Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 147

Truthiness

I’ve been watching the Winter Olympics with rather less enthusiasm than is my wont. Possibly because so much else is happening in my life right now that the Olympics are more of an intrusion than a pleasure. But still I feelobliged to watch, somehow. (The NBC overlords are chortling as I’m typing this.)
My favorite winter sport is still curling. Chess plus lawn bowling plus billiards, andon ice! Plus, it’s the only sport where players get better as they age, which seems pretty significant when...

Open Topic

I’m in Boston right now staring out the window at snow, so I won’t be doing much posting here over the weekend.
So y’all do it. Feel free to have a chat. Just remember to keep it civil.

Lessons For Writers: The Beatles Edition

So here in the States we’re celebrating the 50-year anniversary of the Beatles landing in New York, and at least one local station played nothing but Beatles the other night.
And what did I think about? I thought about what writers could learn from the Beatles.
I was actually alive and present on the planet when the Beatles arrived, and I remember all the excitement, for all that I was not terribly excited myself. I was a little kid in Minnesota, and I thought the Beatles were okay, but I wasn’...

Lessons For Writers: The Fab Four

So here in the States we’re celebrating the 50-year anniversary of the Beatles landing in New York, and at least one local station played nothing but Beatles the other night.
And what did I think about? I thought about what writers could learn from the Beatles.
I was actually alive and present on the planet when the Beatles arrived, and I remember all the excitement, for all that I was not terribly excited myself. I was a little kid in Minnesota, and I thought the Beatles were okay, but I wasn’...

Boskone Schedule

I’ll be in Boston for Boskone this coming weekend, and if you’re in the area you should definitely stop by and say hello.
Here’s my schedule, to make it all the easier to find me.
The New SF/F Thriller

Friday 20:00 – 20:50

Here’s one subgenre that’s really taken hold these days. Examples: Neal Stephenson’s _Reamde_, Max Barry’s _Lexicon_, Wesley Chu’s _The Lives of Tao_, Walter Jon Williams’ _This Is Not A Game_, Charles Stross’ “Laundry” series, and more. Why now? Do these appeal more to mainstr...

Guerres des Étoiles!

It’s Star Wars, as written by those mad scamps Georges Lucas and his partner, Jean-Paul Sartre.

More Tips for Writers

In another of our series of tips for writers, a brief cautionary video about what might happen once you start getting lost in your own complicated fantasy epic.

UPDATE: Well, the embed code sucketh, so it won’t play here. But you can clink the handy link, so that you’ll be transported totheir damn page and experience all their fine advertising. Enjoy.

Stripey

So here we have a sea snake, in fact the deadly “sea cobra,” heading for the surface to breathe (which it has to, ‘cuz it’s a reptile). The venom can kill, but the snake’s mouth is quite small, and it has a hard time opening wide enough to get a grip on a full-grown human. It’ll go for the webs between your fingers, or so I’m told.
In any case the snakes I encountered were fairly shy, and spent their time nosing through coral, either trying to hide or looking for something to eat.
I’m told they...

55 Years

The Day the Music Died was 55 years ago today. This is the only video I could find of Buddy Holly performing, though— as there’s no guitar lead visible— I imagine he’s just miming to his own record.
But then he was far from the last person to mime a Buddy Holly song, now was he?

Shocked

So I was in my local greasy spoon the other day, paying for my breakfast, and I saw a delivery that had been left on the counter near the cash register, a big cardboard box with the words SOPAIPILLA SYRUP.
And I think my heart probably skipped a beat. Certainly my knees almost gave way. I was struck dumb. I couldn’t do anything but point.
“Oh yes,” the manager told me. “We can’t afford honey anymore.”
Because, you know, sopaipillas sit on the right hand of God. Or somewhere nearby.
Let me explain...