Lecture #7: Short Stories — With Special Guest Instructor Mary Robinette Kowal

Welcome to the seventh lecture of my BYU 2020 creative writing class focused on writing science fiction and fantasy. Today’s class is focused on short stories. As you probably know, short story telling is not my forte. So I asked my dear friend—more importantly a brilliant writer—Mary Robinette Kowel to come in to help us hone our short story writing skills. Mary Robinette’s bio: Mary Robinette Kowal is the author of the Lady Astronaut series and historical fantasy novels: The Glamourist Histories series and Ghost Talkers. She’s the President of SFWA, a member of the award-winning podcast Writing Excuses and has received the Astounding Award for Best New Writer, four Hugo awards, the RT Reviews award for Best Fantasy Novel, the Nebula, and Locus awards. Stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Asimov’s, several Year’s Best anthologies and her collections Word Puppets and Scenting the Dark and Other Stories. Her novel Calculating Stars is one of only eighteen novels to win the