the book would work. There are certainly other viable approaches to a novel, but once I find the symmetry, I’ve found the edges of the jigsaw puzzle that is my tale. Even if I haven’t figured out all the stuff in the middle, I have enough of a picture to move ahead.

Do I want to read this story?

Remember the first question? The answer to “is there a market” has been greatly muddied by the advent of self-published ebooks. Last year I wrote a novel called Burn Baby Burn about two supervillians on a crime spree. I wrote it knowing that I was unlikely to find a mainstream publisher, but also knowing from my experience with an earlier superhero novel, Nobody Gets the Girl, that superhero ebooks sold reasonably well. I could have skipped Burn Baby Burn to get a head start on another epic fantasy. But, I wrote it not just because I thought I could make money, but because I really wanted to read the finished book. No one else had stepped up to write the damn thing for me, so I did it myself. In the end, you are your ultimate fan. You’re never wasting time if you’re writing a book you can’t wait to read.

Do I want others to read this?

When I first started self-pubbing in parallel with my traditional career, I was surprised at my success and eager to get more material into the market. One candidate in my back catalog was a novella that had been published several years ago. It wasn’t the best thing I’d ever written, but it was good enough to have been published the first time around. I whipped up a cover, tightened up the prose, and put it online… for all of three days. Then I yanked it. Why? Because the novella was hard science fiction, and all my other ebooks were either about dragons or superheroes. While the novella was a decent coming-of-age space adventure, it didn’t really fit my “brand.” I worried that people might read my other books, become a fan, then read this story and find it less interesting. One mediocre story can be enough to cool the passions an otherwise enthusiastic reader. Judging the story as objectively as possible, it was merely an okay story. Not bad, but not great. So, it’s no longer for sale, and I’m not going to waste another moment trying to spice it up. You think getting rejected by a publisher is rough? Wait until you reject your own finished manuscript!

In the end, one dividing line between the professional and the amateur writer is developing that instinct for setting aside work that isn’t up to par. Sometimes, it takes a dozen drafts to figure out that a story should never be shown to the world. Often, you know the truth ten minutes after you reach the end of a first draft. With enough practice, you’re able to reject a flawed story before you ever type a word. It sounds like a certain recipe for low self esteem, but trust me, you won’t believe how much time this opens up to work on good material.

For more information about Odyssey, its graduates and instructors, please visit our website at http://www.odysseyworkshop.org.

Interview: Rhiannon Held

2012-06-10T04:01:15Z

Rhiannon Held is a graduate of the 2006 Odyssey Writing Workshop. She lives in Seattle, where she works as a professional archaeologist. Unfortunately, given that it's real rather than fictional archaeology, fedoras, bullwhips, aliens, and dinosaurs are in short supply. Most of her work is done on the computer, using databases to organize data, and graphics programs to illustrate it. Her debut novel, Silver, is the first in an urban fantasy series from Tor. You may visit her website at http://rhiannonheld.com/

Congratulations on your book deal with Tor! Can you tell us what inspired Silver?

The character of Silver herself came to me first. I started playing with the idea of a werewolf who had been injected with liquid silver: what would it do to her? Would she hallucinate? What if she saw the spirit realm—or possibly something her imagination had constructed that seemed like the spirit realm? Of course, to create the spirit realm, I had to figure out the werewolf religion. And then I had to figure out werewolf culture. And Silver needed some other characters to jumpstart her journey, and of course my other POV character had to have a journey of his own…and by then, I had an entire novel!

Has this sale had an impact on your writing schedule? How about on your day job as an archaeologist?

In some ways it has, and in others it hasn’t. Before the sale, I was already a fast writer, so I don’t necessarily need to put in any more raw hours at the keyboard now to meet deadlines. My writing time has been cut into a little by all the business aspects of having a published book, though. Maintaining a social media presence, arranging signings, looking for opportunities to attend cons, writing guest blog posts, finding reviewers who would be interested in my review copies… A lot of the shuffling of my schedule has been to figure out when to do business within my old writing time block: write first, business later, or vice versa? To make room for business, I’ve been working on becoming more efficient about my writing time. I make sure to do my plotting on my way to and from work. That way, I can sit down and write out what I’ve already figured out ahead of time.

I’ve so far been able to fit my writing time around my day job, but business things like cons and out of town signings aren’t as flexible. Fortunately, currently I work most with the final stages of producing reports for our clients, so while deadlines can be tight, I know ahead of time when a report will be due, and can finish my work on it before leaving for a con.

