adelaidesean | Entries tagged with sawc

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!

After three and a half weeks without a phone line (thanks to ageing cables in our area, slow contractors and wet weather) we are now reconnected to teh interwebz and all is well again. It's amazing (but not terribly surprising) how much we've come to rely on it for music, tv, news, games, etc. The school holidays were tough, let me tell you.

Has everyone here watched "Dexter"? Amanda and I ripped through both seasons in a week last month, and now I'm reading the books. Jeff Lindsay has a terrific voice, and the novels are similar enough to push the same buttons but sufficiently different to be more than transcripts. I really enjoyed them.

Reprints: The Blood Debt is up to three and The Changeling has already gone back to the printers.

Demotion (voluntary): to Deputy Chair of the SA Writers' Centre. Whew!

Lastly, here's an excerpt from a book I'm working on at the moment. Apropos of nothing, except that I liked it:

"Once upon a time," the dragon said, "the world was full of creatures like me.  We are rare now, and for the most part we avoid your kind.  We see the fear in your eyes when you gaze upon us.  It's unpleasant, for we belong in this world as firmly as you do.  It was ours before it was yours.  We understand it a little better.

"So we hide ourselves in a variety of different ways.  Some live in the sky, as clouds or mysterious lights.  Some live underground, feasting on molten rock.  Some spread their wings in the canopies of forests, where vines will hide them and they can sleep out the rest of eternity.  Some find ways to walk among you as I do, as one of you.  It is difficult, but it can be done."

----------------
Listening to: Tangerine Dream - Hyper Sphinx

Every month, one of the board-members of the SA Writers' Centre writes a piece for publication in our monthly newsletter. It was recently my turn, and the text (for those of a non-South Australian bent) is below the cut.

Reading over it again brings home to me the not unrelated facts that (1) Christmas cheer is just not my thing, and (2) I'm getting grouchy (or at least more political) in my dotage.

( Board's Eye View, December 2007 )

(With thanks to Tim Powers for allowing me the quote from his Writers of the Future/Clarion notes.)

Polemics aside, all the very best of the season to you and yours. I hope 2008 brings an improvement on whatever lifted you up or got you down this year. This my first Christmas ever with a family in a home we call our own, and the first in a very long while with a Prime Minister I can respect, so I'm feeling pretty optimistic. Here's to good times for us all!

Current Music: Robert Henke - "Signal to Noise"

Congratulations to the staff, board and members of the SA Writers' Centre for winning a South Australian AbaF (Australian Business Arts Foundation) Award last night in a star-studded ceremony at the Don Dunstan Playhouse. The award recognises its ongoing collaboration with the Onkaparinga City Council (which shared the award) to produce the SA Writers' Festival, a biennial event next scheduled for September 2007. AbaF was established by the Australian Government in 2000 to promote private sector support for the arts. State winners in each category will move on to the national awards, announced later this year. The Big Book Club is a previous winner. (It's purely a coincidence that I'm on both Boards!)

I've been flattened by a second bout of the cold that's doing the rounds here in Adelaide (losing my voice once is bad enough; twice in two weeks just plain sucks) but the work continues and LJ-worthy items accrue as a matter of course. Here are some, in no particular order.

At last night's meeting of the new board of the South Australian Writers' Centre, I was honoured to be voted in as Chair for a second time. Having been off the board for a few years (I was seconded in January to fill an empty seat) it's been really nice getting back into the swing of things. Giving back to the community is something I strongly believe in, and I hope that I can help the centre (the oldest in Australia) continue its excellent work.

Conflux ho! It's official: I'll be a guest at Conflux (Canberra, 9-12 June). Proposed program items include the world-premiere reading of "The Soap Bubble: A Space Opera" with an all-star cast, an interview with Sir Arthur C Clarke, and other goodies. If you're coming, keep an eye on the web site. If you're not, change your mind and join the party!

