Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 111

The Graveyard of Conan

A 3200-year-old bronze-age battlefield has been excavated next to the Tollense River near the Baltic Sea. The result: 10,000 bones of at least 130 individuals, plus some horses. The bodies, all men, were hacked with swords, stabbed with spears, and shot with bronze arrowheads. Archaeologists have only opened 450 square meters, which suggests that there’s a lot more to find. If these warriors wore any armor beyond deer hides, it was looted from the bodies. No bronze swords were found, but bodi...

Tools for Life

Here, meeting in what is perhaps the most unflattering lighting ever, is last weekend’s reunion of Taos Toolbox grads. Included in the unflattering light is Melinda Snodgrass, who is not a Toolbox vet but has twice been a special lecturer. It hardly seems fair that she must share the dismal lighting with us. This group has been meeting every year since the first of them graduated in 2010. They’ve met in different cities around the country, this month in Santa Fe. It’s not something I organize...

Protagonists

So I was talking to an acquaintance whose family hails from Tennessee. He said, “In my family we used to be embarrassed that the Yankees came and took away our plantation. But now what’s embarrassing is that we had a plantation in the first place.” Which is enlightened self-knowledge, if you ask me. And which further brings to mind a question I asked at a panel at Boskone, a month ago. We were talking about protagonists, I think, and who or what could be heroes, and I asked, “Can you have a S...

Big Oops

Alert reader Bruce Perens has written to let me know that the ebooks ofAristoi have a formatting error, in that one chapter was moved to the end of the file. And by end, I meanend,after the “Other Books by Walter Jon Williams” section and everything. This mistake has now been corrected, and the revised file uploaded to the various sites involved. It’ll take maybe 24-48 hours to migrate through the sites and appear for publication. The wrongly-formatted books were uploaded on February 1, so if...

St. Urho Rides Again! (on a bar stool. on skis.)

“Heinäsirkka, heinäsirkka, mene täältä hiiteen!” Yes, another year has gone by, so on Wednesday its time to don the green and purple and celebrate St. Urho’s Day! Just so you can get an idea of the sort of mischief you can get into on St. Urho’s day, here’s a video of the celebrations from Menahga, Minn. Not that you necessarily have to ride bar stools down steep hills on skis. That might be dangerous. Instead you should just drink enough so that youfeel as if your bar stool is skiing downhil...

Genres and Such

Authors Jane Lindskold and Alan Robson recently interviewed me, Pati Nagle, and John Maddox Roberts about why we’ve worked in more than one genre. Here’s Part I. And Part II.

To MFA or Not to MFA

There’s always been a debate in the writing community over the usefulness of creative writing programs. My own experience with creative writing courses in college wasn’t particularly positive— I don’t think the experience benefitted me as a writer, but I didn’t hate it, either. Now with the huge increase in creative writing MFA programs— 20,000 students contributing $200 million dollars to universities!— the debate has shifted from whether creative writing programs can actually teach you to w...

The New City

So let’s say you’ve managed to get around the barriers Amazon has placed aroundMetropolitan, and you’ve read it and liked it. Which means you should check out the sequel, City on Fire, which is not only available but which has a handsome new cover, built around a striking painting by the English artist Ann Marie Bone. (The painting is titled “Fire in the City,” which seemed like a suggestion tome.) City on Fire may be found at Amazon, Google, iBooks, Smashwords, Kobo, and Barnes & Noble. Down...

More Joy From Amazon

So Amazon gave me my buy button back, but now they’ve sent a message to everyone who’s bought a copy of Metropolitan: An updated version of your past Kindle purchase of Metropolitan (Metropolitan Series) by Walter Jon Williams is now available. The updated version contains the following changes:
Improved formatting for readability.
Significant editorial changes have been made I made no editorial changes, significant or otherwise, and I didn’t improve the formatting because nothing was wrong w...

Amazon— May They Choke on My Vomit

So here I am running a sale on my Metropolitan ebook, as detailed a couple posts ago. And then comes a notice from Amazon Quality Control saying that they blocked my book from sale! Now what horrible quality control issue was so urgent that they had to completely block my book from sale during the middle of a major promotion? Here it is: “The HTML Table of Contents is present in the middle/back of the content. Please provide the Table of Contents at the beginning of the book as per the Secti...