Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 139

Waterloo It Ain’t

My short novel “Wall, Stone, Craft,” which was nominated for the Hugo, Nebula,and the World Fantasy Award, is now available for your reading pleasure at Amazon, Smashwords, Kobo, Barnes & Noble,and soon at various other locations throughout the eReaderSphere.
The story appeared in an Axolotl chapbook back in 1993, and saw magazine publication later that same year.
It was a story that I wrote purely for myself, but like many of the works that I wrote for my own enlightenment (likeHardwired), it...

Eyesight

I’ve been trying to upload an ebook to the iBooks website through Apple’s software iTunes Producer, and it’sjust like jabbing knitting needles in my eyeballs! The interface isterrible, hard to read and confusing, there’s a pop-up that keeps reappearing and you can’t get rid of it, and the results are often something very like gibberish.
Aw, fuck it. I’ll upload through Smashwords, because it’s worth paying them a cut in order not to have to deal with this.
Apple, if you want to compete with Ama...

And Then I Said No

So . . . the other day I said no to a contract from a major New York publisher.
Not that it was a terrific offer or anything. There didn’t seem to be a lot of enthusiasm, the money wasn’t great, and the contract was non-negotiable.
(Non-negotiable contracts are a thing now. Because publishers are so threatened by Amazon and other signs of change that they say to themselves: “Instead of expanding our business, let’s just squeeze the artists!”)
But I declined to be squeezed. Instead I looked at th...

Stripping the DRM

I need to bust me some DRM.
It’s the DRM on my own work, I hasten to add. My publishers have ebook rights for North America on some titles, but I control the rights elsewhere. Easiest way for me to exploit these rights is to strip the DRM from the North American ebooks, then put new covers on them and market them to the rest of the world.
Anybody got a good way to do this?

I Am At Bubonicon

I am at Bubonicon 46, New Mexico’s longest-lasting science fiction convention. (It’s lasted nearly as long as I have.)
So I’ll be in Albuquerque for the weekend, hanging out with convention mascot Perry Rodent (pictured right), and therefore not posting for a while.
If you’re in the Greater New Mexico area, please come by the convention and say howdy.

I Haz a Newsletter

So now I’ve got a newsletter, to which I urge you to subscribe. Because though the same announcements will probably appear here, the newsletter will turn up in your inboxinstantly, and you won’t have to even turn on your browser.
I promise not to send you a whole lot of crappy spam. Or even non-crappy spam (if such a thing exists). I’ll only exercise my Awesome Newsletter Powers when I have an actual announcement.
Technology goeth on apace. And I goeth with it.

Double Vision

Two covers for the Italian translation of my story “Reincarnation Day,” by the artist Tiziano Cremonini.

I’m sure you’ve all read the story so many times that you’re practically memorized it, but if it’s somehow escaped your attention, it’s about a society in which children raised in a virtual environment are incarnated in physical bodies only when they reach adulthood.

Which cover do you like best? (Click for a larger image.)
(And the story, by the way, is available in theGreen Leopard Plague e...

Three Beautiful Words

Creationist Ken Hamm believes that all aliens are going to hell, because they haven’t met Jesus personally or something.
Neil deGrasse Tyson has something to say about that.

Amazonia

Amazon has admitted to a second quarter loss of $126 million. Which is not a lot on revenues of over $19 billion, but nevertheless it’s bad news for Hachette and any other Amazon suppliers, because it means Amazon is going to be squeezing every last little penny out of their suppliers, and coming up with every-more-ingenious “services” they can charge their suppliers for.
Amazon’s announced that they’ll lose even more money in the third quarter, but that doesn’t mean that Amazon’s doing badly....

News From the Doughnut

New details from the Doughnut, which is to say the second-largest European public building project of all time, which is to say the Cheltenham headquarters of GCHQ, the British equivalent of the NSA.
(I should admit that these details are more than a week old, I just haven’t had a chance to comment till now. And the details themselves are older than that, they’ve just been released recently. Got that? Right then, carry on.)
GCHQ has these listening stations in places like Ascension Island and C...