Brandon Sanderson is offering his novel Warbreaker as a free download.

What I like about this particular freebie is that he's not only making the final version available but previous versions as well. That's kind of a twist. How often do you get to see what pains an established author went through from first draft to polished final?

He starts with Version 1.0, which bears a warning:

this version is very, very rough. It includes characters that I decide to cut halfway through, has some serious lack of foreshadowing for elements at the climax, and contains a lot of typos. Read at your own risk!

You can make your way through versions 2.0, 3.0, 3.5, and, finally, 4.2, the latest and greatest. He's also got a Word doc which compares versions 1 and 2 if you want to see the differences side-by-side.

Sanderson is giving away Warbreaker under a Creative Commons license. The book will be available for purchase in June of this year.

Opened up my feed reader to find this post by Jason Sanford where he says:

In only the last few weeks, we've learned that

• Realms of Fantasy will cease publication in April (and after they published a great January issue).
• Year's Best Fantasy and Horror anthology is no more.
• F&SF is going to a bi-monthly publication schedule.

On top of that, Asimov's and Analog last year changed to a new format that was more economical to print, while Locus and NYRSF have both recently asked for more subscribers to keep their financials solid. Add this in with problems in the magazine distribution business and cut backs in the book publishing industry, and it isn't hard to see how more bad news could come down in 2009 for written SF/F.

Some of that I'd heard about, but Realms of Fantasy, one of my favorite magazines, closing? Sure enough, go to their web page and you'll see:

Dear Readers: We're sorry to report that the April 2009 issue of Realms of Fantasy Magazine will be the last. Thank you very much for your support these many years!

If you have a remaining subscription to Realms of Fantasy, you can choose one of three options:

-Transfer your subscription on a remaining issue by issue basis to SCI FI Magazine.

-Transfer your subscription on a remaining issue by issue basis to OTAKU USA Magazine.

-Get a refund for the remaining issues left on your Realms of Fantasy subscription.

To tell us about your choice, click on this link to our customer service department. Make sure to include your full name and address. Thank you.

There's perhaps no better reminder that publishing is a business than when doors start closing and someone wraps the proverbial chain and padlock around the door handles.

In these troubling economic times it's always nice to find some great entertainment that isn't going to cost you anything. Enter Baen Books and their Free Library.

Lots of good stuff here.

I just downloaded Holly Lisle's Fire in the Mist and Michael Z. Williamson's Freehold.

Go check it out and see what you can find.

I have a file that accompanies every one of my stories. It's called "stuff to use later.doc". This file contains sentences, paragraphs, snippets, possibly even entire chapters. Some of it is stuff that comes to mind before I've even started work on an outline. It might be a scene of dialog between two characters, or some information on setting. Then, once I've started writing or editing, I might toss into this file tidbits that are good, and that I like, but maybe don't quite fit into the story as it is right now.

The point of this file is simple: it gives me a place to throw things without throwing them away. I'm not a packrat, but when it comes to writing I don't delete anything unless I know with absolute certainty that it's crap. Even then I may hold onto it for a while longer, just in case.

Point in case: as I continue through a second edit of my current fantasy novel, I just came across a place where it hit me that a short scene I had previously chopped might fit quite nicely. I'm digging into my "stuff to use later" file now and will soon have it back in place.

A weekly monthly weekly progress report as I work through the (second pass) editing of my current fantasy novel.

This past week was not a writer's week. It was much more a software engineer's week, and a DIY'ers week around the house a bit, too. That's how it goes sometimes, though; as an author-in-progress I have to squeeze in time for writing whenever I can. Sometimes that time is ample, and I make good progress. Other times… not so much.

That being said, this past week was not a complete wash. I spent some time thinking through some plot points and especially coming up with some new material for the current chapter I'm working on. You see, the chapter has a lot of holes. Not plot holes. I mean, literally, holes, as in big chunks of the text were deleted during the previous edit. This is not as bad as it might sound because I'd been searching for a point in the story to layer in some character development. The story is rather fast-paced, so fitting in such material had been a challenge from day one. Now, though, I have the perfect place for it, and even a very nice segue from the previous chapter into this one.

One last thing before I conclude. I'm changing the frequency of this weekly update to monthly. I started this series as a way to track my progress and also to create a sort of accountability. I'm not relaxing either of those. But I've been finding lately that my blog is getting full of these updates and my weekly links series. In order to provide myself a bit more time to actually write and also to work on more meaningful posts, I'm relaxing the frequency of my writing updates.

The all-new monthly updates will come right around the 1st of each month. That means no (writing) update until February 1. See you back here then.

This weekend's fun and interesting stuff.

‘Science fiction’ vs. ’sci-fi’…? None of the above.

According to iconic (and contentious) sci-fi author Harlan Ellison, the term sci-fi is a “debasement” — and a dangerous one — of a proud genre that is properly referred to as science fiction, at least according to this classic Newsweek article.

Teenage Girls Are Writing Harder Science Fiction Than You Are

Megan at Teen Ink magazine is teaching teenagers how to research real science before writing science fiction stories. I wonder how many real science fiction authors actually follow her methods?

Life On Mars Looks More Likely

NASA researchers this week said Mars appears to have been more hospitable to life in the past than previously believed.

Writing Advice from Fantasy Authors

I searched the interviews of twelve successful fantasy authors to find their advice for aspiring authors, which I’ve compiled in this entry.

9 Things Every Writer Needs To Do Every Day

 

New Year's Goals - Yes (Resolutions - Not So Much)

I've done the goal setting things in the past. I heard of the studies where only the successful 3% have goals written down. I had ideas of what I wanted to accomplish. But for differing reasons, I didn't always reach them as often as I would have liked. Some were just ideas which stayed ideas. Others I worked at didn't turn out as planned. So I wondered why.

A weekly progress report as I work through the (second pass) editing of my current fantasy novel.

This past week was a good one. 30 pages edited total, bringing me up to page 181 out of a current total of 352. There's some significance there, not only in the 30 pages, which is the most I've edited in a week since starting this second edit, but also in the fact that my total page count did not change from the previous week to this one. Without fail the total page count has been going down, sometimes dramatically, so it's nice to see some stabilization.

Here's how pages edited/remaining is looking:

That puts me at 171 pages remaining and, wow, I'm +50% now:

51.42%, to be exact.

Total word count only went down by 34 words this time, ending at 103,363.

Looking ahead, I'm about to enter a minefield where many of the mines have already gone off and left craters behind. That's because I took out some rather large chunks of the story during the first edit as I realized those sections were not entirely relevant to the overall storyline. What this now means that instead of editing I'll be patching disparate parts together and, in some cases, writing new material to bridge the gaps.

I'll see how it goes and report back next week. Till then, good writing.