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New York Times bestselling author Brandon Sanderson, otherwise known as the best writer working in the fantasy genre right now, posted an update on his site yesterday concerning the progress of his two current projects: Wheel of Time sequel Towers of Midnight and the completely new and 100% Sanderson created The Way of Kings that has been in the pipeline for a few years.

First up is the Wheel of Time news. Sanderson famously maintains a progress bar widget on the side of his website that lets readers know close he is to completing whatever he’s working on. And the bar for Towers of Midnight has been stuck at 82% for awhile now which prompted some worries in the Wheel of Time fan community.

Understand that this is a group of fans who has learned to read volumes into any tiny tidbit author Robert Jordan was willing to feed them over the years while simultaneously going from a year in between updates to four years between new volumes over the course of the series.increasingly dangling plot threads and seemingly no end in sight, and a small progress bar not moving over the course of a few months suddenly becomes a very big deal in the WoT fandom.

But everything is on track. Brandon just had to go back and do some rewrites and didn’t want to update the progress bar since it wouldn’t accurately reflect his progress. Towers should still be out in late 2010, which is an impressive turnaround for Wheel of Time.

As for The Way of Kings, all he’ll say is that it’s still very much in progress with a promise of more information to come in the next few months. While I’m excited for the next Brandon Sanderson book, I also still have to pick up a copy of Warbreaker. So I’m fine with a little bit of delay if it means we get the next Wheel of Time this year.

Satirical book 13 cover image by Aranfan.

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This week’s Bookcast is going in a slightly different direction than the past two entries.  Before we featured a discussion of the book that we were featuring later in the week for the Book and Film podcast, but it turns out that we didn’t have much to say about this week’s book, Jurassic Park, without bringing the movie into the discussion.  So instead I’m flying solo this week with a recap of a book signing I attended a few weeks back in Dayton for the release of the new Wheel of Time book The Gathering Storm.

As always,  Bookcast can be listened to in the player at the end of this post (click through to the site if you’re coming to us via an RSS reader) or, alternatively, you can point your favorite podcatching software to the Bookcast RSS feed or subscribe in iTunes.

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Why yes, that is me standing with New York Times bestselling author Brandon Sanderson.  I hopped in the car last night with my endlessly understanding wife and made the two hour trip from Indianapolis to Dayton for a book signing.  For some reason Dayton is the closest Tor will send one of their authors.  A friend and I had to make the same trip a few years back to see Robert Jordan for a Knife of Dreams signing, but it would be nice if they’d send someone to Indy for the next book tour.

The Wheel of Time fans were out in full force for this signing.  The place wasn’t quite as packed as for the R.J. signing, but there was still a healthy crowd there.  A few women wore shawls or cloaks embroidered in the fashion of Green Ajah Aes Sedai, but by far the most elaborate costumes on display were two Asha’man who showed up for the festivities.  Otherwise it was mostly a gathering of good-natured geeks happy to be seeing one of their favorite authors and to get a chance to talk with like-minded obsessives about the books.

There was one brief snag when I first arrived.  They were handing out tickets to get in line for the signing, but I was told that you had to buy one of the books at the bookstore if you wanted to get it signed.  This was a bit of a problem since I bought my copy of The Gathering Storm on release day and I’ve had my copy of The Hero of Ages forever.  They were nice enough to let me through without much fuss, but it seemed odd that they would expect Wheel of Time fans to wait two weeks to pick up the new book.

One nice thing I noticed was the number of people who showed up with Brandon’s books in addition to The Gathering Storm.  People working at the bookstore said that they’d sold through all of their backstock of his stuff as well.  I started reading through his stuff earlier this year to get a feel for the new guy taking over The Wheel of Time and he’s quickly become my new favorite fantasy author after working my way through Elantris and most of the Mistborn series.  And that’s not something I say lightly.  I’ve only conferred “favorite fantasy author” on Tolkien and Jordan before this in my twenty-five years of voracious reading.

The Q&A session was abbreviated compared to what Robert Jordan did at the Knife of Dreams signing, but there was one question that approached Aes Sedai levels of intricacy that I thought bore mentioning here.  One lady explained that she understood Brandon couldn’t reveal who killed Asmodean, but did want to know if he felt that the evidence for the killer was sufficient that it seemed obvious to him once he saw the answer in Jordan’s notes.  I thought this was an excellent question since R.J. had always maintained that Asmodean’s killer should be “intuitively obvious” to anyone who read closely enough.

Brandon gave a response that would be worthy of any Aes Sedai as well, explaining that he’d spent so much time reading all of the various Wheel of Time theories online since around 1994 that his reaction upon finally seeing the killer’s identity was “Oh, so that set of theories was right.”  But he also pointed out that out of roughly 2000 characters who have appeared in Wheel of Time so far there have been theories that account for how roughly 1900 of them could have been Asmodean’s killer.  The example he used was “Tam killed Asmodean!” which got a laugh from the crowd.

