Interview: Graduate & Guest Lecturer Barbara Ashford

Barbara Ashford will be a guest lecturer at this summer’s Odyssey Workshop. Barbara has been praised by reviewers and readers alike for her compelling characters and her “emotional, heartfelt” storytelling. Her background as a professional actress, lyricist, and librettist has helped her delve deeply into character and explore the complexities of human nature on the stage as well as on the page. Her musical adaptation of Far from the Madding Crowd has been optioned for Broadway.

Barbara’s first published series was the dark fantasy trilogy Trickster’s Game (written as Barbara Campbell). Published by DAW Books, Trickster’s Game was a finalist for the Mythopoeic Society’s 2010 Fantasy Award for adult literature.

She drew on her musical theatre roots for her second novel series, the award-winning Spellcast and its sequel Spellcrossed, set in a magical summer stock theatre. DAW Books released the two novels in an omnibus edition: Spells at the Crossroads.

A 2000 graduate of the Odyssey workshop, Barbara has taught eight online courses for Odyssey and has served on the staff of the Odyssey Critique Service for more than a decade. You can visit her dual selves at barbara-campbell.com and barbara-ashford.com.

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You’re one of several authors who provide in-depth critiques for the Odyssey Critique Service. What are some of the common weaknesses you see in submissions?

Often, writers do not think about how the various “big picture” elements—plot, character, theme, world—relate to each other. To me, it’s critical to understand the heart of the story you’re telling. Whether you call that the story’s promise or its theme, without a clear understanding of the “message” you want readers to take away, the story can devolve into a series of plot incidents instead of evolving into a unified whole where all the “big picture” elements work together to create a story that is more cohesive and compelling.

2020 Odyssey Writing Workshop Scholarship Opportunities

GEORGE R. R. MARTIN SCHOLARSHIP AND OTHER FINANCIAL AID FOR THOSE ATTENDING THE ODYSSEY WRITING WORKSHOP

The Odyssey Writing Workshop is an acclaimed, six-week program for writers of fantasy, science fiction, and horror held each summer in New Hampshire. Write rs apply from all over the world; only fifteen are admitted. For those attending, Odyssey is pleased to announce that five scholarships and one work/study position are available.

Interview: Guest Lecturer Yoon Ha Lee

Yoon Ha Lee will be a guest lecturer at this summer’s Odyssey Workshop. His debut novel, Ninefox Gambit, won the Locus Award for best first novel and was a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Clarke awards. Its sequels, Raven Stratagem and Revenant Gun, were Hugo finalists. Lee’s middle grade space opera, Dragon Pearl, was a New York Times bestseller. His short fiction has appeared in venues such as Tor.com, Lightspeed Magazine, Clarkesworld Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. He lives in Louisiana with his family and an extremely lazy cat, and has not yet been eaten by gators.

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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?

Keep trying. Nobody is born knowing how to write. Like math, or ice-skating, or putting on eyeliner, it’s something you learn by practice.

Interview: Guest Lecturer JG Faherty

JG Faherty will be a guest lecturer at this summer’s Odyssey Workshop. A life-long resident of New York’s haunted Hudson Valley, JG is the author of seven novels, ten novellas, and more than seventy-five short stories, and he’s been a finalist for both the Bram Stoker Award (The Cure, Ghosts of Coronado Bay) and ITW Thriller Award (The Burning Time). He writes adult and YA horror, science fiction, dark fantasy, and paranormal romance, and his works range from quiet, dark suspense to over-the-top comic gruesomeness.

Since 2011, JG has been a Board Trustee for the Horror Writers Association (HWA) and a Mentor. He launched their Young Adult program, and also their Library & Literacy program, which he still runs. Recently, he co-founded the HWA’s Summer Scares reading initiative in conjunction with Becky Spratford and several library organization, and he teaches local teen writing programs at libraries. In 2019, he was recognized with the Mentor of the Year Award by the HWA.

As a child, his favorite playground was a seventeenth-century cemetery, which many people feel explains a lot. You can follow him at www.twitter.com/jgfaherty, www.facebook.com/jgfaherty, and www.jgfaherty.com.

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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?

The focus of my lecture will be how horror is the most basic and integral genre, and how it affects and entwines with all the other genres, such as science fiction, thrillers, romance, etc. But in terms of what I can personally offer outside of that, I always try to impart on my students the idea that no story is finished until it’s officially in print. That means there’s ample opportunity during the writing and editing processes to pursue alternate plot lines and endings, add and delete scenes, and even cut characters who don’t drive the plot forward. My advice is, always be willing to try different things with a story and remember that it’s okay to ‘kill your babies.’

“Make Your Big Moments Sing!” by Barbara Ashford

Award-winning novelist and librettist Barbara Ashford will be teaching the Odyssey Online class “The Heart of the Matter: Bringing Emotional Resonance to Your Storytelling” this winter (application deadline: December 7, 2019). Barbara has been praised by reviewers and readers alike for her compelling characters and her “emotional, heartfelt” storytelling. Her background as a professional actress, lyricist, and librettist has helped her delve deeply into character and explore the complexities of human nature on the stage as well as on the page. Her musical adaptation of Far from the Madding Crowd has been optioned for Broadway.

Barbara’s first published series was the dark fantasy trilogy Trickster’s Game (written as Barbara Campbell). Published by DAW Books, Trickster’s Game was a finalist for the Mythopoeic Society’s 2010 Fantasy Award for adult literature.

She drew on her musical theatre roots for her second novel series, the award-winning Spellcast and its sequel Spellcrossed, set in a magical summer stock theatre. DAW Books released the two novels in an omnibus edition: Spells at the Crossroads.

A graduate of the Odyssey workshop, Barbara has taught seven previous online courses for Odyssey and has served on the staff of the Odyssey Critique Service for more than a decade. You can visit her dual selves at barbara-campbell.com and barbara-ashford.com.

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Before I began writing fiction, I worked as an actress in musical theatre. Those years not only gave me the inspiration for my novel Spellcast, but taught me a lot about creating memorable moments in fiction.

Director’s Corner: Uncovering the Mysteries of Flow in the Opening of Stephen King’s 11/22/63

Jeanne Cavelos is the director of the Odyssey Writing Workshops Charitable Trust. 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.

Find out more about Jeanne here and more about the Odyssey Writing Workshop here.

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Flow remains shrouded in mystery. I’ve rarely seen writers explain it or analyze it. When you read a story by someone else, you probably sense when it flows, but you may not know why. When you read your own work, it’s likely harder to sense the degree of flow. Even if critiquers tell you that flow is a problem, they may have a hard time explaining why or offering suggestions to improve the flow. As the director of the Odyssey Writing Workshops Charitable Trust, I’m constantly critiquing fiction in our online classes or in-person workshops, and I’ve come to realize how important flow is to a story. A story may have an exciting plot, compelling characters, a fascinating world, and a clear style, but without flow, we’ll be struggling to reach the end.

Graduate Essay: Linden A. Lewis, “How to Create a Novel from a Short Story”

Linden A. Lewis is a queer writer and world wanderer currently living in Madrid with three American cats who have little kitty passports. Tall and tattooed, Linden exists only because they’ve stopped burning witches. Linden graduated the Odyssey Writing Workshop in 2016, and their first novel, The First Sister, will be released by Skybound Books in Spring 2020.

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I was in the query trenches for over a year when I realized I needed to focus on something else. The novel I had poured my heart and soul into brought only rejection after rejection—or even worse, silence—and I was falling deeper into what I thought of as “writer’s depression,” or the belief that I would never write something good enough.