So, I’m writing this play. Its working title is The Piano Bench: A Love Story with Music and Ghosts. If all goes well it might even make it on stage late next year. Why? Well, therein lies a blog post. The house in which I live has been in my wife’s family since 1939. (It …
On Saturday I attended a book launch at the Regent Park branch of the Regina Public Library, and no, it wasn’t for one of mine: it was for Only One Round: One Couple’s Journey to Living the Good Life, by Steve and Reneé Wallace. I was thrilled to be asked, because Steve and Reneé were …
I posted this back in July, but it seems apropos to post it again today, with the release of the first movie in the new trilogy based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s book The Hobbit. It’s the first chapter of the biography of Tolkien I wrote for Enslow Publishers, entitled J.R.R. Tolkien, Master of Imaginary Worlds..and it’s …
I don’t very often follow up on things I’ve been “tagged” with in the online world, but I was tagged twice for “The Next Big Thing,” both times by writers from Australia, and that seems somehow karmically important. So… The way this is supposed to work is that if you get tagged you answer10 questions, …
Here’s a rather metaphysical question for you: why do we strive for perfection? Cold logic tells us that perfection is impossible. As a writer, I know perfectly (sorry) well that I will never in my life write something perfect. In fact, I know logically that it’s impossible to even define what a perfect piece of …
Later this morning I’m expecting a phone call from a reporter at the Regina Leader Post, who wants my science-fiction-writer take on the future of the city, ca. 2035. Of course the city has its own rather boring (well, from an SF writer’s perspective) plan for the futuristic city of Regina, which is full of …
[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/uploads//2012/12/Circadian-Deosynchrony-and-the-Blue-Light-Special.mp3[/podcast] We’re coming up on the shortest day of the year in the northern hemisphere: at the latitude I live at, in Regina, Saskatchewan, that means that today the sun rose at 8:49 a.m. and will set at 4:54 p.m. We’ll lose a few more minutes yet before the winter solstice. That’s not a lot …
“Edward Willett” isn’t a name you trip over everywhere you go, but it’s not exactly rare. Nor is it new: it crops up in genealogies and histories down through the past few centuries. It’s true that these days if you Google “Edward Willett” (and doesn’t everyone?) the majority of the links will relate to me, …
My daughter likes to write, too. Here’s a recent piece, illustrated by the author. Kingdom in Shadows By Alice Willett The Kingdom of Averendel was dying. One girl looked out of her window, the rain drizzling outside. The girl was crying. Her little sister came in with a letter. The girl turned, wiping tears from …
Playing with new audio software today at the same time I was picking out a song for an audition tonight, I made the recording below of Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields’s “The Way You Look Tonight,” from the Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers movie Swing Time. It won’t make anyone forget Fred Astaire’s version, or Tony Bennett’s …
TSR. Gygax. The names may mean nothing to you, but to me, they were once words of power, for TSR (Tactical Studies Rules Inc.) published Dungeon & Dragons…and Gary Gygax, who cofounded the company in 1973 with childhood friend Don Kaye, created that seminal fantasy role-playing game, along with Dave Arneson. Now comes news that …
Back in high school, I was a debater…kind of. I say kind of, because like football, debate was something I did for only one year. (What, you don’t think football players usually end up on the debate team? Then you didn’t go to a small enough school.) I don’t know that I was a very …
