Introducing Jayna Bosse

As an emerging author, I’m always looking for unique ways to get my work out there and connect with new readers, so when author John Fox, a good friend of mine, mentioned that he had worked with student interns to help him with his popular writing website, Bookfox, the gears started spinning in my head. After contemplating the idea for a while, I decided to bring on an intern of my own to work with me as a writing assistant.

Intern extraordinaire, Jayna Bosse 

As luck would have it, Jayna Bosse, the applicant who ended up being the most qualified and enthusiastic, is a student at the Orange County School of Arts (OCSA) Creative Writing Conservatory, a high school writing program that was founded by author James P. Blaylock and brags Tim Powers as a master teacher. And oh yeah, and I used to teach there, too (although I left before Jayna became a student there).

In speaking to her during the interview process, I could tell right away that Jayna and I were on the same page. She’s already a strong writer, has great ideas, and is enthusiastic to learn more. In addition to helping me with the business end of my writing, she’ll also be writing here on this blog. With that in mind, she was kind enough to share some thoughts about herself in the way of an introduction to readers.


GC: So Jayna, when I was there teaching at OCSA, students in the Creative Writing Conservatory really embraced sci-fi, fantasy, and geek culture in general. Have things changed much, or is there still a healthy love for SF/F among students?

Celebrating Seven Years: Best of The Machine Stops

Saying goodbye to the old Machine Stops logo

August 8, 2016 was the seven-year anniversary for this blog, and I finally got around to giving the site a facelift. Hopefully, the new layout will make reading easier on they eyes. I'm also going through and updating broken links, including making sure all the book titles and images now have active links.

The Machine Stops started out with me intermittently rambling on about what I was working on in the infancy of my writing career, but as I became more involved in the SF/F community as a professional (sometime around 2011), the blog become infinitely more interesting, featuring interviews with other authors and the occasional SF/F lists.

Looking forward, I'll still be blogging about my own writing updates (about once a month), but you can expect to see a lot more interviews with other authors and fun features like top-10 lists and whatever other strange ideas pop into my head.

To celebrate the first seven years and kickoff a new chapter for The Machine Stops, here are the

Top 10 Most Popular SF/F Posts

Spring Recap and Summer Events

It's been an eventful spring and early summer of 2016. I kicked things off with a book signing at the Book Carnival in Orange back in April, along with steampunk legend James P. Blaylock. The event was well attended and my trip back down to southern California afforded me the opportunity to meet up with family and the crew from my writing group, The Biscuits.

Goodbye to Teaching

I'm used to saying goodbye to students come late May every year, but last week was different. I wasn't just saying goodbye to students for the summer, but to teaching altogether. The decision didn't come easily.

My first year teaching, 2002. Songwriting
students and me in the lower right hand corner.

I love teaching, and teaching writing itself forced me to grow into a better writer, a better reader, and an all around better person. On top of that, the colleagues and students I've had over the years are some of my favorite people ever. "Why leave then?" you're probably wondering. Partly, it's because my wife and I are moving, but, sadly, the answer has mostly to do with money. Simply put, I can't afford to be a writing teacher anymore. There are a lot of reasons for this, many of them having to do with systematic problems in the administration of higher education, but I don't have any solutions to offer, so I'm not going to complain. What it came down to for me was that after twelve years in the classroom, I've reached my zenith career-wise in academia. I have no PhD and my professional writing credits are in the speculative fiction field, which adds up to being permanently stuck as an adjunct (part-time) instructor, particularly with the trend in higher education of relying even more heavily on adjuncts in recent years.

A going away gift from the Creative Writing
Conservatory at OCSA, 2015.

At times I've felt like a mercenary writing instructor, teaching up to seven classes a term at three different institutions, each considered a part-time job with no benefits, but combined adding up to ludicrous hours not only in the classroom, but also prepping for lectures and grading. Mostly, though, I've enjoyed my time teaching and helping young people find their voices as writers, and if I could keep doing it and create a secure future for my wife and I, I would. Teaching for the Creative Writing Conservatory at the Orange County School of Arts (OCSA), particularly, has been a great experience. Jim Blaylock brought me on in 2002 to teach a songwriting course, which then expanded into teaching a slew of other creative writing courses, including classes on spec-fiction, novel writing, zombies, and comic-book writing. And it was at OCSA that I got to know Tim Powers and met lifelong friends, both in the faculty and among the students. Similarly, although to a lesser extent, teaching at Chapman University has been highly rewarding. The students have always been respectful to me and receptive to my techniques, despite whatever misgivings they might have had about writing coming in. The faculty within the English Department have been great as well.

So what does this mean for me moving forward? It means taking on a full-time day job as a copywriter, which, believe it or not, will be less work than what I've been doing. Granted, it won't be as personally rewarding, but it will open up a lot of time for reading and writing, which I am very excited about. I haven't had much time for pleasure reading the last ten years, so I'm looking forward to getting caught up on current work in the spec-fiction field. Most importantly, with the change I'll be writing like a fiend from now on.

Souldrifter is slated to come out this summer from Diversion Books, and then I'll be working on the third installment in the Dreamwielder Chronicles as well as my standalone cli-fi novel, Remember the Future. After that, who can say? I have a lot of crazy ideas percolating in my brain—it's time to start getting them out!

