ROCKVILLE, MD, OCT. 25 — Fantasy Magazine, the critically-acclaimed online short fiction magazine published by Prime Books, will relaunch in March 2011, with a brand new look, a new approach, and a new editor: bestselling anthologist John Joseph Adams (Wastelands, The Living Dead).

Fantasy Magazine is currently edited by Sean Wallace and Cat Rambo. Wallace, who is also the publisher of Prime Books and Fantasy Magazine, will stay on as publisher but will be stepping down as co-editor. Rambo, who in addition to her work as an editor is also an accomplished author, will be stepping down in order to focus on her writing. John Joseph Adams will edit Fantasy Magazine while continuing to edit Lightspeed Magazine (also published by Prime Books), bringing both magazines under the same editorial umbrella.

Fantasy’s new publishing approach will bring it in line with its sister magazine, Lightspeed. Like Lightspeed, Fantasy will:

• Offer all of its content for free on the web
• Offer ebook editions of every issue of the magazine (including back issues)
• Publish four short stories a month (two originals and two reprints)
• Publish three nonfiction articles a month, closely tied to the fiction, plus one feature interview
• Publish two fiction podcasts a month, produced by award-winning producer and narrator Stefan Rudnicki
• Publish interviews with Fantasy Magazine authors (a/k/a “Author Spotlights”)

Fantasy Magazine launched in 2005 as a print magazine, before transitioning to its current online model in 2007. The magazine’s current inventory, selected by Rambo and Wallace, will appear in the magazine through February 2011; Adams will take editorial control of the magazine immediately, and his first selections will debut in the March 2011 issue when the new website launches.

About John Joseph Adams (Editor)

John Joseph Adams (www.johnjosephadams.com) is the bestselling editor of many anthologies, such as Wastelands, The Living Dead (a World Fantasy Award finalist), The Living Dead 2, The Way of the Wizard, By Blood We Live, Federations, and The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Barnes & Noble.com named him “the reigning king of the anthology world,” and his books have been named to numerous best of the year lists. Prior to taking on the role of editor at Lightspeed and Fantasy Magazine, John worked for nearly nine years in the editorial department of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. In addition to his editorial work, John is also the co-host of io9.com’s Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast.

About Prime Books

Prime Books (www.prime-books.com), edited and published by Hugo Award- and World Fantasy Award-winner Sean Wallace, is an independent publishing house specializing in a mix of anthologies, collections, novels, and magazines. Some of its established and new authors/editors include John Joseph Adams, KJ Bishop, Philip K. Dick, Theodora Goss, Rich Horton, Nick Mamatas, Sarah Monette, Holly Phillips, Tim Pratt, Ekaterina Sedia, Catherynne M. Valente, and Jeff VanderMeer.

Contacts

Sean Wallace, publisher: sean@fantasy-magazine.com
John Joseph Adams, editor: john@fantasy-magazine.com

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My anthology, The Way of the Wizard, is forthcoming in November from Prime Books. Here’s the cover copy, and the table of contents is after the cut:

Power. We all want it, they’ve got it—witches, warlocks, sorcerers, necromancers, those who peer beneath the veil of mundane reality and put their hands on the levers that move the universe. They see the future in a sheet of glass, summon fantastic beasts, and transform lead into gold…or you into a frog. From Gandalf to Harry Potter to the Last Airbender, wizardry has never been more exciting and popular.

Now acclaimed editor John Joseph Adams (The Living Dead) brings you 32 of the most spellbinding tales ever written, by some of today’s most magical talents, including Neil Gaiman, Ursula K. Le Guin, George R. R. Martin, Robert Silverberg, Kelly Link, and many more.

Enter a world where anything is possible, where imagination becomes reality. Experience the thrill of power, the way of the wizard. (more…)

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I’ll be a guest lecturer at the 2011 Odyssey, The Fantasy Writing Workshop, which will be held June 6 – July 15. My lecture day is scheduled for July 13. This year’s writer-in-residence will be Gary Braunbeck, and other guest lecturers include Theodora Goss and Barry B. Longyear.

Here’s a little bit about the workshop, from my article “Basic Training for Writers“:

Odyssey is a well-respected six-week writing workshop, in which the entire learning process is overseen by one instructor, editor Jeanne Cavelos. “A single instructor guides you through the six weeks, gaining in-depth knowledge of your work, providing detailed assessments of your strengths and weaknesses, helping you target your weaknesses one by one, and charting your progress,” Cavelos said. “Some other workshops provide a series of instructors, which leaves you without any continuity of feedback to help you understand whether you are improving or not.” Odyssey allows students to work on both short fiction and novels, in the genre of science fiction, fantasy, or horror.

