On this week’s Writing Excuses podcast episode, Mary, Dan, Howard, and I talk about Orson Scott Card’s M.I.C.E. Quotient. That stands for Milieu, Idea, Character, and Event, and it is a valuable tool for improving your writing.

The final WARBREAKER annotation is up. Next week my assistant Peter will start putting up draft chapters of MYTHWALKER, the unfinished book that I lifted Siri and Vivenna from, among other things. These will go in the deleted scenes section of the library filed under Warbreaker. I need to warn you though that the book is really bad. I abandoned it with good reason. But sharing it with you is in line with my philosophy on the whole WARBREAKER experiment, as I explain it here. All the old drafts are still available here, so you can see how things progress from clunky, malformed initial idea to polished final execution and one of Library Journal‘s five best science fiction and fantasy novels of 2009.

There’s also a new collection of Twitter posts up.