Category Archives: appearances

Published: January 18, 2011

A question, a picture, a taunt, and a signing.

So when I posted the upcoming tour dates, people asked a bunch of really good questions in the comments of the blog.

Some of the questions were easy to answer. Like this one:

  • “Will you sign my Kindle?”

Yes.

There. See how easy that was? Good question. Quick answer. Everyone wins.

On the other hand, some questions were harder to answer. Such as:

  • “Will you sign my nook?”

Um. That kinda depends. If you mean the e-reader. Then yeah. Sure.

If you mean something else…. Well. Then I’m not sure.

I think I’ll have to check with my PR people. And Sarah. And OSHA.

Seriously though. There were a *lot* of good questions. Some of them brought up issues I hadn’t even thought of yet.

So I need to do some research before I give you any answers. I don’t want to say one thing then change my answer later.

While I’m compiling the list of official answers, here’s a few things that might amuse you.

First, a picture I just re-discovered from the little mini-tour I took last March. I can’t remember if I ever got around to posting it before.

If you’re wondering what my events are like, this might give you a clue.

(Click to Embiggen)

At this particular signing, a lot of people wanted their pictures taken with me, but that was making the line move really slowly. I asked everyone if it wouldn’t be simpler to do a group photo instead, and it turned out there was a cool photographer with a great camera in among my readers.

About two thirds of the folks there wanted to be in the photo. This one was my favorite. We did a standard smiling one too. But that was boring, so we did a few more. The one where everyone made crazy eyes was my second favorite.

In other news, Brandon Sanderson seems to have taken umbrage at the tangible proof of my writing prowess. I wasn’t going to bring it up, but since he already twittered about it, there doesn’t seem to be any point in hiding the fact that the ARC for The Wise Man’s Fear is longer than the ARC for The Way of Kings.

Mind you, these are both the unedited advance copies of our respective works. What’s more, layout counts for a lot in these situations. So I wouldn’t dare imply that my book is, in fact, bigger than his. More majestic, perhaps. But bigger? No. I’d never claim that. That would be gauche.

Lastly, a quick reminder that I will be doing a reading/signing northern Michigan this upcoming Thursday (the 20th). Details here.

pat

Also posted in a few words you're probably going to have to look up, Fanmail Q + A, talking shit | By Pat62 Responses
Published: January 12, 2011

Wise Man’s Fear: The Tour

Okay folks. The dates for my upcoming tour are finally set.

Here they are in chronological order.

Week One: The West Coast

SEATTLE, WA
March 1 at 7 PM
University Bookstore
4326 University Way NE
Seattle, WA

PORTLAND, OR
March 2 at 7 PM
Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing
3415 SW Cedar Hills Blvd.
Beaverton, OR

SAN FRANCISCO, CA
March 3 at 7 PM
SF in SF Reading Series
The Variety Theater
582 Market St.
San Francisco, CA

LOS ANGELES, CA
March 4 at 7 PM
Barnes & Noble
7881 Edinger Ave.
Huntington Beach, CA

SAN DIEGO, CA
March 5 at 2 PM
Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore
7051 Clairemont Mesa Blvd.
San Diego, CA

HOUSTON, TX
March 6 at 2 PM
Murder by the Book
2342 Bissonnet St.
Houston, TX

Week Two: Middle America


MADISON, WI
March 8 at 7 PM
Barnes & Noble
7433 Mineral Point Rd.
Madison, WI

CHICAGO, IL
March 9 at 7 PM
Borders Books & Music
1500 16th St.
Oak Brook, IL

DAYTON, OH
March 10 at 7 PM
Books & Company
4453 Walnut St.
The Greene, Dayton, OH

LEXINGTON, KY
March 11 at 7 PM
Joseph-Beth Booksellers
161 Lexington Green Circle
Lexington, KY

SAINT LOUIS, MO
March 12 at 7 PM
Left Banks Books
399 n. Euclid Ave.
St. Louis, MO

Week Three: The East Coast

WASHINGTON, DC AREA
March 14 at 12 PM
What If Reading Series
Library of Congress
101 Independence Ave. SE
Washington, DC

WASHINGTON, DC AREA
March 14 at 7:30 PM
Borders Books & Music
5871 Crossroads Center Way
Bailey’s Crossroads, VA

NEW YORK, NY
March 15 at 7 PM
Barnes & Noble
267 7th Ave.
Park Slope
Brooklyn, NY

BOSTON, MA
March 16 at 6 PM
Northeastern University Bookstore
Snell Library
360 Huntington Ave.
4 Ell Hall, Boston, MA

So now you know. And knowing is half the battle.

