Hello! Welcome to the Weekly Update. I am back from New York Comic Con. We will have some videos of the panels that I did there coming up on the YouTube channel at some point. There was a really fun one I did with Diana Gabaldon and with Terry Brooks, which I hope that you guys will enjoy. We got recordings by my team of all of these things, so we can post them for you.
Sorry to miss a week on you but I am, Bing! 50% of the way through Secret Project 4. That’s my main task for this month and I’m feeling pretty good about the revision. This will be the last of the secret project revisions that I have to do, which means that I will soon be able to go into Stormlight 5 again.
And speaking of that, I will probably be doing NaNoWriMo this November. This is where you try to write 50,000 words in one month, and I’ll be posting my progress and updates. I don’t know if I’ll be able to do it. You guys all joke about how fast I am as a writer, but I also have a lot of other things besides writing that I need to do in running a company. So I’m hoping that I’ll be able to do 50k in November. And, like I said, I’ll be posting my word counts. So if you’ve been looking for kind of a kick in the pants to get going on your writing, well, you can try to beat me in November. This might be one of the easiest Novembers to do it in. And so we call it SandoWriMo. I’ll be posting my updates each week in this Weekly Updates. I’ll tell you how many words I’m at.
We’ve got some cool things coming up because the Lost Metal is about a month away. This is the final of the Wax and Wayne series. And so I’ve got some cool things to tell you about that. Number one, we’ve been doing preview chapters on TOR.com. Chapter 10 is up right now. I like to have a large list, large chunk of preview chapters, just to give people a chance to kind of read up early and have discussions about it. Once the book comes out it’s kind of hard to have discussions about individual chapters, and I find it’s fun for the fans to jump on Reddit or on that TOR.com page and just have fun discussing a single chapter. It’s like having a single episode of a television show to do a discussion on. So if you want to read those you can but the book’s coming out in a month so you also don’t necessarily have to. You can put it off until then.
We have an update from the store. The Lost Metal hardcover is available for pre-order now. This is the signed, stamped, and numbered version of the book that also comes with a swag bundle. So we have a few personalizations we’re doing. I think they said we’re going to do a thousand of those this year. The personalizations we charge for and the money then goes to charity. Those will go very quickly because we’re only going to do a thousand of them. So watch. Go look at the pre-order. They may be gone already. But if not, maybe go pick up your bundle. We’ve got a really cool swag bundle to go along with the Wax and Wayne book.
So other things that we’re doing. We have the convention that we’re doing, Dragonsteel convention or Expo, we haven’t decided which one it’s going to be. I just call it Dragonsteel 2022. We opened up a new set of badges in case you missed the previous announcement about this. We still have some of them left and so if you were thinking of going and couldn’t make it because there weren’t enough badges, well, we do have some for sale.
We’re also going to be doing a charity Magic draft, and those ticket sales open on Monday, October 24th at 10:00 AM Mountain Time. This is a first come, first serve basis. There will be an overflow draft made available once the event sells out but I won’t be playing with those people. It’s still all for charity. The proceeds will go to the School Zone at the Primary Children’s Hospital. Basically this is for kids who are in the hospital for kind of longer term. We provide school materials and books and things to help them while they’re staying at the hospital. So go check that out. It’s one of the charities that we like to support. And the money from the draft, basically I buy the cards, and all the money that you donate will then go straight to the charity with us taking none of it. So if you want to play against me there will be some slots that’ll have a chance, not guaranteed, to play against me. And then there’ll be lots of other slots to just hang out at the con and play some Magic.
So a few other interesting things. Long update this week. Sorry, I’ve been gone. The Stormlight Mini Kickstarter is over. Wow, it went really well. And if you didn’t know, there’s some secrets being teased in this thing. So you may want to head over and find out a preview of a character coming up in the Cosmere sometime in the future.
We also want to give away some ARCs. These are advanced reader copies of our books. And we found we ran into a problem. It’s not a huge problem but we realized we’re kind of sending ARCs to all the same people over and over again, which doesn’t give us a lot of diversity in the different numbers of people who are getting these books from us. And so we thought we would start up a little program where you can apply if you are an influencer and just want to get an early copy of some of my books. We’re calling it the Ambassador Program. This is not a quid pro quo. You may give us a bad review. It is totally viable. Don’t stress about that. But we just want to cast a wider net than we have been casting and give people who haven’t gotten these early copies from us a chance to get them. You will have to have some sort of review mechanism, meaning a website, BookTube, TikTok, or something like that, where you are consistently posting reviews and things like that. It is meant for reviewers. But details are in the description if you are interested in being part of that program.
Last thing on the list is my BYU class. This is my university course. We will be having the application window open very soon. It only opens for one hour. You have to submit your applications between 10:00 and 11:00 PM Mountain Time on October 23rd. A random drawing of the applications group will determine the 65 applicants that we’re going to read and consider. There’s just too many submissions otherwise. We can’t actually read them all. And we find from among this number that we can narrow it down to the 15 who get in the class. There’s an online application form that will ask you to answer questions and submit writing samples. The writing samples we need, they can be in the opening for a novel, that’s what we recommend, 1,500 to 3,000 words.
You do not need to be a current BYU student. This is an evening class. You will have to go to BYU evening classes and sign up. This is easier than a normal application process to the university but it is something you’re going to have to do. They do require it to be local. During the years of the pandemic we were able to do remote. So you will have to be able to attend the class in person and you will have to go through BYU evening classes application process to join the class. If you get into the class you will be allowed to do this. There is a fee. It used to be pretty cheap. It’s gone up over the years and I think it’s up to, like, a couple grand even right now to take this class. So that’s all university protocol. I’ll point you their direction if you aren’t currently a BYU student about how to do that you shouldn’t worry and stress about getting into BYU because in this case you’re just taking this one class. But you will have to sign up for the class that way. So short version, turn in your applications on that day. If you aren’t a BYU student and you get into the 15 person, ask us for instructions on how to do the rest.
Otherwise, hopefully next week’s Weekly Update will not be quite this long. But thank you all so much for hanging out with me, and I will be back and give you more in the following weeks.