Cassidy Sunday: Two Years in Two Weeks

The memories, experience and beauty of my KSP residency will be something I cherish for the rest of my life.

I’ve never been a fan of time travel stories.

Or, more specifically, I’ve never enjoyed ruminating on the science of time. How can time possibly slow down or speed up? It's linear. My day starts at 7am, ends at midnight, and there are exactly 60 seconds in every minute between that period.

There have, of course, been bendy blips that almost persuaded my brain to believe in time’s elastic tics and tricks. The 30-minute dentist visit that stretched into a new season, the one-week holiday barely the duration of a Zoom call, and, most recently, my two-week writer's residency at Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers’ Centre.

When I was (happily, disbelievingly!) awarded the Caruso residency at the end of 2024, the idea of immersing myself in my contemporary young adult novel for a fortnight felt like a fantasy.

Imagine what I can get done in two whole weeks, I daydreamed.

60 seconds in every minute. 60 minutes in every hour. And at least eight hours every single day...

I alternated between believing I’d sashay out of the residency with a fully edited and pitch-ready manuscript, to the more realistic aspiration of structurally editing a few chapters.

Then, I arrived.

The driveway was still sprinkled with stray gum leaves, bits of flaky bark and even flower petals – debris from a storm that had blown through the bushland and historic garden the day prior – as I rolled my suitcase thunk-thunk-thunk down the wet steps to my cabin at KSP.  I unlocked the door and was presented with a cosy room of my own.

Time stopped, spun, and butterflied in my chest. In reality, I couldn't have paused for more than a few seconds. But the moment expanded, holding space for a dream I’d never have achieved if it hadn’t been for KSP.

My two-week stay continued to be a lesson in time travel. Time ballooned, contracted, dashed, and slipped through my fingers. 

The moments that sped by: Day one turning into day fourteen. 1pm to 5.30pm, every day. A whole day, dissolved into nothing more than a blur of beautiful bookshops in Fremantle.

And the moments I know will last a lifetime in my heart: Sleepy early-morning chats with my fellow writer-in-residence. Having an ‘ah-ha’ moment that changed the entire trajectory of my novel. Sitting on the floor in another writer-in-residence's cabin, a picnic feast of Chinese takeaway spread on the rug between us, sharing honey chicken, stories and a beautiful awe for the experience we’d been gifted. And clicking ‘save’ on a manuscript that was now, thanks to KSP, 20 chapters closer to being completed.

The work I completed while at KSP would have taken me two years, at least, to complete. But the immersion of this once-in-a-lifetime residency accelerated my creativity in a way my ordinary life didn’t, and doesn’t, allow.

My pace will be slower now that I've returned to my 'real’ life, but I’ll be eternally grateful for the fast-forward KSP gave me. The memories, experience and beauty of my KSP residency will be something I cherish for the rest of my life.

An extra special thank you to Emma and Sofija for making me not only feel at home, but also a little closer to the writer I dream of being.

Cassidy Sunday is an Australian author who writes about games, goddesses, and good floofs. Her debut contemporary romance novel, ‘Good Luck, Have Fun’ is a celebration of fantasy gaming culture, milk tea, and the family we meet and make online.