How does being an archaeologist affect your writing?

I think it affects my world-building most, which won’t surprise people, but I think they would be surprised by the kind of world details that it affects. When people think of archaeology, they often picture Old World archaeology: temples and artifacts of large, settled societies. When you study small hunter-gatherer tribes, you have to rely more on aspects of anthropology, to get at their culture without fancy paintings and monuments to showcase it. I treat my werewolves as a tribal society, one that lacks written records to allow them to better hide from humans. That means they should have all kinds of things I’m familiar with because of my anthropology training: taboos and songs and games and holidays and etiquette and…

My graduate degree was from a program specializing in evolutionary anthropology, which creeps in too. For example, evolutionarily, it makes no sense for a shift to be involuntary. Any werewolves with that trait would have been caught by humans sooner or later on their DNA pitchfork and torched out of the gene pool. I considered other questions like how many werewolves would there need to for a breeding population? How fertile could they be given a longer lifespan? I think they’re all fun and interesting things to consider, and while I don’t bore the reader with them on screen, I think readers all have enough experience with various human cultures for something to feel subconsciously “real” if it’s based in real human cultural traits.

Silver is the first book in a trilogy, correct? Did you have all three books written before approaching a publisher?

Actually it’s the first book in a series, not a trilogy! I’m careful about making the distinction because I think urban fantasy runs into trouble when it doesn’t realize its differences from traditional fantasy and doesn’t capitalize on its similarities to the mystery genre. The trilogy is a concept often used in traditional fantasy, and it carries connotations of some large, book-spanning arc to be resolved at the end of the third book. A mystery series, on the other hand, has much more flexibility for the author to craft an arc for returning characters for each book, but not have to save the whole world at the end of the third, the sixth, the ninth books...

But to actually answer the question, when I sold Silver, I had book 1 and the discovery draft of book 2 finished. When my editor told me she was interested in buying book 1, she also asked whether I had any other books planned. Tor decided to buy the first 3, with an option on the next one. At that time, I had rough ideas for books 2 to 4, but over time and in talking with my editor, they got modified and refined. Book 2, Tarnished, is a combination of my rough ideas for 2 and 3, the current book 3 is something entirely new, and the old idea for book 4 has been pushed to an indeterminate place later in the series.

Since I am writing my books as a series, I think it freed me up so I didn’t need to have them all extensively plotted or written before trying to sell the whole package. That’s not my writing process anyway. I do an outline for each book, but as I get to know my characters through the process of writing one book, more opportunities for conflict amongst them and with aspects of the world occur to me. Those conflicts form the basis for later books. I’ve heard of urban fantasy writers who had their series roughly plotted up to ten books from the beginning. I’m writing book 3, I have 4 outlined, 5 brainstormed, and a spark of an idea for 6. As I write forward, the leading edge advances too.

Bestselling author Kevin J. Anderson has collected hundreds of rejection slips over the course of his career. How many rejections did you receive before realizing this success? What is your philosophy about rejections?

Sometimes I feel like my number of rejections is lower than average, but as a scientist, I suspect a reporting bias. You often hear that this story sold after 22 rejections! That novel sold after 16! I can’t remember the last time someone mentioned that they sold a story after a modest two or three rejections. It’s not something people remark on.

But I shall remark! I started keeping precise track of my short story rejection numbers fairly early on. Data is important! Around 45 or so, I made a deal with myself that when I reached 100, I would buy myself a flat-panel TV. Fifty was obviously too easy a goal at that point, and 75 seemed insufficiently round. Around 55 or 60 rejections, I sold my first story. I’ll admit I was stumped--did that merit the TV or not? I decided to keep going. I sold a second short story, and then around 70 or so, I sold my novel. With the novels taking my attention, I haven’t been submitting short stories nearly as often lately, so I still haven’t achieved my 100 (and I bought that TV long ago, because I stumbled onto a deal for a used one I couldn’t pass up).

That’s the raw data, but let me put it into perspective. As near as I can recall, the period from my very first rejection to when I sold my novel was six years. In that time, I attended four convention writer’s workshops, Odyssey, and spent over three years in an awesome writer’s group that met weekly. I could feel my writing skills improving significantly with each of those experiences, so a lot of the time I wasn’t submitting because I was waiting for the gains I’d made in skill to fully show themselves in my new work. So my rejection numbers are low compared to some because I waited to capitalize on my improvements rather than keeping up my submissions during the transitions.

