Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 16

I Bitch Nicely France

When I mentioned in the last post that The Green Leopard Plague was reviewed in Le Monde, loyal reader Guillaume Jay retrieved the (rather short) review from the Bibliotek National, along with another, more comprehensive review from Liberátion, a translation of which I append below.I used Google Translate, which broke the text into about 100 paragraphs, mostly sentence fragments, which I have tried to edit in HTML into something resembling the product of something other than a deranged mind.  T...

Still the Beste Peste

Jean-Daniel’s translation of “The Green Leopard Plague” was reviewed in Le Monde on the 7th. I am beginning to be impressed by myself.

It was behind a paywall, so I don’t know what it said. If any of you have an online subscription, could you copy it and send it my way?

The In Crowd

Standing before one of the secret doors in the library, it’s this year’s Rio Hondo workshop: Walter Jon Williams, Kim Jollow Zimring, Rosemary Claire Smith, Diana Rowland, Michaela Roessner, Barbara Ferrer, Alan Smale, Alex Jablokow, Rick Wilber, David D. Levine, Oz Drummond, Rachel Swirsky.

Together we survived high altitude, high tea, and a week’s worth of critique. Thanks to the Truchas Peaks Place for the lovely scenery and the fine hospitality.

Truchas Sunset

Getting High

Rio Hondo I think may fairly claim to be the only writers’ workshop to offer high tea.

Nor was this my idea. Oz, Alan, Barb, and Rosie put this together while I paying attention to other things. We had scones, cucumber sandwiches, crumpets, and trifle, accompanied by various teas, clotted cream, double cream, jams, and other fine things. Later there was Chicken Kyiv for those feeling deprived of protein.

My taste buds offer thanks to the chefs.

Wilt Thou, Walter, Take This Library . . .

This week is the Rio Hondo workshop, and we are at Truchas Peaks Place in Truchas, NM. The top floor is composed of a library, complete with hidden doors and secret rooms.

Perhaps I am in love.

Starr Time

The other night we went to see Sir Richard Starkey, MBE, and his charming little orchestra.

He achieved worldwide headlines by tripping and falling during his final song, but I blinked and missed it. I hope I’m that spry when I’m 83.

Local Sunset

Maybe Not Russian

In the previous post, I identified my spammers as Russian, because much of theirs spam was in Cyrillic. But since I cleared my Pending file and erased everything in the spam file, and only enabled comments on maybe half a dozen topics, I’ve been getting a little trickle of spam that seems to be in Turkish, posted by folks with names like Mustafa and Usran.

Maybe it’s a Turkish bot after all! Maybe the bot’s masters are gently taking credit for their work. If so, I would like to restate th...

Six Thousand Russian Spam

I apologize if you tried to post a reply here in the last few weeks, because as your post was waiting for approval it was buried under nearly 6000 Russian spam. I was delating the spam as fast as I could, but I could only delete one spam from the Pending file at a time, and during that period hundreds of spam could fly up. I believe only one post, from James Strickland, actually made it to the public.

I had to delete the entire Pending file and block anyone from posting on my blog. I hope...