State of the Inbox (Plus Reader Mail.)

Sending an email through a website like mine can be kind of a nebulous process.  You click send, get a little "Thank you for your email!" response on the screen, then wonder where the little bits of data have flown off to.

Here's how it goes.  Whenever someone sends to me, I get an email sent directly to my inbox.  It gets filtered into a special folder.  I usually read the email the same day it was sent, but I don't often have time to respond immediately.  Instead, I try to answer the emails in the order I got them.

At various times, I have 'email overload' where I have trouble getting responses to everyone who has sent to me.  One of these times, as you might imagine, came in December following the Wheel of Time announcement.  I got hundreds and hundreds of emails that week, and felt them pile up. 

However, lately I've been doing fairly well.  My response time for emails is about six weeks--however, I had an overload February-April, and so very few emails got answered through there.  I still hope to get to those someday....

Anyway, if you've sent me reader mail, know that I'm answering emails from the first week in August right now.  So it may be a little while before you hear from me, but you SHOULD hear eventually.  (Unless book tour wipes me out again...)

As for forum going, I'm still on forum hiatus.  I'm too tempted by forums, and don't want to get drawn into long discussions when I should be writing AMOL.  I plan to return eventually.  Until then, know that the best way to get hold of me is via email or posting on my LJ.  I plan to do a Q&A on my own forum come October, kind of a 'virtual book signing' for anyone who hangs out there.  (Also, we're working on getting a new moderator for my forums to keep an eye on things there.)  I appreciate all of you who populate the forums and post such interesting thoughts and speculations; I do want to be able to respond to you in the future, but right now I'm just swamped. 

And, since this is an email-related blog post, let me actually do a reader mail.

Steve from Sacramento writes,

Hi Brandon,
Besides being an avid reader (and fan of your writing), I'm also a computer gamer... I think your Mistborn world would make an excellent setting for a game. I'd love to play a game with allomantic and feruchemical powers. Is this something you've considered pursuing?

Thanks for the question, Steve!  I'm a gamer myself--a big fan of RPGs and FPSs.  (And I've put off playing Halo Three, which I really want to play, until I get AMOL written.  It's been kind of hard.) 

I HAVE considered doing a Mistborn game.  In fact, I was in talks with a company at one point to licence the game to them.  I even wrote up a proposal for the game.  (I imagined it being a nice hybrid between an RPG and a platformer, perhaps something along the lines of the metroid/castlevania vein with a physics engine.  Or, for something more big budget, I'd love to see a Morrowind style Mistborn RPG.) 

That deal fell through, however, and I don't blame the company for going another direction.  Still, I'm openly pursing this option.  If any of you out there work for a video game company and might be interested in a Mistborn game, feel free to fire me off an email!  I'll respond faster than six weeks on something like that.  ;)

And while it's something kind of different, we've still got the Mistborn Pen and Paper RPG coming out, which has me VERY excited.  If I had to chose between a video game and a pen and paper like this, I'd go with the pen and paper first.  I think it offers a more complete and immersive experience, and the chance to work with Crafty has me psyched.