Sean Williams

Once upon a time, I used to think being a writer meant, well, writing.  All the time.  If only that were true!  When between books, as I am at the moment, I don't even attempt to stick to my 1500 words/day target. There just isn't time.  Here's what I got up to in the last week (Monday 5 to Sunday 12), for anyone interested in what I actually spend most of my time doing.

• I delivered re-writes of all four Fixers books to my editor at Scholastic;
• re-wrote outlines for The Resurrected Man and The Crooked Letter TV shows, as per feedback received while in LA;
• reread the story notes of Magic Dirt, seeking inspiration for a podcast about my fifteen year-old story "A Map of the Mines of Barnath";
• ditto my story "Ungentle Fire" in the forthcoming Dragon Book;
• was interviewed live on ABC radio at the Royal Adelaide Show (and ate a large amount of junk food afterwards);
• attended the Ruby/ABAF Awards;
• had a Skype conversation, transcribed some notes, and looked over an outline for a project I haven't mentioned here yet (ooh, mysterious!);
• attended a meeting of the SA Writers' Centre Board;
• took Christobel Mattingley's place on the SA Writers' Festival "Fact or Fiction" panel, down at the beautiful Wirra Wirra vineyards in the McLaren Vale, and chaired the "First Book" panel;
• read and annotated submissions for a retreat I'll be co-taking in a few weeks;
• signed up to sit on a grant assessment panel doling out money for young South Australian writers;
• suggested some spec fic titles for the Big Book Club's December/January selections;
• caught up on the parallel import situation for the Australian Society of Authors;
• revived my LJ and wrote this post. :-)

I also bought the new Steve Roach album, Destination Beyond, and Deepspace's World Ocean Atlas. (That's not really work, I know, but these albums will probably comprise my main writing music for the coming weeks, so it's kinda related.)

This wasn't an exceptional week, but it probably was a little busier than normal, thanks to the awards night and the festival. 

How was yours?  Did you manage to get some writing done?  If so, well done.  I am jealous!

Meanwhile, I'm on my Big Book Club tour as of tomorrow. The schedule includes events in Queensland this Tuesday, WA on Wednesday and Thursday, and SA the following Monday, and is available now on the Big Book Club website. If you're interested in coming along, just click on your state, then following the "Touring Dates" link for more info.

Not long after that, on October 3, I'll be in conversation with Lucy Sussex and Paul Collins at the Victorian Writers' Centre, followed by the weekend intensive, "Dismantling Science Fiction" , which I blogged about briefly before. The first link takes you straight to the VWCs info page, where you can find times, costs, etc.

Come along if you can. It'd be great to see some friendly faces at the events.

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Listening to: Steve Roach - Structures From Silence

Sometimes being a writer is more about reading than writing. Sometimes reading swamps writing entirely, a situation I find myself in at the moment.

I don't mean reading over my own work during the editing process; neither do I mean reading for review or research. During October, I'll be reading as a judge for the Aurealis Awards and the Writers of the Future Contest. I'm assessing grant applications (which includes scrutinising support material by the box-load) for Arts SA. I'm perusing submissions for the ever-expanding Big Book Club. And I'm looking at a galley from a friend in the States with a view to providing a blurb.

All of these things are important. All of them take time. There are days in the middle of writing a novel when I would kill for an afternoon reading a good book (aka falling asleep on the couch with a hardback plopped over my face). Seems all those wishes are coming true at once this month.

I'm not complaining. I'm actually looking forward to it. It counts as input, and I can't let myself nod off while reading this kind of stuff. Any one of these books or stories could inspire me in unknown ways. I might even read something that will change the way I think about fiction forever. It's possible. Isn't that why we let stories into our lives in the first place? To change and inspire us?

It's also a pleasant change of routine. Before I know it, I'll be back to doing what I normally do and wishing for moments like these. By anyone's standards, reading for a living looks very much like luxury.

Tim Lloyd of the Adelaide Advertiser (he of the legendary "vacuous" review for TRM) was more impressed with this year's releases.

Of THE BLOOD DEBT he had much to say: "South Australian writer Sean Williams has been deeply ensconced in his Austral fantasy land for some years now, but his latest book is his clearest vision of the place. It is as though it has been gradually emerging as Williams writes, and now, in THE BLOOD DEBT (...), the plot lines are clearer and more engaging, and the landscapes more closely articulated.

"Williams has been wrestling with a setting that was larger than any single book, and that is a very satisfactory thing. Most fantasy writers have a set-piece, battlefield kind of approach to their worlds, adding extra levels of fable or fiction to keep them interesting. But Williams has been much less mechanical in his approach, stepping through time, and coming from unexpected angles. This time, however, the sense of connectedness in all his landscapes and books is palpable, and various difficult-to-resolve threads have begun to twirl together. ...

"Williams' writing is suffused with themes of orphanhood, broken parenthood and flawed relations, and in this book the emotional themes and the physical landscape truly begin to reflect one another. It's the best of the books so far..."

He also liked GEODESICA: ASCENT, calling it "high-class", for which I'm very grateful.

When the Advertiser reported the Ditmar/Aurealis win, they omitted the word "fantasy" from the all-important sentence -- "THE CROOKED LETTER is the first novel in Australian history to win the Ditmar and Aurealis awards -- but it was still great to get a mention.

SA LIFE, a fancy glossy spread that comes out once a month, ran an article about "Men of Words, Ideas & Flair". Fellow author (and dude) Max Anderson interviewed me for the piece, and he very kindly described me as "an especially good writer, one very dedicated to his craft. The rhythm and meter in his prose works a deft magic on his readers; he very quickly renders himself invisible, the perfect "glass pane" through which we see his imaginings."

Max is a forthcoming Big Book Club author, so anyone reading this in SA should check him out.

S