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!

That's the name I settled on for the story I wrote about yesterday.

"Ungentle Fire" is a stand-alone sequel to The Scarecrow, the last book of the Broken Land series, and is therefore set in the same world of the Books of the Change/Cataclysm.

It's also just been accepted into the Dozois/Dann Dragons anthology, the follow-up to their successful Wizards. Whew!

I'm having a pretty good run with shorts at the moment. As well as this sale, there's "The Inevitable" in The New Space Opera 2 and "A Glimpse of the Marvellous Structure (and the Threat It Entails)" in Godlike Machines, all of which were written in the last few months. Who'd've thought?

Up next is a novella for Dreamtime: Legends of Australian Fantasy (Jack Dann and Jonathan Strahan), and then I have to get back to novels and the PhD. Alas. It's been a wonderful diversion, but at some point I have to go back to paying the bills.

There'll always be haiku, I guess.

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Listening to: Goldfrapp - Road to Somewhere