Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 137

Globalquerque, Part I

This highlight of the weekend was Albuquerque’s world music festival, Globalquerque, held in the Mayan pyramid-shaped Hispanic Cultural Center. Three stages running simultaneously, along with a food area offering ethnic fast food, craft beer, and arts and crafts.
Since three bands were playing simultaneously, I wasn’t able to catch them all, but I got a taste of most of them, along with the craft beer and what they call döner in Turkey and gyros in Greece, except these were from an Egyptian c...

Newly Available

A brief announcement before I get to the actual subject of this post. Angel Station and The Rift are now available on iBooks. There had been some kind of technical issue with Smashwords until I got my very own iBooks account, and now the technical issues don’t exist. Nothing like do-it-yourself. The Green Leopard Plague and Other Stories,however, is totally plagued with technical issues, even though these issues don’t seem to exist with any other vendor. Go figure.


But that’s not my actual annou...

Update/Flashback

I’ve been spending long hours updating my web page, which is the sort of task that makes me wish I had an assistant— at least to handle the foul language, because that’s the most repetitive part of the process.
While I continue to wrestle WordPress into submission, please enjoy this composite picture of the solar eclipse I viewed back in November of 2012. I tried to upload this photo then, but the ship was having such bandwidth problems that uploading anything but mere text proved impossible.
P...

The Redcoats Are Silly!

Some poor Grenadier Guardsman is in trouble for, well, this. And all he was trying to do was make his jobless boring. And maybe do a wee little hommage to John Cleese.
You’ve got to hope his officers are at least as tolerant as those fellows in Norway.

Ticking, Ever Ticking

My 99-cent sale forMetropolitanends midnight on Wednesday, so if you haven’t yet got a copy, check outAmazon,Kobo,Barnes & Noble,iBooks, andSmashwords. (Actually I may delay a bit, because there’s a late run at Smashwords, with the book running off the shelves ever since Saturday night. I assume someone said something nice about the book somewhere online, but I don’t know who, or where . . . so if you’re responsible, you have my thanks.)
The book got to #168 at Amazon, broke the top fifty at B...

On Its Way

A fine piece of art by John Picacio, for a story scheduled to appear on Tor.com in November.
Pity about the spelling of my name, though.

For the City that Girdles the World, a Mere 99 Cents!

The ebook of my novelMetropolitan is on sale for the next week for a mere 99 cents!
99 cents for a novel about the city that covers the world! How can you possibly resist this deal?
I’ve previously made a whole series of posts about the book, which I won’t repeat now, but which you can find here, here, and here.
You can findMetropolitan at Amazon, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, iBooks, and Smashwords. And some other places like Baker & Taylor and Sony, but I haven’t checked to see if the price change mig...

I am NPR’d

Last week NPR ran a piece on the Hachette-Amazon controversy, and I was one of the authors interviewed. The interview ran for about an hour, but the piece as aired cut my contribution down to three sentences. (This is two sentences longer than my usual quote on national media.)
I was told that I’d be informed when the piece ran, but somehow the news went astray. Which is also typical.
If you’ve got four minutes to spare, I’d suggest listening to the actual audio rather than reading the summary....

Scent

So right now I want to go all Andy Rooney on the subject of armpits.
I recently went to a drugstore to get myself some stick deodorant. You know, the containers that allow you to stuff aluminum into your armpits, so that people around you won’t faint if you’re stuck in crowded elevator.
I like the unscented deodorant because it seems to me that the wholepoint of deodorant is to be unscented. Plus, being unscented permits the option of adding the scent of your choice, if scent seems desirable. (...

Babymetal

Cuties in flouncy skirts mixing J-pop and heavy metal in front of a giant statue of Kuan Yin.
And yes, mixed message is thepoint. [via Oz]