Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 12

Spooky Kitty

I’m not your ordinary gumshoe.

My name’s Nina Cohen. Born: 1898, died: 1912. I’m a poltergeist in a human body. I work from home as a private investigator. I watch entirely too much TV, and I talk to my cat. Say hello, Djinn.

Meow.

Thus begins Dead of Winter, the second in James R. Strickland’s Poltergeist series. (It’s a pretty damn good opening, isn’t it?)

James Strickland, I should point out, went to Taos Toolbox back in 2011, and has been publishing regularly in the years s...

Medium Rare

Tonight’s dinner: sous vide leg of lamb cooked medium rare, with a sort of roux/wine sauce, plus cheesy potatoes and a spring salad.

Six Weeks In

So I’ve been to the Cancer Center for my six-week checkup. My PSA came in at 0.1— any lower and it would have been undetectable. (It was over 70 when I started treatment.)

So . . . happy news! Cancer confirmed dead! Champagne in my sights!

Toolbox in ’23

Here’s the second in my survey of works published by graduates of Taos Toolbox in 2023. The Kuiper Belt Job is the first in David D. Levine’s Cannibal Club Chronicles, a new adventure series following a collective of highly shady individuals.

Once upon a time in the Solar System, there was a gang called the Cannibal Club led by the man known as Strange. Max was the muscle, Damien the pilot, Alicia the thief, Tai the hacker, and Shweta the grifter. They would break into banks, hack comp...

Don’t Sleep. Just Read.

The new Wild Card book, SLEEPER STRADDLE, launches on February 8! The book contains a new story by me, “Semiotics of the Strong Man,” and features two of the series’ most popular characters.

SLEEPER STRADDLE features stories about Croyd Crenson, known as the Sleeper and created by Roger Zelazny. Roger created the most brilliantly useful character in the series, because every so often the Sleeper falls into a coma and wakes in a completely new body, and acquires a completely new set of p...

Talkin’ Atcha

My interview by Steve Bardin is now available on Youtube.

The ostensible topic is my Star Wars tie-in, but the interview ended up quite wide-ranging, so you don’t have to be a Star Wars geek to enjoy it.

From the Time Capsule

I went through an old file cabinet drawer yesterday to see if it was time to send some of the paper to (1) the shredder, or (2) the archives.

The stuff in the cabinet dates from 1975-1982, my earliest years of trying to write professionally. Right up front was a massive research file for the Privateers & Gentlemen series. Nautical charts, articles xeroxed from various dictionaries of national biography, extracts from nautical dictionaries, pages of notes that looked as if they’d been thr...

Toolbox Scores Again

Here I begin a survey of works published by Taos Toolbox veterans in 2023. First up is Refractions by M.V. Melcer, a far-future novel that features intrigue, action, and an all-consuming mystery at its heart.

Nathalie has joined a rescue mission to the once-thriving settlement at Bethesda, which has lost communication with Earth. Her years-long hibernation is interrupted by an on-board fire that kills the mission’s commander and which reeks of murder and sabotage.

Nathalie is now t...

We Have Lost the National Treasure

Here’s Howard Waldrop— that’s MISTER National Treasure to you!— in 2006, reading someone’s submission to the Rio Hondo workshop, then held in Taos Ski Valley.

Howard died yesterday of an apparent stroke. He was 77.

I met him in the early Eighties, when I was writing the first Privateer & Gentlemen books. They hadn’t been published yet, and I was known (if I was known at all) as this guy who wrote books that no one had ever seen, which made me more obscure even than Howard. Pictu...

Crescent

Tonight’s crescent moon at sunset.