Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 39

I Am In Spain

Envy me!

New/Old

Not only is there a new Praxis book in the pipeline, there are new old Praxis books either on offer or about to drop shortly.

What happened was this. Audio rights to the first three Praxis books were purchased by Audible some years ago, for not a lot of money, and recorded by the excellent David Drummond. Audio book contracts run for a number of years, and then either expire or are renewed.

Audible’s rights were scheduled to expire this year, but they were somewhat dilatory about ...

Deerie Me

Here’s a new friend I made over the weekend. The scarcity of people in the pandemic has made animals less shy around people, I guess, and she let me hang around for quite a while. This photo was taken from maybe ten meters away.

Kathy had a major home improvement project scheduled for the weekend, and I thought it a good idea to make myself scarce before a group of home improvement workers descended on our rancho brandishing noisy tools. As it happens the event got canceled, but my re...

Sometimes the Magic Works, Sometimes It Doesn’t

I found some duck breasts at the market, and it occurred to me that I liked duck breast but had never cooked one, and that this could serve as the seed for another fine culinary adventure.

The label assured me that the duck breasts were antibiotic-free and had been raised vegetarian (which isn’t the case at all with ducks in the wild, who enjoy chowing down on a nice frog now and again).

So I looked up recipes online, and they were all basically in agreement, so I picked one, cooked...

Hero State

Over the summer I’ve been participating in a multi-episode online superhero campaign run by Matt Yancik, all installments of which are available on YouTube. The series is modeled on comics, naturally, and first introduces all the characters as if they were appearing in their own title. Then comes the two-parter finale crossover, wherein the assorted heroes form their own Avengers/Justice League and set out to save, if not the world, at least Fenway Park (and maybe the world too).

There a...

Episode 1015

Hank Garner interviews me on Episode 1015 of his Author Stories podcast. He’s obviously had a lot of experience interviewing authors, so give it a listen!

Audio Me

The Best of Walter Jon Williams has just been released as an audiobook from Tantor Audio. You can buy it most places where audiobooks are sold, or you can get it here for free.

I’ll send a download code to the first three people to reply to this post. Be sure to make certain that I can email you the reply.

In other audio news, it seems I’ve sold my early historical fiction, the privateer books, to Blackstone Audio. I never thought this would happen, so I feel fairly pleased with ...

Chin Up, Bear

Alas, Covid has forced Taos Toolbox 2020 to postpone for the third time. We hope to hold the 2020 workshop sometime in mid-2022.

I couldn’t see putting 16 people in a classroom for six hours per day over a two-week period and trusting that no one would get sick. And of course if someone did get sick, we’d all be quarantining for two weeks, and my idea of a dream vacation has never involved being locked in with over a dozen grumpy writers.

Next year in Angel Fire!

First to Die

So a few years ago we booked a hotel online in Rennes. Though this wasn’t obvious from the online site, the hotel was brand-new, and sat in a half-completed industrial park just outside the city proper. The street it was on was so new that it wasn’t to be found on any map. We had a devil of a time just finding the place.

When we arrived, we drove into the underground parking garage and parked. There were no other cars in the garage. We walked through the cold echoing garage to the e...

I Am Dragon’d

Fleet Elements has been nominated for a Dragon Award, given at Dragoncon in Atlanta over Labor Day Weekend.

It’s been nominated in the Military SF category, which I suppose ends the discussion over whether the Praxis series is MilSF at all. I’ve always maintained the book isn’t about the military, but about people who happen to be in the military.

But there’s no category for “Epic Multi-Volume Far-Future Science Fiction,” so I guess the voters worked with what they had.

If y...