A story in Asimov's is read by hundreds of thousands of people.
Australian SF book publishing has undergone a boom recently, and sometimes it's easier for new writers to sell a book to a local publisher first, which then makes a US edition more likely.
Being rewarded for anything other than the quality of their work is the fastest way to screw-up a writer-and it isn't only new ones who suffer from that.
Diaspora starts about a thousand years from now. Most of human civilisation has moved inside computers; essentially, a major branch of our descendants consists of conscious software.
Even if I have no trouble producing new work for another 40 years, the publishing industry is sure to go through some major upheavals.
Fandom is about fandom, it's a great big social club.
I admire David Lynch so much, and I think he made some bad decisions with Lost Highway.
I don't have any structured grand plan; I just intend to keep writing about the things that interest me-some of which change, some of which don't.
I hadn't given much thought to the prospect of a Hugo nomination at the time it happened, but obviously once you're nominated, winning one seems a bit less far-fetched than before.
I think my non-attendance at conventions was never of the slightest interest to more than a handful of people: a tiny fraction of Australian fandom, which itself is a tiny fraction of the SF readership.
I think new writers everywhere need opportunities to get published.
I was born in Perth in 1961. I have a BSc in Mathematics. I've worked as a computer programmer, mostly in jobs supporting medical research. But I've been writing full-time since 1992.
I'm rarely grabbed by anything the way I was when I was 10 years younger. About the only relatively new artists whose albums I own are Beck, and They Might Be Giants.
I've been taking longer to write stories lately.
I've put a conscious effort into updating my maths and physics education, which had grown very rusty. I'm reading postgraduate-level physics textbooks these days, rather than relying on popularisations.
I've supported myself by writing since 1992, and I'm probably very nearly unemployable by now because employers are likely to be put off by the long gap.
If I did want to write short stories exclusively, then I'd have to get a day job; there's no way I could make my living at it.
My technical skills were very much at an amateur level, and by now they're both rusty and obsolete. Depending on how the technology evolves, I might docomputer animation one day.
Pop science goes flying off in all kinds of fashionable directions, and it often drags a lot of SF writers with it. I've been led astray like that myself at times.
The idea that Australian SF writers go through cycles of improving and diminishing quality together is just hilarious to me.
Widespread caffeine use explains a lot about the twentieth century.
Writing nothing but novels would be exhausting; I'd probably have to waste as much time between books recovering and psyching myself up for the next one as I now spend writing short stories.
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