-Garrett Calcaterra

(Addendum: 5/28/15 5:55PM PST - Several people have asked me offline to comment more on the problems I've experienced as an adjunct. I don't want to single out any of the schools I've worked for, but here are a couple of recent articles from the NY Times that I've found to be pretty spot on: 1) The Real Reason College Tuition Costs So Much, 2), What's the Point of a Professor.)

2013: A Year of Books and—what!?—Non-fiction?

I’m not much for resolutions, but it is nice to reflect upon the past year in order to recalibrate your goals going forward, so here’s my 2013 year in review. It was a big year for me, one in which I’ve hit a few stumbling blocks and learned a lot about the business of being a writer.

Dreamwielder

The publication of my debut, standalone fantasy novel was the big story for me in 2013(and a huge step forward in my career). After much deliberation with my agent about the wisdom of signing with an e-book first publisher, we inked a deal with Diversion Books at the end of 2012, and it paid off. The first couple of months in 2013 were devoted to working with my editor at Diversion to get the book ready for publication. The book was released in e-book format on March 5 and was promptly picked up as a Nook First selection at BarnesAndNoble.com. In May, the audiobook version was released by Audible.com. To date, while not setting the fantasy world on fire, the book has sold well and garnered positive reviews, including these two here and here, although I did get this puzzlingly mediocre review in Tales of the Talisman. If I continue to post improving sales numbers, we’ll hopefully be able to offer the book in print.

20 Obscure SF/F/H Books Recommended by the Pros

Understanding why some SF/F/H novels become massively popular while others languish in obscurity is an exercise in futility. For whatever reason, some books simply never get the right combo of marketing support, reader buzz, and magical-mass-market-mojo to become popular. Other books have moments of critical and popular success only to fade into obscurity over time. It’s no surprise then that there are dozens—if not hundreds or thousands—of SF/F/H gems that are largely unheard of and unread by modern readers. In an effort to unearth some of these gems I invited fourteen authors to recommend their favorite obscure spec-fic novels. Along with my own recommendation, we’ve dug up over twenty novels for readers to go out and discover. Enjoy!

-G. Calcaterra


“The Machine Stops” by E.M. Forster
-Recommended by Garrett Calcaterra, author of Dreamwielder

Brave New World, Ninteen Eighty-Four, and Yevgeny Zamyatin's We always get credit for being the grand-daddies of dystopian fiction, but E.M. Forster's novelette “The Machine Stops” predates all of them. First published in 1909, it is a stark warning tale of what could happen when humans become too reliant on technology. It seems more prescient than ever in today's era of dependency on smart phones, GPS navigation, and auto-correct. “The Machine Stops” is not entirely obscure, having been included in Volume 2B of the Science Fiction Hall of Fame anthology (1973), but few people know about it today. Dig up the Hall of Fame anthology, the Penguin collection of Forster's Selected Stories, or find the story free online, thanks to it being in the public domain.

Big Orange Book Festival 2013 Recap

Bruce McAllister, Garrett Calcaterra,
Terri Nolan, and James Scott Bell

Book festivals, conferences, and conventions are always a great time, especially when they're in your backyard, and especially-especially when you get to participate in one of the panels. That was the case for me this year at the Big Orange Book Festival. I had the honor of moderating a panel on "Making a Career in Writing" and it was a wonderful experience. The three authors I got to work with were all insightful, informative, and a pleasure to hang out with. They included:

Find Me at the Big Orange Book Festival

If you live in the southern California area, you should come check out the Big Orange Book festival this weekend, located at Chapman University in Orange, California. I will be moderating a panel on Sunday at 12:30 pm called Making a Career in Writing, and the panelists will include an amazing cast of writers:

• Bruce McAllister—acclaimed SF/F author and writing coach
• James Scott Bell—suspense/thriller author; author of the #1 bestseller for writers, Plot & Structure; former fiction columnist for Writer's Digest; and author of the Mallory Caine zombie legal thriller series, written under the pen name K. Bennett
• Terri Nolan—mystery author, who by some odd coincidence is represented by the same literary agency as me, Kimberly Cameron & Associates

The Roads to Baldairn Motte

After many years of hard work, The Roads to Baldairn Motte is finally here! Collaborators Craig Comer, Ahimsa Kerp, and myself started working on the mosaic fantasy novel back in 2007. It took us about a year and a half to write, then we searched high a low to find a home for it (which we found in the awesome independent publisher, L&L Dreamspell), and then we had to forge through the revision process with our editors. All said and done, we have a book that all of us our proud of, and more importantly, a book readers are going to love. Here's what two of our reviewers had to say about the novel:

"I was drawn into the world of Baldairn Motte at once by the rich prose and the promise of high adventure, but it was the characters and the fast moving story that held me literary hostage. I hope there's a sequel!"

 - James P. Blaylock, Winner of the World Fantasy Award and Philip K. Dick Award

"Whores become heroes, farmers become freedom fighters and healers strike down the unjust against the backdrop of a land in turmoil. Fans of George R R Martin's Song of Ice and Fire or Paul Hoffman's The Left Hand of God will relish the excitement of The Roads to Baldairn Motte."

- Misty Massey, author of Mad Kestrel

I'd like thank Jim Blaylock and Misty Massey immensely for saying such kind words about the book. Now it's up to all you readers out there to see if Jim and Misty are full of shit or not. The book is available in paperback and Kindle formats. Grab a copy from Amazon here, and let me know what you think. And as always, thanks for your support!

-Garrett Calcaterra