S&S Workshop
Want to get your adventure writing leveled up? Adrian Simmons (Heroic Fantasy Quarterly), Mark Finn (Skelos) and Jason Ray Carney (Whetstone) have combined forces to bring you our online writing workshop.
How it works
There will be 18-24 participants, split into three groups. Each group will share manuscripts with each other, and each group will have two of the three editors reviewing their work. We’ll host a zoom meeting on either the last weekend of September or the first weekend of October. Each group will begin with a round-table review of their works, with the editors at bat last.
What to submit
This is a workshop for short S&S and adventure fantasy fiction. It is not a place for novel sections, or science fiction, or urban romance. We want complete stories, they can be of any length, but nobody is on the hook to read through more than 10,000 words.
What to expect from the editors
Our goal is to show you what we see through our ‘editor eyes’. We’ll tell you where the story is strong, where it is weak, and have a suggestion about improvements. Our editors eyes can also include the Big Black Line where, had it come into one of our magazines as a standard submission, we would have rejected it. If that happens (and remember, we all reject 8 out of 10 submissions with a form rejection) we’ll still review the full story (or 10,000 words, whichever comes first), and we’ll talk about the Big Black Line and why it’s there.
Crucial Dates
We plan on officially opening up the workshop on August 1st, when we’ll have the full details and the a contact email and methods of payment set up.
Once you’re in, send stories to us by August 31 and we’ll get them sent out to the groups September 1.
Cost
Since this is our first venture into this particular dungeon, we’re planning on $65 per person.
Who We Are
Jason Ray Carney
Jason Ray Carney is a Senior Lecturer in Popular Literature and the History of Literary Criticism at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia. He is the author of the academic monograph, “Weird Tales of Modernity: The Ephemerality of the Ordinary in the Stories of Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and H.P. Lovecraft” (McFarland 2019), the sword and sorcery anthology Rakefire and Other Stories (Pulp Hero Press 2020), and he edits Whetstone: Amateur Magazine of Pulp Sword and Sorcery and The Dark Man: Journal of Robert E. Howard and Pulp Studies. Additionally, his fiction has appeared in various publications such as Tales from the Magician’s Skull, Cirsova, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Old Moon Quarterly, and more. He is enthralled to two catlords, Goblin and Worm.
Mark Finn
Mark Finn: Noted authority on Texas author Robert E. Howard, contributing editor for Skelos: The Journal of Weird Fiction and Dark Fantasy, and author of fiction and now role-playing games, Mark is coming out of his online home at the North Texas Apocalypse Bunker to lend his expertise and sensibilities to our panel of experts.
Adrian Simmons
Adrian Simmons is a founder and senior editor for Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, an ezine devoted to sword and sorcery and heroic fiction and poetry. Over a decade of reading submissions has given him a keen eye for what makes a solid story submission. He can take it as well as dish it out, having had fiction published at Cirsova, Tales From the Magician’s Skull, and Weirdbook. He’s had various pieces of nonfiction published at Strange Horizons and Black Gate.
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