Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 203
June 12, 2011
Write-a-Thon
Want to write? Want to encourage someone else to write? You can do one or both of these at the Clarion Write-a-Thon, which begins on June 26!You can agree to sponsor a writer and pay by the word! You can be a writer, and receive encouragement from your sponsor! Or you could both write and sponsor other writers!You also get to interact with the talented students of this year's Clarion Writers Workshop, and help them toward their goals.Your tax-deductible donations will go to support the...
June 9, 2011
Timely Reminder
"Everybody get to work to destroy the Four Pests!"
June 8, 2011
Freakish Fun
My good friend Melinda Snodgrass has a new Wild Cards story up on Tor.com. You can read it for free.
Consider it an introduction to the newly-released Wild Cards anthology, Fort Freak, tales of the mean alternate streets of New York, sixty-odd years after the Wild Cards outbreak.
Enjoy.
June 6, 2011
Shards Redux
Here's the cover to the forthcoming ebook release of House of Shards. Which you should be able to buy Right Soon Now.
June 5, 2011
The Big Finish
I just finished playing Dragon Age: Origins, the console game, to its conclusion. For the fifth time.While I like this game a great deal— enough to go through the sixty or so hours of gameplay no less than five times— it must be said that I truly hate the finale. It's a brutal slogfest in which your hero and his/her companions battle the Ultimate Evil and hordes of its companions, and nothing really interesting happens in it. It's just a long, long fight that you're almost guaranteed to...
Mischief of the Moment
Just a few notes from odd corners of the world press.You'd think that the, with the failed rapture a couple weeks ago, the world's quota of religious silliness has been filled, but apparently not. The Vatican has closed the 1700-year-old Monastery of Santa Croce after "abuses of a liturgical and economical nature," which included nuns dancing before the altar under the direction of Sister Anna, a former stripper. (Despite attempts by the tabloid press to paint the place as a den of vice...
June 1, 2011
Jewel In My Crown
Behold the new cover for the upcoming ebook release of The Crown Jewels. I slapped it together myself with Photoshop and a piece of stock art.Not bad, if I do say so myself. And it achieves the principal objective of an ebook cover, which is to remain legible when reduced to postage-stamp size.I plan fairly shortly to release the three Maijstral books simultaneously. The first will have a very attractive price.Why the Maijstral books, you ask?To begin with, the stakes are low. These are b...
May 30, 2011
Feathered Flight
Dick Ruttan's SpaceShipTwo has completed its first "feathered flight." Soon this lovely ship will be operating from the New Mexico Spaceport, just a couple hundred miles south of here.
Aristoi Remembered
The fine writer Jo Walton has written an equally fine analysis of Aristoi on the Tor.com blog. It's not a rave filled with nothing but praise, but that's jake with me. It's a great analysis of what in the book works, and what doesn't, for Jo Walton— and since she's a very smart reader, that's a worthwhile perspective.Jo also falls into the "I really hate the protagonist" school, which a lot of people do. Other readers just want to have sex with him. Some hate him and want to have sex...
May 25, 2011
Royal Blood
According to a new book by Richard Sugg, the British royal family regularly dined on human flesh. As well as bones, skin, and internal organs.A new book on medicinal cannibalism has revealed that possibly as recently as the end of the 18th century British royalty swallowed parts of the human body.The author adds that this was not a practice reserved for monarchs but was widespread among the well-to-do in Europe.Even as they denounced the barbaric cannibals of the New World, they applied...
