Jon Williams
Jon Williams
tables littles
An SF author who reads only SF will have little new to contribute, but someone with a broader experience will bring more to the table.
writing elements want
Everything that you read is an influence on everything you write, and you want to draw as many elements into your work as you can.
labels helping genre
Genre labels are useful only insofar as they help you find an audience.
character years law
Right up till the 1980s, SF envisioned giant mainframe computers that ran everything remotely, that ingested huge amounts of information and regurgitated it in startling ways, and that behaved (or were programmed to behave) very much like human beings... Now we have 14-year-olds with more computing power on their desktops than existed in the entire world in 1960. But computers in fiction are still behaving in much the same way as they did in the Sixties. That's because in fiction [artificial intelligence] has to follow the laws of dramatic logic, just like human characters.
interesting community advertising
The Internet offers an interesting combination of advertising and community - by participating in the community you can become an advertisement for yourself.
beach book magazines
I want a platform that, like a book or a magazine, I can carry into the bath or leave at the beach.
compliment results ifs
If you can find collaborators whose strengths compliment your own, the result can be more than the sum of its authors.
Now I have to motivate myself much more than I had previously.
years two pages
The Rift, which was well over a thousand pages of manuscript, took two years.
mass expensive
The mass-market paperback, for one, is too expensive.
block writers-block
I've experienced writer's block, but never for more than a few days.
writing college courses
I went to college, though I didn't take many writing courses.
school britain
I was pretty much grown-up by the time I attended school in Britain - or as grown-up as I'll ever get.
writing reason
I now have to find a reason to write, every single day.