Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 118

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-...

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...