Review:

Toronto Star

The big, fat fantasy/sci-fi novel of the season avoids the supernatural, except as expressed in game worlds online. Canadian Cory Doctorow’s For the Win may even be labelled “probable” rather than “speculative” fiction.

Deirdre Baker, The Toronto Star

/ / News

Here’s a short interview I did about my reading habits with the Globe and Mail‘s My Books, My Place section:

I didn’t move to London so much as ooze there. I had a year of going back and forth a lot. April ’04 was when I actually landed. Now, I’m married to a Londoner and we have a little baby who’s a Londoner, and I’m a pretty happy Londoner.

I used to work out of our place until we had the baby. One of the things about getting my own office – my wife calls it the Mancave – was getting my own Napping Sofa. I have a daily schedule that involves an hour of lying on my Napping Sofa, reading.

Writers need to read. I do a lot of reading on the road. I picked up a book yesterday in New York – it’s a hard-boiled noir detective novel about burlesque called The Corpse Wore Pasties, and it’s quite funny. It’s from Hard Case Crime, which publishes books that look like those beautiful Chandlers you see in Mylar bags in antiquarian booksellers for $500, except brand new – it’s like they fell through a time warp.

/ / For The Win, News

Here’s part 2 of the interview I conducted in Second Life with the Copper Robot show. In this part, I talk about the research that went into For the Win.

“For anyone who’s my age and uses computers, you would have to undertake an extraordinary effort not to be a gamer,” he said. He started computer games at age 8, when a neighbor got Pong, and they became obsessed with the game.

“We think you’ve got to be somebody who spends 70 hours a week playing World of Warcraft in order to call yourself a gamer,” Cory said. However, that’s not true, he said. Likewise, most people think of gamers as either being children or overgrown children, but 50% of FarmVille players are 50-year-old women with high school diplomas, Doctorow said.

MP3 Link

/ / News, Podcast

Here’s part 2 of the interview I conducted in Second Life with the Copper Robot show. In this part, I talk about the research that went into For the Win.

“For anyone who’s my age and uses computers, you would have to undertake an extraordinary effort not to be a gamer,” he said. He started computer games at age 8, when a neighbor got Pong, and they became obsessed with the game.

“We think you’ve got to be somebody who spends 70 hours a week playing World of Warcraft in order to call yourself a gamer,” Cory said. However, that’s not true, he said. Likewise, most people think of gamers as either being children or overgrown children, but 50% of FarmVille players are 50-year-old women with high school diplomas, Doctorow said.

/ / News, Podcast


Part one of “The Jammie Dodgers and the Adventure of the Leicester Square Screening“, originally published on Shareable.net.

(Image: Tilt and shift – Leicester Square at night, a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No-Derivative-Works (2.0) image from rthakrar’s photostream)

Mastering by John Taylor Williams: wryneckstudio@gmail.com

John Taylor Williams is a full-time self-employed audio engineer, producer, composer, and sound designer. In his free time, he makes beer, jewelry, odd musical instruments and furniture. He likes to meditate, to read and to cook.

MP3 Link