So we know that someone out there has figured out who killed Asmodean, but we’re still back at square one since there has been a theory for just about everyone in the series killing him.  Brandon did mention that the killer would be identified in one of the next two books, however, which is keeping with a promise that Robert Jordan made at the last signing I went to that he would reveal the identity.  I’m still amazed that someone had the balls to ask R.J. the Asmodean question so bluntly at the Knife of Dreams signing.

Now wouldn’t it be the ultimate irony if it did turn out that Tam somehow killed Asmodean and Brandon was just using some clever sarcastic obfuscation to throw us off the trail?

When meeting Robert Jordan I was so star-struck that I only managed to mutter a few unintelligible words while he signed my books.  Thankfully I didn’t make that mistake this time around.  I thanked Brandon for all of his work on Writing Excuses and told him how much I enjoyed his books without getting too fanboyish.  My wife standing there acting as a nice counterbalance to my nerdiest tendencies probably helped on that count.

At the end of the night I came home with signed copies of The Hero of Ages and The Gathering Storm as well as an “I Killed Asmodean” bumper sticker and some other promotional swag they had at the signing table.  All in all it was a pretty good geek out night for this Wheel of Time fanboy.

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The paperback cover for Elantris.

In a follow-up to my last post about the impending release of the next Wheel of Time book I’ve decided to brush up a bit on Brandon Sanderson, the author who is taking the reins for the last three planned books.  I hadn’t been keeping up with the fantasy genre outside of Robert Jordan’s new releases around the time that Sanderson published his first book, Elantris, or I might have known more about him when it was announced he was taking over The Wheel of Time.

Now that I’m finished with my Masters and back to reading what I want to read all the time rather than trying to squeeze it into periods when I’m not reading what other people have assigned me to read I feel that it’s as good a time as any to catch up on Sanderson’s work and see just how good he is.  After all, being picked by Robert Jordan’s wife and editor to continue her late husband’s work seems like a ringing endorsement for a newly minted fantasy author.

Sanderson’s first book, Elantris, debuted in 2005 and is available in paperback at most major book retailers.  I’ll also have a link up to the book at Amazon in the sidebar by the end of the day if you’re interested in picking it up online.  I grabbed a copy yesterday and made it through the first hundred pages.  So far it seems to be quite promising.  He has a unique voice and a definitive writing style that doesn’t fall into the common fantasy dual pitfalls of being either too simple or too elaborate.  And the main hook of the story, while not something I’m going to give away here in the interest of preserving some sense of surprise for anyone who wants to read it for themselves, is definitely a big enough mystery to keep me flipping pages.

So far so good for Mr. Sanderson.  I just hope that Elantris continues to live up to its excellent opening.  But I do have to say that it looks like The Wheel of Time is in safe hands.

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U.K. cover for The Gathering Storm.

Did you know that the official release date for the first of the final three books in The Wheel of Time is due out on November 3, 2009?  That means that most Wheel of Time fans need to get started now if they’re going to have any hope of brushing up on the series by the time the next book is out.  I started the series the summer before book 9, Winter’s Heart, was released, and ever since then I’ve made re-reading the books something of a pre-release tradition before each new book comes out.

The next book, The Gathering Storm, will be interesting for quite a few reasons, not least of which being that it will be a true test of Brandon Sanderson, the fantasy author who was tagged with finishing the series after Robert Jordan’s untimely demise.  Thankfully Sanderson and Harriet, Robert Jordan’s widow, have made the decision to split the “final book” into at least three books.  A friend and I made a three hour drive to Ohio to see Robert Jordan at a book signing for the release of Knife of Dreams where he swore that the next book would be the last book even if it was twenty inches thick.  While I can appreciate his enthusiasm for getting the books over with and sympathize with fans who are ready to get to the resolution after the plot seemed to spiral farther and farther out of control in books 7-11, I’ve always thought that there was just too much that needed resolving for just one volume.

So dust off your copy of New Spring and get ready to jump back into the Wheel of Time universe as the release date for The Gathering Storm grows closer and closer.  You definitely don’t want to find yourself in the situation I was in the last time around, stuck halfway through The Shadow Rising after promising myself that I wouldn’t crack open the new book until I’d made it through the rest.  Ultimately I caved and skipped the infinitely forgettable Crossroads of Twilight and jumped straight into Knife of Dreams after finishing Winter’s Heart, but it was still torture avoiding spoilers for the month it took me to slog through the rest of the books.  But The Wheel of Time is one of those lengthy and detailed series that is ultimately enriched if you’re up to speed on everything that’s been happening over the past twelve books.

Or you could always just go and get the Cliff’s Notes version at the Wheel of Time FAQ.  It even looks like the FAQ might be switching management and moving over to the good folks at Dragonmount just in time for a long-overdue update that incorporates all of the material from Knife of Dreams.

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