Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 152

A Quiet Reminder . . .

That you should all be honing your submissions for Taos Toolbox, the master class for writing SF and fantasy, which will be held July 6-19, 2014, in Taos Ski Valley. Teaching will be Nancy Kress, Walter Jon Williams, and special lecturer Ian Tregillis.
Submissions open on December 1! And in the meantime, sharpen your prose.

How Can You Possibly Resist This Darling Face?

Nudibranchs in Love

Mother Ocean must be singing songs of sweet, sweet love, because I keep finding nudibranchs in pairs. Nudibranchs are found all over the reef, and most of them are small and lovely. (The shorter nudis in these photos are only a couple centimeters long.)
Nudibranchs are basically sea snails that have lost, or rather drastically shrunk, their shells. Instead of defending themselves with armor, they defend themselves by tasting really, really foul, such that no predator wants to eat them. And the...

Bandwidth

A note on the bandwidth here. The last photo I uploaded took 40 minutes. The last email I sent took over an hour. For the last two or three days, I’ve got no email at all.
This I could perhaps have dealt with gracefully: if it doesn’t Send the first time, you just keep hitting Send. But there was only one small area that had wi-fi, and it was the hottest, most airless part of the place. My last update, the sweat was pouring off me, dropping from my nose onto the keyboard, and probably ruining...

Spot the Fish in This Picture

Picture of the day

This turtle was, for some reason, quite interested in me. He sailed along the reef, encountered me taking pictures, and then circled me two or three times before moving on. He was maybe four feet long, and quite blasé about meeting us. Maybe turtles are blasé about everything.
There are more turtles here than I’ve seen anywhere, including one huge old guy, named Rambo, who is longer than I am, and probably much older. Shortly after I met the chap in the photo, Rambo came rolling down the reef...

In the Strait

After 44 hours of airplanes, airports, a bus ride on a Third World road, a voyage on a Third World boat, I made it to my current location just in time for the sun to set behind the local volcano.
I’m going to wash off the travel and go to bed.

Open Topic

Since I’m going to be flying a dozen time zones in the next couple days, I’m not going to be here much. So I’m going to do as friend of the blog TRX suggested recently, and have an open topic.
If you have any questions, want to make any announcements, or have any good jokes, feel free to make use of this space.
Just be polite, and turn off the lights while you leave.

Going Bamboo

I had one of those birthdays just recently, one with a zero in it that’s supposed to be a landmark of some sort.
So, in the spirit of flipping the bird at my birthday, I’m getting on a plane today and going to Indonesia for nearly three weeks. I’ll be mostly on the island of Sulawesi, formerly Celebes, and I’ll be doing scads of research both above and under the water, and contemplating the sea, volcanoes, and my own immortality.
There’s supposedly internet where I’m going to be, so I’ll try to...

The Rift: Now at Smashwords!

For those of you waiting, The Riftis finally available at Smashwords, though only in epub format. It seemed to choke on anything else, and I couldn’t tell if that was their fault, or that of the manuscript. From Smashwords it will migrate to Sony, iBooks, Diesel, and other sites.
And naturally it’s still available atAmazon,Nook, andKobo.