Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 11

Maculate

“Damn.”

Now that’s a word you don’t want to hear from your eye doc when he’s peering through his scope at the interior of your eye. And you really don’t want to hear his next line, which is:

“You really can’t catch a break, can you?”

The vision in my left eye has been deteriorating for a year or more, and last August I went to the doc, and I got dilated and scoped and the doc couldn’t find anything wrong. So I just went on using reading glasses, which worked less and less well as my ...

Down the Gullet

This is the best picture I got of 2024’s solar eclipse, taken by focusing the camera directly into the eyepiece of Kathy’s Astroscan telescope.

What followed was disappointing, because the actual eclipse was clouded out. Totality nevertheless remained impressive, as the moon’s shadow descended with amazing speed. If I were a neolithic tribesman I would have been terrified. The not-quite-night lasted less than four minutes, and then the rooster started to salute the new dawn.

Mss.

I haven’t been visible much online because I’ve been buried up to my eye sockets in submissions for Taos Toolbox. Because of the weeks of radiation and other treatments last year, I was late in getting notices out, and as late as a couple weeks ago I was wondering if we’d get enough applications to keep the workshop in the black. (I run this workshop for a lot of reasons, but losing money isn’t one of them.)

But with the 1 April deadline approaching, a tsunami of manila envelopes began to ...

La. La.

The big residuals check from Hollywood came in! Imagine the fun I could have with all this money!

Because Some Days You Just Damn Well Want To Be Uplifted

I can’t quite believe that Mariza is performing on a freaking talent show, but that doesn’t make her any less awesome.

Not Saving

So the other night something weird happened with Scrivener, my word processor. I finished my work, backed it up to Dropbox, and went about the rest of my evening. Next night, I opened Scrivener, and discovered that none of the new writing I’d done the previous night was anywhere in the file.

I checked the time stamp, and the file had registered no updates from the time I first opened it. When I hit “save,” nothing happened.

I very much doubt that I’d forget to save after hours of wr...

Honor St. Urho!

It’s St. Urho’s day! Time to dress up in green and purple, and empty the bars of all contents before the Irish get in tomorrow!

Shining, Darkly or Otherwise

Here’s a brand-new March release, and another in our survey of books by veterans of Taos Toolbox, the master class for writers of science fiction and fantasy. My Stars Shine Darkly is the first book in a new YA series, featuring a young heroine’s attempt to escape the dystopia into which she was born.

Living on a conservative colony world, Sienna Tascioni is no stranger to pushing boundaries. Constrained by what’s expected of her as a proper young lady, she still reads books from classe...

Glassical Glass

Here’s another in the series of works recently published by veterans of Taos Toolbox, the master class for writers of science fiction and fantasy..

Dorothy Winsor attended the very first Toolbox in 2008, and has been publishing regularly in the time since.

I’ve often felt that glassmaking and glassblowing was magical, and Dorothy liberalizes the metaphor with Glass Girl.

Seventeen-year-old Emlin is about to become a fully-fledged crafter of dragon-inspired stained glass. The...

Hail to the Chief

The mysterious, enchanting red-gold shimmer of an el presidente cocktail.

Rum, dry vermouth, Grand Marnier, and a few dashes of my friend Terry Boren’s homemade grenadine.