I suppose my philosophy on rejections expands on “don’t take them personally.” It’s “you will take them personally at first, and even sometimes later, and that’s okay.” I struggled a lot with that at the beginning, because writers would helpfully advise me to not take any rejections personally, and then dust their hands and sit back. It made me feel like there was some sort of switch I was missing. Obviously I should be able to flip it to “not personal,” and my life would be great!

It did not, unsurprisingly, work that way. Not taking rejections personally is a muscle. You don’t get up from the couch and run a marathon the first day you ever put on track shoes, and you don’t receive your first rejection and take it in instant, easy emotional stride. Taking a day, a week, a month, to work through it doesn’t make you a bad person. The more you get, the easier dealing with them becomes, but try not to forget that there’s still going to be a rejection from an extra-special market, or for an extra-special story, that will knock you for a loop.

What made you decide to attend the Odyssey Writing Workshop?

I’m a big fan of schooling! Through my experiences in high school and college, I figured out that I learn best when I have someone teaching me, rather than just reading from a book. Having been a part of the larger writing community for quite a while now, my mindset back then seems unusual for a beginning writer, but when I decided I wanted to be a proper writer, I started searching for someone to teach me rather than just reading about writing or practicing a lot. I submitted my work for critique in free workshops at a couple cons, but then I started looking into residential writing programs like Clarion and Odyssey. Odyssey seemed like it would have a really high level of instruction and would be a good fit for me.

How did attending Odyssey change your writing process?

Odyssey taught me to deal with critique much faster. Before then, I’d get critiques on a story and not look at them for six months. Now, after Odyssey and having a weekly critique group for several years, I sometimes start revisions as early as a few days after receiving critique. A lot of that is because I learned to speed up the process of putting my emotions about being critiqued aside so I could take in the content of the critiques. The few days I take now are mostly spent brainstorming plot problems. Odyssey gave me a huge jump on learning to put my emotions aside quickly, because the experience was so intense and densely packed with information. You didn’t have time to be emotional about a critique, because you were turning in your next story, or starting your next revision, or learning some cool new writing technique to add to your arsenal.

What surprised you most about what you learned there? What insights did you gain into your own work?

What I hadn’t expected was how Odyssey helped give me a framework to continue to learn from many different sources after the workshop was over. I learned a lot of really useful specific writing and self-editing techniques, but I also learned to view my writing skills as something I could constantly grow and improve throughout my career. Odyssey gave me a firm foundation, and I’ve gone out and continued to build on it.

The biggest insight I gained into my own work was how to integrate my love of lyrical imagery with a comprehensible plot. When I arrived, I had developed both somewhat separately, and enjoyed doing both, but Odyssey showed me how confused people were when I indulged in too much imagery in one place. Hearing the specific points of confusion helped me tweak my imagery to work with my plot instead of against it.

How many stages did Silver go through before you began the submission process?

It went through approximately 4.1, or perhaps 4.2 stages! (The precision of the numbers is a joke due to the fact that I thought of polishing passes as half drafts, and named the files things like “Silver Draft 2.5”) I wrote a draft, showed it to my local critique group, revised, showed it to them again, revised, submitted it to TNEO [The Never-Ending Odyssey]. Then I let it and the TNEO critiques sit and sit and sit for probably around six months, in the name of clearing my mind, until a good friend kicked me in the pants and said “Submit it!” So I revised and used Ken Rand’s The 10% Solution exhaustively to make the sentence-level writing better, sent it to some friends who hadn’t read it yet to get their polishing critiques, and submitted it! You’ll notice two points in the process where I stalled briefly (I need to let it rest longer! I need one more person to read over the whole thing!) but I managed to break myself out and keep going.

Do you have any advice for those ready to submit their novels?

The advice I wish people had given me has more to do with what you do while you wait, after having sent the novel off. Prepare yourself for it not to sell. Start a completely new project, so if you run out of places to send your current novel, you have something new and different to try next. Settle in for the long haul, and remember all the statistics about how many novels hugely successful authors wrote before they sold their first.

