If you're interested in reading more about the woes of Adelaide Writers' Week, Stephen Orr has written a wonderful piece for ABC news. Wander by and leave a comment. It will be read.

Also, I'll be on ABC radio this afternoon saying much the same thing.

As Stephen says: "Frankly, I'd rather be writing my fiction than opinion pieces, but some things can't go unsaid, that's the whole point of being a writer."

ETA: Here's the version of the piece on Articulate, where comments can be left.

(This post was supposed to air before Sunday, but I was distracted by deadlines, cold viruses, etc.)

For those who don't already know, I've decided not to attend Adelaide Writers' Week this year. Some of the reasons behind this decision are professional (writers should be paid at or near ASA rates, for instance, especially by publicly funded organisations) and some are personal. These problems have been weighing heavily on me in recent years, and it's with a mixture of frustration and irritation that I've finally come to accept that there's probably nothing I can do about them, except be elsewhere.

Note that I'm not asking anyone to join me in my sad, one-person boycott. Note also that I'm not speaking with my SA Writers' Centre hat on (or any of the other hats I occasionally wear). I'm just a writer who's become so disillusioned and disheartened by my behind-the-scenes experiences with AWW that I no long enjoy the event itself. I'll be happier at home, getting some work done. Not even the chance of bumping into William McInnes can make me change my mind.

So if anyone's in town March 2-7 and would like to catch up, we'll have to find somewhere else to do it. Luckily, there are plenty of choices! I highly recommend Thea Tea Shop, which makes the best Taiwanese vegetarian food I've ever tasted. Yum.

martinlivings is calling for writers to send in photos of the rooms in which they write. "I think this would make a nice snapshot," he says, "to go alongside the one that the ASif team recently did. We've had insights into your minds, now I'd like insights into your private spaces." Ho ho.

This comes in response to the Guardian's recent gallery of writers' rooms, featuring such greats as J G Ballard, Alain de Botton and Jacqueline Wilson. As Martin says about the gap in stature between said greats and the likes of us: "We're not rich, or famous. Heck, most of us don't make a living from writing, and probably never will. But we're not bitter. Angry, twisted, filled with unspeakable rage, yes, but not bitter, no. But we all work at it anyway, and we all work somewhere."

Indeed. I've submitted a snap of my new study for all to see. And creative types of all kinds reading this--not just writers--should also drop Martin a line in order to give us a glimpse into your worlds. I for one am curious..

Sad to say, I won't be working at home for the next couple of weeks--albeit for very good reasons. I'll be at Conflux this weekend and then taking a retreat with a bunch of wonderful friends and writers in Queensland shortly thereafter. I'll be back in town mid-October, just in time for my best friend's 40th birthday bash. Oh, and for The Crooked Letter to be the feature book in SFFWorld's Fantasy Book Club.

Hurrah!

PS. Thanks to everyone who came to see Kevin J Anderson speak at Dymocks last week. It was a great turn-out. Wonderful to see so many people taking the opportunity to meet a writer of his stature when it arises. I was fortunate to spend a lot of time with Kevin and his equally brilliant wife Rebecca last week, at various dinners, bars and even a performance of the War of the Worlds in Melbourne. I'm looking forward to seeing them again in Canberra, if they're not completely sick of the sight of me by now. :-)

PPS. A big hello to everyone I bumped into while I was in Melbourne. It was a non-business trip (thanks to Nick for a wonderful 40th birthday present!) so I wasn't really in SF-community mode. It never even occurred to me that this little Jeff Wayne fanboy would see anyone he knew in the mighty metropolis that is Melbourne. Just goes to show, eh? The world is smaller than we think, and a whole lot more interesting for it.

On this bitterly cold Adelaide morning, my bones are uncharacteristically eager for some luscious Northern Hemisphere weather. As it happens, they're going to get exactly what they wish for.

Tomorrow, I'm heading off to the Writers of the Future 2007 Awards Ceremony in California. Highlights will include hanging out with an amazing bunch of people--including new and past winners, like Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Jay Lake and Steven Savile--plus a tour through legendary JPL.

I'm also filming an interview that will be used to promote The Force Unleashed, closer to its release date. And maybe I'll catch an episode of Flight of the Conchords "live" while I'm there.

It only seems like last week that Amanda and I returned from honeymoon, so I'm not exactly looking forward to the long haul across the Pacific. But it will be totally worth it. Every year, I come home from the awards ceremony totally recharged. Given the schedule I have coming up, it's perfect timing.

Well, we survived Connemara, and Oxford, London and New York too. And now I'm home. I'll blog properly in the next day or two--and work on replying to some of the posts people have left here in the last few weeks too, honest--once I'm over the jet lag. Adelaide is bloody cold compared to Manhattan, but it's really good to be back.

I just wanted to briefly mention this excellent contest that Fantasy Book Critic is running until July 31. For US citizens only, but a wonderful deal nonetheless. If you're Australian and have friends in the US who might like the books, let them know. The hardcovers are beautiful.

Back soon!

Less than a month from now, I'll be moving home. Not far: I'll end up in a lovely, green area just a ten-minute walk from where I live now, on the other side of the parklands that surround Adelaide's inner square mile. But it'll be a big change, as anyone who's moved from the CBD to the suburbs or vice versa will realise.

