Theoryland of the Wheel of Time

There have been a couple of reader polls lately that my books did well in. SFFWorld polled its forum members for readers' favorite books of 2010, and The Way of Kings came out on top, with Towers of Midnight in second. In addition, Tor.com held a poll to determine the best science fiction and fantasy novels of the decade, and Mistborn: The Final Empire came in at #9. They've since posted an appreciation of the novel by Jason Denzel from Dragonmount. Towers of Midnight at #11, The Way of Kings at #12, and The Gathering Storm at #15 also contributed toward me managing to accrue the most votes of any author, spread among seven books. It's a surprise and quite an honor. I'm glad so many people are reading and enjoying the books.

Another poll that's currently ongoing is the Locus Poll and Survey. (Locus is the newsmagazine of the science fiction and fantasy field, and is a fantastic resource for anyone who wants to keep up with the industry.) You don't have to be a subscriber to fill out the survey and vote in the poll, but subscribers' votes count double. None of my books are listed as nominees, but they accept write-in votes.

It should probably be mentioned that SFFWorld is not an incredibly friendly environment for WoT fans, so most of us avoid it. That probably affects their poll numbers at least a little bit. It's hard to get a scientific poll at any of the fantasy forums because they're all specialized to a point.

Voting on the long list of nominees for the David Gemmell Legend Award is finishing up at the end of the month, and The Way of Kings and Towers of Midnight are both on the list. If you haven't voted yet, give the full list of nominees a look. (Multiple votes don't count.)

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Suvudu is doing yet another cage match where they pit characters from different series against each other and have them fight (usually to the death). This year both Perrin Aybara and Vin are in the pool of contestants. The writeups Suvudu does for these battles can be interesting, and often don't align with how the readers vote. Anyway, if you're interested in this sort of thing, take a look at the bracket.

suvudu

In this week's Writing Excuses episode, Dan Wells, Howard Tayler, and I are once again joined by Sherrilyn Kenyon. We discuss perseverance—sticking in there in your writing career. Sherri has some great examples from her own experience, so check it out. The newest Warbreaker annotation covers the shortest chapter in the book. I considered making this the longest annotation, but decided against it. It's still much longer than the chapter itself.

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