Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 37

Quillifer for the Holidays

Simon & Schuster has kindly put the ebook of Quillifer on sale for $1.99 through the New Year, enabling you to keep company with Quillifer throughout the holiday season. Find it wherever fine ebooks are sold!

And yes, that’s a new cover! It has things on top of other things!

We’re Baaaaack!

Taos Toolbox, the two-week master class in writing science fiction and fantasy, has bravely donned its mask, taken its vaccinations, and announced its new dates, for June 6-19, 2022, in Angel Fire,NM.

While there a few members of the cancelled 2021 workshop who have bravely hung on through the pandemic, there are seats now available, and if you have a hankering to write in this field, I’d encourage you to apply once the application period starts on January 1, 2022.

The class will, as ...

Sunset Supreme

Today being a perfect day for it, we headed down the Rio Abajo to our local bird sanctuary, where we watched thousands of our feathered friends flying in at sunset.

Sometimes we see deer, coyotes, or wild javelinas (smallish boar), but no luck today. Instead, we saw colossal numbers of sandhill cranes and snow geese.

Snow Geese

The weather was perfect until the sun set, at which point the air chilled rapidly, and it was time to go home.

Sandhill crane comes in for a landing...

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.