All that’s stuff you’ve probably read before, though. I want to add something else. The probability of it might be lower, but it’s still a probability, so: prepare yourself for your novel to sell. Pay attention to published author’s blogs. I got caught off guard because I had avoided reading about what being published was like, because I didn’t want to get so distracted by daydreams of attending red-carpet premiers for the movies based on my books, cheered by legions of screaming fans, that I didn’t put in the work to make my novel any good in the first place. In fact, I went so far to avoid distracting daydreams that I had to scramble when I actually sold my novel. What could I expect? What might be the fun parts, the pitfalls, and the places where I’d have to work hard? A little pragmatic planning around hypotheticals can be good: will you have to rearrange your schedule to meet deadlines? Do you have the flexibility at work to attend a lot of cons? What kind of self-promotion and marketing are you good at? Which kinds are you going to have to start practicing to get better at?

For some, that might be like counting your chickens before they hatch, but for me, it would have left me much less flustered when I made my sale. Only you can decide the exact proportions of planning for the worst outcome and planning for the best outcome that will keep you happy and motivated and continuing to write while you wait, but there’s no reason to neglect one or the other entirely.

What's next on the writing schedule for you? Are you starting any new projects?

I’m hip-deep in book 3 at the moment, though I’ve been taking time off for a short story for a themed anthology, and I do fun projects every so often. I’ve written a couple short shorts as presents for artist friends who have drawn my characters. I only ever work on one novel at a time, but when I feel the new project itch, I have a spin-off series that I’ve been outlining the first book of. It satisfies the feeling of playing in a new sandbox, without going so far as to become hard—but fun!—work, as a project does when you take it on properly.

For more information about Odyssey, its graduates and instructors, please visit our website at http://www.odysseyworkshop.org.

Interview: Barbara Ashford

2012-05-13T14:01:12Z

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.

Interview: Craig Shaw Gardner

2012-04-08T04:00:11Z

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/setting/theme/etc.--to get the best, and usually simplest, direction to tell the story. And this process is different every time I use it, even with stories that are sequels to other stories!

You 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.

Interview: Jennifer Jackson

2012-03-11T04:59:25Z

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.

Interview: Paul Park

2012-02-12T15:04:16Z

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.

Interview: Jeanne Kalogridis

2012-01-08T18:58:58Z

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.

Director's Corner: Gaining Distance to Revise

2011-12-11T22:05:08Z

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.

Graduate's Corner: Torture Your Character, Capture your Reader by Elaine Isaak

2011-11-06T15:44:13Z

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.

Interview: Eric James Stone

2011-10-09T15:05:58Z

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.

Interview: Justin Gustainis

2011-09-11T17:26:44Z

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.

Graduate's Corner: The Sprint or the Marathon? by Carrie Vaughn

2011-08-14T14:31:05Z

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.

Graduate's Corner: The Dangers of Writing What You Know by Barbara Ashford

2011-07-10T15:28:42Z

A lot of Barbara Ashford's life ended up in the pages of her new fantasy novel Spellcast. Like Maggie Graham, she grew up in Wilmington, Delaware, began performing at an early age, and--after a series of jobs in educational administration--ran away to the theatre.

Barbara worked 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.

After several attempts at writing a novel, she attended the Odyssey Writing Workshop in 2000. It 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. Published by DAW Books, Trickster's Game went on to become a finalist for the Mythopoeic Society's 2010 Fantasy Award for adult literature.

Spellcast is her first contemporary fantasy and is inspired by her years as an actress. You can visit Barbara at her websites: http://www.barbaraashford.com and at http://www.barbara-campbell.com .

Writers of speculative fiction rarely follow the old adage “write what you know.” We’re writing about worlds that exist in Rod Serling’s “middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition.”

My first novel told the tale of a Bronze Age hunter who embarks on a quest to save the world from eternal winter. About the only things I had in common with Darak were control issues and cold feet. So I researched, researched, researched and by the time I finished writing, I knew a lot more about making fire bundles, fishing traps, and snares than most city dwellers.

When I turned to contemporary fantasy with Spellcast, I figured I had it made. For once, I was writing about something I knew: the world of summer stock theatre. I drew on my years as an actress to create the Crossroads Theatre and poured much of my life into the protagonist’s, even going so far as to have Maggie grow up in my hometown.

Writing in first person brought Maggie even closer. My voice became her voice, so much so that my husband--always my first reader--had trouble offering feedback because he felt like he was critiquing me rather than the story.

The opening chapter flowed as easily as one of the monologues I had performed as an actress, but I hit a snag as I was fleshing out Maggie’s backstory. In particular, I couldn’t get a grip on the character of her father. Although he never appears in the book, I wanted him to be a key figure in shaping Maggie’s attitudes about magic, make believe, and men.

