The Wise Man’s Blurbs….

This showed up in the mail about a week ago….

(Guest Starring: My Thumb)

It’s officially hitting the shelves today (Tuesday, April 2th.) The paperback version of The Wise Man’s Fear.

Or rather, it’s what *I* call a paperback, but what everyone else calls a “mass market paperback.”

I’ve probably seen 80-90 different versions of my books come out in various languages and editions at this point. So by now I probably should be kinda blase about the whole thing….

But the truth is, I still get excited.

This edition I’m particularly glad to see, because when I was a kid, paperbacks were the only books I bought and the only books I read. This is the edition that will be easier for people to afford, and easier for people to carry around with them.

But in addition to that, when I picked it up and flipped it open, I got to see something cool:

You’ll have to click to embiggen if you want to read the text, but the opening pages of this edition are full of the nice things people said about the book in their reviews and blurbs.

Truth is, I don’t remember getting the vast majority of these blurbs or reviews.

That might seem a little odd, but you see, the month before The Wise Man’s Fear came out, I was doing promotion round the clock: interviews, podcasts,  getting ready for my book tour….

Then when the book came out, I spent three weeks touring. I think I had something like 22 events in 21 days. I didn’t have the time or the energy to obsess about my reviews.

And after that, I just wanted to sleep and spend time with Oot.

So a lot of these reviews were new to me and gave me all sorts of happy feelings.

They also reminded me of something else I did back in 2011 when I finished touring. I went through the 500-600 e-mails that readers had sent me while I was away.

Those were the real reviews I read about my book, and so many of them amused and delighted me that I started cutting and pasting them into a word file, thinking I would eventually post them up here in the blog…

It seems that time has come. So here are the ones I could dig up on my computer, in celebration of the paperback release….

*      *      *

• I had a passionate love affair with Wise Man’s Fear. Seriously, I was calling my husband Kvothe for 2 weeks. Still do on occasion. He loves it.

• My husband and I were sorting out a lot of issues, learning to understand each other… to love each other again. I was ready to give up and call it quits and it was about this time I finally got my hands on your second book. It was as if I learnt how to live again, how to feel, how to imagine, how to create. The few minutes spent with Kvothe each day taught me to love myself again.

That’s once of the nicest things anyone has ever said about my writing.

• Ok, you know when you find The Shoes? The ones exactly that colour of red. The ones with the slightly rounded toe – not too pointy, not too round. The heel is the right height and shape. When you wear them they make you feel gorgeous and sexy and confident and you can take on the world. They are just wide enough to fit your hideously wide foot and just long enough so that they don’t rub your heel until it’s bloody every time you wear them. You know when you put that shoe on, it feels like…it’s perfect. It fits like the proverbial glove. That’s your writing style for me, Patrick. I’m so glad I found you :-)

I’m not much of a shoe person, but I know where you’re coming from. Extra points for including the u in “colour”

• For the week leading up to the release of The Wise Man’s Fear, I slept with The Name of the Wind under my pillow. For the three days that it took me to finish The Wise Man’s Fear (and for an additional two days after I finished), I slept with that book directly under my face, as I stayed up so late reading that I was too tired to relocate it beneath my pillow. Now, the front and back covers of both books have face-shaped curvatures in them. Thank you again for a wonderful read. Yours Truly, Lexa P.S. The Wise Man’s Fear smells delicious. It definitely meets my all-good-books-must-smell-like-heaven standards.

Nice to meet a fellow book-smeller Lexa. And no, I’m not being sarcastic.

• I missed my train stop when Kvothe was fighting Carceret at the First Stone. You know how long it’s been since I missed a train stop? I’m a veteran city dweller. That’s just not done man.

Don’t worry. We’re not judging.

• The Wise Man’s Fear has the absolute best texture to its pages. Kudos!

I agree. Thank my editor for that. (This is mostly a hardcover issue.)

• Your characters are 3-D and lifelike. I can just imagine Denna gliding through the doors of a Hilton daring the world to comment while Kvothe watches her meet a senator from the corner of a building, a bag of McDonalds forgotten in his hands. Or Elodin flouncing into a lecture hall in an ivy league college, bewildering his students with impossible questions….

• I have gotten about seven hours of sleep over the last three days because I have refused to put down Wise Man’s Fear. I’ve failed a test, gotten no work done, missed a class, and shunned my friends. You may have heard of me.

Hell. I’ve *been* you.

• My name is D– and I am currently deployed to an undisclosed location in Afganistan with the U.S. Armed Forces. I just wanted to simply say thank you. Your two books have given me an opportunity to escape from here while reading for just a minute.

Glad I could help, even if it’s just for a minute.

• Thanks for putting homosexuals in WMF that are not queens or craven pedophiles, an odious habit of many fantasy writers.

My pleasure. Thanks for noticing.

• I finished reading the new book tonight (er… this morning), and I just wanted to let you know: I’ve been sad lately, and it’s kept me away from playing music. Your book made me want to play again.

Huzzah!

• I have just received my copy of The Wise Man’s Fear in the mail. I have not opened the book, yet already I feel the need to apologize to you. I am sorry. I know this is your baby, I know that you have been working on her for years and that you love her dearly. I wish I could feel the same, and that I could show her all of the respect that she deserves. I want to my time with her, but I cannot. I am using all of my patience to send you this message. My first time with this book is going to be fast, it is going to be dirty, and it is going to be all about me. Again, I am sorry. I promise that the next time, and the next time I read this book that I will be gentle and caring. But not this time.

Congrats. It’s rare someone pulls of the hat-trick of “creepy” “funny” and “true” all in the same e-mail.

• Hi, I really enjoyed your work. Your prologues and epilogues could win awards, if there were awards for prologues and epilogues.

• I would like to wish you a BIG congratulations on the book! CONGRATULATIONS! I was one of those whiney fans ‘Whens the book coming out. How soon. When? Wahhh Wahh Wahh.’ I regret every word. The time you have spent on such a masterpiece of work was well worth it and I, as a whiney fan, have been quieted.

• Greetings from the sunny (AND 120 degree) Middle East. I just wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed your second book, The Wise Man’s Fear. I dragged it all the way back from Washington, DC with me on a 17 hour flight back to Bahrain. I also brought it to Beirut, Lebanon. It was well worth it, but now I see the advantage for using a Kindle. In short, I loved it. I also wanted to let you know that in a very, VERY serious meeting with NAVCENT Brass, I snickered (for the 40th time) about, “I liked Shehyn’s little hat.” It was just loud enough to get noticed by a full bird colonel. Well, I thought you’d want to know what you were contributing to the global war on terror.

There were many more. Too many to print here.

I just wanted to say thanks to everyone who has sent me a message over the years with a kind word about the books. I can’t reply to all of them, but I do read them, and they make me smile….

Later Space Cowboys,

pat

P.S. That cool thing I mentioned before is over soon. If you like things that are cool, don’t miss it.