Sean Williams

Today may be unlucky for some, but it's a very special day for the students of Clarion South 2009. In January, it was my great privilege to spend two weeks with these talented new writers, getting to know them and their stories in a way that's rarely possible, in this busy old world. Now they've reached the end of week six, and the time has come for them to burst out onto an unsuspecting audience

Here we all are in Sopranos mode:



Keep an eye out for them. They will do wonderful things. I'm sure of it.

So I discovered last week that bits of roasted cacao beans taste really, really nice when mixed with Old Gold, and ever since then I've been making my own chocolates. But in the meantime, work goes on:

Stephen Baxter, Pamela Freeman, Pat Rothfuss and I compare notes on SF vs F over at The Second Bookgeeks SF and Fantasy Author Panel.

Voyager online has published some of my thoughts on Clarion (here and here) among a host of others, all thanks to the hard work of jasoni.

My LibraryThing page is up and running, but it needs some work. So many books, so little time!

I discovered a couple of short interviews on YouTube: here, where I talk about how the Writers of the Future contest changed my life for the better; and here, on the Force Unleashed experience.

Bookseller + Publisher liked The Scarecrow, months ahead of its release: "everything you would expect from a good YA book [but] also quite different from most of its contemporaries. ... There is something in this series for both reluctant and confident readers." The review talked about the positive relationship between characters ("sometimes confused, often frightened but never pathetic"), magic ("another positive point of difference") and landscape, which Black also touched on in its review of the previous book in the series: "A short novel that will appeal to a broad spectrum of readership, The Dust Devils is Sean Williams tapping into the naive youngling in all of us. The villains presented here are the stuff of nightmares, and hold up to the strangest dangers being presented in fiction, today. But more appealing is the landscape itself, a scarred wasteland where not only Dust Devils lay in wait for the hapless traveler. The book bristles with a faint gothic undertone reminiscent of his grandest Space Opera..."

Lastly, Ansible published a letter in which complained about the Gender Analyzer, which responded to my request to analyse this journal with the error message: "Sorry, we can only classify web pages written in english." I can't imagine what I've been writing in instead all these years. Klingon, perhaps?

Oh, and I started a new book.

We're gradually coming to the end of my list of ill-advised odes. Another recording soon. Today's is in "The Demesne of the Deaf (a Song Without Words)".