ALCATRAZ VERSUS THE SHATTERED LENS has now been released in the UK (and presumably also in Australia and New Zealand). That means all four books are now out, and since they all came out this year, it should be relatively easy to find them on shelves and in ebook form. (Note that all four books are still out of print in the US, though the audiobooks ARE currently available in the US.).

The most recent Writing Excuses episode is a microcasting episode touching on the following questions. Give it a listen!

• What’s your first step in the rewriting process?
• How do you write Artificial Intelligences as characters?
• Tactful promotion: how do you get nominated for a Hugo or Nebula?
• How do you decide whether or not to take an offer from a publisher?
• Do you use a writing notebook? How, and for what?
• What methods do you use to test the “coolness” and/or viability of a story idea?
• What genre or style do you read that is outside of the one(s) in which you write?

Tor.com’s reread of THE WAY OF KINGS continues with chapters 13 and 14, the battle with the chasmfiend and Kaladin’s first attempt to change Bridge Four.

Readers have been asking if my forthcoming novellas LEGION and THE EMPEROR’S SOUL will be released in audio versions. The answer is that they will be—we have deals made for these, but I’m not sure how quickly the audiobooks will be released compared to the book versions. I’ll let you know when I have more details.

Another question commonly asked is whether Michael Kramer and Kate Reading will return to voice the audiobook for A MEMORY OF LIGHT. The answer is yes, and the audiobook will definitely be released the same day as the hardcover.

All of my books are now out in audio editions, including the last three Alcatraz books that were missing audiobooks for a few years. There are two different kinds of audiobooks of mine that have come out: standard unabridged readings (from Macmillan Audio and Recorded Books) and full-cast dramatizations (from GraphicAudio). Which type each book has depends on how contracts were negotiated.

Recorded Books has unabridged readings of Elantris, Warbreaker, and all four Alcatraz books.

GraphicAudio has full-cast dramatizations of Elantris and Warbreaker.

Macmillan Audio has unabridged readings of Mistborn 1, 2, 3 and The Alloy of Law; The Way of Kings; and The Gathering Storm and Towers of Midnight.

Amazon has most of the above for sale. Audible has everything except for the GraphicAudio editions. iTunes also has many of the books.

Tor.com has a free unabridged reading of the novelette “Firstborn.”

At the World Science Fiction Convention in Reno a couple of weeks ago, we recorded a few Writing Excuses podcast episodes. The first one features Patrick Rothfuss, and we discussed suspension of disbelief. Check it out.

I’ve put up the third chapter of my unfinished novel MYTHWALKER from ten years ago.

The big announcement today is that the first ebooks of ALCATRAZ VERSUS THE EVIL LIBRARIANS are now available, in French. Currently you can buy the first three books, and I assume the fourth one will come out around the time it gets published in print form in France.

I do want to get the ebooks out in English too, but for now my French publisher is being more progressive. For one thing, the books are being put out DRM-free as I suggested to them. That means you should be able to buy the ePub version (from anywhere other than Kindle, which uses a different format) and load it on your Nook or Sony Reader with no problem. Now, I haven’t been able to verify that DRM is definitely not applied by all of the stores below, but some of the linked pages specifically mention there is no DRM. So I hope it’s the case across all of the vendors.

• Kindle
• iBooks
• Feedbooks
• ePagine
• Immatériel

This year’s World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon) will be held in Melbourne, Australia from September 2nd through September 6th. Unfortunately, I won’t be in attendance since I’ll be going to Dragon*Con in Atlanta that same weekend. However, every year the members of Worldcon vote on and present the Hugo Awards, and I have three books that came out in 2009 that are eligible to be nominated in the Best Novel category: WARBREAKER (which you can download for free here–feel free to pass the link on to any Worldcon members you know!), ALCATRAZ VERSUS THE KNIGHTS OF CRYSTALLIA, and THE GATHERING STORM. My editors Moshe Feder and Harriet McDougal are eligible for nomination in the Best Editor, Long Form category, and artists Dan Dos Santos (for the WARBREAKER cover–which a fairly random blogger has just named the best cover for a 2009 SF book by an LDS writer) and Darrell K. Sweet (for the THE GATHERING STORM cover) are eligible in the Best Professional Artist category. (Technically I believe my MISTBORN 2 annotations are also eligible for a nomination in the Best Related Work category, since I finished with them back in April, but I haven’t even considered that those might be worthy of recognition.) Any member of this year’s or last year’s Worldcon may nominate until March 13th, after which only members of the 2010 Worldcon will be able to vote on the final ballot.

Robert Jordan never won a Hugo Award. Not one of his books even garnered enough nominations to earn a spot on a final ballot. On one hand I think it’s a shame that someone who was such a monolith in the field and who did so much for the mainstream success of fantasy publishing should never have been so recognized (as I said back in 2006 when I advocated his nomination for the World Fantasy Life Achievement award). On the other hand, his absence from the lists may simply illustrate that his fan base doesn’t overlap much with the voting base for the awards. If few of Robert Jordan’s fans attend Worldcon, it can hardly be a surprise that he was never nominated for a Hugo. Still, I think nominating one of Robert Jordan’s final three books would be something Worldcon members could feel proud to do, though I don’t know that this year will be the best opportunity for that. We’ll have to see what happens.

