Heya everybody.
I’ve been on tour for a week now, and this is one of the few times when I’ve had enough time to get online.
I’ve got a bunch of stories from the first week of the tour, and a few pictures too. Hopefully I’ll be able to post them up in a blog in a day or two.
How would I briefly describe the tour so far?
Madness. Absolute madness.
I’ll go into more detail later.
One question people keep asking is this: “How can I tell if my copy of The Wise Man’s Fear is a first edition?”
I answered this question before on the blog a long time ago. So if you’re looking for a detailed answer, you should look over there.
The short answer is that you can tell if you have a first edition/first printing by looking at the number line of the book that’s located on the copyright page.
The problem is this: due to a printing error, some copies of The Wise Man’s Fear don’t have a number line. The copyright pages of those books look like this:
(That’s not my thumb, obviously.)
However, that printing error only occurred on the first printing of the book. That means if you see a book with no number line, it’s a first printing.
Surprisingly, The Wise Man’s Fear has been selling well enough that it’s already in its fourth printing even though it’s only been out for a week. Personally, I’m going to be picking up a few extra firsts this time around. It’s something I didn’t think to do with The Name of the Wind, and now they’re being sold for truly stupid amounts of money. If I had a few boxes of those in the basement, I could use them to pay off my mortgage….
In other news, I did an online conversation with Brandon Sanderson for Amazon about a week ago. It’s a beast, more than 6000 words long. But what else would you expect when you get two authors like us together and ask us to talk about books?
Here’s a link to our conversation.
Lastly, here’s a link to an interview I did with the Portland Mercury.
Unlike most of my interviews, I didn’t type this one up. It’s more of a transcript of a phone conversation I had with with Erik Henriksen. He was a cool guy to talk to and our conversation was far-ranging to say the least.
More later folks. I’ll be seeing some of you in Madison later tonight.
Be good.
pat






Fanmail and Hummus
I have just now managed to get through the last of my e-mail backlog that built up while I was on tour. Who ever knew that it would take so long to work my way through a mere 2000 messages.
Next on my list is going through the 600 or so pieces of fanmail that have built up while I was gone. These are mostly e-mail too, though I do have a couple dozen old-fashioned envelopey messages too.
I used to respond personally to every message. But those days are long gone. I just don’t have the time anymore. But I do read them all. I don’t have anyone filter or pre-sort them for me.
On the home front, I’m having a good time hanging out with my baby. Little Oot is 18 months now, and he’s picking up words like crazy. When I came home on the 7th, after a week of touring, I found out that he had learned how to say “Monkey.” I was impressed, but also kinda sad that I hadn’t been the one to teach him this word. Because… y’know… monkey.
I’d been home for about 10 minutes when Sarah said, “What did we eat for the first time today?”
Oot gave her a look that wasn’t exactly blank, but let her know that he needed a little more help.
“Did we eat hummus?” Sarah prompted.
“Hummus,” Oot said. He said the word with a particular intensity. It wasn’t: “Hummus!” Not an exclamation. But it really wasn’t just “hummus,” either. It said it with emphasis. “Hummus.”
He pronounced it “haahmis.” With a tiny bit of a lisp on the s. It was, quite possibly, the cutest thing I’d ever heard.
“Haahmis….” he said again. “Haahmis.” A two-second pause. “Haahmis.” Another pause. “Hummus nummus,” he said. Expressing the opinion that hummus was, in fact, delicious. (Yummy = Nummy. Nummy ~ Nummus.)
I quickly had to revise my cuteness scale. “Hummus Nummus” was now top of the cuteness chart.
He then proceeded to say nothing but “hummus” for the next ten minutes.
And you know what? It never stopped being cute. Why? Because my baby is fucking adorable.
In other news, (for those of you who have been asking) I’ve made my first tentative steps into playing Dragon Age II. I’ve only played 6-7 hours or so, and thus far my feelings are mixed.
More soon, including news of a few more signings, and stories from the tour.
pat