Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 143

Tightening the Screws

As I mentioned in a previous post,Amazon is engaged in pitched battle with Hachette, the publisher of my Dagmar books, over terms of a new contract. And now Amazon has tightened the screws a little bit more.
They are delaying the shipment of physical books published by Hachette. (MyThis Is Not a Game is currently delayed by 3-5 weeks.) They are no longer accepting advanced orders for Hachette books, such as the forthcomingCibola Burn by my good friend James S.A. Corey. Some authors, like Anne...

Police Pursuit of Happiness

So there’s this Internet meme of people posting their own homemade videos of themselves dancing to or otherwise enjoying Pharrell Williams’ song “Happy,” and there were six young Iranians who made a video and put it up on YouTube. In part they did it to counter negative stereotypes about their country. “To tell the world that Iran is a better place than what they think it is,” in the words of one of the participants.
Do we sense that this story doesn’t have a happy ending?
Of course it doesn’t,...

Creationist v Creationist

Wow! There’s a big ol’ ruction going on between Creationists at Bryan College, which was founded in 1925 after the Scopes Monkey Trial, and named after William Jennings Bryan, who successfully prosecuted John Scopes (the Commie bastard!) for teaching the Theory of Evolution and corrupting the Youth of America. (Most people think the trial went the other way, but that was only because H.L. Mencken so successfully and infamously portrayed the prosecution as a collection of boobs, hicks, and mo...

Weird Weird West

One of the “lost stories” I wrote ages ago has finally seen print! (Seems like I’ve been reading from this one for years now.)
It seems like decades ago that John Joseph Adams wrote to see if I’d contribute to an anthology of Weird West stories. I’d never written a weird western before (“The Last Ride of German Freddie” is alternative history, without any fantastic element beyond the existence of the main character in that time and place). I thought weird west might be an interesting stretch,...

Aiee!

Ia! Ia! It’s Snow-Niggurath, Ice-Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!

(Not stir-crazy yet. Nope. Not me.)

Snow Holiday

It’s still coming down hard, so we’re sticking to the lodge. Terrified that someone was going to pitch headlong down the steep outdoor stairs, and that their survivors would sue me naked, I sent everyone out this morning to sweep clear the stairs and walkways. Even though more snow is falling, I have done my due diligence!
Rick Wilber contributed a small snow man— or, as I prefer to think of it, “life-size snow marmot.” By the end of the workshop, maybe there will be a dozen of the little crit...

Belated

So here we are at Rio Hondo, and the first thing that happens is that we get an extreme winter storm warning lasting from noon today till 6pm tomorrow.
Guess I won’t be taking that afternoon hike.
We are snug, however, and have lots of food. As long as the electric lines don’t blow down— which has been known to happen— the week should be pleasant, if a little claustrophobic.
Not sure how much I’ll be posting this week. I might just decide to have extreme winter fun instead.

Me and Salinger and Patterson an’ Them

So . . . what do I have in common with J.D. Salinger and James Patterson and Malcolm Gladwell and Stephen Colbert? (Besides a loyal following who view me as a god, I mean?)
We— and a whole lot of other folks— are now caught in the middle in yet another battle between Amazon and a publisher, in this case Hachette/Little, Brown, the science fiction imprint of which is Orbit.
We Orbit writers have for the last couple weeks been discussing among ourselves the fact that our novels, while still in pr...

Our World and Welcome To It

NASA has started streaming a live HD video feed from the ISS.
I could watch this all damn day.
(You might not see much if it’s pointed at the Earth’s night side, or if the feed is switching satellites. But just wait a few minutes, it’ll be back.)

Live streaming video by Ustream

Sales Pump

So myVoice of the Whirlwind 99-cent sale continues through Saturday. I’ve made enough sales that I’ve paid for the Bookbub advert and will have some profit left over, even though I’m only making 30-40 cents per copy (depending on the forum). My overall sales have increased slightly after each of these sales, though my suspicion is that far more ebooks are sold are the 99-cent rate than are ever read.
The big exception was the sale earlier this year of my historical novel Brig of War, which not...