David J. Williams

Los Angeles was great, but jeez are those folks spoiled. If it gets below sixty at night everyone’s ranting about how #$# cold it is. Highlights of trip include:

-Getting an old-fashioned shave at a retro barbershop—my closest shave EVAH. I tried to re-enact the barbershop scene in Chinatown with the guy in the chair next to me, but I’m not sure he’d seen the movie.

-Getting an In and Out Burger and eating it while stuck in traffic.

-Realizing somewhere over the midwest that I’d locked the deadbolt lock on my apartment door, and that I’d failed to give the catsitter that key. A frantic visit to a FedEx in the LAX vicinity prevented The Cat from experiencing a sudden interruption in his supply of dead meat.

-Rewatching Serenity and realizing that it’s not the piece of crap I thought it was the first time I saw it.

-Not working on anything related to Autumn Rain for a period of 96 hours.  Christ, I’m going soft in my old age.

FedExed the manuscript to Bantam yesterday; it’s all over. You won’t see THE BURNING SKIES for a few more months, but you can feast your eyes on the cover in the meantime. Among other things, the book features (a) the return of Autumn Rain, (b) my entry for the Most Insane Space Battle Ever Sweepstakes (trust me, you’ve never seen anything like it), (c) the long awaited meetup of all the characters, (d) several hundred instances of the f-word, (e) action at L2, L3, and L5, (f) a Eurasian secret weapon, and of course, (g) total mindfuckery.  It was a long haul (long enough to make me wonder if second novels are the toughest), but I’m pleased with the result.

And now I’m off to the west coast to lie low for a few days.  Back soon enough. . .

For sheer chutzpah, Blagojevich certainly gets a prize, but it’s worth remembering that when it comes to selling public office, he’s a rank amateur compared to the all-time recordholders, the Praetorian Guard back in 193 A.D. If you believe Ridley Scott’s version, once Commodus was dead, Russell Crowe’s body was carried out of the Colosseum covered in flowers and the Republic was restored amidst a suitably uplifting musical score. Of course, what really happened is that the Praetorians auctioned off the entire empire in a single night, and the lucky winner was Senator Didius Julianus, who enjoyed the throne for all of two months before Severus’ troops marched in from the Rhine and chopped him into little bitty pieces. Before it’s all over, Blagojevich will undoubtedly be wishing for a similar fate.

Amidst all the uproar over my cat last week, I’m only just now getting to the long-awaited report by Congress on weapons of mass destruction. The key soundbite: “unless the world community acts decisively and with great urgency, it is more likely than not that a weapon of mass destruction will be used in a terrorist attack somewhere in the world by the end of 2013.” The report goes on to say that the most likely source of any nuclear device would be Pakistan, given that they’ve been peddling their nukes in every Central Asian bazaar they can find. If this sounds depressing to you, just imagine how I feel about it:  I live in Washington D.C. (why, I’m not so sure).  My cat remains blissfully unaware of all this, though he would probably welcome any scenario in which mice start to glow.

This has been making the rounds on the SF blogosphere, and as you guys know, I’m all about bandwagons.

Age when I decided I wanted to be a writer: 29
Age when I wrote my first short story: 31
Age when I first got my hands on a good word processor: 28
Age when I first submitted a short story to a magazine: 31
Rejections prior to first short story sale: Never made a short story sale.
Age when I sold my first short story:  See above. You trying to rub it in?
Age when I killed my first market:  Can someone tell me what this means?
Approximate number of short stories sold:  Approximately zero.
Age when I first sold a poem: A what?
Poems sold: If I admitted to anything here, I’d destroy myself with my ultratough battle-crazy constituency.
Age when I wrote my first novel: 29-35
Age when I first sold a novel: 36
Novels written between age 23 and age 37: 2
Age when I wrote the first novel I sold: 29-35
Number of novels written before that: 0
Age when that novel was published: 36
Total number of novels written: 2
Books sold:  3
Books published or delivered and in the pipeline: 2
Number of titles in print: 1
Age when I was a Writers of the Future winner:  I met one once.
Age when I became a full-time novelist: 36 (courtesy of these guys)
Age now:  37

At least, that’s what they called the war in Afghanistan up until this year, when it started to become brutally apparent that the situation has turned to shit while we were focused on Iraq.

