Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 37

Drink Like a Peer

Blue Gredel (01)

Last night we had some friends over for dinner, and I made the black roux gumbo of Chef Francoise Auclaire le Vison, along with a heart-of-palm salad dressed with remoulade sauce. The meal was made more delightful with the appearance of some custom cocktails created by our friend Terry Boren, who has spent the pandemic becoming quite the expert mixologist. More flattering was her naming these creations after characters in my Praxis books, the Blue Gredel and the Lady Sula....

The Moon is Red!

The best of my photos from this morning’s partial lunar eclipse. It was interesting watching the sunlight creep around the moon’s perimeter.

Things To Do on a Holiday Weekend

We’ve all got holidays coming up, so I thought I’d offer ideas for fun things to do with the whole family.

For instance, if your family happens to consist of 21,000 soldiers, you can form an image of President Woodrow Wilson, as these warfighters of Camp Sherman, outside Chillicothe, did back in 1918.

They sure know how to have fun in Ohio, don’t they?

Space Opera Soufflé

Taos Toolbox veteran Cat Rambo has dropped a new novel on us just today, folks! Here’s what she has to say about it.

“Farscape meets the Great British Bake-off” is how they’ve been billing the book. It’s the story of a band of former mercenaries who’ve opened a restaurant on a space station and are doing well, so well that a critic may be about to bestow a coveted Nikkelin Orb on the restaurant.Then a mysterious package arrives, things start exploding, and they have to steal a ship to e...

La Ruta

Our last full day in Spain. We were scheduled to fly out of Madrid the next morning, and we already had hotel reservations in the capital.

It had been a kaleidoscopic journey, dashing from one corner of Iberia to another, like a butterfly dancing from one flower to the next. It was necessarily a bit superficial, but I hope that what we lost in depth we gained in breadth. I would happily have spent a week in nearly all the cities we visited, and maybe next time I will.

I was fai...

A coffee shop in Málaga had these tiles explaining the dr...

A coffee shop in Málaga had these tiles explaining the drinks on offer, with a handy Latin translation for those who don’t speak Spanish.

Someone told us “They don’t actually make all of these,” which I discovered when I tried to order a Largo and the waiter just stared at me.

I wonder what I’d get if I’d ordered a “horror vacui.”

Boosting

I got my Covid booster yesterday, and today I find myself very tired, with a lot of body aches.

Still, I don’t feel sick, and I’m able to function when I put my mind to it.

I’ll be better tomorrow, or so I hope.

The Red Thingie

After three nights on the Costa del Sol, it was time to hit the breakfast buffet and ship out to view the wonders of Granada.

A note of appreciation for Spanish hotel breakfast buffets. There’s fresh fruit, croissants, chocolate croissants, lots of crunchy and non-crunchy breads, juices, and a myriad of pork products like Serrano ham, chorizo, various sorts of salamis and other sausages. Most have the rather dismal chafing dishes of scrambled eggs familiar from American hotels, but t...

Wolf Aprowl

My novelette Wolf Time is available as a free read from Bullet Points, a blog by Nathan Toronto devoted to “capture the complexity, tragedy, and hope of warfare and violence in human (and nonhuman) society.”

There are other stories on the blog by David Drake, Tony Ballantyne, the ever-youthful H.G. Wells, and others.

The story has been lightly edited to maintain the blog’s PG character. The R-for-Rude-rated version is available in the Bullet Points collection, or for that matter as...

On the Beach

As I mentioned a couple posts back, we planned three nights on the Costa del Sol as a kind of rest stop, though we managed not to get a lot of rest during our stay. Our route took us through the millionaires’ playground of Marbella, where we decided we could just about afford lunch. The tapas were good, and the paella was not very interesting. (The area seems to specialize in not-very-interesting paella, though eventually we found some good stuff.)

Marbella features the idle rich of a...