adelaidesean | Entries tagged with scarecrow

It’s that time of year again. Congrats/commiserations to those on/off the shortlists. It doesn’t matter who wins--in some ways it doesn’t even matter if you’re shortlisted, although it is an honour to be there, one I’m very grateful for. The award thing is primarily a celebration of community. I booked my ticket to the party weeks ago and am looking forward to it already.

The Scarecrow - nominated for Best YA Novel
The Grand Conjunction - nominated for Best SF Novel

(Could this be eighth time lucky in the latter category? Time will tell!)

Reviews are probably the least interesting part of this LJ, but I do try to keep on top of them for my future reference. While cleaning out the actual physical inbox on my desk I stumbled across some regarding the Broken Land books that I hadn't filed away, so here they are.

The Age thought The Dust Devils "deft and crisply rendered" while Viewpoint described it as "good speculative fiction" that "imagines a future upon familiar terrain. This is the arid interior of Australia gone to sand, its few denizens roaming the landscape for survival and seeking shelter in the half-buried remains of old cities." (Not true of the entire world, but a reasonable description of that part of it.) Viewpoint also thought that The Changeling "could be viewed as a thriller", a "thrilling" one at that, which "will keep you guessing into the end".

The Sunday Age concluded its crisp summary of The Scarecrow thusly: "In this third instalment in the Broken Land series, Ros is confronted by arduous choices about friendships and the future." Spot on, I'd say. Where those choices ultimately lead him and what kind of future he has won't be spelt out in future books, but will be revealed in short fiction coming out later this year.

If you're looking for a read, here are some things I have out at the moment:

The Scarecrow - the final book in my first kids' series, set in the same world as the Books of the Change/Cataclysm.
The Hanging Mountains - the third book in the Cataclysm series, now out in a delicious tpb from Pyr in the US.

(Despite being separated in time from The Scarecrow by several hundred years, these two books do share an important character, someone who may or may not be a dragon.)

"Signs of Death" - seed story for The Crooked Letter (the First Book of the Cataclysm) as reprinted in Australian Dark Fantasy + Horror Volume Three, edited by Angela Challis.
"The Haunted Earth" - in the bushfire benefit e-zine Hope.
"A Longing for the Dark" - set in the Geodesica universe and podcast-only from Terra Incognita, as read by yours truly.

Coming up real soon is The Grand Conjunction - the finale of Astropolis, which I received in the mail on Friday. It looks awesome! More on that later.

Ain't it beautiful?

(The book, not my receding hairline.)

I'm pleased to report that a novella "The Spark (a Romance in Four Acts)" joins several other large-ish pieces I have coming out in or around 2009. "Spark" clocks in at 20k and concludes one of the story arcs left hanging at the end of The Scarecrow (due March). The story picks up about five years after that book's end, with the characters facing challenges they never imagined as kids. I've just learned that it will appear in Australian Legends of Fantasy (edited by Jack Dann & Jonathan Strahan), and I'm very excited about that.

"Spark" is one of two stand-alone tales related to the Broken Land Series. The other is the 10k "Ungentle Fire", which is set just before "Spark" and due appear in The Dragon Book: Magical Tales from the Masters of Modern Fantasy (Gardner Dozois & Dann).

The other stories aren't fantasy. "The Inevitable" will appear in The New Space Opera II (Dozois & Strahan), while "A Glimpse of the Magnificent Structure (and the Threat it Entails)" is due in Godlike Machines (Strahan), both around the middle of the year. At 10k and 25k respectively, they're related to a new space opera idea I've been noodling with in the last few months. It's based on an old story, "A Map of the Mines of Barnath"--and you can expect a spoken word version of that work sometime in 2009 too, just to refresh your memory.

(While I'm talking about spoken word stuff, I've recorded "A Longing for the Dark", a stand-alone excerpt from Geodesica: Descent, for Terra Incognita, and that will be coming out in March too.)

The other big release in 2009 is The Grand Conjunction (May), which will wrap up the Astropolis series once and for all. I've just finished the page proofs and I'm very excited at how it turned out. If you thought the scale of the first two books was big, this might do your head in. Mine is still recovering from writing it.

So that's the year ahead. It's a little less hectic than 2008, for which I'm grateful. Unless you count all the deadlines looming ahead, of course...

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Listening to: Telomere - Idiochrome

Here's the final cover and blurb. I am excited! (Also: fans of the Books of the Cataclysm will note the return of a familiar character.)

Ros is heading for the coast with Adi and Know-it-all the camel, hoping to drop the crystal containing the Golem of Omus into the ocean.

Arriving in Samimi, a small town on the outskirts of the Strand, the friends meet Quirk, who tells them outrageous stories about Ros's 'heroic' adventures. Ros doesn't suspect Quirk's treachery until he disappears--along with Varis, Adi's kinsman and bodyguard.

Ros and Adi use the Change to track Varis down, but now they're up against the Scarecrow, a lethal amalgamation of man and material who will do anything to get hold of the power contained in the crystal Ros holds.

Help comes from an unexpected quarter: Pukje, an impish stranger, offers Ros the change to gain the knowledge he's always wanted. But is the deal too good to be true? Ros must decide one final time exactly who to trust.

Due: March 2009.

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)".

I've just added some excerpts to my official site, specifically opening chapters of every book in the Broken Land series (including The Scarecrow, not due until March next year) and excerpts from Astropolis up to The Grand Conjunction (May):

"Real life was always more boring and deadly than fiction."

And to make this post more visual, I offer my contributions to Scalzi's LOLCreashun Thread, from way back when:

( More... )

...in approximate order of release. Why? I was curious to see if they created their own little narrative. They don't, but I thought I'd post them here anyway. A list of the second lines, below, turns out to be a lot more interesting.