At any rate, here’s two incredible sets of photos. One is of U.S. soldiers in the Korengal Valley, right up alongside the Pakistani border.  Looking at the terrain (which is so hostile, supplies get flown in), you can see why empires throughout history have found Afghanistan to be a graveyard.

And speaking of . . . here’s photos of Soviet soldiers during their attempt to tame the place. Makes me think of the ending to The Living Daylights, when Timothy Dalton teamed up with the mujahideen to kick some Red Army ass. Now *there’s* a movie that failed to age gracefully. . .

I’m currently going through the copy-edits of the sequel to THE MIRRORED HEAVENS. Turns out the editor(s) had a problem with the Remixed Ending I wrote up in the last stage of the edits. They like virtually all of it, but there’s just. One. Thing. They. Aren’t. Sure.  About.

So now I have to decide whether or not I agree with them. This is always the weirdest part of the process—years in the planning, months in the writing, and now whatever I choose, I’m stuck with.  My desk is littered with manuscript pages; my cat has been banished from the study because of his fascination with them, as well as with that Awesome Blue Pencil I’m using to mark up the text. He doesn’t give a fuck what I decide to do with the text, just as long as he gets the chicken/turkey combo that keeps appearing in his bowl like magic. Maybe he’s got the right perspective.

The Washington Post recently published a story on the McColo spam network—McColo was the San Jose-based company that was unceremoniously booted offline after the Post told internet providers all about the fun customers the company was hosting. But what’s particularly cool is the map of all those customers (many of whom are presumably backed by the same folks).  Check out the botnets in the upper right: apparently spam on the web took a nosedive right after the shutdown, but now most of them are back at it. The world’s most profitable numbers-game is nothing if not resilient.

Boeing has fired its airborne laser in the first comprehensive end-to-end test of the world’s most pimped-up 747. Next year’s follow-up test will feature an attempt to shoot down a real missile; after that, the ABL will be cleared for operational status, assuming Obama doesn’t scrap the whole thing. The new president will have to decide fairly early on how he intends to play the missile defense card; particularly now that he’s picked Gates, he’ll be under enormous pressure from the Pentagon to keep (if not accelerate) BMD.

The logical culmination of all this, of course, is weaponry in space. It’s doubtful that’ll occur or reach maturity on Obama’s watch, but space-based lasers capable of hitting missiles in their booster phase would constitute the crown jewel of any missile defense architecture that’s worth the name.  But the public is skittish about weapons sailing over their heads several times a day, so for now all the focus has been on surface- and air-based hardware. The advocates of the current generation of missile defense learned their lesson well from SDI:  don’t propose everything at once, and don’t talk about space until you have to.  That’s why they’ve made far more progress than SDI ever did. The fact that the technology has come a long way doesn’t hurt either.

The Mumbai attacks demonstrate just how much damage can be done by striking high-profile civilian targets even if you don’t have heavy weapons. Last year, U.S. intel warned of potential Al-Qaeda attacks on U.S. shopping malls; even a single gunman could do some pretty nasty damage. Attacks don’t have to be imaginative or sophisticated to get results: watching that get proved in India has increased the likelihood it will happen elsewhere.

Meanwhile, the international repercussions of Mumbai are only just beginning. It seems almost certain now that the attacks emanated from inside Pakistan, and that they had some kind of government backing (even if that just means that someone in govt turned a blind eye); the problem is that “government” in Pakistan is a very amorphous term, as the country’s split into a myriad factions—which doesn’t bode well for crisis decision-making if India start rattling its nuclear saber. Pakistan is already under enormous pressure from the Americans on its Afghan border; now it’s going to be caught in the proverbial nutcracker. Already halfway to a failed state, the Islamic Republic may complete the rest of the journey all too quickly.