I’d say Brandon made the right choice in terms of reader interaction. I literally became a fan of his reading his blog posts about the Wheel of Time. Only afterward did I even start any of his books.

I listened to this podcast a bit late because (once I’d finished with homework) I got my copy of the Way of Kings! Yay Way of Kings! I finished it Saturday night and annoyed my entire family by separately telling each of them at midnight-thirty! After having already twittered it. <- Not really related to the 'cast, but I'm excited. So there.

At first, I didn’t even realize what I’d done. Then I had a giggle.

http://mbarker.livejournal.com/187312.html

-bn

I happen to live on an rain forest island in the pacific. It might make a humour setting for a writing prompt. Because it’s not a tropical island in the pacific.

I give you a free setting.

I work as part of a morning radio show and my partner wants nothing to do with the audience, is insulting to them and is extremely picky with who he talks to. I on the other hand will talk with any fan or critic and get thier opinion on our show. It shows them that you care and it allows them to either get something off their chest or express their admiration for your work. They then feel like a part of that process and will listen in (at least I hope so) for a long time to come.

You let someone into your little sphere of writing, and are polite and conversational about it, they should come away from the experience with the same feelings.

I’d like to throw in some unsolicited advice, to other authors.

Q: How do you make the transition from writing fan-fiction to writing original fiction?

A: I started out writing fan-fiction, I’ve since moved on to original work. The way I did it was to take some of the things I loved about the source material but use a completely different core idea and setting.

My fan-fiction was an urban fantasy, so I took some of the cool things from it and plopped it into an apocalyptic Sci-Fi setting.

New characters are a good idea too. DON’T just rename them.

But don’t abandon fan-fiction completely. It’s fun.

Q: What do you do when your cast of characters has grown too large for you to manage it?

A: I ran into having way too many characters. I started with two characters and at the height of my madness I ended up with seventeen so I killed some of them off, literally. When you have hostile alien animals, hostile survivors, and a hostile mother nature deaths are going to happen. It would be unrealistic to have everyone survive in that kind of setting.

Now one other thing I did was to separate some of the characters from the POV. You don’t need and can’t fit everyone on the helicopter. Send some of the characters off to do other things away from the POV.

By the way Dan, I do read your blog and enjoy it.

I am looking forward to reading Brandon’s new book. I loved Warbreaker and the Mistborn trilogy.

I think another way to keep the tension up when death isn’t a problem for your characters (who may be immortal) is to threaten the lives of mortals that they care about.

I also would like more information regarding the process for getting published. I understood step 1, Write. However, I kind of got lost on the rest. I would appreciate a link to a site with more information.

Thanks, the writing excuses team rocks.

Can’t wait til the next live broadcast, guys!

Ten years ago the aliens landed — and they were us.

Yes, writing from the point of view of one of the aliens who conquered Earth. And hasn’t had much time to write in his/her/its journal since. (By the way, what pronoun do you use for a race with three genders? He, she, and what? Any idea?)

Another note re: posting earlier, less skilled works to the general public: I love it when artists in any medium do this, because it lets the beginners out there in the world now know that the artists they admire were once just like them. Whenever I read one of Brandon’s much earlier stories or drafts, I get an incredibly comforting sense of “hey, he made the same mistakes I make, and struggled with some of the same things I struggle with, and he’s an amazing writer. If I really work at this, I might be one day too.” Many of the anecdotes from this podcasts have the same effect.

Anyway, I find myself digging through my old stuff quit often to salvage bits and pieces or look up old ideas I’ve had that combine well with a new idea. I think it’s so cool that the Mistborn trilogy came about this way. Information like that is so inspirational to me. I hope to be a published author one day and I can use all the advice I can get from people who are already busy doing it. Thank you so much for having this podcast and comments page. I think I will enjoy digging through your archives looking for nuggets of gold.

It also makes it much easier to tell someone your site, for example, brandon can just say “go to brandonsanderson.com” and people will find it easily because its easy to remember and its easy to get first on the search results for “brandon sanderson”.

Readers could have a harder time finding Dan because “danwells.com” is already taken. In my opinion, if he had published as “Dan Butcher” for the horror genre for example, that would have been pretty cool.

If you have a super common name like “John Smith” and johnsmith.com is not an available domain name, you might want to really seriously consider using a pen-name so that when people search for you on the internet, they will easily identify your website and easily find you. So much better if your pen-name evokes the genre.

For howard, schlockmercenary.com is probably pretty good since a lot of writers may be more farmiliar with the name of the comic than the name of the author. Howard should probably register howardtayler.com though, which he could just redirect to the schlock site. It doesn’t look like anyone owns it now.

I disagree with burning the trunk. Ideas are precious and if they don’t inspire you when you need them, maybe they’ll inspire someone else.

I know in the grand scheme of things it doesn’t really matter, but it did leave me wondering. I really love the concept of being able to revisit those themes that really resonated in the early years once you’ve learned the skills to give them a framework that will actually do justice to them.

http://mbarker.livejournal.com/184660.html

On Monday I submitted it to Reading Excuses (my first submission). This pod-cast was NOT influential in that decision as I had already rewritten it and already planned to submit it before Sunday night.

So I wondered about my other two trunk stories. It seems they have disintegrated. I looked in the trunk where they were stored (my head) and it was empty.

I’m not sure that came out right??

The whole idea of burning the trunk after publication sounds intriguing and yet frightening. I’m still too attached to those darlings to think about them going up in smoke…

If anyone wants to check it out I’ve posted it on my blog.

http://alonekingofone.wordpress.com/other-work/interspeciated-workplace/

I also saw the title of this podcast, and felt like someone had been reading my brain. I’ve been trying to decide how many of these I should try to be submitting at once (submitting takes time, and that’s time I’m not writing).