First Lines

The life of Darth Vader's secret student took a strange and deadly turn the day his master first spoke of General Rahm Kota.

(The Force Unleashed)

Ros drew the camel to a halt as a pair of very strange contraptions crested the next dune along from his. (The Dust Devils)

It is difficult to measure the time since my last communication. ("A Glimpse of the Marvellous Structure (and the Threat It Entails)")

Somewhere between Chemaly and Smerdon, Ros suspected they had become lost. (The Scarecrow)

The sky changed no less than three times on the way to the detective's office. (The Grand Conjunction)

The prisoner was both young and male, which suited Master Bannerman perfectly well. ("The Inevitable")

On the twenty-third day of his quest, the young man detected crabbler spoor. ("Ungentle Fire")

Second lines:

He had had no warning that a moment of such significance was approaching.  

It wasn't immediately obviously if they were machine or beast or a weird merger of the two.
  
Too much has passed, I fear, for the suspicion of my demise not to have become a certainty in some minds.  

Adi, as always, disagreed.

First, on stepping out the front door of the Iceberg building, a line of bright blue stars swayed erratically across the sky, casting sprays of sharply defined shadows down the length of Rammas Street.  

She had encountered his type before--headstrong, shallow, visceral--and refined numerous techniques for extracting what she needed.  

Swinging the reins of his mechanical steed sharply to the left, he parked in the shade of the yellow canyon wall and lightly hopped to the ground.

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Listening to: Altus - A Different Universe

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."

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Listening to: Tangerine Dream - Hyper Sphinx

Five days before a deadline, this is not the kind of page I want to see:

And this is a draft I'm happy with!

\(--)/

Meanwhile, in not entirely unrelated news: scarecrow scares crow.

Current Music: Harold Budd & Robin Guthrie - "After Night Falls"

This flurry of posts (three in four days--whew!) isn't an indication of business as usual. Alas, I'm on a tight deadline to finish The Scarecrow and can't write more than a sentence at a time on anything else.

I did, however, find time to talk to the wonderful

satimaflavell for the latest issue of the specusphere. You'll find the interview here. Satima asked great questions. Take a look.

PS. I'm also launching Malcolm Walker's debut novel, The Stone Crown at the SA Writers' Centre tonight. If you have a fondness for Susan Cooper, Alan Garner and Robert Holdstock's Arthurian/contemporary fantasies, you'll like this book as much as I did.

PPS. I'm late in pointing out that Earth Ascendant had its world premiere as a spoken word release through the great guys at Audible. You can buy it at their website (or through iTunes) and get a walk-through of the next million or so years of history, easy.

PPPS. Oh, and The Force Unleashed ( has a new cover. )

Onward and upward!

Current Music: Thom Brennan - "Mist"

In March next year, I'll have three new books out--The Changeling, Earth Ascendant and The Force Unleashed--making them my equal-23rd novels. I'm quite excited about it, and not just because 23 is my favourite number.

What it's meant, though, is that I've spent the last month or so poring over three separate sets of re-writes, copy edits, and page proofs, plus many discussions about blurbs, cover quotes, maps, and cover designs. That wears a thin pretty fast, and can be a bit confusing on sleepy mornings with three books on the go at once. To keep things interesting, a French translation has also been popping up every now and again, plus the Pyr paperback reissue The Crooked Letter in paperback, also due in March.

Still, it's over now, and my brain can go back to normal (or what passes for normal around here). I'm about to launch into The Grand Conjunction (the last of the Astropolis books) and from there straight into The Scarecrow (the last in the Broken Land series). I have a couple of other loose ends to tie off after that, and then I'm free. What that means, I'm still working out.

But this might be part of it:

I've been accepted into a PhD in creative writing at Adelaide University.

Current Music: BSG OSTs on shuffle

Below is the cover* of my first kids' novel, The Changeling, which will be published by HarperCollins March 2008.

Below the cut are the covers to the sequels, The Dust Devils and The Scarecrow.

They couldn't be more different to the wonderful cover and illustrations by David Cornish, which I posted here a while back. It doesn't matter. I love them both. What do you think?

Soon I'll post an excerpt for your reading pleasure, and I'll link to that here.

I am quite immodestly proud of these books. They may be the best things I've written, so far.

( The Dust Devils & The Scarecrow )

* Cover design by Natalie Winter. Cover images all courtesy of Shutterstock.

Sci-fi Wire ran an interview with me concerning The Crooked Letter, which has just been released by Pyr in the US. See here for the full text of the interview, and here to order the book from Amazon.

Here's part of the blurb from Publishers Weekly: "Drawing on worldwide myths and legends, Australian author Williams (The Resurrected Man) expertly twists the familiar into the grotesque in this deeply spooky story, the first in a new fantasy series. When Seth Castillo is stabbed and killed, his spirit is whisked away to the Second Realm, a literally inside-out place full of hideous monsters, while his mirror twin, Hadrian, remains in the First Realm of the living. Their psychic link draws the two realms together, precipitating a world-warping cataclysm..."

But the really big news concerns a new series: The Broken Lands trilogy, written for kids of 10 and up, which HarperCollins Australia has picked up for publication in 2007-8. Set in the same world as the Books of the Change and Cataclysm, the new books--The Changeling, The Dust Devils and The Scarecrow--follow the adventures of a young boy living on the north side of the Divide. The Changeling was the ms I submitted for my MA in Creative Writing last year. Expect golems, crabblers, sand bandits, man'kin, ghosts, strand beasts and more!