Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 22

Bones

This is a skeleton excavated from an Athenian graveyard under the Acropolis. You’ll notice what looks like a bone plate lying atop the skeleton’s spine.

This is what a fused spine looks like. This gent led a hard working life, either as a slave or manual laborer. He must have spent his last years in a hell of a lot of pain.

Life in classical Athens wasn’t all pretty statues and philosophy.

Sounion/Byron

Here’s the temple to Poseidon at Cape Sounion, perched on a cliff at the very tip of the Attic peninsula, viewed on our trip to Greece last year.

You’re not allowed to walk on the monument nowadays, but it was very different when I first saw the temple forty-odd years ago. I not only walked all over the temple, but I snuck onto the grounds at night along with a sleeping bag and slept there, getting up at first light and capering all over the site, snapping photos of the spectacular Aege...

Double Sale for the Toolbox

M.V. Melcer (Taos Toolbox ’16), has sold a two-book deal to Storm Press. The first volume should appear in October.

I would like to suggest that you don’t want to fall too far behind. If you have ambitions to write and sell science fiction or fantasy, by all means follow Ms. Melcer’s example and apply to Taos Toolbox 2023 without delay!

Go East, Young Man

As I wrote in an earlier post:

Breathes there a man with soul so dead that he doesn’t like cowboy songs?  Even if they’re sung in Mongolian, with indigenous instruments and throat-singing?What you need for a proper cowboy-western song is the following.A sound that somehow invokes the big open spaces.Music that reflects the varieties of natureHeavy-duty nostalgia for days gone byIt also doesn’t hurt if your sound somehow echoes theme music from epic Western films.

Anda Un...

Fiyo Away

We’ve been listening to Mardi Gras music all day on Sirius Radio, so I thought I’d share some with you. Here’s Trombone Shorty and Cyril Neville with “Fiyo on the Bayou.”

Dance if you want to.

Another Point for the Toolbox

I’m pleased to report that The Bone Orchard, by Taos Toolbox veteran Sara A. Mueller, has been nominated for the Compton Crook Award.

The Bone Orchard was workshopped at Taos Toolbox, and has been generating buzz for its author ever since its publication earlier in the year.

Not to be forever harping on the subject, but if you have ambitions to write professionally in the science fiction and fantasy field, you should apply to the Toolbox. We’ve helped a lot of people wri...

Back to Boston

I’m heading to Boston for Boskone 60 this weekend. I’ll hope to see you there.

I’ll be participating in panels, a reading, a signing, and a kaffeeklatsch, and I’ll also be hanging out and talking to people. Here’s the schedule. Some of the convention will be virtual, so you might be able to participate without actually traveling to Boston. Maybe some of my panels will be carried on the virtual schedule. It must be admitted that I don’t know.

Be that as it may, I plan to have fun thi...

Sending

Talk Video

Brenda Cooper, Ken Scholes, Hank Schwaeble, Cliff Winnig, and I are interviewed by Sean Patrick Hazlett about our participation in the anthology High Noon on Proxima B.

We had fun, I think. Odds are you will, too.

Cover’d

Looks like I’ve bought tickets to see Steve ‘n’ Seagulls live.

Hope they bring the anvil with them.