Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 72

Spies and Spinets

One of the oldies channels has been running back-to-back episodes of The Avengers (the British one, with Patrick Macnee), and Danger Man, with Patrick McGoohan, both Patricks playing men named John.  I remember watching the two Patricks as a youngster, and being enthusiastic fans of both.  (Danger Man seems to have been the first British series ever shown on US television, with its name changed to Secret Agent and a new theme song by rockabilly star Johnny Horton, which probably would have so...

Score

Yesterday my Brig of War sale went into overdrive, with an ad placed through Bookbub, which promptly sold a couple thousand copies (without, however, coming near the total required to reimburse myself for the cost of the ad). But the sale nevertheless managed to bring my Amazon ranking to #61, which placed it on the Amazon Bestselling 100 list. As you will see from the screen shot, it also placed ahead of Game of Thrones! I plan to savor the moment while it lasts, because this will never happ...

No Trauma

We saved ourselves untold amounts of trauma by not going shopping on Black Friday and going to the Bernardo Bird Refuge, right at sunset when the sandhill cranes were flying low, dropping their landing gear, and coming in to a soft landing. We saw hundreds of them, but oddly enough saw no other birds at all, though we heard bird calls from the trees, including one rather vocal owl that seemed to want to attract our attention.

No Turkey Here

Here in the States we’re about to enjoy the Thanksgiving holiday, which was established by Abraham Lincoln as a day of fasting, repentance, and prayer, and is now celebrated as a day of feasting and football.  (The repentance comes the day after.) Unfortunately I can’t invite you all to the house to enjoy my Seriously Deadly Stuffing Recipe, so I’m doing the next best thing— I’m putting one of my historical novels on sale for 99 cents, so that you can better enjoy the holiday in its historic...

We’re Baaaack!

Taos Toolbox, master class for writers of science fiction and fantasy, will return in 2019! The workshop will take place July 7-20, 2019, at our location in Angel Fire, New Mexico.  Nancy Kress and Walter Jon Williams will instruct, with the assistance of special guests George R.R. Martin and E.M. Tippetts. Like last year, George will be offering the Terran Award, a full tuition scholarship for students hailing from a non-English-speaking country. The application period begins December 1, 201...

Wild Cards Hulu

Variety has reported that two new original Hulu series will be based on the George RR Martin shared-world series Wild Cards. Hulu is developing multiple shows based on the “Wild Cards” book series, which is edited by “Game of Thrones” scribe George R.R. Martin. Variety has learned from sources that the streamer is set to open a writers room for two shows set in the “Wild Cards” universe. Universal Cable Productions will produce along with Hulu, with Andrew Miller set to write and executive pr...

A Century Ago

Matters Economic

I haven’t been posting here because I’ve been traveling, and either I was very busy or there wasn’t sufficient internet access, or there was no place to put my laptop so I could write on it.  (Amazing how many bedrooms have no chairs in them.  Or tables.  Or tables that aren’t completely filled with delicate bric-a-brac.) Eventually I came down with stomach flu, sufficiently awful so that I actually had double vision; so I’ve been recovering from all that, and today’s the first day I’ve felt...

A Scandal of Somm Sort

As those of us who’ve seen the movie  Somm  or the TV series Uncorked will attest, there is an organization called the Court of Master Sommeliers which offers restaurant wine stewards a number of ranks leading up to Master Sommelier, a rank which will guarantee the winners a well-paid job at a posh restaurant. The only hurdle is a fiendishly difficult exam which only 249 people have passed in the entire history of the organization, which was founded in the UK in 1977.  There’s an oral test on “...

Invasion of the Grillidae!

So has anyone seen anything like this? It may be a little hard to view, but what you’re seeing is a swarm of crickets climbing the west wall of our house.  By nightfall they were all clumped in a black mass beneath the eaves.  Now, a couple days later, they’re mostly still there. Since it had rained all the previous day, I thought maybe they were trying to climb above the flood waters, but the flood waters were no longer there. I kept yelling at them, “Hey!  Halloween is next week!”  But they...