Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 148

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...

Ambiguity

Back in September, friend of the blog Marcus Geduld posted a long, thoughtful essay in response to an essay I wrote about Kazuo Ishiguro’s novelNever Let Me Go. That essay was my response to a literary writer turning to a science fiction trope, and necessarily involved theorizing about the differences between literary fiction and genre.
Among the many intelligent comments Marcus made had to do with ambiguity, which literary works tolerate more than does genre. I’ve been thinking about this eve...

Tesla vs. Edison

It’s the rap battle that all true geeks want to see:
Tesla vs. Edison!

We Make Writers

Writers are made, not born. The talent itself may be innate, but it must be conditioned and developed, and developed in such a way to maximize the writer’s potential.
At Taos Toolbox, we don’t tell you what to write, we help you make what you write better.
If you want to write better, you need to the tools to do it. And the tools are right where we put them, in the Toolbox.

Oo-ee-oo

The Muppets do to those stupid ghost hunter shows whatought to be done to those stupid ghost hunter shows.
(cue sinister organ music)

Reviews in the Nick of Time: Saving Mr. Banks

I was surprised thatSaving Mr. Banksreceived only one Oscar nomination (for Original Music), since it’s such a well-written, well-acted film with a powerhouse cast of past and future Oscar contenders: Emma Thompson, Tom Hanks, Paul Giamatti, Colin Farrell, Bradley Whitford, Jason Schwartzman. Thompson is terrific, and Hanks is very good, even if he’s somewhat inconsistent in rendering Walt Disney’s Missouri dialect, and everyone else inhabits their characters very well indeed.
So for anyone w...

Neal

Our field has lost another unique voice: Neal Barrett, Jr., who died on January 12th at the age of 83.
I got to know Neal sometime in the early Eighties, when I was breaking into the field. I can’t say I knew him well, but I enjoyed his company and his wry observations, which always came from a slightly different quarter than you might expect
As did his mature writing. As Emily Dickenson might say, Neal “told it slant.” His characters were eccentric when they weren’t bizarre, prone to stopping...