Hey! Brandon with your Weekly Update. An exciting one this week. We are at, Bing! 90% on Stormlight 5. And Skyward Legacy is at, Bing! 77%. So both of those are getting very close to being done. You can follow along. I’m supposed to turn mine in one month from the 15th, which was last week. We have less than a month left for me to finish Stormlight 5. I’m on track. I’m looking good. I finished my revisions. I actually got them done a little early, and together the revisions added about 1%, and then I got another 1% this week. So that’s how we’re at 2%, even though I spent a couple of days this week doing revisions.

Let’s talk about the Defiant release. It releases today, November 21st. This is the fourth and final book of the Skyward series. I am very excited for you to be able to read this book. You can get it everywhere you would normally get books. So, if you want to participate and you do live locally, we’re opening the doors at 6 o’clock, and everyone’s going to be seated by 7:00, and then the event takes place 7:00 to 9:00. We will be streaming it starting at 7:00 PM, probably a little bit before that, I would guess. The streaming team is nodding at me. So 7:00 PM Mountain Standard Time. So you can show up here on this channel and you can listen to our cool announcements, and you can listen to the reading from Stormlight 5, and things like that. So hope you are going to join us for that. And either way, I hope you enjoy Defiant. I like writing exciting endings, and I feel like this is going to fulfill your expectations for that.

So, we do have a lot of cool merch that we have been announcing the last few weeks. Remember, all of these will be for sale at our convention, but also go up on our store this Friday. That means if you want one of those awesome sweaters, they go up on Friday. I have heard that the product team is a little worried we might sell out of those. So that’s the item that we have the least number of. Theoretically, there should be ones available on Friday, but you may want to check early when those go up. They’ll be on the Dragonsteel store. We also have new bundle deals on the store. So check them out this weekend at Dragonsteelbooks.com.

Speaking of awesome merch, every year, for charity, in association with my foundation, Lightweaver, we have ornaments that we do. And all of our proceeds from these go to charity. This year we’re supporting the Primary Children’s Hospital, the School Zone, which is a local hospital. Basically the School Zone is for kids who have to spend long term time in the hospital. It helps them with their education and with other activities and things like that. We are one of the big funders of that through our charity efforts. So your money will go toward helping sick kids with their education. And we have five ornaments this year that you can get. We have the limited edition secret project ornaments, wooden ornaments based off of the cover art of the various secret projects, the Dragonsteel cover art. And we have a nice Defiant/Skyward themed ornament with all of the ships on it, and a nice 2023 on it. So those will go live when Jane? 

JANE: They’re on Black Friday.

BRANDON: On Black Friday as well. Yeah. So this upcoming Friday, these will go live. I have Jane here who’s in charge of the Foundation. And just so you know, money that comes through us, none of it is spent on administration for our charity. I fund all the administration fees and all the salaries and everything like that, so that your money can go directly to the causes. We’re still getting together kind of a report on what we spent our charity money on this year. We had a couple of things, such as selling the numbered copies of some of the secret projects. I’ll try to get back and be accountable to you guys for where that money ended up going. But do know, I pay for all the incidentals that come through with running a charity.

So, Gollancz decided to do some cool hardcovers of the Stormlight Archive. We’ve been pushing them to put the books out a little more availably. Availably? A little more in the UK. It’s sometimes hard to find the hardcovers of some of my books, and indeed, we have been persuading them to bind them in a single volume rather than splitting them. And so they have done these nice, sprayed edges versions of the Stormlight Archive hardcovers. You might have seen them if you’re browsing Reddit. They’ve got this red design on the sides. They look really slick. They’re going to be shipping those on December 7th. And so those are available only in the UK and places to which the UK distributes. They don’t ship to the US, but those of you in the right places, you can order those online and get them shipped to you. That’s just—it’s nice that they do that because our shipping to the UK is still pretty monstrous. We’re finding ways to try to make that cheaper. But we do encourage the UK publisher to do some cool things over there, just because I know it’s hard for you to get the leatherbounds over there.

We do have lots of Black Friday deals from multiple retailers, so check out the description. Lots of people have been sending those in, book sellers and things. So you should look at those. And of course, on our store we’ll have all sorts of fun things on Black Friday, all the way, of course, through the weekend.

So anyway, I hope to see many of you at the convention. I hope I’ve been seeing you, actually, already, because I’m recording this on Thursday, but when you’re seeing this, I will be at the convention. And I will look forward to talking to many of you, and I hope that you enjoy Defiant. It is out right now.