Interview: Graduate Scott T. Barnes

Scott T. Barnes is the winner of the Writers of the Future Award and a graduate of Odyssey. His short fiction has appeared in numerous venues, including the anthologies Gaia: Shadow and Breath Vol. 3, History and Horror, Oh My! and Kevin J. Anderson’s Pulse Pounders II. He is also the author of Rancho San Felipe: A Story of California One Hundred Years Ago, an illustrated fourth-grade reader. He edits the online magazine NewMyths.com. His complete bibliography can be found at www.scotttbarnes.com.

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You attended the Odyssey Writing Workshop in 2008. What made you decide to attend Odyssey? You also took two of the online Odyssey Workshop courses. What made you decide to take them?

Well, I didn’t get into Odyssey the first time that I applied in 2007, and so I applied a second time…

Interview: Odyssey Online Graduate and Author Jenise Aminoff

Dianna Sanchez is the not-so-secret identity of Jenise Aminoff, whose superpower is cooking with small children. She is an MIT alumna, graduate of the 1995 Clarion Workshop and Odyssey Online, active member of SCBWI, and a former editor of New Myths magazine (www.newmyths.com).

Aside from 18 years as a technical and science writer, she has taught science in Boston Public Schools, developed curricula for STEM education, and taught Preschool Chef, a cooking class for children ages 3-5. A Latina geek originally from Albuquerque, NM, she now resides near Boston, MA with her wonderfully geeky husband and two daughters.

Her debut novel is A WITCH’S KITCHEN, forthcoming from Dreaming Robot Press in September 2016.

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Congratulations on the sale of your first novel, A Witch’s Kitchen, coming out from Dreaming Robot Press on September 25, 2016! How many stages did your novel go through before you sent it to the publisher? How much of your time was spent writing the first draft, and how much was spent in revising? What sort of revisions did you do on the novel?

Thanks! All told, A Witch’s Kitchen took me two years, three months to complete. I started it just before Thanksgiving 2013 and completed the first draft on March 25, 2014. Luckily, I had signed up for Odyssey Online’s Powerful Dialogue in Fantastic Fiction, intending to use it for a completely different project, so that helped a great deal. Even so, I knew it was nowhere near ready to send out.