Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 117

Through the Holiday

Just to let you all know, I’m continuing the 99-cent sale onDays of Atonement through the Thanksgiving holiday. Just ’cause I’m a nice guy. You may find it via Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, Kobo, Google, and iBooks. Have a great harvest festival!

Water View

Once again, we have created a calendar, this one for 2016. It features views of some lovely places one or another of us has been in the last year, including Hawaii, Lake Superior, and the Black Hills. I do this to share my life with my friends, so I don’t make any money on this. The calendar features all your holidays, at least if you live in the U.S., Canada, U.K., and/or Mexico. (And happy St. Andrew’s Day to my friends abroad, by the way.) If you’re the sort of person who still uses a wa...

That Darn Postillion

Years ago, I heard of a phrase book used by travelers to the Russian Empire which included the useful phrase, “Alas! Our postillion has been struck by lightning!” What I didn’t realize until today was that the unfortunate lightning-struck postillion had become a kind of folk meme transmitted down nearly a century, and thus become a suitable subject for an article in Wikipedia. The earliest use of the term dates to a 1916 article inPunch, where the phrasebook is described as Hungarian. The nex...

Words of Astounding Wisdom

Author Ryan Schneider has asked me his famous ten questions, in an interview directed at my writing process, the Oxford Comma, and my novelDays of Atonement, which I remind you is still on sale for a mere 99 cents. Check it out!

Taos Toolbox, Rousing from its Hibernation

Yes, there will be a Taos Toolbox next year! I’ve had to delay the announcement due to our losing our lodging, and to the fact that there will be massive construction in the Ski Valley next year. The master class for writers of science fiction and fantasy will be held July 17-30, 2016, at Angel Fire, NM, just a short distance from Taos. Teaching will be Nancy Kress, Walter Jon Williams, indiepub guru Emily Mah Tippetts, and James S.A. Corey, author ofThe Expanse. Applications begin December !...

Holm/Rousey

I’m just back from seeing Penn and Teller at the Route 66 Casino, west of Albuquerque and owned, I believe, by the Laguna tribe. (Indian casinos seem to own most of the new concert venues.) The concert was great fun, though I was a bit disappointed that I’d recently seen almost all the tricks on P&T’s summer TV series,Fool Us. I’m heading back up Route 66 tomorrow night, because I’ve got a ticket to watch the Ronda Rousey/Holly Holm fight on HD. (The actual fight is taking place Sunday mornin...

Atonement Bargain

My novelDays of Atonement, which I have described as “the world’s only gothic Western science fiction police procedural,” is on sale for a mere 99 cents. You may find it via Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, Kobo, Google, and iBooks. It’s one of the books which, as the years go by, I find pleases me more and more. If you’re interested in the book and its origins, check out this essay I wrote when the book was first might available in electronic form (and with a less successful cover). UPDAT...

Reviews in the Nick of Time: Ken and the Muppets

I don’t watch a lot of sitcoms. It’s not that I don’t like to laugh, I just don’t have a lot of time for TV, and I choose to spend most of my limited TV time with dramas, possibly because dramas are pretty much what I write for a living, and that’s what interests me. (Not that I haven’t done comedy, too.) But I’ve been watching a couple of the new sitcoms, and I’ve become aware of how constricting the structure of a sitcom can be, even to the point where it works against the strengths of the...

Grand Tour

This grim-faced, big-eared fellow is I believe the Middle Kingdom pharaoh Amenemhat III (my notes are a little unclear). Just before leaving New York, we caught a special exhibit at the Met featuring goodies from the Middle Kingdom, which was a period of economic growth, massive building, and foreign trade, sandwiched between the fall of the pyramid-building Old Kingdom and the invasions of the Hyksos. Pharaohs were traditionally shown as eternally youthful and smiling, but Middle Kingdom pha...

Big City

I’m off on a trip to an Undisclosed Location. And as I have in the past, I’ve inserted a clue as to my present location in the above photograph. The clever among you may be able to work out where I am.

As you can see from this second photograph, business is booming here in the Undisclosed Location. Any economic downturn that may or may not have been caused by the shenanigans of people living in this vicinity seems to be pretty much over (at least in this vicinity). Today we visited a newly-...