Tsunami Relief Auctions, Writing & Illustrating for Young Readers + Updates

Tor has donated a few of my books for auction at Genre for Japan, a charity drive to support the British Red Cross's Japan Tsunami Appeal. The auctions include a THE WAY OF KINGS audiobook, hardcovers of THE GATHERING STORM and TOWERS OF MIDNIGHT, and a Mistborn boxset. You can go to those links to bid (in UK pounds); bidding and auction rules are here. There are over 130 other items up for auction as well, so check it out.

A couple of years ago, I was an instructor at the Writing & Illustrating for Young Readers conference in Utah. I'm unable to do it again this year in June due to my Europe tour (more on that later as details are finalized), but it's a valuable experience if you want to break in to creating books for children. Instructors this year include Louise Plummer and Holly Black, among others. The workshops are filling up fast, so it's a good idea to register quickly.

Audible.com is once again putting on its Tournament of Audiobooks, and TOWERS OF MIDNIGHT is one of the competitors. The first round is underway, and so far TOWERS is narrowly beating out AMERICAN ASSASSIN. If you want to vote, click on the Best Sellers tab. (THE GATHERING STORM won last year's tournament.)

Suvudu has Vin up against Jon Snow in the semifinals of this year's cage match. Since Jon Snow hails from George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, he's probably going to win. Which I'm perfectly fine with, as George is a true master of a writer. Besides, I really have no interest in seeing both Vin and Perrin winning their semifinal matches (Perrin will be pitted against Quick Ben from Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen, who is no pushover) and facing each other in the final.

Ta'veren Tees is having a contest where customers can win free Wheel of Time shirts. See their contest rules here.

This week's Writing Excuses podcast episode features Larry Correia and Robison Wells joining Dan and Howard to talk about writing action scenes. The most recent WARBREAKER annotation covers more on Siri and Susebron's relationship. And I have a new batch of Twitter posts up.