Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 201

Up the Mountain

Nancy Kress and I are in Taos Ski Valley, where the Taos Toolbox workshop will begin tomorrow.
It's lovely here.  It's cool, unlike the 100-degree waterless desert— my home— that I left this afternoon.  The air is scented with pines.  And it rained thoroughly this evening— the first rain I've seen since early February.
No bears yet.  But it's early days.

Expectations

 

I've recently completed the video game L.A. Noire (sic), which has prompted some thoughts about audience expectations, and how to satisfy them— or at least mollify them, assuming that actual satisfaction turns out not to be possible.For those of you who haven't somehow been swept up in the hype, L.A. Noire (sic) is a video game that charts the rise (and fall and rise) of a Los Angeles policeman circa 1947.  The game took all of seven years to develop.  It looks quite gorgeous, and the...

Listen to Me!

 

Hey, everybody, Hardwired is now available as an audio book in multiple formats!
Whether you listen to CDs, MP3s, or cassette tapes, Blackstone Audio is willing to oblige!
Check it out.

 

March of Time

I keep telling myself I need to post on this here blog, but then I keep saying, "I got all this other stuff to do, why don't I do that first, and then do my blog post?"  Except that all this other stuff keeps growing, and the blog posts keep getting postponed.I don't have a solution to this except to suggest that we all contemplate the eternal march of time, as illustrated by this photo I took in Turkey a couple of years ago.  This was taken at a place called Pinara, which no longer exists...

Low-tech High Tech

 

Via Chris Mills, it's the tale of FabFi's contribution to the movement for Internet freedom sponsored by, among other things, the American government.The American effort, revealed in dozens of interviews, planning documents and classified diplomatic cables obtained by The New York Times, ranges in scale, cost and sophistication.Some projects involve technology that the United States is developing; others pull together tools that have already been created by hackers in a so-called...

Ebook Updates

 

All three Maijstral books have been uploaded to Smashwords.Smashwords pretty much requires that books be submitted in Microsoft Word, a program I've never used because it was designed by aliens intent on world conquest.  But I'm better at Word by now, and I'm happy to report that my Smashwords .epub formats are now much more successful.  Pretty, even.I've uploaded a newer, cleaned-up version of The Crown Jewels, which has none of the formatting errors seen in the earlier version.    Enjoy...

Albuquerque Comic Expo

 

I'll be at Albuquerque Comic Expo this weekend.  I'm not entirely certain when I'll be available to meet y'all, but I know for sure I'll be there on Saturday afternoon.
Since, along with me, the event features only minor figures like Stan Lee, Marina Sirtis, Nicholas Brendon, LeVar Burton, and Len Wein, I'm sure I'll have the fans all to myself.

House of Shards Available!

Okay, whatever technical problem existed has now been resolved, and House of Shards is now available in its Kindle edition.
Enjoy!

Maijstral At Last!

Okay, kiddies, the ebook versions of the Maijstral books are online!The Kindle editions of The Crown Jewels may be found hereabouts, and Rock of Ages over in this direction.(For some reason the middle book, House of Shards, is held up "for review" at Amazon, and has been for days now.   Which to me indicates some kind of problem with the machinery, and I'm trying to find an actual human being to find out what's wrong.)All my Nook editions— which does include House of Shards— may be found on...

Maijstral (Comedy is Hard)

I thought I'd write down some thoughts on the Maijstral books, in anticipation of their imminent release in e-formats.(And first of all, the matter of pronunciation.  I pronounce it My-STRAHL.  You are, however, welcome to pronounce the protagonist's name any way you like.  I'll know who you're talking about.)I wrote these books pretty much accidentally.  It wasn't part of any plan.  I had just finished Hardwired and Voice of the Whirlwind, both of which would become Tor hardbacks.  Neither o...