Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 118

Contents

Tonight was Patricia Rogers’ legendary biannual Halloween Party, complete with Victorian coffins, mummies, body parts, bubbling flasks, sinister laboratory instruments, brains in bell jars, a tilting, electronically charged autopsy table, and a whole lot of science fiction and fantasy writers and fans dressed up as monsters, mad scientists, and figments of the demonic imagination. (I feel deeply privileged to have a friend with “polish coffin” on her to-do list.) Tomorrow morning, a few hours...

Dancing Along

These guys, who have been dancing in Rouen for hundreds of years now, are having a lot more fun than I am right now. For one thing, I’m not in Rouen. Location aside, this week it’s been one little thing after another. No big crises, no big triumphs, just a lot of little detail I have to contend with, generally without enough sleep. I’m falling behind, so I have to go fiddle with some more detail right now. But in the meantime I thought I’d show you, if not a good time, then at least a picture...

Gulf & Western

Yeah. This guy. So I was talking to Daniel the other day, and I said, “I’m going to do the most unhip thing I’ve done in ages.” “What’s that?” “I’m going to see Jimmy Buffet in concert.” Daniel thought about that for a while, and he said, “I think Buffet’s been in the business so long that he’s lapped himself. He’s cool again.” “Like Tony Bennett?” “Exactly.” So there I was in a huge outdoor crowd with guys in grass skirts, coconut bras, and parrots on their heads. And the thing was,it was c...

Year Five

This summer I completed my fifth year as an indie author, albeit one who markets only his own backlist. And then to top it all off, I sold six books to traditional publishers. So. Yeah. All that. The upshot is that every long work I’ve ever written is now available in electronic form, in most parts of the world. (And yeah, I know the Praxis books aren’t available in the UK, Australia, and the rest of the British former dominions [except for Canada], but I’m working on that.) Maybe half of the...

End the World in Style

In the popular imagination, Doomsday isn’t any fun. I mean, all the radiation and the ruins and the heavily-armed mutant gangs are the sort of thing that can make the end of the world a real drag. And even if you’ve done your doomsday prep, you’re still stuck in a buried RV with your heavily-armed idiot cousin Clem, and if you run out of food, either you gnaw your own leg off . . . or Clem does. But it doesn’t have to be that way, at least if you’re among the 1%! Thanks to the Vivos Group, yo...

New Package

Introducing the new cover for my novelDays of Atonement,which replaces a cover designed in the days when I was fairly new to Photoshop. I was trying really hard to think of a cover that said, “gothic western science fiction police procedural,” which is what the novel is,and I overthought it and threw in too much stuff and it got overcomplicated and homely. This one at least gets the “science fiction” and “western” parts, plus it’s a lot prettier. The fractal design in the center is by the new...

Fustilarian

Over on another Social Network, I was rejoicing that I’d written a sentence containing the phrase “fustilarian bellygods.” This occasioned a deal of speculation about what my sentence actually was. I declined to answer, because I didn’t want to interrupt the flow of imagination that was going on. And I thought I’d stimulate imagination here, by initiating another contest. Write a sentence— or more than one, if you like— containing the phrase “fustilarian bellygods.” And of the various entries...

Contest!

The first person to identify the object in the photo will win free downloads of all 11 Philip K Dick Award-nominated novels, now available at StoryBundle. This thing looks like you might find it at IKEA, but you’d be wrong.

Charting My Course

SS Mark Twain

Here I am, age five or so, charting the course into my future as I pilot the SS Mark Twain past the dangerous shoals of Walt Disney’s Adventureland. I still have my pilot’s certificate. I don’t remember the natty little jacket at all.

Peakéd Oil

I’m currently paying $2.09 per gallon of gasoline, which is the lowest I’ve paid in a very, very long time— and which may, if you adjust for inflation, be the lowest gasoline priceever. Ten years ago, people were saying that we’d met, or even passed, Peak Oil, wherein the supply was just going to go down and down, and the price up and up. But now new technologies, including fracking, have resulted in a gusher of new oil spraying onto the market. The result is energy prices falling off a cliff...