Sometimes made-up words take on a life of their own. A "glast" puts in a pivotal appearance in the final Books of the Cataclysm (The Hanging Mountains and The Devoured Earth). It's also the name of a space telescope due to be launched in 2007. Whoops and, well, whatever. :-)

The Crooked Letter received a "spankingly good review" (to quote the legendary Steve Savile) from Rob H Bedford at SFF World. Here's the link, and below are my favourite bits. I love this review for three reasons: (1) I always wanted to start a book by killing off a main character then following what happened to him afterwards, and Rob tips his hat to that. (2) Rob also recognises the fact that The Crooked Letter is as much a horror novel as fantasy novel influenced by apocalyptic SF, which no other reviewer (iirc) has mentioned. (3) He says such nice things in general!

"In The Crooked Letter, Sean Williams explores the nature of life, death, and reality. Big subjects, but with the precision of an archaeological expert, Williams is more than up to the task. There is a lot to admire in Williams epic fantasy, the wide range of global religions and myths of which, his afterlife is comprised, to the characterization of the protagonists. The story has the mythic resonance of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman and American Gods, the dark fantasy/horror one might associate with something like Stephen King’s Dark Tower saga, the multiple universes/realities of Moorcock’s Eternal Champion mythos, and the strange, weird creatures one might associate with China Miéville’s Bas-lag novels. Williams imagined world is equal part those novels which preceded his, but fortunately, there is enough newness to both the approach and vision to make this the work of a singular vision. ... When I first opened the book, I was expecting an epic fantasy. While the scope of the novel and range of characters lends itself to such a description, pigeon-holing the book in such a category does a disservice to the book and to Williams. On every page, it becomes very evident that Williams is playing with a different set of rules. The darkness of the events, as well as the tone of the book elicited more of a horror feel for me, as I continued to follow Seth and Hadrian’s plight. ... In a year that is proving to be an interesting and enjoyable one for Fantasy and Science Fiction, Williams’s The Crooked Letter is near the top of my list as the year approaches the half-way mark."

With that, I'm off to take some drugs. Bleurgh.

Current Mood: sick
Current Location: Dan Jones - "Shadow of the Vampire" OST

This Wednesday saw the launch of David Cornish's Foundling, the first book of his Monster Blood Tattoo kids' fantasy series, here in volatile Adelaide. It's a great book, and I was honoured to launch it in front of a packed crowd at the SA Writers' Centre. Here are a couple of excerpts from the speech. (You can assume I said many nice things about David's book. Read it. He's a star.) I was talking to a fairly mainstream crowd, hence me putting the boot into realist fiction, just a little, and reminding people that Adelaide is home to more than just its popular, prestigious and very proper writers' week.

Excerpt #1:
South Australia has more fantasy writers per capita than any other state or territory in Australia--possibly the world. They include Fiona McIntosh, Tony Shillitoe, former SAWC Chair John Fletcher, Joel Shepherd, and Gillian Rubinstein (aka Lian Hearn). The list becomes even speccier if we include Sara Douglass, who came from SA, and Jennifer Fallon in Alice Springs. We're an imaginative lot, and I'm sure it's not because we habitually imagine ourselves somewhere more interesting, like Sydney or Melbourne, or Europe. We live in a liminal place, we South Australians, and I prefer to think that this gives us a unique perspective on ourselves and the rest of the world. A perspective that makes us the speculative fiction capital of Australia.

Excerpt #2:
What makes a good fantasy novel? Or, rather, what makes a fantasy novel good? Fantasy writers are, in many ways, no different to writers of any genre; we struggle just as much with characters, dialogue, style, settings, and the like. But we have an extra burden as well. Perhaps I'm overstating the obvious by saying that a novel isn't a fantasy novel unless it has something fantastic at its heart, and that's a slippery, wriggly notion to pin down. Fantasy writers are constantly called on to make the outlandish seem perfectly ordinary, and the ordinary seem perfectly outlandish, something writers of realist fiction may never be asked to do. This unusual skill is brought forth to stimulate the much lauded "sense of wonder", a sense readers of speculative fiction employ every day but which cannot be explained to someone who doesn't have it, much as you can't explain a joke to someone with no sense of humour (thanks, Justine Larbalestier). Personally, I think that everyone has it--to greater or lesser degrees, of course. It's a fundamental part of what makes us human, and alive. And sane.