Perfect Shadow Cover Art Revealed!

I’m pleased to be able to announce that Raymond Swanland has turned in the final art for the cover and interior illustrations for the Subterranean Press limited editions of Perfect Shadow. Mr. Swanland has a storied career as an artist with the Oddworld video game series, a fantasy artist, comic book illustrator, and has even created work for the Magic: The Gathering card game. You can see more of his work here.

If you haven’t yet bought the limited edition, go here to order your copy now. (Please note that the lettered edition is sold out, but the limited edition is still available as of this posting.)

And a hat tip to Michael at Mad Hatter’s Bookshelf & Book Review for breaking the story!

 

Web Chat

This coming Friday (or Saturday, if you’re in Australia), we will be having a live web chat for an hour, or maybe just a smidge more, at 3am GMT. For those of you on the West Coast of America, like I am, that’s 8pm PST on Friday, October 7th. But, good news, this really isn’t for those of you who are on the West Coast! This is for my Australian fans. I will be talking, live, into the video camera, while you guys submit your questions over IM.

Though I scheduled the webchat to be most convenient for my Australian fans, anyone is welcome to come. The internet address is: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/brent-weeks. You can also access it via the Ning Brent Weeks forum here: http://brentweeks.ning.com/. I envision, first, answering questions about the Night Angel Trilogy, then about The Lightbringer Trilogy, and then about the writing process or getting published.

We’ve never done this before, so we’re kind of pushing the frontiers, so please be patient if there are any technical difficulties. (We have checked it out beforehand, and it looks like everything will work, but being experimental means inviting trouble. 🙂  )

For those of you to whom 3am GMT is actually 3am, we will be doing a second chat, following the same format, 14 hours later for my UK fans at 5pm GMT, Saturday (again, everyone is welcome, I’m just doing my best to make this easy for my fans in other parts of the world).

(As a nod to my fans in South Africa who seem to keep asking, those times are: 5am, Saturday, October 8th and 7pm on Saturday, October 8th). Hope to see you there!

*UPDATE*

To participate in the chat, you can either submit your questions via the Ning chat system (which we’ll be monitoring) and just watch the video, or you can log-in to the UStream site from Ning with your Facebook or UStream account and chat in the UStream chatroom while watching the video.

Writing Advice: Names in Fantasy Novels

After taking a one-month hiatus for travel and while I was finishing initial drafts of The Blinding Knife, the Writing Advice Post is back! This month, I am happy to address, in so far as my limited lights are able to illumine, how to come up with names for a fantasy novel. I chat at relative length about aesthetics, culture, history, social and commercial concerns. If you’re interested, please click here to see the post.

Also, I opine about this:

 

Color Quiz: En Francais

Due to the Gallic genius of Bragelonne (and the generous cooperation of my English-language publisher, Orbit — thank you Alex!), the color quiz that I originally wrote to describe a little bit about the world of The Seven Satrapies and the magic users who inhabit it is now live in French.

Bragelonne has translated and coded anew the quiz here. If you enjoy it, please “like” the Facebook page for both The Black Prism and Bragelonne, and be on the lookout for Le Prisme noir, coming in October!

Because I Love Australia…

… and the UK, too. (Just in smaller font.)

I am going to be attempting an experiment which I have every reason to believe will have catastrophic results. That’s right: I’m going to invite technology to run amok in my home. For Australians, before anyone else, I will be doing a video chat on Saturday, October 8th at 1pm (Sydney time). Originally, I had hoped to just do one video chat because I have a strong suspicion it will just be me talking to myself. Then I realized that my main fan bases are on three equidistant points around the globe. So if I do a video chat at a reasonable time for me, my fans in either the UK or Australia would be getting screwed (I mean, I’m cool and everything, but I wouldn’t stay up until 3am to hear me talk. So I don’t expect you to do so, either).

So my elegant solution? Risk embarrassment and loneliness twice. Australia, you get the first chat, and possibly the technical difficulties. Then, the next day, I will host another video chat for my brethren across the pond, even if some of your ilk do call people like me “gingers”. The UK chat will be at 6pm, Saturday, October 8th (UK time).

