Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 69

Framed!

Here I go, breaking the fourth wall again. Now that I’ve changed my frame of reference, I’m on my way to an Undisclosed Location, so I may not be posting for a few days. If you’re looking for something to read, Locus has put the always-perceptive Russell Letson’s review of The Accidental War online for your edification.

Purple Gin and Pink Martini

Gotta say, last night had a lot to recommend it. I took the train up to Albuquerque to meet Kathy downtown, and then we went to the Apothecary Bar atop the Parq Central Hotel to watch the sunset turn the mountains pink, which it did right on schedule.  We had cocktails and ate high-end bar food.  My drink choice, called Metamorphosis, turned out to be appropriate for a place called Apothecary, because it performed a transformation before our very eyes.  We start with gin and ice in a crystal...

Toolbox Time

Hey, it’s 2019!  If your New Year resolution included working to become a professional author, you should consider applying to Taos Toolbox, the master class for writers of science fiction and fantasy.  This year’s workshop, held in the deluxe Angel Fire resort in New Mexico, will be run by Nancy Kress and Walter Jon Williams, with contributions from speakers George RR Martin and indiepub guru EM Tippetts. George has once again kindly offered the Terran Prize, providing full tuition and lodgi...

Portals

There follow some thoughts on setting, inspired by the earlier discussion on corridors. Setting is a character in fantasy and SF, or should be if the author knows what he’s doing.  This is particularly true in fantasy, where the setting can become this big, unwieldy character with which the protagonists have to wrestle in practically every scene.  The setting in fantasy has rules (there are elves, there are dragons, there is magic, there are Portals), and the setting itself can have personal...

Forty

On the first of January I celebrated my fortieth year as an author, the period in which I have supported myself solely on writing and related professions. I would have mentioned this on the day, but you know what?  I forgot. It was early on January 1, forty years ago, that I got a phone call from my agent telling me that the first three historical novels had sold to Dell.  The sale had actually been on December 31st, of course, but then she and and everyone else had gone off to publishing par...

New Horizons Meets the Kuiper Belt

“I have reached these lands but newly
From an ultimate dim Thule-
From a wild clime that lieth, sublime,
Out of SPACE- out of TIME.”

 

Ring Out the Old

It’s New Year’s Eve, which is a chance to celebrate the old as well as ring in the new. To that end, let’s party like it’s 1973! (Just watch the video for now, I’ll tell you about it later.) This is two examples of Seventies excess mashed together.  The tune is “Nutbush City Limits” by Ike and Tina Turner, this having been recorded about the time Ike (teetotal till he was 30) began to spent $50,000 per month on cocaine, and then (when it became available) chase down his coke with crack, a si...

Corridors

I’m well into the as-yet-untitled second volume of the second series of Praxis novels— now that would make a poor title— and I’ve come to realize that I’m really missing having at least some of the action set on a planet, where there are things like wind and plants and pretty scenery. Every scene is either on a starship or on some kind of station, and that means decks and corridors and machinery.  Each setting is artificial, and there are only so many ways I can describe it. Fortunately the P...

So. This Happened.

It’s the first big winter storm in a number of years, and the world is covered with a layer of ice buried under several inches of snow.  It won’t really get above freezing for over a week, so we’re just going to have to get used to involuntary acts of skating. I hate driving under such conditions, not because I’m afraid of icy conditions, but because I’m afraid of the other drivers.  Practically no one here knows how to drive in weather, and I’m sure the highways are littered with wrecked veh...

Sunset Time