Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 77

Normal Programming Will Be Resumed Shortly

Taos Toolbox 2018 is over.  I drove Nancy Kress to the airport this morning, then went home, enjoyed the air conditioning for a while, and promptly sacked out. Here’s a photo— actually from last week— of us taking guest speaker Carrie Vaughn out for some of the local cuisine. We didn’t get burned up in a forest fire, and we critiqued about 300,000 words of fiction, delivered 18 lectures, and hosted three guests.  About halfway through this last week I began to feel my mind turning to Cream o’...

Free Accident!

There’s a drawing for free copies of The Accidental War on Goodreads. It’s not like the publisher told me about this.  I found out by, well, accident.

Song of Crit and Fire

Fortunately Melisandre brought us back, at what price I shudder to imagine. Behold the Sardenas Canyon Fire, visible from our nest at Angel Fire. Droughtland’s latest fire is small, but has been burning uncontrolled for several days now.  We have to hope that the name of our refuge, Angel Fire, remains metaphorical rather than literal. I have spent the last week and a half at Taos Toolbox, the master class for writers of science fiction and fantasy.  I’ve been teaching alongside the brilliant...

The Red Workshop

Participants at the 2018 Taos Toolbox Writers’ Workshop, taught by Nancy Kress and Walter Jon Williams and hereafter known as the “Red Workshop,” were lining up for a photo with guest speaker George R.R. Martin when what a spokesman described as “an unfortunate incident” occurred. Among the casualties were David DeGraff, Jo Miles, Brenda Kalt, Sarah Paige Hofrichter, Kevin O’Neill, Sherri Woosley, Gayle Schultz, Nancy Kress, Walter  Jon Williams, Autumn Kalquist, Joey Yu, Liz Colter, Peri Fle...

Beautiful Artifact

A goodie arrived in the post today.  My own personal copy of the signed, illustrated, slipcased limited edition Subterranean Press hardback edition of The Book of Swords, edited by Gardner Dozois, and featuring my story “The Triumph of Virtue.” There are other stories as well, by minor authors like George R.R. Martin, Robin Hobb, CJ Cherryh, Elizabeth Bear, Daniel Abraham, Scott Lynch, and many more. Each story is illustrated by Ken Laager, and there are also full-color plates and a dust jack...

Stable Relationships for Spies

One TV drama I watched from first to last was The Americans, about two married Soviet spies living in D.C. in the 1980s.  Mr and Mrs Jennings bugged American officials, ran networks, eliminated defectors, seduced informants, raised one of their two children to be a spy, and racked up a surprisingly large body count among the enemies of socialism— including coming within an ace of assassinating Casper Weinberger. Turns out that the East German Stasi had a manual for all that.  Unlike the Jenni...

Small Batch

I’m fond of a whisky of a cold evening, and sometimes a warm evening too, and I’m particularly fond of Scotch.  I’ve enjoyed Irish, too, but I’ve never much cared for bourbon or rye. Maybe I was onto something without knowing it.  Turns out that a lot of American whiskies labeled “small-batch” or “hand-crafted” are all produced in the same distillery in Indiana. Bulleit “Frontier” Whiskey, for instance, is owned by multinational spirits conglomerate Diageo. For years, it sourced much of its b...

Still Lurid

Here’s another lurid sunset photo.  I think this one has little or nothing to do with any forest fires that may still be burning, but more to do with the cloudburst that passed just before I snapped the picture.  The setting sun is causing storm clouds to glow red. The big forest fire in northern New Mexico has completely dropped out of the news over the last four days, which tells me that the fire is more or less contained and that the evacuated towns of Cimarron and Ute Park were not incine...

Read Like a Dinosaur

When I was out of town a new collection from Mad Cow Press arrived on my doorstep, a collection that features my story “Dinosaurs,” which was nominated for a Hugo Award. From the title, A Fistful of Dinosaurs, you might guess what the collection is about, and if you have any doubts remaining, a glance at the cover should resolve them. In addition to “Dinosaurs,” the story features “Think Like a Dinosaur” by James Patrick Kelly, and “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love”— none of which, it must be...

Lurid

The sunsets are murky and disturbing these days.  Droughtland is burning down. The snowpack last winter was one-third of normal, whatever “normal” is these days, and the forest fires have already started.  A fire— “one hundred percent uncontained” —is raging in Ute Park in the north of New Mexico, and other fires blaze here and there.  The other day a helicopter spent a day practicing hauling up water from the Rio Grande and dumping it on targets. Smoke obscures my view of the mountains, and...