Sean Williams

I'm on the road again for the next ten days or so.  Here are some things I've been meaning to post properly about but hadn't got around to.  My apologies.  See you when I get back!

• an Astropolis reviewing contest
• an interview with me and a couple of awesome Writers of the Future winners in LA, on Starship Sofa
• another interview, this time about the SA Writers' Festival
• Karen Lee Field and I talk about stuff
• my favourite science books of recent times
• once upon a time, I had a quote of the day on my favourite spec fic news site, io9

(It's raining here in Adelaide at the moment, and I'm really going to miss it.  Could be the last we see for a while.)

The ever excellent io9 gets to grips with a pressing question--"Why are some writers so prolific, and others slower than you'd like?"--touching on the scandalous proposal that writing realist fiction is a doddle because you don't have to make everything up.

In the process, they quote Lara Anne Gilman on the ghastly task people set themselves by writing series: "[You] have to make sure that nothing happens that's too jarring, or contradicts something previously established. It's a lot like doing a jigsaw puzzle, but about 10% of the pieces will come from a puzzle you already completed. Worse, it's like doing a 3-D jigsaw puzzle, because the timeline goes not only forward and backward, but sideways as well."

Which reminds me of something I've been meaning to post here for a while, mainly for my own benefit but also for those interested in the various fantasy series I've been working on these ten years or so. When I woke up from the dream that inspired the first book, I had no conception that the story would eventually consume a million words.

( So here's a chronology of the Change, as it stands today. )

Will it get any bigger? Only if my brain does too.

PS. It turns out that Sal's journey is a kind of bildungsroman. You and I know that this was completely intentional.