First, I decided he would die when Maggie was a child. Then he was going to be remarried and “out of touch” with his first family. Neither scenario felt right. More importantly, neither worked in terms of Maggie’s arc.

That’s when I realized that I had put so much of myself into Maggie that the lines between fact and fiction had blurred. I was unable to make her father unsympathetic because it felt like a betrayal of my father.

The realization shocked me. How many times had I reminded aspiring authors that characters are the tools that we use to achieve our storytelling ends? And that secondary characters are in a story first and foremost because of the light they shed on the protagonist’s nature and journey?

I completely lost sight of that--and I lost the critical distance every writer needs.

After that “Aha!” moment, I was able to move forward. There are still elements of my father in Jack--his playfulness, his imagination--but I chose them deliberately because they helped shape Maggie. I even allowed Maggie to experience similar difficulties in discovering a character when she struggles to get a grip on one of the roles she has to perform.

Reestablishing those boundaries helped focus Spellcast and reminded me that, however much we love our characters, we have to be ruthless about using them – creating some, discarding others, and controlling the unruly ones to achieve our storytelling ends.

For more information about Odyssey, its graduates and instructors, please visit our website at http://www.odysseyworkshop.org.

Interview: Erin Hoffman

2011-06-12T13:37:37Z

Erin Hoffman was born in San Diego and now lives with her husband, two parrots, and two dogs in northern California. Her game credits include Dragonrealms, Shadowbane: The Lost Kingdom, Kung Fu Panda World, and FrontierVille. She also serves on the International Game Developers Association’s board of directors, writes for the award-winning online magazine The Escapist, and has had fiction and poetry in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Electric Velocipede, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and more. Erin’s games have won multiple awards and have been played by over 23 million kids and adults worldwide. She is a graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop, and her first novel, Sword of Fire and Sea, is forthcoming from Pyr Books in June 2011.

You can learn more about Erin at www.erinhoffman.com and at www.facebook.com/andovar.world.

What made you decide to attend the Odyssey Writing Workshop?

It was frighteningly spur-of-the-moment. I found out about the workshop a week before the deadline--honestly discovered it for the first time, randomly on the internet I think--happened to have a break between ending one job and starting another during that summer, wrote a new short story because everything else I had was either long form or old (or both), and was pretty stunned when I got accepted. I’ve chased down writing advice since I was a teenager, so wanting to go was a no-brainer--the surprising thing to me was that there was a workshop specifically for genre writers. I did know about Clarion but had heard mixed things and didn’t like the format quite as much.

What affect did the Odyssey experience have on your writing?

The effects of specific things on one’s actual writing for me is difficult to track, other than in silly things like I use fewer adverbs (and I already knew that was a problem; it still is). It had a dramatic, distinctive impact on how I plot, which I will value for the rest of my career. It also had a permanent, fantastic impact on my connection with genre writing culture. Whereas before I had felt very isolated by affection for fantasy--which may have had a sort of Spartan focusing value on my determination and production, so it wasn’t all bad--here I had this invaluable thriving community of people who cared about it as deeply and weirdly as I did. (And who weren’t jerks.) That is a genuine treasure.

Congratulations on the forthcoming fantasy novel Sword of Fire and Sea. Tell us about your writing process with this novel.

Thank you! Sword’s process was strange. I’m realizing how strange even now as I’m midway through writing the sequel, Lance of Earth and Sky. Sword started as a novella (which I wrote while going through an insane crunch at work, in spurts from 11pm-2am) for an anthology Mundania Press was putting together. By the time I was done, they read it and liked it but had canceled the anthology and asked if I could expand it into a book. I thought I probably could, but this was about a year before Odyssey 2005 and my life went kind of crazy in the interim. At Odyssey I realized how much I still had to experiment and learn in short form (I’d written only four short stories before Odyssey and would double that in the year after alone), so I focused on that, and didn’t revisit the novel until 2008 or so. This meant that the actual writing of it was spread out across multiple strange periods in my life, with gaps of years in between.

Do you think Odyssey had an effect on how you wrote Sword of Fire and Sea?

