As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been writing a play, tentatively titled The Piano Bench: A Love Story with Evening and Ghosts. Today I finished the draft script, which I’ll be passing on the fine folks at Regina Lyric Musical Theatre, which I hope will be staging the play (with me directing it) this fall. Since it’s …
The audiobook version of my young adult fantasy novel Spirit Singer (the book which is also soon to have a new print and ebook edition from Tyche Books), is now for sale at Audible.com, which is exciting because a) you never know, someone might buy it, and b) I narrated it myself. Spirit Singer is …
[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/uploads//2013/01/Tall-Trees.mp3[/podcast] Sometimes science is focused on really big questions: where did life come from? How did the universe begin? But sometimes, the focus is much smaller. Sometimes, researchers set out to answer a simple question, one that many people have perhaps asked, but no one has ever set out systematically to answer. A question, for …
I know that sports teams have avid followings in many cities, but I doubt there are many places whose pride and interest in a team exceeds that of the fans of the Saskatchewan Roughriders. I won’t delve into it here—there are whole books about it, not to mention art exhibits—but although there are certainly people …
I’m very pleased to announce that Bundoran Press, a small Canadian press that’s put out some terrific books in its short life and has a new owner and managing editor, Aurora Award-winning author Hayden Trenholm, has bought my science fiction novel Right to Know (that’s the working title–it could still change), with the goal of …
Many years ago I took it into my head to turn a short story of mine, “The Dragonslayer, “into one-act stage musical, intended for high schools. In brief, it was about a teenager who was a whiz at killing dragons when playing Dungeons & Dragons, who gets called into an alternate world to deal with …
My 11-year-old daughter Alice and I, during a before-school stop in a coffee shop this morning, were discussing books that have been made into movies: specifically The Hunger Games, which won several People’s Choice Awards last night. “Why are the books always so much better than the movies?” asked Alice. A question for the ages. …
I’ve occasionally been called on to talk to various groups—teachers, librarians, others—about science fiction. It’s an interesting challenge, since you can’t be sure that your audience knows the first thing about the topic. I start, of course, by establishing my bona fides: talking about my own writing and publications. Then I go on to say …
A quick meme for today, which I picked up from Norman Geras: the first lines of the first blog posts for each month of 2012…which in my case tend to be science columns! When the first post happened to be one of my Saturday Specials, where I posted some bit of the many different types …
[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/uploads//2013/01/Planets-Everywhere.mp3[/podcast] You don’t have to be very old to remember a time when we didn’t know if there were any planets anywhere else in the universe beyond those in our own solar system. Oh, sure, scientists and science fiction writers had long assumed these extrasolar planets existed, but the stars were so distant it seemed …
One thing we have lots of in this old house is pottery, possibly because my grandmother-in-law, Anne Owen (Nancy) Goodfellow, was from Stoke-on-Trent in England, a city in Staffordshire that is also known as The Potteries. This week’s Retro Sunday items are two ceramic jugs I’ve noticed for years but never looked at in detail. …
The latest installment in my “The Space-Time Continuum” column on science fiction and fantasy that appears in Freelance, the newsletter of the Saskatchewan Writers Guild; inspired, as you will see, by a panel I attended at the World Fantasy Convention in Toronto. There are, broadly speaking, three kinds of fantasy tales. There is the kind …
