Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 143

Sleepless

I saw this, and now I’m so terrified I can’t sleep. And when I do sleep, my slumbers will be troubled by nightmarish legions of identical roller-skating accordion-playing sub-debs singing thepolka from hell!
So I thought I’d better share this, because if I can’t sleep, neither should you.

Time for Wolf Time

My novelette “Wolf Time” is now available for download on Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and Smashwords. And it’s a mere 99 cents! What have you got to lose?
There was a period of my career when my longer pieces were regularly spawning short fiction, and this is one of those stories. When I finishedVoice of the Whirlwind, I knew that the story of Steward, the protagonist, was over— but I also liked Reese, his friend/puppetmaster who killed him in the penultimate scene. So I decided to continue...

Breaker Breaker

There’s a Philip K Dick story which I read decades ago, and which I don’t remember very well, but I remember the key scene, so that’s okay.
In the key scene, the protagonist walks into a dark room and reaches for the light pull cord that he’s pulled many times before, but it isn’t there, and instead there’s a light switch on the wall. And the protagonist comes to realize thatall of reality has shifted since the last time he walked into that room, and the light switch is the proof, and that he...

Vodka and Vikings

I don’t know if you’ve ever had the pleasure of visiting Eastern Europe, but if you ever go, there are certain conventions that should be observed. One of them being that at some point you have to go out and drink lots of vodka with the locals. Lots of vodka. Lots and lots of vodka.
Back in the year 2000 I was the guest of honor at Polcon, in Gdynia, Poland (which is a port town just across the bay from Gdansk). It was not only the Polish national convention, but also Balticon, the big convent...

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...