Many effects. The ’05 class read a synopsis and one of the chapters from the middle of the book, so I had feedback on the writing itself, the world (they really liked the gryphons, which kind of surprised me!--I’d go on to keep getting that comment), and the characters. I realized I needed to dig a lot deeper both into Vidarian and into ship culture, which wound up being very rewarding--you’d be amazed at how many phrases our modern culture inherits from ship language. Jeanne [Cavelos, Director of Odyssey], very crucially, gave a thorough plot critique to my synopsis and two major things I added are a direct result of her comments. I’d be curious if Odfellows can pick out which ones. ;)

How long did it take you to have Sword of Fire and Sea ready to submit?

Again its timeline is so weird that it’s hard to say. What happened was, when I finally came back to the novel in 2008--Jeanne had advised me that I should finish it in 2005 and she thought it was marketable, which was amazing, but again I worried about work I wanted to do on my actual toolbox first--I needed something to get me back into the ‘world.' So I wrote “Stormchaser, Stormshaper,” a short story from the youth of Ruby, one of the major characters. This bounced around markets for a while--it’s quite long so there weren’t many--eventually selling to Scott Andrews at Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Later, unrelatedly, I’d struck up some online conversations with Lou Anders, and he looked up my work, found “Stormchaser," and asked if I had a novel set in the same world. I did, but it was only at that time about a third finished! So I told him I could get it to him in six months and set about a marathon of finishing the book. I delivered it to him at MidSouthCon in March 2010, and here we are.

How did you go about bringing this novel to market?

Whoops, kind of jumped ahead on that one. I wound up doing something that isn’t prescribed or reliably repeatable. I do think one of the keys to marketing an unsold novel is to think carefully about what the market wants and where it is growing. These were the kinds of conversations I’d had with Lou, about the growing inter-media experience (books, movies, games, TV) that fans now have, and what lessons can be taken from one field into another. Particularly with fantasy, it really seems to help to have a genuine new idea that is relevant to the meme-space of the fantasy audience. Which is not to say that my elemental magic or gryphons are fundamentally new at all, but both had gone away from prominence for a while and recently made a return to the market in new ways, for mysterious reasons. Marketing a book is really about showing you have the right thing at the right time, in a very concrete fashion, not just “a great story” or “compelling characters" or “a magic system." And it is hard and capricious.

Everyone is talking about how the publishing industry is changing. What is your opinion on these changes?

It seems like we’ve all been having this conversation for years now, since the decline of the midlist starting in the late '90s, and if we look back further than that there were many gamechanging shifts even earlier (urban fantasy, Robert Jordan, etc., etc.) Publishing seems to be always changing. It does seem that technology is causing a change-acceleration, but I think the important thing to remember is that according to the data what we have are more books being sold and more people reading them. This can only ultimately be good for authors. I think we have to be very careful not to go chasing fool’s gold--and that for instance if you look into Amanda Hocking’s success, it seems like a fluke until you read how relentlessly hard-working she was and how much attention she was paying to the desires of the market. Those things will lead a writer to success regardless of technology (though the tech certainly helped her get discovered faster). I think the most important thing we can do is apply a broad personal stroke of thinking deeply about what we want out of life. (Do we want to write only for ourselves, or do we want to reach and move a large audience? Do we respect readers and what they want and what drives them crazy? Are we willing to relentlessly analyze our own craft and make it better, word by word and line by line?) These things improve one’s odds regardless of what the market does, and so are a lot more predictable in achieving success than getting that one (unsustainable!) shiv-strike of being a tech first.

Do you have any advice for those just in the process of submitting novels right now?

Wow, I’m probably a frustrating example when it comes to that, because I don’t have multiple novels that circulated around looking for homes. My husband Jay (whom I met at Odyssey, but don’t get any ideas) is in that spot, though, and I think he’s doing exactly the right thing (and has some promising stuff happening to show for it). Keep writing. And write new things. Respect the market. Look deeply into your own writing and think about what your major life themes are, and how they intersect with the deep myth roots of genre: i.e., take your rotten childhood and add a dragon. (Of course, don’t really do that.) Find good friends and treasure them. Don’t let the market get you down. Look back at the stuff that’s circulating around and remind yourself of why you wrote it and what you loved about it, and use those things to guide you forward and keep your spirits up. It’s a long, long race, and perseverance--about seeking truth in your work, respecting the audience, and improving your craft--is what wins. Those are all things you can control; try to focus on them and not the dice roll elements. Keep the love close and make good things.

For more information about Odyssey, its graduates and instructors, please visit our website at http://www.odysseyworkshop.org.