Of course, I won’t be checking your IP address to see where you’re coming from and all are welcome. The chats will be held at:

3AM on Saturday October 8th (Greenwich Mean Time)

0

and

5PM on Saturday, October 8th (Greenwich Mean Time)

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The video chat will welcome you to send in your questions via  a chat channel. My interviewer will then ask me the questions and we’ll do our best together to keep things organized and flowing. I expect each chat to last about an hour, but if the audience is reasonably small, I will do my best to answer all questions.

I’ll post the link on this page a few days before the chat, and you can always easily find it through my Ning pages here.

 

Mysterious Galaxy: Redondo Beach This Friday

To help celebrate the release of the mass market paperback of The Black Prism and the opening of the new Redondo Beach location of the justly-famed Mysterious Galaxy, I will be flying down to California this Friday to do a quick signing. If you’re in the area, please come and see me and check out the new store! If you haven’t heard, they’re kind of a big deal. If you’re interested in science fiction, mystery, fantasy, and horror, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a store with more knowledgeable staff or better selection.  I’ll be reading previously unseen chapters from my work, and signing your books at 7:30 pm at 2810 Artesia Blvd, Redondo Beach, CA 90278, on Friday, September 23rd.

 

Number 1!

Thank you so much to everyone who spread the word on Thursday about the e-book promotion for The Way of Shadows. And if you’re new to my work, thanks for giving me a shot! I don’t have any numbers yet from all the other major e-tailers, but I am beyond delighted to say that I had a few golden hours in the sun.

And I’m a redhead. So really, a few hours is all I can handle. Wonder if I can get The Help to hand me my SPF 75?

Again, thank you so, so much. And hey, check out that other book too. I hear it’s got ninjas.

$1.99 e-Book

If you have recently purchased a handy-dandy e-Reader, and you’re not yet in trouble with your bank, parents, or significant other for your impulse purchases — boy do I have a deal for you!

Today The Way of Shadows e-book is available for $1.99.  This is a limited time offer, available only in the United States for 24 hours, this Thursday only.

Impulses, rejoice!

Go here, here, here, or here to buy the e-book.

Twitter Give-Away

Upon recently reaching 5,000 followers on Twitter, someone had a great idea: I should give away something free! I think other people have had this idea for a long time. We call those BitTorrent geeks.

This time, however, they actually asked my permission! See what happens when you say please? (Note: please do not say “please” in the aftermath of this webpost. It only works once.)

Originally, I was going to select a winner in some way that is creative and fun. I was informed, however, that lawyers do not like creative and fun, and that I might run afoul of lottery laws if I did anything that burbled with personality.  So on Friday night I will be randomly selecting, with the help of some internet randomizer, 5 lucky winners! No purchase necessary!!

Oooh, prizes!


If you were not in the first 5,000, but you do follow me before Friday, it is quite likely that the randomizer will be simply too stupid to screen you out. (This is why I was a terrible disciplinarian when I was a teacher. The hard luck cases get me every time: “Ah, but Mr. Weeks! My syphilitic cat threw up on my homework!” “Um, yuck. Ok, turn it in tomorrow.”)

I will contact the Lucky Five on Monday. And remember, lottery games should not be played for investment purposes. Unless, you know

 

Bookplates Bonanza!–UPDATED–ALL GONE

For those of you who have not been able to come to any of my signings — and you had an incredibly good reason, right? — I want to give a limited, first-come-first-serve opportunity to get the next best thing to a signed book. If you don’t know what a bookplate is, mine look something like this:

I will be happy to sign and personalize bookplates for the first 200 people who email me with their snail mail address. Please put “bookplate” in the subject line. In the  body of your message, please include which book you intend to place the bookplate in, and to whom you want the bookplate dedicated. I will cover the postage for those first 200 (even internationally) and only ask that if you haven’t done so already, that you sign up for the Brent Weeks newsletter here. (I will not automatically put you into the newsletter list, and the newsletter only goes out 2-4 times a year. It’s an e-newsletter, btw. Those are just emailed out.)

 *UPDATE* All the bookplates are gone. Thank you so much for your fervor. I had wondered if I’d be pathetically flogging my free bookplates on street corners a month from now. My hand also thanks you… not so much. Give me a couple weeks to get these all done and in the mail.