Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 212

Tron Holiday Special

With the new Tron in the theaters, maybe it's time to flash back to 1982 .  . . and the Tr0n Holiday Special.
[via Monte Cook]

The 1982 Tron Holiday Special from Rip Taylor

Shark El-Sheikh

The Egyptian resort of Sharm El-Sheikh was being terrorized by a shark that had killed one swimmer and injured three more.Then the man-eater was killed mano-a-mano by Dragan Stevic, a drunken Serb tourist.   The only problem being, he was too drunk to remember doing it.Milovan Ubirapa, one of Stevic's friend who witnessed the incident explained that Dragan had decided to go to the beach for a swim after a long night of drinking. As Dragan and his friends approached the beach, he saw a...

Not For Christmas

If any of you have bought what seems to be a new $45 Walter Jon Williams collection off Amazon . . . well, maybe it's not too late to get your money back.Folks seem to have packaged my Wikipedia page plus 80 pages of other publicly-available information and are selling it between covers for an outrageous amount of money.And it's a paperback!  These people have no shame.I've just found out about this, so I don't know what can be done about it, if anything.  Maybe we can all review it on...

Clarion Calls

The six-week Clarion writers' workshop is now accepting applications for 2011.
It's a six-week workshop for writers of science fiction and fantasy, featuring six writer-instructors.
It's harrowing, merciless, brutal, and life-changing.  Fifty percent of the graduates eventually stagger on to some kind of career in the field.
Check it out.

Awesomely Awesome

What's more awesome than a 2100-year-old astronomical computer found on the sea floor a century ago?
A 2100-year-old astronomical computer reconstructed in Legos!

And, for those of you for whom sheer awesomeness is not enough, here's a 3D digital reconstruction of the original mechanism, complete with gear ratios for the home hobbyists among you.

Vicious Grace

This post belongs to my good friend MLN Hanover, whose new book Vicious Grace has just been released.  Vicious Grace is Book III of The Black Sun's Daughter, which (as you can tell by the heavily armed, seminude voluptuous female on the cover) is an urban fantasy series.Urban fantasy isn't always my personal cup of tea, but MLN's is as good as it gets, and that turns out to be pretty darned fine.The first two books, Unclean Spirits and Darker Angels, introduced MLN's heroine Jayne Heller...

Villainy

No big secret here, but I'm attracted by dark characters.  I've created characters like Sarah, Black Shadow, Caroline Sula, and Loren Hawn.  I'm interested in shining light into the darker corners of their consciousness, interested in prowling along with them as they ghost about their desperate midnight errands.I regularly write about people that I wouldn't invite to dinner.   (And what would I talk to Loren about, anyway?  Sports?)But my point is that I often use as protagonists the...

From Yog-Tube

Because it's the Season.

Heard Any Good Jokes Lately?

I'm fighting off an attack of food poisoning.
Someone else be amusing for a change.

James Frey Responds

Some of you may recall my post of a couple weeks ago, in which I lambasted author James Frey for the exploitative methods used in his fiction factory, Full Fathom Five.  According to an article in New York, Frey was recruiting naive MFA students to write YA series while paying them a big $250 advance and a promise of a share of any profits, all the while shackling them in a hideously one-sided contract that included huge financial penalties for breaking any of its terms.   The New York