KINGS final draft, THE GATHERING STORM in Audible's tournament + Updates

I mentioned on Twitter and Facebook that THE GATHERING STORM needed votes in Audible's 2010 tournament. Last I heard, it was beating THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE by four tenths of a percent. Voting ends today sometime—actually it may be over by the time you see this message, but go vote anyway (if you think it should win). If it gets to the next round, it will be up against the winner of BEAT THE REAPER vs. ALWAYS LOOKING UP.

In the most recent MISTBORN 3 annotations, I talk about Sazed taking action and Marsh encountering Goradel. And in this week's Writing Excuses episode Dan, Howard, and I talk about writing an epic. You may imagine we have a bit of experience on this topic, so check it out.

I'm working on the final draft of THE WAY OF KINGS in order to meet its April 8th deadline, and over the past few days I've posted on Twitter and Facebook breakdowns of how many words I'm cutting from each chapter. This has confused some readers who have asked me not to cut anything out or to save them for an eventual "writer's cut" edition. Trust me on this one--the book you'll get on the shelf is the writer's cut, and you wouldn't like the writing as much if I didn't go through and do the trimming on this draft. Sort of like a director shoots a lot of film and then edits it into a coherent narrative later, I tend to overwrite on my first drafts—the language is more wordy than it needs to be, sometimes a character will come to the same realization multiple times as I'm working out where best to fit it in, that sort of thing. In my final draft I go in and trim out all the fat. We talked about this in an episode of Writing Excuses last year; if you're curious about the process, give it a listen.

So the words I'm cutting in this draft aren't anything you're going to miss as a reader. Now, sometimes I will cut an entire scene or heavily rework a section, but that usually happens in earlier drafts than this. I do save the cut scenes in case they contain something I want to use somewhere else or just for posterity. In the Library section of the website I've included some deleted scenes from ELANTRIS, MISTBORN 1, and MISTBORN 2—check those out if you want to understand why it's a good reason those scenes are gone. Long after WAY OF KINGS is out, some of its cut scenes or early draft sections may end up on that page. We'll see.