Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 123

Peter Dinklage + Coldplay

So what do you think they might be singing about?

Double Rainbow

I’m up the mountain for the 2015 edition of Taos Toolbox, where we’ve just done the first round of critiques for some talented new writers. Posts may be on the rare side for the next couple weeks.

Words From the Yogi

The great Yankees catcher Yogi Berra was famous for his “Yogisms,” malapropisms that kept the sports press amused (and Yogi in the headlines). Things like,“I’m not going to buy my kids an encyclopedia. Let them walk to school like I did.” Which is amusing enough, but maybe I (and the rest of the world) have been underestimating Yogi’s profundity all this time. I’d been assuming all along that “Yogi” was a name or nickname from whatever part of Old Europe the Berra family hailed from, but I re...

Write-a-Thon

The Clarion workshop’s annual Write-a-Thon is underway. First, you go to this page, and then you either write, or you sponsor, or both. The money raised helps to create scholarships for Clarion. Which is a six-week workshop that can really change your life. (I’ve taught there. I should know.)

Two From the Toolbox

I’m gearing up for this year’s Taos Toolbox, which starts this weekend. But before I climb the mountain to begin my yearly two-week struggle for quality genre literature, I thought I’d pass on my congratulations to a couple Toolbox graduates whose books have recently been published. First up is Alan Smale, whoseClash of Eagles,which was workshopped at Taos Toolbox, has been released from Del Rey. It’s the first of atrilogy, people, and it’s an alternative history in which Roman legionaries cr...

Dad’s Day

Here we are at Father’s Day, and here I am, a big-headed blond Minnesota kid, with my dad. I believe I am helping him read a comic book. You can tell it’s Minnesota by the big heaping piles of white snow visible through the window. I’d like to thank my father for being gentle, understanding, and loving, and helping to give me something like a perfect childhood. (Having a perfect childhood was a handicap when it came to becoming a writer, but after diligent practice I believe I have overcome i...

“. . . And They Is Us.”

John Stewart, rocked back on his heels by the horrific events in Charleston, improvising, and unable to come up with a single joke, nevertheless manages more coherence and resolution than I could, even when I have time to prepare. Which is why he’s the TV star and I, obviously, am not. Not that I feel like joking or anything. And it’s not like the thing is new, or even unusual, or something that belongs in another age. I remember Bill Clinton’s speech back in the mid-Nineties, when something...

Waterloo

So we find ourselves on the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo. More than marking the end of Napoleon’s great adventure, the battle gave Europe 100 years of peace. Not that there weren’t wars now and then, but there was nothing that tore apart the social order and massacred a whole generation the way Napoleon or Wilhelm II did. On the other hand, the war and the Congress of Vienna froze in place a number of European autocracies that required war and revolution to overthrow, somethin...

Saintly Repose

Behold, it is the corpus of St. Celestini— taking a rest, I guess, from his holy labors in the apse of the cathedral in St.-Malo, where I encountered him last autumn. I have been unable to find out anything about St. Celestini— there is a St. Celestine, but he was a pope and was buried in Rome, and there’s no papal tiara or other paraphernalia to indicate that these are the remains of the Vicar of Christ. Celestini seems very well preserved, though it’s possible that this is an effigy and the...

Scribble Scribble Scribble (eh, Mr. Williams?)

I will be signing copies of my story in the new collectionThe Change, edited by S.M. Stirling,on Monday, June 15, at 7pm, at theViolet Crown Cinema, 1606 Alcaldesa St., Santa Fe, 87501. I’ll be there alongside colleagues Diana Paxson, Jane Lindskold, John Jos. Miller, Emily Mah, M.T. Reitan, Keir Salmon, Victor Milán, S.M. Stirling, and Lauren Teffeau. The event was originally announced for George R.R. Martin’s theater, the Jean Cocteau, but scheduling with Steven Spielberg didn’t work out or...