A few notes closing:

  • These dates are solid, and won’t be changing unless something strange and/or catastrophic happens. If that happens, I’ll mention it on the blog and update the tour schedule.
  • Did you see the first event in week three? Yeah. That’s right. I’m doing a reading at the Library of Congress. How cool is that?
  • Yes. I am doing fifteen signings in sixteen days. I expect somewhere around Lexington I’m going to have a manic episode, so those guys at Joseph-Beth are in for one one hell of a show.
  • I am considering buying a tuxedo. Or rather, I’m considering buying a new tuxedo especially for one of these events. I like wearing a tux.
  • I will be doing most of these events solo. But at some of them I might have Sarah and Oot with me. If this is the case, I will display Oot to you, and you will be required to gaze adoringly at his cuteness.

(Saying “awww” will also be encouraged.)

  • I’ve done the math, and with 15 signings, it’s a statistical near-certainty that at some point in the tour I will sing.
  • I’ll be posting up information about how you can get a signed copy of The Wise Man’s Fear even if you can’t make one of these events. Expect that blog on Friday.

In other news, for all you Girl Genius fans out there, Phil and Kaja’s new book just came out recently. It’s a novel set in the Girl Genius world.

I have to admit that I haven’t read it yet, but I’m excited to. I ordered my copy just 5 minutes ago because it’s Kaja’s birthday today….

Lastly but not leastly, could we avoid having a bunch of comments on the blog where people say, “Wah Wah! Why don’t you ever come to Hobgen?” (Or whatever town you live in…)

I know that those comments come from a place of love. Or at least from a place of vaguely love-scented narcissism. But honestly, they’re a little disheartening to read every time I post up an event.

Keep in mind that I’ll be traveling 3 solid weeks in March just to meet fans, hang out, and sign books. Unless my mutant power manifests in February and I’m suddenly able to bi-locate or teleport, it is physically impossible for me to do more events.

Rest assured that once my mutant powers develop, I will make every effort to come to Wagon Mound, New Mexico. Until then, you’ll have to drive a bit to see me, or wait until I come to a convention in your area. And yes, when choosing which conventions and signings I attend, I make a point of trying to pick ones in parts of the country (and world) that I haven’t visited yet.

More soon. I’m back in the groove now, so expect a new blog on Friday.

Later space cowboys,

pat

Also posted in Oot, recommendations, Sarah | By Pat214 Responses
Published: January 10, 2011

Citizen of the World

Well I don’t know about y’all. But I’m considerably more relaxed than a couple weeks ago.

Don’t get me wrong. I love running Worldbuilders.  I also love working on my book and getting ready for Christmas. I even love packaging t-shirts believe it or not.

I just don’t love doing all of those things at the same time. That was not so much with the fun.

At this point, we’ve dealt with most of the aftermath of the fundraiser.  About 3/4 of the prizes have been mailed out, but I haven’t contacted the winner of the Golden Ticket or Gaiman’s Snow Glass Apples yet. That will happen sometime this next week.

So if you see an unfamiliar number on your cell phone in the next couple days, you might want to answer it….

The t-shirt madness is largely over. We shipped a bunch last week, and I packaged up another 60 or so yesterday night. That means with the exception of about a dozen packages, we’re pretty much entirely caught up on mailing out everything people have ordered from the store.

Needless to say, I’m surprised at how well the t-shirts sold. Whenever we thought things would start tapering off, we’d sell another couple hundred. Because of this, we kept running out of specific sizes and have to re-order more shirts. That’s the main reason some orders ended up shipping later than we would have liked.

Speaking of which, we’re about to put in one last order of shirts for a couple months. So if you really want a shirt, this might be the best time to order one. Why? Because the next time we run out of a size, we probably aren’t going to be in a big rush to re-stock it. We might not re-print some of these shirts at all after this next order, and instead focus on other things in the store.

Consider yourselves fairly warned.

In other news, we have a new addition to the family.

(Click to Embiggen.)

It’s the Hebrew translation of The Name of the Wind. As an added bonus there’s some bacon in the picture.

Yknow, only as I typed that last sentence did I realize the weirdness of that. Because…. y’know… Hebrew.

I would just like to state for the record that this happened by accident. I wasn’t trying to be ironical or anything. I was just making a BLT…

I still love seeing the new versions of my book. I don’t think it will ever get old for me. I think this one is the 18th translation of my book to get into print. I should be seeing copies of the Bulgarian version soon, too. And after that should come the two different versions of Chinese: complex and simplified.

When I opened the package and picked up the book, the first thing I did was try to remember what the different Hebrew letters were called. I could identify about half of them, which is better than I can do in Japanese or Russian.

This made me feel very savvy and cosmopolitan. I was a citizen of the world.

That feeling faded when I tried to put the title into Google Translate to see if I could get a literal translation. It said that what I typed in meant “Name Crank.”

