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In the fall of 2005, Card also launched Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show ([1]). He edited the first two issues, but found that the demands of teaching, writing, and directing plays for his local church theatre group made it impossible to respond to writers' submissions in a timely manner; former Card student and experienced freelance writer and editor Edmund Schubert became the new editor as of 1 June 2006.

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And this from IGMS.com:

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About IGMS
IGMS Welcomes New Editor, Edmund R. Schubert

Orson Scott Card is pleased to announce that Edmund R. Schubert has joined our staff as editor of InterGalactic Medicine Show. He will assume responsibility for selecting the stories that will appear in IGMS, beginning immediately by sorting through our extensive backlog of submitted stories.

Schubert's story, "Trill and the Beanstalk," appeared in the first issue of IGMS, and he has published over thirty short stories in a variety of other magazines and anthologies. In addition to his fiction writing, he is also executive editor of the business magazine, North Carolina Career Network, and is excited about this opportunity to bring his editing experience together with his love of great speculative fiction.

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Anyway, to those who have had submissions sitting at IGMS for many moons, Edmund hopes to catch up on the backlog over the next couple months. Congrats, Edmund!

Obviously this is the opportunity of a lifetime and I am tremendously fortunate and honored and grateful for a chance to work with someone of the caliber of Orson Scott Card.

The assistant editor/slush reader has done a great job of keeping up with many of the submissions, and I'll be taking care of anything that got past her, something OSC hasn't had time to do because of his many other commitments. My immediate goal is to get caught up on not just the submissions, but the production schedule overall.

My larger goal, however, is to fill the magazine with great stories. That's one of the things Scott and I talked about when he asked me to take this on. In my opinion, too much short fiction today is about the author and their style. I don't have any patience with 'style monkeys.' I want to fill IGMS with tales about interesting and memorable charcaters having fantastic adventures. I think that's what people would like to read, too. If you have an opinion on that subject, I'd love to hear it right here in this forum.

I'm also going to be in Charlotte NC this weekend as a guest at ConCarolina. I'll be doing some panels and workshops, so if you're planning on attending the con, look me up. I'd love to talk to you about IGMS or anything else SF/F.

ConCarolinas web-site is posted below if you need info about it. Writer Guest of Honor is Spider Robinson.

www.concarolinas.org

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memorable characters having fantastic adventures

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Sounds like a good program. I hate style exercises (which is ironic because I pay so much attention to it in my fiction). I prefer the "characters having an adventure" bit to the "sheer adventure with not-so-strong characters" part, though, but I suspect lots of people have differing opinions.

Scott has an excellent essay (I'm pretty sure it's somewhere in the Uncle Orson's Writing Class section of this web-site) where he talks about Isaac Asimov's style. He points out that while some critics complained Asimov had no style, it was truer to say that Asimov's style was intentionally transparent, so that the reader focused on the story instead of the author. (And Asimov didn't do to badly as a writer; I think he even managed to get a couple of his books published.) That's the kind of style Scott and I agree we prefer - style in service to the story.

As for character vs. adventure/plot vs. everything else, I wrote an essay once called "History's Literary Perspectives" where I talked about what gets remembered the longest, and in the final analysis I think great characters override everything else. The reasons Shakespeare's works survive to this day is because of his enduring characters. Ask the average man on the street and they'll tell you they don't like reading Shakespeare's plays (his style is dated by several centuries, making it largely a moot point outside of academic circles), they can't really tell you much about the plot (you're lucky if you can get a one-sentence synopsis out of them), but EVERYONE knows who Hamlet is. Everyone knows who Romeo and Juliet are. Because they are great characters.

If you let time slowly erode those things that are less important, what you are invariably left with are great characters. What makes them great are the things they said and did. And the author's style? Well, probably people wouldn't have read the story in the first place if there wasn't a decent writing style to begin with, but when all is said and done, that's the first thing that is stripped away by time and history.

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However, there's a big difference between style used in service of the story and style used as the author's way of saying "Hey, look at me!" It's that second one I have no patience for.

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I couldn't have put it better.

http://www.hatrack.com/writingclass/lessons/1998-05-12-1.shtml

Here's the relevant snippet, lightly edited:

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Isaac Asimov, as a young writer, found himself imitating the admired style of his youth -- a purple kind of prose that today would be execrable, but even then was no great thrill to read. Disgusted with the results in his own storytelling, he stopped trying to have a "style" at all, and instead concentrated on simple, declarative writing. In his own mind, he was removing all style from his work. But I see it differently. Asimov was concentrating on perfecting his rhetoric, which he did better than any other writer of our time. His writing became so transparent, so rhetorically effective, that you are almost never conscious of the style, but rather are conscious of the ideas or events being presented...

In fact, Asimov became the foremost practitioner of the American plain style... And -- most important to this discussion -- his work had a definite, pronounced style which is extraordinarily hard to imitate. His "fingerprint" is clear and uniquely his own. That it does not intrude on the reader's consciousness at any point during the process of reading is one of its virtues, not a failing.

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Congratulations on the new gig, Edmund. I don't know you at all (except that you have the names of one of my favorite Narnia characters and one of my favorite composers), but it's a good slot to be in and I wish you the best.

My warmest congratulations! What an opportunity!