About

About me

My name is Andrew Lyall. AD Lyall is the name I write under – it gives my identity some ambiguity, which I like. Our identities are such important things. Some people wear them with ease, having found them early and without difficulty; their identities fit them comfortably. For others, identities are slow to fully form, and sometimes difficult to articulate. Either way, they shape us and influence how we move within our lives.

Okay, enough of the esoteric crap. Speculative fiction. I’ve always loved reading and writing it. And watching it. From my teens I wanted to write stories about space, technology, magic and scary things. I dabbled in writing it on and off for many years. After studying professional writing and editing at RMIT in Melbourne, Australia (one of the top writing courses in the country), I intended to focus on my writing, but my other focus – work – got in the way. Not that I’m complaining about that; my professional career brought me much happiness. It just didn’t allow me time to write, or more importantly, all my words were used up at work.

All that changed during the COVID pandemic, and I’ve turned my attention back to writing. I may falter again, I probably will, but it’s been wonderful to be back into it. I’m already up to the third book in a dystopian trilogy I’m writing and have plenty more ideas I want to explore.

I live in the Central Highlands of Victoria, on the lands of the Dja Dja Wurrung people. I have a rescue dog called Laika. Named after that very special dog.

My style

I’ve heard my style described as “literary”. I’m not sure if that’s accurate, but for me the way an author writes is as important as the story and the characters they create.

I find beauty in sentence structures, variances in their length, and in the author’s choice of words. Giving a sense of place is important to my story telling, while avoiding laborious detail – I like how as readers we fill in missing pieces of information, each of us in our own way, we might see the story differently, but we largely understand it in a way that is consistent.

At times there is a stream of consciousness approach to my writing, something I picked up from the amazing and highly-regarded Ania Walwicz who taught short story classes when I was at RMIT. Not that I can claim to emulate her style. It’s just that she encouraged its use in her students, and I’m grateful for that.

I usually write in limited third person narrative, occasionally limited first person, and once in a rare while I might add an omniscient voice, but only if the story justifies it. My third person narration is usually restricted to what I would notice in a particular setting, but it is rarely severely limited. I tend to describe natural sounds (especially those of birds), weather, lighting, the feel of things, but little about people.

My themes / intent

There is a dystopian theme that seems to run through my work. It can be quite bleak, but it’s rarely without hope, and usually it contains glimpses of life’s wonder. I suppose this is how I see the world. Always a bit wrong, but never fully. There’s always beauty, somewhere.

Home is frequently referenced, as is family, and the striving to create a sense of belonging. Exploring the frailty of people and the world in which they live drives many of my stories – science fiction or fantasy is my preferred vehicle for highlighting the features and flaws in both.

The notion of other and outsider is consistent in my work, both a means to understand identity, power and belonging. Other for me is about difference, and particularly about lacking visibility, existing on the periphery of belonging, while outsider is about looking in. And then there is outcast – the rejected, the disenfranchised, the powerless. All three overlap of course, and people/characters can move between these concepts at different times of their lives, in different situations.

The Australian landscape features in many of my stories. The Wimmera, Mallacoota, Flinders Ranges, Mossman Valley, the Tasmanian wilderness, all have featured to date, as has the more general settings of ocean, rivers and forests. And birds seem to be ever present – I’ve always had a thing for avian creatures, how they fly, how they call.

From the pictures I have chosen so far, orange seems to be a bit of a theme for me. That isn’t intentional. Although like my character, Icarus, from The Last to Go, I guess I find oranges (and yellows and golds) strangely symbolic… Nah, I just like them.

About this site

Creating this website was hard. I’m not very active on social media, and I don’t like to speak much about my writing, but I understand the importance of marketing for any product or service. I was encouraged by my editor/literary agent to create an online presence; I’d rather not have to, but I know that if I am to publish more of my work – and I really want to do that – then I need make such an effort.

This site is therefore for potential publishers. Perhaps it will be of interest to others who may want to see some of my work, to get a sense of what I’ve done, what I’m working on, and perhaps a little about who I am. But really, it’s just a more detailed writing CV.

I’ll include extracts from my work, some which will be pretty awful because they were written quite some time ago. Like all things, our writing evolves and changes. Hopefully.

I may share some thoughts on writing, just raw ideas that come to mind, if only to show that there is life behind this site, a pulse to be found somewhere.

Anything to do with self promotion seems self-indulgent to me. This site does. I’ll just live with that as best I can, and if it gets too much, I’ll switch the damn thing off!

This site is a work in progress, as is my writing. As am I. All three are likely to be riddled with errors. Sorry about that.