So I guess my Hebrew alphabet could use some work…

Erasing my final shred of cool-feelingness was the fact that shortly after picking up the book I experienced two seconds of cold-sweat panic when I realized that somehow a major printing error had happened with this edition. Somehow they’d printed the cover upside-down. It wasn’t just one book, either. It was *all* the books that had been sent to me….

Then I remembered. Hebrew is right to left, not left to right.

Yup, that’s me. Citizen of the world.

More soon,

pat

P.S. For those of you who live in Michigan. I’m going to be doing a reading/signing Q&A session at McLean & Eakin on January 20th at 6:00. For more details you can check out the Facebook event or hit Mclean & Eakin’s website.

Yes, there will be some Princess books there. And yes, I’ll be reading something from The Wise Man’s Fear….

Also posted in foreign happenings, The Tinker's Packs | By Pat68 Responses
Published: October 22, 2010

A Low-Key Gathering

Just a quick heads up. I’m going to be doing some panels for Neil Gaiman’s Low-Key Gathering at House on the Rock this Halloween.

The schedule of events is posted here on the House on the Rock’s website:

And the schedule for Saturday’s panels are on the Low-Key Gathering’s Facebook page.

There are still tickets available, from what I understand.

A good time will be had by all,

pat

Edit: For those of you that have asked – of course I’m dressing up for the costume contest. It’s Halloween. And the winners get to ride on the Carousel. How could I not want a piece of that action?

Also posted in Neil Gaiman | By Pat22 Responses
Published: October 6, 2010

Book Two and a Reading in Duluth

Okay. In keeping with my tradition of slapdash scheduling. I’m going to be doing a reading/signing/Q&A session next week up in Duluth. It’s at the local Barnes and Noble on Tuesday the 12th at 7:00.

More details are over on the tour page. I also created a facebook event, if you want to use that to invite your friends without having to go to all the unpleasant work of actually talking to them.

If y’all would help spread the word a bit, I’d appreciate it. I hate doing these things on such short notice, but I only found out last week that I’d be up in the Duluth area.

And now, a piece of fanmail:

Dear Mr. Rothfuss,

As you are no doubt aware, in your April 28th blog post, you mentioned that the manuscript would be done by September.

I’m guessing you are furiously trying to put the finishing touches on the manuscript, but us fans would love an update about how the work is going. I really enjoyed your August 16th post about what revision work actually entails, and always enjoy getting a view of what your day to day work is like.

Thanks for updating the blog so frequently, it makes the waiting a lot easier, and we love hearing from you.

-Asa

Asa,

I did actually get the manuscript to my editor on schedule. She’s probably reading it even as we speak. Um. Type. Or rather, as you read what I have typed. In the past.

You know what I mean.

That means I get a little bit of a vacation while I’m waiting to hear back from her. Or rather, it means that I would get a bit of a vacation if I wasn’t still obsessively tinkering with the book.

Yesterday, for example, I re-read 87 pages of book two.

(Note that these pages aren’t the length of a paperback page or a manuscript page. They’re my own page layout that I use for editing.)

Anyway, I spend yesterday re-reading these 87 pages of the book. As I read, I try to winnow out the extra verbiage, making the book quicker and easier to read. My philosophy is that if I take out everything that is merely meh, all that’s left will be the parts that are really super-wow. That means that the book will be, in the parlance of our time, good.

Sometimes while I was reading I would get an idea for a different part of the book, and I’d skip off to another part of the book to make the change.  Sometimes I would make a change that necessitated making a few other changes throughout the book to maintain consistency.

But mostly I was just word-winnowing.

So yesterday I re-read 87 pages of the book. Pages that I’ve already read at least 100 times. It took 8 hours during the time that is, theoretically, my vacation.

At the end of those 8 hours, the book was 600 words shorter. I hadn’t trimmed a scene. I’m long past that stage. All the chaff scenes were gone months and months ago. These days if I want to tighten up the book, I have to hunt out little bits and phrases. Lines of dialogue that don’t sparkle. Non-essential snippets of description. Single superfluous words.

As I was going home, I wrestled with a familiar thought. Specifically, I wondered if I was insane.

Again, I’d spent an entire day making changes to the book that nobody would ever really notice. And I have to ask myself, is it really worth it?

Then I did the math.

A paperback page holds about 340 words, less if you use a lot of dialogue. (Which I do.) So by trimming 600 words, I’d effectively made my book about two pages shorter.

I’m guessing a quarter million people will read book two. In the US anyway. Last I heard, that’s about how many copies of NOTW have been sold.

That means, taken all together, I’ve spared my readers 500,000 pages of *meh* text.

Let’s assume it takes about a minute for a person to read a page. Roughly.

500,000 minutes = 8333 hours = 347 days.

That means, taken all together, I’ve saved my readers a full year of meh reading. That’s not counting foreign translations, book club versions, and people who read the book multiple times.

