When I met with Brandon Sanderson on Saturday, he was gracious enough to include me in his fabled (and super fun) event, The Great Hunt.

For those who haven’t heard of the hunt, from Sanderson’s website:

I leave codes hidden around the world for Wheel of Time fans to locate, and they collectively input them into a web page which slowly unlocks text for everyone to see. (You can read a recap of last year’s Great Hunt here.)

I have some thirty codes to reveal, hide, or otherwise give out while on tour this time. I may hide some inside books in certain bookstores. I might give them to individuals (like Tor employees) for safe keeping, and require you to figure out who they are. Or, perhaps, you might have to do something else. Whatever strikes me.

Before we go farther, however, some ground rules:

• The codes are inside envelopes this year, with a label requesting that a bookstore employee NOT open the envelope and read the code over the phone. I’ll probably prepare the bookstore employees for what is coming. You are required to fetch the codes yourself, or at least send someone you personally know to get the code. I don’t want you bothering employees of any store—whether it be bookstores or someone from a store next door—to do the work for you. They aren’t being paid to fetch codes. If you know someone in the area and can send them, go for it. Avoid bothering strangers.
• All but four of the codes need to be entered in order to reveal the secret, but each one inputted will reveal small bits. This is a collective endeavor. Share information, work together. Once you find a code, input it on this page. Everyone else, feel free to watch the page and try to figure out what the secret is going to be as more is revealed.
• It is okay to try to guess codes. They have something in common. In a way, they are some fun information themselves.
• If you want to get involved, both Theoryland and Dragonmount (among others) are likely to have threads where you can post, participate, and see what codes have been found and what others have been tried. You can follow the hunt’s progress by searching for the hashtag #wotgh on Twitter.

I was given one of the codes and tasked with coming up with a fun way to tease fans and make them work to uncover the code. To that end, I’ve hidden one of the codes in a post here on A Dribble of Ink. There are over a thousand posts, so get digging. Good luck.

The code can be entered HERE.

My goodness does it feel good to be back. Having watched some of the production videos from the film (found on Peter Jackson’s Facebook page), it looks like Jackson and company are picking up right where they left off with The Lord of the Rings ten years ago. Christ, ten years already?

Wandered into the bookstore the other day and saw this:

It’s a blurb from my review of SHADOWHEART by Tad Williams, right there at the top of the list and alongside some pretty heavy hitting and well known critics. I nearly dropped the book on the floor when I saw it.

I’ve had quotes from my reviews included in novels before, but they’ve always been on the inside (this blurb’s on the cover!) novels that I’d enjoyed, but didn’t necessarily mean a whole lot to me. This, however, is a whole different ball game. Tad Williams is one of my absolute favourite genre writers and has long been an inspiration to myself as both a reader and a writer. I look forward to his new releases with anticipation that’s rivalled by few other authors. To now be a part (however small) of his novel is an absolute honour.

Now, go read his Shadowmarch series. It’s really good.

From Prime Books:

Prime Books is pleased to announce the sale and transfer of ownership of their acclaimed online magazines Lightspeed and Fantasy to John Joseph Adams. Adams, the current editor of both magazines, will officially assume the role of publisher starting with the January 2012 issues.

“With the continuing expansion and success of Prime Books, my attention and time is increasingly consumed by book publishing,” publisher Sean Wallace said. “With John already doing a terrific job as editor, it simply made sense for him to take over as publisher as well. We’re really thrilled that this has worked out for both John and Prime.”

New publisher John Joseph Adams says he is delighted at the prospect of taking over the magazines and looks forward to the challenges ahead. “It’s an exciting time to be involved in publishing,” he said. “Models are changing and so is the readership, and online magazines have a better shot at sustainability than ever have before. I believe the possibilities for growth are tremendous, and I look forward to staying in the vanguard of this new frontier.”

Fantasy Magazine was established in 2005, and has been edited by Sean Wallace, Paul Tremblay, and Cat Rambo, with Adams taking over as sole editor earlier this year. Lightspeed—published by Wallace and edited by Adams—debuted in June 2010 and was a 2011 Hugo Award nominee. Numerous stories originally published in Lightspeed and Fantasy have been reprinted in best-of-the-year anthologies, and Lightspeed and Fantasy stories have been nominated for the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Award, and others. Lightspeed’s first year of fiction has just been published by Prime Books in the print anthology Lightspeed: Year One.

I’m very happy about this. Not that Prime was handling the online magazine’s poorly (quite the opposite, actually), but Adams is one of my favourite editors and professionals in the genre, he has wonderful ideas on how to market and present short fiction and his turn around on stories is absolutely tremendous. It will be interesting to see how Adams turns the magazines into self-sustaining entities (without Prime’s money as a backing, as little or as much as that might have been). Either way, they’re two of the best short fiction markets out there and they’re even more firmly in the talented hands of Adams who has been their editor for some time now.

In addition to this news, Andrew Liptak, a good friend of this blog, has been named Editorial Assistant at Lightspeed. Congrats, Andrew!

You can read Fantasy and Lightspeed entirely for free.

Many readers first found Newton’s work with Nights of Villjamur (REVIEW), a novel that is often mis-attributed as the author’s debut. In reality, Newton’s first published novel, albeit by a small press, was The Reef, a novel tangentially related to his current Legends of The Red Sun series, but ostensibly a stand alone.

Newton, on the novel:

It was published a few years back with UK indie publisher, Pendragon Press, but only in limited numbers. So the folks at Tor UK decided it would be a great idea to make it available to buy as a digital edition – and for less than two quid. Quite a few people have asked about this title over the last couple of years, so it only seemed logical to bring it back in this format. Of course, it’s much more expensive to do these things with another print run, but one of the cool things about ebooks is being able to publish digital versions of books that wouldn’t otherwise have been released.

I feel I’ve grown a heck of a lot as a writer since this book. I wrote it when I was 23 or 24 years old, and that was an age when I was experimenting with themes and finding my feet. My outlook on the world is different, as is my awareness of various issues, but I’m still proud of this little tome.

And Adam at The Wertzone says:

The Reef is an intriguing novel. Although the events that unfold have potentially huge ramifications for the continent of Has-jahn and the rest of the world, it’s largely a small-scale story focusing on the island of Arya and those who visit it. Whilst the novel is apparently about a mystery – who is behind a spate of murders on the island – it’s actually much more of a character study, particularly looking at the dynamics of relationships and desire. The book succeeds admirably at both tasks, with the mystery unfolding satisfyingly and the book’s comments on relationships interesting and thought-provoking. Manolin is a sympathetic but flawed protagonist, and his companions are also well-drawn, as are Jella’s crew of terrorists (although I’d like to have learned more about the enigmatic and lethal Allocen). Whilst Newton’s prose has improved since The Reef, it’s still nicely different to a lot of fantasy books out there, with its poised manners and stylistic speech inflections reminiscent of Victorian fiction. The worldbuilding is also top-notch. As far as I can tell, The Reef is set on the same world as Nights of Villjamur (they share the non-human race of the rumel), but in a more distant location, maybe the other side of the world, since none of the locations in either book is mentioned in the other. The ‘Dying Earth’ feel Newton is looking for with this world of ancient, forgotten technology is again successfully achieved here.

It’s certainly of interest to fans of Newton, and likely anyone looking for some early, experimental work from one of the genre’s most interesting young writers. It’s also nice to see Tor UK put their weight behind the book (they didn’t published it initially), though one wonders if Newton might not have just published it himself. Good news, either way.

The Reef is available as an eBook.