This week on my podcast, it’s our annual Daddy-Daughter Podcast, a tradition since 2012! The kid’s sixteen now, a senior in high school and getting ready to head off to university next year, so this may well be the final installment in the series.
Here are the previous year’s installments: 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023.
This week on my podcast, I read the sixth and final installment of “Spill“, a new Little Brother story commissioned by Clay F Carlson and published on Reactor, the online publication of Tor Books. Also available in DRM-free ebook form as a Tor Original. Spill will be reprinted in Allen Kaster’s 2025 Year’s Best SF on Earth.
I didn’t plan to go to Oklahoma, but I went to Oklahoma.
My day job is providing phone tech support to people in offices who use my boss’s customer-relationship management software. In theory, I can do that job from anywhere I can sit quietly on a good Internet connection for a few hours a day while I’m on shift. It’s a good job for an organizer, because it means I can go out in the field and still pay my rent, so long as I can park a rental car outside of a Starbucks, camp on their WiFi, and put on a noise-canceling headset. It’s also good organizer training because most of the people who call me are angry and confused and need to have something difficult and technical explained to them.
My comrades started leaving for Oklahoma the day the Water Protector camp got set up. A lot of them—especially my Indigenous friends—were veterans of the Line 3 Pipeline, the Dakota Access Pipeline, and other pipeline fights, and they were plugged right into that network.
The worse things got, the more people I knew in OK. My weekly affinity group meeting normally had twenty people at it. One week there were only ten of us. The next week, three. The next week, we did it on Zoom (ugh) and most of the people on the line were in OK, up on “Facebook Hill,” the one place in the camp with reliable cellular data signals.
This week on my podcast, I read part five of “Spill“, a new Little Brother story commissioned by Clay F Carlson and published on Reactor, the online publication of Tor Books. Also available in DRM-free ebook form as a Tor Original.
I didn’t plan to go to Oklahoma, but I went to Oklahoma.
My day job is providing phone tech support to people in offices who use my boss’s customer-relationship management software. In theory, I can do that job from anywhere I can sit quietly on a good Internet connection for a few hours a day while I’m on shift. It’s a good job for an organizer, because it means I can go out in the field and still pay my rent, so long as I can park a rental car outside of a Starbucks, camp on their WiFi, and put on a noise-canceling headset. It’s also good organizer training because most of the people who call me are angry and confused and need to have something difficult and technical explained to them.
My comrades started leaving for Oklahoma the day the Water Protector camp got set up. A lot of them—especially my Indigenous friends—were veterans of the Line 3 Pipeline, the Dakota Access Pipeline, and other pipeline fights, and they were plugged right into that network.
The worse things got, the more people I knew in OK. My weekly affinity group meeting normally had twenty people at it. One week there were only ten of us. The next week, three. The next week, we did it on Zoom (ugh) and most of the people on the line were in OK, up on “Facebook Hill,” the one place in the camp with reliable cellular data signals.
My latest Locus column, Wealth Inequality Is Even Worse in Reputation Economies, explains the ways in which “reputation” makes a poor form of currency — in a nutshell, reputation doesn’t fulfill most of the roles we expect from currency (store of value, unit of exchange, unit of account), and it is literally a popularity contest where the rich always get richer.
Illustrator Brian J. Smith did me the tremendous honor of creating this fabulous, detailed illustration inspired by my novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, which turned ten this year. He hid all kinds of great little gracenotes in it, too — tons of characters from the book and from the Disney parks.
As I mentioned in my March Locus column, I’m celebrating the tenth anniversary of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by planning a prequel volume. As part of that planning, I’m going to read aloud the entire text of that first book into the podcast, making notes on the book as I go. Here’s part two.
Mastering by John Taylor Williams: wryneckstudio@gmail.com
John Taylor Williams is a audiovisual and multimedia producer based in Washington, DC and the co-host of the Living Proof Brew Cast. Hear him wax poetic over a pint or two of beer by visiting livingproofbrewcast.com. In his free time he makes “Beer Jewelry” and “Odd Musical Furniture.” He often “meditates while reading cookbooks.”
As I mentioned in my March Locus column, I’m celebrating the tenth anniversary of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by planning a prequel volume. As part of that planning, I’m going to read aloud the entire text of that first book into the podcast, making notes on the book as I go. Here’s part one.
Mastering by John Taylor Williams: wryneckstudio@gmail.com
John Taylor Williams is a audiovisual and multimedia producer based in Washington, DC and the co-host of the Living Proof Brew Cast. Hear him wax poetic over a pint or two of beer by visiting livingproofbrewcast.com. In his free time he makes “Beer Jewelry” and “Odd Musical Furniture.” He often “meditates while reading cookbooks.”
Here’s a reading of my recent Locus column, Ten Years On, in which I reflect on my first decade as a novelist and discuss a possible further volume related to Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, my first-ever novel:
I never thought I’d write a sequel. The allure of writing books has always been the experience of discovering and exploring a place and people that have been cooked up by my imagination. By the time I’ve squeezed the book out through my fingertips, I’m generally pretty sick of that place and those people, and frankly glad to be shut of them. But a sequel to Little Brother happened, and when it was done, I discovered that I’d thoroughly enjoyed it. It was like discovering that a whole gang of close friends I’d lost touch with after high-school had stayed tight, and were happy to welcome me back into their bosom. Thoroughly enjoyed it? It was amazing.
Back to February 2013. When my publisher told me that the book would come out on Feb 5, I immediately flashed back on Feb 3, 2003, ten years and two days before the publication of Homeland, when my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, was published. D&O was all kinds of firsts: the first novel I’d ever written, the first book of mine Tor ever published, and the first Creative Commons licensed novel – ever. It’s shocking to think that an entire decade has roared past in the interim, with 14 more books in print, and another two (Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free, a non-fiction book; and Anda’s Game, a full-length graphic novel from First Second) in the pipeline.
Realizing that I was a decade into my writing career literally staggered me. I missed a step while walking down the street and nearly fell over.
Mastering by John Taylor Williams: wryneckstudio@gmail.com
John Taylor Williams is a audiovisual and multimedia producer based in Washington, DC and the co-host of the Living Proof Brew Cast. Hear him wax poetic over a pint or two of beer by visiting livingproofbrewcast.com. In his free time he makes “Beer Jewelry” and “Odd Musical Furniture.” He often “meditates while reading cookbooks.”
Sean Puckett has read my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, aloud for the Voices in the Dark site. The download is free and CC licensed, and it’s very good.
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
(Thanks, Tomi!)
Sean Puckett has read my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, aloud for the Voices in the Dark site. The download is free and CC licensed, and it’s very good.
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
(Thanks, Tomi!)
