Sean Williams

I'm juggling two projects at once this weekend, which always hurts my brain.  Here are some recent happenings:

• Shawn at Suvudu asked if any of my books originally had different titles. There are a few.
• Paul Cornell wondered what I was doing for Christmas.
• The ABC's Life Matters program wanted to interview me about my essay on Doctor Who in 50 Voices of Disbelief.
• Au Contrair, the New Zealand natcon, very kindly asked me to be their 2010 GOH, and I'm excited to be going.
• The Dragon Book is out and looks awesome.  If you want to know what happens to Ros after The Changeling, here's part one.

If I hear one more Christmas carol, I swear I might have to kill someone.  Unless it's this one, of course:

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.

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

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