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?

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.)

FOGcon, Cli-Fi, and Wattpad

FOGcon has come and gone, and along with it my first appearance on a panel at a SF/F convention. Yay, I’m no longer a virgin! The convention itself was fantastic. It was great to catch up with Tim Powers, one of the guests of honor, and I learned a lot from attending the panels I wasn’t involved in. One panel in particular, “Manic Pixie Angel,” really opened my eyes to the inadvertent sexism and prejudice common in fiction. Seanan McGuire, the other guest of honor, was hilarious and insightful in the discussion. Afterward, I gave a lot of thought to my female characters in Dreamwielder, and was relieved to come away knowing they all stood up as strong characters, independent of the male characters in the story.

Why I Suck at Blogging So Far in 2014

Keeping a consistent posting schedule is the trademark of a good blogger, so if there was any doubt before, it’s decided—I’m definitely not a good blogger. But that’s okay. I’m a spec-fiction author first and foremost, and if I’m not spending time here at The Machine Stops, it’s because I’m busy with other aspects of my writing career, and that has been the case so far in the year 2014.

Let’s start with the biggie. Dreamwielder is now available in print! Available in trade paperback format to be precise. I’m pretty stoked, and would like to thank the great people at Diversion Books and my agent Liz Kracht for making it happen, and I’d especially like to thank everyone who purchased, reviewed, and helped spread the word about the e-book and audiobook versions of the novel over the past year—without your support, the print version never would have come to be. To help spread the word, I'm raffling off a great prize package of four signed books, a Wheel House CD, and an empty Cthulhu mint tin I stole from Tim Powers! Simply head over to my FB page and share my book link to be entered into the random drawing.

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

Author Interview: Misty Massey

Misty Massey is no bandwagon pirate fanatic who got turned onto the trend on account of the Disney Pirates of the Caribbean movies or by watching too many Captain Morgan rum commercials. Nope, she’s been fascinated by pirates since she was a kid, and her first novel, Mad Kestrel, carries on the rich literary heritage of great pirate adventures. Misty and I became acquainted several years back on an online forum where she was hosting a Q&A session. She happened to mention that the Tim Powers novel On Stranger Tides was a big influence for her, and I quickly bragged that I work with Powers at the Orange County High School of the Arts, and was myself a big fan of his work. She was duly impressed, and when my book The Roads to Baldairn Motte (co-written with Craig Comer and Ahimsa Kerp) came out, I more or less begged her to give it a read and write a cover blurb. She obliged, and once again her generosity has come through by granting her time to come chat here on my blog.

What follows is the inside scoop on a potential sequel to Mad Kestrel, who it is that makes her gush like a school girl, and some secret skills she’s been honing that’ll keep randy buccaneers at bay on the dance floor. Yarr!

Garrett: First off, how is the sequel to Mad Kestrel coming along?

Misty: (laughs) That's the question of the hour, isn't it? You wouldn't believe how many people ask me that every day (which is lovely, and I'm not complaining at all.) It’s coming along. I'm in rewrites, and frankly I've discovered a few things that I somehow missed in the first draft, making it a deeper and hopefully more satisfying story. I had hoped to be finished mid-July, but now it looks like I've got another week or so of work. The end is in sight!