World Fantasy Award Nominations for Jeanne Cavelos and Scott H. Andrews

We here at the Odyssey Blog and pretty much anyone ever associated with Odyssey Writing Workshops are ecstatic! Why?

Because Jeanne Cavelos, the founder and director of the Odyssey Writing Workshops, and Scott H. Andrews, Odyssey graduate and founder and editor of Beneath Ceaseless Skies Magazine, have each been nominated for World Fantasy Awards! The World Fantasy Convention and award ceremony will take place next month in Saratoga Springs, New York–and until then we’re all on the edge of our seats.

Without further ado, we Odfellows present a tribute to Jeanne and Scott.

Ode to Jeanne

Jeanne Cavelos

Odyssey just concluded its 20th workshop, and its two decades of operation have spawned such writers as Carrie Vaughn, Theodora Goss, James Maxey, Alex Hughes, Rebecca Shelley, Lyn Benedict, Barbara Webb, Mike Grinti, J.A. White, Meagan Spooner, and David J. Schwartz, and editors such as Scott H. Andrews and Douglas Cohen–and many more, and more to come.

Jeanne Cavelos, nominated in the Special Award–Professional division for creating and running the Odyssey Writing Workshops, is one of the most humble, unassuming people I know–all the better to get her sneaky editor claws in you, because she has lived quite the varied life, and she brings all of her experience plus a critical eye toward editing, critiquing, and writing, whether she’s assessing her work or someone else’s. She’s an astrophysicist who worked for NASA, then was a senior editor at Bantam Doubleday Dell where she started an award-winning line of books, and now is a college professor who runs a full-service freelance company on the side. She is the author of several books, both fiction and nonfiction (The Science of the X-Files was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award), and has also edited an anthology. (She swears she has not cloned herself.)

But those are all the jobs she gets paid for.

I can say with all honesty that creating and running Odyssey is the jewel in Jeanne’s crown. I’ve gotten to know her a little over the last eight years and in that time I can’t say her enthusiasm for Odyssey has ever flagged. She works tirelessly to promote and host the annual six-week on-site summer Workshop, and even expanded Odyssey’s offerings to include online winter writing courses and themed free online salons.  There is always something to do and someone to see, and when an Odyssey workshop comes around, plots to fix and characters to revive.

Jeanne lives and breathes Odyssey, at great sacrifice to herself and others. She has made it her life’s work to educate amateur, up-and-coming science fiction, fantasy and horror writers, and introduce us to the world of writing and publishing. The caliber of instruction at Odyssey is always high because Jeanne sets the bar high and makes good on that promise, year after year. If something doesn’t work, she acknowledges it, fixes it, and does better.

In Odyssey, Jeanne has crafted an atmosphere that fosters collaboration and community over competition. Many graduates return year after year for TNEO (The Neverending Odyssey)–ten days of critiquing, story writing and all things science fiction–for more of that same community and support. Most of us stay in contact with each other, encouraging writerly habits.

Jeanne doesn’t do any of this for fame. She is always looking for better ways to serve amateur writers and give us the tools we need to become professional writers. She does it for the students, for all the people she sees who are writers. Whether Jeanne wins an award or not (but hint: we think she should), we thank her for everything that she does for us–and she should know we wouldn’t ask for a better evil overlord.

~Ronya F. McCool (Odyssey 2007) is the managing editor for the Odyssey Workshops Blog. She lives, works, writes and renovates in the Midwest and can sometimes be heard on the Libraryland podcast.~

---

A Toast to Scott upon the Event of his WFA Nomination

Scott H. Andrews (photo courtesy of Al Bogdan)

My pal, drinking buddy and fellow 2005 Odfellow Scott H. Andrews is up for a World Fantasy Award! Permit me to briefly bask in the credit of his association and raise a glass of something frothy in his honor as I elucidate why it couldn’t have happened to a better editor.

Scott is a great, meticulous, thoughtful, perceptive, respectful editor. As far as I’m concerned, he’s like nobody else working in the field. If you’ve ever submitted to Beneath Ceaseless Skies, you know how routinely generous he is with his time. He provides actual feedback in practically every rejection. He asks for way more rewrites than is good for him. When he buys a story, all too often it’s because he helped the author make it better. This has certainly been the case with all five of the stories I’ve sold him. He’s made me a better writer.

As a reader, he has an uncanny ability to inhabit a character inhabiting a world that isn’t our own, to see that world through their eyes and feel what they feel. As an editor, that ability helps him keep me honest. Often it seems like he knows my world and my characters better than I do. I’m not saying I’ve never been frustrated working with him–I think every writer loves their own words too much for their own good–but he knows that as well as I do, and he’s always ready to work through it. And the story is better for it. He is the only editor I’ve worked with willing to go to those lengths. In fact, I’d argue no other short fiction editor in the field contributes as much has he does to making the stories they buy as good as they can be.

Contrary to what we’ve heard from different quarters over the past few years, short fiction is not dying. But neither does it pay an editor’s bills; novels do that. In an era when many top markets for short fiction act as loss-leaders for novel sales, BCS is an end in itself. The purview is narrow: character-driven, secondary world adventure fantasy. But that narrow focus allows Scott to be the best at what he does. And in doing so, he’s forged a legitimacy for that kind of fiction without which by now it might have faded away completely. When BCS came on the scene in 2008, Realms of Fantasy was the only professional-rate market dedicated to short fantasy, and it was in its death throes. Eight years later, thanks to Scott, BCS is the top market for fantasy.

I’m really proud of him for the nomination. In fact, I think it’s overdue. But if this year has taught us anything, it’s that there’s no accounting for awards politics. So by way of closing, let me just suggest that in the event he doesn’t win the award (and here let me express profound relief Scott and Jeanne aren’t in the same category), next time you run into him, you should really ask him to recap his acceptance speech.

Here’s to Scott and BCS!

~Michael J. DeLuca’s (Odyssey 2005) short fiction has appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Apex, Interfictions, Pseudopod and Clockwork Phoenix. He guest-edited Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet #33, an ecologically-themed issue that came out this July 2015. He narrates occasionally for the Beneath Ceaseless Skies fiction podcast, operates Weightless Books with Gavin J. Grant, and blogs at mossyskull.com.~

Advertisement