Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 91

Literalize That Metaphor!

When I’m teaching at Toolbox, I talk about literalizing metaphors, but it’s always hard to come up with a concrete example of how that works. No longer.  I’ve watched Hotel Beau Sejour on Netflix. This ten-episode Belgian-made mystery series, with dialog in Flemish, opens with teenage Kato waking up in a hotel room, to discover her own bloody murdered corpse lying in the bathtub.  Kato escapes the room and shortly afterwards discovers that she’s a ghost, albeit one who can ride her own motorc...

Migrant

This morning the neighbor’s tree was covered in African cattle egrets, a breathtaking sight.  Since first appearing in the Rio Grande Valley forty-odd years ago, these migrants have multiplied and made themselves very much at home.  Their numbers seem to have increased greatly just in the last couple years. The neighbor was irrigating his alfalfa field, and possibly the birds were waiting for the nice juicy insects to flee the advancing water.  Or possibly this flocking was mating behavior— t...

Tower of Dreams

So the other night I dreamed I was in the Tower of Definitive Editions, a giant structure literally built from the definitive editions of every book ever written.  There was some kind of mechanism that would pluck the book that you wanted from the structure without either damaging the book or destabilizing the tower.  (Maybe it stuffed the hole with John Grisham novels or something.) I woke up before my dream-self was able to develop this idea, but I’m still thinking about it. Maybe it can be...

Stuff What I Have Seen

In the past weeks I’ve caught up with superhero stuff that you all no doubt saw ages ago.  I’d like to be more timely with reviews, but frankly my life is very, very busy right now, so I catch movies when I can. Dr. Strange.  I missed this during the burly-hurly of last year, which also means I missed it in 3D, for which the effects were clearly intended.  Not that they were much less impressive on the flat screen, but that “flattening,” ladies and gents, is a metaphor— once you’ve seen as ma...

Birthday Twiddle

And another happy birthday, this time to the U.S. of A!  I’ll be enjoying the day with friends, eating all-American food, and enjoying patriotic music.  Apropos which, here is John Adams with a timely tune.

O Canada

Happy Canada Day to our friends north of the border! In celebration of the 150th anniversary of Canada being itself, I’m pleased to present a rare video of a celebrated Canadian performer jamming with some of her friends. The message is still timely, I’d like to think.

Deer in the Headlights

Taos Toolbox is done.  Over the course of two weeks Nancy and I delivered 18 lectures, read and critiqued 280,000 words of fiction, wrangled three superbly informative guest speakers, and drank lots and lots of coffee. I’m now at home, staring blankly at the walls while listening to a strange, high-pitched ringing in my ears. We had 18 very talented new writers who were, as a group, very impressive in critique, had a an incredibly strong work ethic, and spent a lot of their free time working...

Info Dumplings

Collected by Nancy Kress, here are a series of quotes from last week’s critiques here at Taos Toolbox. * “I like the info dumplings.”
* “I don’t think she could take apart the time machine with a hairpin.”
* “The hard-working proletarian hero saves the day over the upper-class creep–what more do you want?”
* “I don’t want to be near anybody who chirps.”
* “I don’t think a slithery would twirl.”
* “The press-conference scene buried the lede — ‘We just created a friggin’ unicorn!””
* “This is a...

Words for Clarion

Are you a professional writer?  Are you going to be doing a writing project this summer? Sign up for the Clarion Write-a-Thon.  You’ll write the exact same words you’d write anyway, and you’ll earn money for the Clarion Workshop, the world’s premiere workshop for science fiction and fantasy. Are you an aspiring writer?  You can sign up and gain valuable writing experience, while helping to support the workshop that helps writers like you. The Write-a-Thon starts June 25.  Sign up, and start s...

Beneath the Sign of the Bear

I’ve been spending the week at the 10th Anniversary Taos Toolbox, the workshop for writers of science fiction and fantasy.  Here’s a photo of us beneath the bear, including fellow instructor Nancy Kress and special guest George RR Martin. I realized too late that I should have got a photo of us all lying dead at George’s feet, and titled it “The Red Workshop.” We’ve had nearly a week of critique, and below you may find some of the highlights, diligently collected by Nancy: * How do corporate...