Q&A Excerpt: Jeanne Cavelos

Jeanne Cavelos is the director of the Odyssey Writing Workshops Charitable Trust. She was a senior editor at Bantam Doubleday Dell, where she worked for eight years, editing the fantasy/science fiction program, the Abyss horror line, and other fiction and nonfiction. Jeanne is also the bestselling author of seven books and numerous short stories and articles. She has won the World Fantasy Award and twice been nominated for the Stoker Award.

Jeanne has run the Odyssey Writing Workshop for the last 26 years. She created and serves as primary instructor at Your Personal Odyssey Writing Workshop, an innovative program that combines advanced lectures, expert feedback, and deep mentoring, and provides a personalized, one-on-one online experience responsive to each writer’s needs. 

Find out more about Jeanne here and more about the Your Personal Odyssey Writing Workshop here.

In this excerpt transcribed from a question-and-answer session for a 2026 Your Personal Odyssey lecture, Jeanne talks about whether short fiction credits can help your novel career and the value of attending conventions.

QUESTION: I’m wondering if you still think short fiction market publishing has a role to play in helping you get into novel publishing?

ANSWER: I would say it’s definitely no longer seen as a step you have to go through—like, first you gotta do the short to graduate and do the long. I don’t think people think that way anymore. And there’s just so many people who just go direct to novels, and that’s it.

But if you are drawn to writing short, and you have success at writing short, building a reputation, making sales, getting readers to know who you are, getting them on your newsletter, getting them to connect with you via social media—all that can be a great help when your novel comes out. Because when your novel comes out, you need readers. And if nobody knows who you are because this is your very first thing, and your publisher hasn’t done much for you in the way of promotion—you can do stuff, but it’s gonna be really hard. Whereas if you’ve written short stories for ten years, and you’ve had them published, and you’ve built up writers saying nice things about your work, and you’ve gotten maybe some notice with awards or whatever, that can be a great thing to help you have a more successful novel launch when that happens.

QUESTION: I was curious about your thoughts on conventions and the modern landscape. Do you think they’re still worth going to?

ANSWER: Conventions are good. Conventions are good for networking. I never liked the word networking—it always scared me—but networking translates into making friends who are in the business. So you’re gonna make friends when you go, or you should try to make friends when you go. You get your name out there, you get known, other people then recognize you. “Oh, she’s the one who talks about how fairies dance at midnight, and she was really interesting and funny on that panel.” Or whatever. You should volunteer to be on panels, and they might reject you, or they might accept you, depending, so you just keep trying.

I think they’re worth going to. I would not spend a lot of money on them. I would not go to a lot of them. I would pick a few—maybe just one, or maybe two, not more than three, certainly, in a year—that either focus on an area that’s connected to what you’re writing, or are nearby and affordable for you, or have somebody that you want to meet up with. Maybe it’s somebody you have met online, or several authors—maybe you have a critique group, and they’re all gonna go to this convention.

It’s so much nicer to go to a convention with other people than to go by yourself. One of the best things with Odyssey is that when I go to a convention, there’s other Odyssey people there. And I’m like, “Oh, hi, hi,” and then I’m hanging out, and I got a group, and it’s like, “Wow, this is so much better than wandering around by myself like I used to.” So if you have some people you can go with, that’s wonderful, or you can meet people when you’re there.

So I would recommend it in a small way, as long as it’s not gonna break your finances or anything. But you do need to make it worthwhile. You do need to talk to people. You wouldn’t know it, but I’m a very shy person, so that’s a hard thing for me. If that’s hard for you, you kind of just gotta force yourself to pick a few people to try talking to, and make some contacts, and then write down whatever you learn. Write down their names, their emails; keep track of who they are. Then later you can ask them to get on your newsletter list.

NOTE: This transcript has been edited for clarity.