When I think of it that way, I guess it doesn’t seem so crazy. Which is good, because I don’t think I could stop being obsessive like this even if I wanted to.

Later all,

pat

Also posted in book two, Fanmail Q + A, Revision | By Pat108 Responses
Published: September 24, 2010

Miscellanea

It occurs to me that I haven’t mentioned the current season of The Guild on the blog yet.

This makes me feel strangely guilty, as if I’ve failed to uphold my end of some unspoken agreement we have here on the blog. Namely, that I will occasionally remind you of some cool things that are out there, so you can enjoy them.

Included in the category of cool things, of course, is The Legend of Neil. I think I already linked to it when I posted up the interview I did with Sandeep at Comic-con. But what the hell, you can have another link. It’s free.

Lastly, for those of you that don’t make a habit of checking out my tour page or the events I post up on the Facebook fan page. I’m at Madcon this weekend in… well… in Madison, obviously. Or maybe not obviously. I suppose it could be a convention for people who were mad….

Then, on Wednesday night, (the 29th) I’m doing a little panel for the Wisconsin Book Festival, also in Madison. My talk is going to be in the overture center, which makes me feel all posh. I’ll probably fancy myself up for the special occasion in the only way I know how: by taking a shower and making sure I’m wearing pants. I also plan on limiting myself to only the most erudite cussings. (They must have at least three syllables or a Latin root.)

That’s all for now, folks. Have a good weekend.

pat

P.S. Since I’m throwing out links to random cool things. Here’s a link to an article about Joss Whedon that I very much enjoyed.

Also posted in a billion links, Joss Whedon, miscelany | By Pat46 Responses
Published: July 19, 2010

Comic-Con Schedule and a Chance to Ask Your Questions.

I’m a couple days away from leaving for San Diego ComicCon. Since I decided to scale back on my conventions this year because of Oot, this is one of the few big cons I’m hitting this year.

Since San Diego is big to an insane degree, I figured I’d post up my schedule here. Normally when I go to a con I do a dozen panels and signings and such. But at ComicCon I’ve only got a handful of events, so it would be pretty easy to miss me with all the background noise and residual coolness.

Thursday –  July 22:

1:30- 2:30 pm

Panel: Once Upon a Time: Epic Fantasy, Bigger Than Life Heroes/Heroines

Location: Room 24ABC

Notes: I’m pretty excited about this panel. It’s got Brandon Sanderson, Brent Weeks, Lynn Flewelling, Christopher Paolini, and Megan Whalen Turner. And me, of course. Should be a good discussion.

2:30 pm-3:00 pm

Autographing session

Location: Table AA1

Note: The AA table number designates a table in the convention’s Autograph Area, upstairs, under the sails.

Saturday, July 24:

1:00 — 1:50 pm

Signing at Mysterious Galaxy (Booth #1119)

Note: The folks at at Mysterious Galaxy will be selling copies of The Name of the Wind and The Adventure of the Princess and Mr. Whiffle. If you buy your copy of the Princess book there, you’ll also get a copy of the sticker I mentioned a couple weeks ago on the blog.

Further note: Apparently this signing will be a ticketed thing. So if you want to make sure you get a place in line, you need to show up at the Mysterious Galaxy booth at some point on Saturday and get a ticket. Sooner is probably better.

Additional Further Note: Mysterious Galaxy will be selling The Adventures of the Princess and Mr. Whiffle all through the convention. They’ll probably be the only ones that have it. That way, even if you aren’t able to make one of my signings, you can still stop by their booth and grab a copy of my book.

Sunday, July 25:

3:00 – 4:00 pm

Reading and signing with Patrick Rothfuss, Brandon Sanderson, and Brent Weeks.

(I’m guessing 3-4 is the time for the reading itself, with the signing directly afterward. Rest assured I won’t be bugging out right at 4:00. I’ll stick around until everyone’s books are signed.)

Location: Borders 668 6th Ave

Facebook event here.

Note: While this event is happening at at San Diego, it’s not part of the convention itself. That means you can show up for the fun even if you aren’t attending the con. It’s free and open to everyone. There also aren’t any tickets to this one, so if you miss me at the convention on Saturday, you can catch me here on Sunday.

Further Note: To add some extra excitement, Brandon, Brent, and I won’t just be reading our own stuff. Oh no. Far too pedestrian. We’ll be reading each others’ stuff. Honestly, I’m stuck between excitement and terror just thinking about it.

Last but not least, we’ve got something for those of you who won’t be at the convention.

Last year I did a video interview with Shawn Speakman at Suvudu. It was fun, so this year I’ll be doing another.

Gentleman and free-thinker that he is, Shawn is taking suggestions for interview questions. So if you have something you’d really like him to ask me in the interview, you can post it in the comments below. The door’s open, folks. Thrill me.

Later,

pat

Also posted in Ask the Author | By Pat64 Responses

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