Theoryland of the Wheel of Time

Planning to attend the midnight release of A Memory of Light at the BYU Bookstore? Want to see Robert Jordan's wife Harriet McDougal at the event? Then be sure to check out the newest details. Harriet can't stay up for the midnight release itself, but she will be pre-signing the books with me, and we will both appear at a reading/Q&A earlier in the evening of January 7th. This will NOT be at the bookstore itself due to space issues, but will take place at the nearby Provo High School auditorium at 8:00 p.m. So if you're driving or flying in from out of town for this event, make sure you go to the right place at 8:00 Monday evening! That's one week from today, folks. It's coming!

One thing among many that I find cool about the Wheel of Time fandom is how much readers like to help other people. There's one group in particular that has taken the idea of being "servants of all" to heart and gotten very involved in charitable activities. The group I'm talking about is called the Waygate Foundation, which launched this year (although its members have been involved in charitable giving for years though organizations involved with the big fan sites such as TarValon and Dragonmount).

Waygate's mission is to support and engage science fiction and fantasy authors and fans in global philanthropic endeavors. Board members include Harriet McDougal, Robert Jordan's cousin/brother Wilson Grooms, and me. Maria Simons is also a director, and the driving force behind the whole thing is Karen Campbell. Waygate's current campaign is called "A Story Begins . . . " and has a goal of raising $10,000 partially for Patrick Rothfuss's Worldbuilders charity—exactly the sort of charitable endeavor that Waygate wants to help other writers and fans become involved in. When the campaign's goal is met, Waygate will share a sneak peek at the forthcoming Wheel of Time Encyclopedia that Team Jordan is hard at work on.

For more information, please see Waygate's website and Facebook page. I think the way Waygate wants to help writers and fans give back to their community (and beyond) is a great idea, so I hope you will check it out.

fandom

Speaking of Facebook, my Facebook URL has changed. So if you used to visit my Facebook page via a bookmark or typing it in manually, the new URL to use is facebook.com/BrandSanderson. Now the link matches my Twitter handle, twitter.com/BrandSanderson. If you're curious as to why that is, Twitter handles max out at 15 characters, and BrandonSanderson is one character too long. With that restriction, BrandSanderson seemed like the best option that was available. Facebook has no such limit, but there are plenty of other Brandon Sandersons out there, and one of them already claimed the full URL on Facebook. Alas!

Anyway, I used to have two different URLs on Facebook, one of them my profile and one of them a page. Both locations posted the same things, so if you were following one but not the other, you didn't miss out on anything I said—but the conversation in the posts' comments was fractured into two and switching back and forth between the two got confusing. Well, Facebook finally allowed me to combine the page into my profile, so everyone who had hit "like" on my Page is now a subscriber to my profile. (There were about 5,000 of you who were following both locations before.)

Facebook still has a way of usually hiding my updates from your newsfeed, so if you want to make sure you see all of my posts, go to my profile and mouseover the "Subscribed" button. Under "Show in News Feed" click on "Settings . . . " and pick "All Updates." You can also put a checkmark by "Get Notifications" if you really want to make sure you never miss anything I post. That may be a bit of overkill though, unless you're just that interested. My assistant has also uploaded a new Twitter posts archive showing what and who I was talking about/to on Twitter for the last six weeks or so.

Earlier this year when I went to Chattanooga for a convention, I sat down with Derek Pearson for an interview. It's about 20 minutes long and covers a wide range of topics. There's a tiny bit in there about working on the Wheel of Time, but it's mostly about how I got my start as a writer. Check it out.

Writing Excuses has three new episodes, finishing off our seventh season. Episode 52 is another microcasting episode, talking about embarrassing early projects of ours, how to tell if an idea is too big for a particular story, how to avoid discouragement, and how to handle multiple magic systems in one book. Episode 53 talks about Secret History, which is a type of alternate history where historical events are given fantastical explanations (such as with Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter). And the final episode, Episode 54, talks about four ways the publishing industry is changing. Next week marks the beginning of season eight!