The joys of city-living are manifold--uninterrupted power, no breathalysers, tons of shops and post offices, and interesting skylines. On the whole, I've enjoyed it. I've particularly benefited from a forward-thinking project run by the SA Community Housing Authority (recently swallowed by another government department). Although beset with bureaucracy, and occasionally besieged by regime change on high, the program has been crucial to my development as an independent artist. Without it, I might have gone under several times in the last decade, financially speaking, and certainly would not be where I am today, writing-wise.

There are plenty of bad things about living in the city too, including vomit on the sidewalks, rampant ugly apartment developments, poor parking, constant car break-ins, and noise. One of the things I'll miss least is this company. When this cheap furniture importer moved in directly across the road from my apartment block, armed with a catchy slogan that everyone in Adelaide now knows ("It's a pig of a location!"), things went downhill fast. Semi-trailers now frequently clog the street; what few parks existed for residents and their visitors are now entirely consumed by customers; complaints about noise and exhaust pollution have been completely ignored by the business-friendly city council. Thanks to this pig of a neighbour, Surflen Street has become Sufferin' Street, and I'm glad to leave the mess for someone else to sort out.

Anyway, I'm not moving because of Bed E Buys or any other city-life discomforts, even though they have taken some of the shine off my memories. I'm moving for much happier reasons. Seems to me it's always better to run to than from.

Unless, you know, it's from a velociraptor or something.

Well, I'm back at my desk. And whew: it's boiling here in Adelaide. It is, however, quite pleasant with the curtains closed, and I do love to mushroom over the summer months...

While I was away, Rob Bedford posted a couple of items to SFF World, namely a review of The Blood Debt (choice quotes below) and an interview with yours truly. The interview covers everything from balancing SF vs F, writing with Shane Dix, fantasy world-building, the Books of Change/Cataclysm, Astropolis, covers, Star Wars, and more. (Thanks for the interesting questions, Rob, and for the great review too!)

Also, the excellent Darren Nash of Orbit has blown a little secret I've been keeping for months: that one of the major landmarks in Saturn Returns name-checks my very dear friend, Cat Sparks. At her request, I should add, for anyone who thinks the reference disrespectful.

There are quite a few personal references in the book, some more covert than others. More on that soon, I suspect...

( The review... )

A friend sent me a link to a neat site where you can input your postcode and see what the people in your area are getting up to.

Plugging in "5000" reveals that those in my neighbourhood are spending 105.18 minutes drinking and 61.4 minutes having sex every day (both over the national average of 100.89 and 59.68).

We enjoy 501 food outlets (vs 23.14), visit 177 sports/health clubs (14.83), and are 3.66% Buddhist (1.26%).

45.18% of the population are single men (30.75%), 42.91% are single women (28.63%), and 10.31% of those who have paired off are living in sin (5.67%).

Not bad for a little old country town, eh?

And people think I come home to write. :-)

On Friday (the 13th), I gave the keynote address at the opening of the Salisbury Writers' Festival. The text of my speech is accessible via the opinions section of my web site. The topic was "White Hot Passion: Living & Writing on the Edge", taking the festival's themes (murder and romance) and location (a satellite city of Adelaide) as inspiration. I chose the topic but then found it surprisingly difficult to write to. Seemed to go down well, though. Whew.

The joke at the end is an oldie but a goodie, and I'm certain it wasn't originally written for Jeff Kennett. Jokes are passed down from generation to generation like re-enactments in crappy current affairs shows: only the names have been changed. I wonder who the original megalomaniac was? We may never know.

It's been a long time coming. Prior to a couple of weeks ago, the last "substantial" (ie over 1000 words) short story I wrote that wasn't a spin-off from a novel was "The Girl-Thing", which came into being in September of 2000 and was published by Eidolon.Net in 2002. (It was also recommended by the Datlow & Windling Years' Best of 2003, just by the by, and translated into Polish for Nowa Fantastyka.) I didn't stop writing shorts for any particular reason. It was a simple matter of economics. I was working full-time on a stack of novels al due in a very short amount of time, and short stories simply didn't pay the bills. So I forgot about them for a while. Invitations occasionally came my way, but for one reason or another, rarely reflecting the quality of the publications in question, I wasn't able to do anything about them.

Now, six years later, the drought is broken. In the last two weeks, I've written two stories: one, a shortish piece (for me) called "The Seventh Letter", will appear in the summer reading issue of The Bulletin, due to hit the stands on December 13; the other, "Midnight in the Café of the Black Madonna", is for friend and editor Steve Savile, who invited me to contribute to a Doctor Who anthology he's compiling. Neither story would have been written if I hadn't been invited, thereby nudging me back to my old habits. I was very happily reminded of how quickly shorts can be finished, and how satisfying they can be to write. It's been a real buzz.

I also love the fact that the publications in question exist at opposite ends of the publishing spectrum. The Bulletin is the longest standing literary forum for the short story in Australia, going back all the way to 1880. Doctor Who is, well, Doctor Who. The overlap between the readerships would be minimal. But they sit side-by-side in my mind, and the same amount of care went into each story.

Will I write any more? Apart from the kids's books, which, at around 40k, almost count as short stories (ho ho), I do have a piece to write for MonkeyBrain Books' new line of trade paperback novellas. More on that later...

Purely coincidentally, it rained last night in Adelaide for the first time in what feels like ages, so the title of today's post is doubly appropriate.