Workshop Director Cavelos is a former senior editor at Bantam Doubleday Dell, and Odyssey is the only six-week workshop that has an editor’s guidance throughout. Cavelos says that her experienced editorial perspective is key to the learning process and enables her to help writers find the writing process that will best work for them.

But going to Odyssey doesn’t mean you’ll miss out on being tutored by genre luminaries. Each week of the program, a different guest writer or editor spends a period of 24 hours with the students, providing additional instruction, and Odyssey also features a writer-in-residence who teaches and works with students for an entire week. Past instructors include: Harlan Ellison, Dan Simmons, Ben Bova, George R. R. Martin, and Terry Brooks, among many others. The 2010 writer-in-residence was Laura Anne Gilman.

Fifty-three percent of Odyssey graduates have gone on to be published professionally, according to Cavelos. This is the highest percentage of post-workshop success reported by any of these programs. “I believe the journey to become the best writer you can be is a lifelong one,” Cavelos said. “At the end of Odyssey, your journey will not be done. Yet I’m constantly told by graduates that they learned more at Odyssey than they learned in years of workshopping and creative writing classes. The workshop helps you advance in your journey at a much accelerated rate.”

Cavelos notes that one of the big differences between Odyssey and some of the other workshops is that Odyssey offers an advanced, comprehensive curriculum covering the elements of fiction writing in depth. “With two hours of lecture/discussion each day (in addition to two hours of workshopping), Odyssey students learn the tools and techniques that make powerful writing,” Cavelos says. “While feedback can reveal a writer’s weaknesses, that writer can’t improve unless he has the tools to strengthen those weak areas.”

Published novelists who are Odyssey alumni include New York Times best-selling author Carrie Vaughn (six books published by Warner/Grand Central, and one forthcoming from HarperTeen), Barbara Campbell (three-book deal with DAW), Lane Robins (sold two books to Del Rey and two to Ace), Elaine Isaak (two books sold to Harper), James Maxey (four books sold to Solaris Books), and David J. Schwartz (major book deal with Random House); in addition to this, Odyssey alumni have published over 650 stories in a variety of anthologies and magazines, such as Asimov’s and Realms of Fantasy.

Applications for early admission are due January 31, 2011. The final deadline for applying to the workshop is April 8, 2011.

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Well, DO YOU? Because Bennett Cerf wants to know! Or he did want to know, oh, 50 years ago or so.

This looks totally silly, right? Some kind of scam to take advantage of new writers? Well, guess who Bennett Cerf was: only one of the founders of the LARGEST ENGLISH LANGUAGE BOOK PUBLISHER IN THE WORLD (Random House.)

Okay, so let’s see what writers were affiliated with this. ROD SERLING? ROD freaking SERLING?? (Of Twilight Zone fame.)

I wasn’t familiar with any of the other names, but several of them at least do seem to be successful writers of their era:

• Faith Baldwin: “a very successful U.S. author of romance and fiction, publishing some 100 novels, often concentrating on women juggling career and family. The New York Times said that her books had ‘never a pretense at literary significance’ and were popular because they ‘enabled lonely working people, young and old, to identify with her glamorous and wealthy characters.'”
• Bruce Catton: “an American journalist and notable historian of the American Civil War. He won a Pulitzer Prize for history in 1954 for A Stillness at Appomattox, his study of the final campaign of the war in Virginia.”
• Rudolf Flesch: “an author, readability expert and writing consultant who was a vigorous proponent of plain English in the United States. He created the Flesch Reading Ease test and was co-creator of the Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test [anyone who’s used Microsoft Word has likely run into this. —JJA].”
• Other authors: Bergen Evans, Mignon G. eberhart, John Caples, J. D. Ratcliff, Mark Wiseman, Max Shulman, Red Smith.

(Strangely, the first three of the authors I looked up all died in 1978. COINCIDENCE??)

Oh, but LOOKEE HERE. My scam radar was not off after all. It seems there was a considerable scandal over the Famous Writers School’s business practices. The expose—“Let Us Now Appraise Famous Writers”—written by Jessica Mitford*, appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1970, and because we live in the future, you can just click through and read it right now. Snippet from Wikipedia: “Several of the Guiding Faculty attempted to defend the school’s practices, with Faith Baldwin saying ‘Oh, that’s just one of those things about advertising…. Anyone with common sense would know that the fifteen of us are much too busy to read the manuscripts the students send in.'” Yes—how silly that anyone would assume that the writers on staff would READ the manuscripts the students send in.

Man, I don’t know about you, but I’m dying to get my hands on a copy of this aptitude test.

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*Mitford also wrote an expose on the funeral industry—which I haven’t read, but sounds fantastic—called The American Way of Death.

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