This afternoon I am heading off to the Sharjah Children’s Reading Festival in the United Arab Emirates. For those of you who are in the vicinity, I look forward to seeing you there! So far I’ve listed a panel on Thursday the 23rd on my events calendar, and I’ll try to add more details when they’re forthcoming.

In this week’s new Writing Excuses episode, What Do I Do With All This Blank Space?, we talk about how to fill the space on the first few pages of your story. Those are the few pages where you have to convince the reader to keep going, as the first page is often the only opportunity you have to get the reader’s attention at all.

Last week, in Tor.com’s continuing reread posts for Words of Radiance, Carl Engle-Laird viewed the storm with grumpy old men and cheeky whippersnappers. This week, Alice Arneson discusses the outcome of two incomprehensible experiences and their respective forms of madness.

The Rithmatist is on sale on Kindle (and may be price-matched at other vendors) until May 4th in the UK. I have country-specific links in the tabs here. And for everyone else (including those in the UK), my novella Perfect State came out a couple of weeks ago, if you missed the news.

My assistant Adam has updated the Twitter posts archive for April.