Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 98

Fly, My Little Ebooks! Fly!

May I just stand in croggle-eyed amazement and point out that the 99-cent sale on The Rift is the best ever? The sale was supposed to last one week, but it was extended into the second, and now the third, because the book just kept selling! Shows you what might have happened twenty years ago, if the original publisher had been the least bit interested in selling it.  Everybody could have made money, but now it’s just me. Still, the sale will end one of these days, so if you don’t have a copy,...

Unto the Breach

So I’m pleased to announce that I have signed the contract for three more Praxis books. Now I announced the offer in September of 2015, but it took until now to negotiate the contract. What with publishers becoming more monolithic— only five left standing, after all— and feeling threatened by Amazon and new technologies, they’ve reacted by trying to get a bigger slice out of everyone else’s pie, particularly the authors.  Their contracts have grown more, well, oppressive.  Particularly as re...

Five Beats per Second

An excerpt from the surreal Helzapoppin‘, starring the comedy duo Olsen and Johnson. (Not to mention Slim & Slam, Shemp Howard, and Elisha Cook, Jr., as “the writer.”)  A film which, with its dreamlike action and constant breaking of the fourth wall, would nowadays would be considered metafictional, except the word didn’t exist back in 1941. Dancing here are Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers, who also performed as the Congaroos.  These were the dancers who dominated the Cat’s Corner, reserved for the b...

An Actual Conversation

HIM: I don’t know, it’s so hard.  I used to have all these friends, and we talked all the time, but now I can’t keep track of them all. ME:  I think I may have a solution. HIM:  ?? ME:  You know that device in your pocket?  The one you use for texting and browsing the Internet? HIM:  Yes? ME:  I found out that it has another function.  You can use it to telephone someone, and then you can have an actual conversation! HIM:  Really?  You intrigue me.  What is this tel-le-phone of which you spea...

Award Season

This is the time of year in which hopeful authors post a list of their publications in the fond belief that their readers will nominate them for awards.  It’s never worked for me, but then there’s always a first time. My list this time is short and simple: the only publication I had in 2016 was the novel Impersonations (Tor, Oct 2016), the latest in my Dread Empire’s Fall series, also known as the Praxis series. This means not only that the book is eligible for the Novel category, but in the...

Can’t Escape the Damn Eagles

So I went with my gracious hosts to the aptly-named Todos Santos over on the Pacific side of Baja, and I found myself visiting this hotel, which allegedly inspired the Eagles song.  Which song I’ve been unable to get out of my head for days now, so thanks a lot. Jimmy Buffet was supposed to have visited the same day I was there, but I must have missed him. Troubadors aside, Todos Santos is not only a charming village, and reminiscent of the Cabo San Lucas of thirty years ago, but there is a l...

Spot The Fish In This Picture

Here amid the scattered wreckage of the lost German freighterLunderberglies a highly toxic fish. You don’t want to touch it or step on it lest it inject neurotoxin through its spines, which are designed like little pressure mines, the more the weight, the more the venom. Lunderberg went down in 1954, surrounded by the towering pinnacles of Lands End. (Not the one in England, or the catalog store, or for that matter Finisterre in France, but the spectacular formation off Cabo San Lucas.) I met...

Good Numbers

So my 99-cent sale onThe Rifthas generated good numbers, and it is now officially an Amazon bestseller, or as they call it, Best Seller. Its Amazon number was 28 this morning, and they’d probably declined overnight from an even better number. (For some reason these sales seem to generate their best numbers in the early hours of the morning.) I’m also #9 on the Barnes & Noble list, and if I didn’t know how few sales that actually means, I’d be deeply impressed with myself. The sale is by no me...

I Am In Cabo

I have rather unexpectedly found myself in a Mexican resort. I’m sure this is the sort of thing that happens toyou all the time, right? So over thirty years ago I visited Cabo San Lucas with some friends, and had a very pleasant time in a small seaside village with all of four hotels. A few weeks ago one of the friends contacted me and said, in essence, “Hey, wanna do this again?” I did, but Kathy had just had had surgery, and I didn’t think I would be free. But then Kathy recovered splendidl...

Post-Apocalypse

In an apocalyptic mood for some reason? (I can’t imagine what that reason might be.) In that case you should take advantage of the 99-cent sale on my bestselling ebook, The Rift.The Rift was intended as a breakout book, in which a larger-than-usual audience would be exposed to my Walter-y goodness. In the event, the publisher deliberately sabotaged the book’s release, and the sales figures, while okay, were sufficiently unspectacular to assure that I wouldn’t sell another novel for five long...