If THE GATHERING STORM did get nominated, I’m torn about how that would make me feel. We don’t often realize how much we miss something–or someone–until they’re gone. So, in that regard, I think a nomination might be very respectful. However, to have a Wheel of Time book finally get nominated only after Robert Jordan has passed away would also feel somewhat odd, as I do feel this book would have been better if he’d been around to complete it. Still, the reader response to the book has been excellent. I guess I’ll just leave it in your court, readers. If you decide to nominate the book, I suspect Robert Jordan would be honored. But I’m not going to push or lobby for nominations. (That’s frowned upon anyway.)

This week’s episode of Writing Excuses…wait, now that I think about it, Writing Excuses should also be eligible for a Best Related Work Hugo nomination. Huh…that would be an even more unlikely coup than our Parsec Award win last year. Well anyway, this week’s podcast episode discusses collaboration.

In the most recent MISTBORN 3 annotations, I talk about Lord Fedre and some spoilers as well as Vin’s attempt to defeat the sedative.

This month I’ll be answering questions over at GoodReads’ fantasy book club, following up on their discussion of WARBREAKER. Have something you’ve been dying to ask me, particularly about WARBREAKER? Head on over there.

Rob Bedford sent me a note to let me know he’d named WARBREAKER a standout book in SFFWorld’s fantasy review of 2009. Over on his own blog he also named me his MVP Author of 2009. Thanks, Rob! Unfortunately, this does not come with a trophy.

Finally, a note about THE NAME OF THE WIND author Patrick Rothfuss’s Worldbuilders charity drive that’s ending on January 15th. Last year he raised $114,000 for Heifer International, and this year he’s matching donations at 50%. So far people have donated $87,000, making the total more than $130,000. As a carrot for donating, Pat is collecing a large number of prizes that will be given out in a lottery–each $10 donated gets you one ticket for the drawing. Over a thousand books have been donated so far to give out as prizes. I helped contribute one of the biggest items: a copy of THE GATHERING STORM that is signed not only by myself and Harriet McDougal, Robert Jordan’s wife and editor, but by many people who helped make the book as great as it was: Tom Doherty, Tor founder and publisher; Robert Jordan’s assistants Maria Simons and Alan Romanczuk; Moshe Feder, my editor at Tor for my own books; my agent, Joshua Bilmes; Paul Stevens, my in-house editor at Tor; Dana Giusio, a VP at Macmillan, Tor’s parent company; Phyllis Azar, head of marketing at Tor-Forge; Irene Gallo, Tor’s fantastic art director; and last but not at all least, Dot Lin, the Tor publicist extraordinaire who lined up so many great signings in my recent tour. Anyone who donates at least $10 will have a chance to win this book (or a huge number of other great items, like some kind of book by Neil Gaiman that Pat is packaging with a rock), and the more you donate the better chance you’ll have of winning. I think Heifer International is a worthy cause, so why not lend a hand before the January 15th deadline?

Okay, so I’m off by a few hours. Sorry about that. I wanted to get this posted on Tuesday, but it will have to be a wee-hours Wednesday post. Scroll down for pun stupidity. Since It’s so late, I’m going to hold off on those annotations (since I have to edit them and the like) until Thursday.

Those of you who check the main coppermind.brandonsanderson.com page might have noticed that I did a sweeping update of the book percentages in the top left corner. I’d let this section languish, so I decided to throw up all of the projects that I know I need to get done by next year this time, along with a few projects I’d LIKE to get done by then. We’ll see how many of these I can clear off the list by then.

First off, we have the long-awaited Warbreaker draft. I really need to get to this, as it’s the book that will be coming out after Mistborn 3. Our hope was to get it out fairly quickly, perhaps at a 10 month interval, then publish the sequel sometime during the holiday season. However, before any of that can happen, I’ll need to get to revising. This is the project my agent wants me to be working on. (You’ll notice that writing the sequel is on the list of things to do as well.)

Also on the list is Alcatraz 3. 2 is done and turned in, and I’m waiting for the next round of revisions on that one. I’d like to have three turned in early, just like I did for two, and this is actually what I’m working on right now. I figure that I need to get it done before turning my attention to Warbreaker, since I’ll spend a lot of time editing there, then want to move on to do the sequel while the first one is still fresh in my mind.

The Liar of Partinel (a.k.a Dragonsteel Book One.) This is the series I’m doing after Warbreaker, so I kind of jumped the gun on writing it. But, it needed to be done because I’m going to have to let this one simmer for a long time. I’m planning a long-ish series for that one, rather than the two book quickie for Warbreaker. That means I need plenty of time to plan out and plot based on events in the first book. That means getting it done early enough to plan out the rest of the series. (I hate ‘make it up as you go along’ series.)

That leaves a couple of backburner ‘on spec’ projects. Dark One, something I’ve been trying to finish off for two years now, is a YA fantasy. The Super Secret Project is something I’m not really talking about right non (as you might have guessed) but I’ll do so eventually.

Mixed up in all of that are a bunch of other edits I need to do. I had no idea how much I’d have to juggle things like this when I got published.

Anyway, stupid pun time! Apparently, there was a big video game release last month while I was on book tour. Who knew?