World Wide Wednesday: Kings and Football!

Well, the Internet has been ablaze with news and chatter this week! Lots of interesting tidbits to bring you, so let’s get started immediately if not sooner…

1) The Way of Kings

Just about every major book blog brought to you the extract of Brandon Sanderson‘s The Way of Kings from Tor.com. The Speculative Scotsman has a bit to say on the subject, and links through to virtually every pertinent piece of information. I am most definitely excited about this major fantasy release! Stefan and Bill will be reviewing that for us (actually, they’ve got a duel going on).

2) Where to start with Terry Pratchett

Adam Whitehead has run a few of these handy little guides to key SFF authors, and this time he turns his extensive knowledge to that icon of English speculative fiction, Sir Terry Pratchett.

3) Book Blogger Appreciation Week

Although this week-long celebration of blogging is going to be of more interest to the bloggers amongst our FanLit readers, I think it is something to highlight because I’m sure it will be a great resource for finding new blogs of interest, especially in the genres that FanLit doesn’t tackle!

4) Events! Alt:Fiction and Book Expo America/Book Blogger Convention

I realise that my previous bias has been towards reporting events run in the UK (and usually those I have been to). I am planning to continue that tradition by giving you a few reports of the Alt:fiction one-day convention that ran in the UK on 12th June. In a reverse of this usual trend, I am bringing you a belated couple of accounts from both Book Expo America and the Book Blogger Convention that happened a couple of weeks back in the States!

5) Good Female Genre Writers

There are a lot of readers who bemoan the fact that they don’t seem to read enough good female genre writers. Stomping on Yeti brings us this handy guide (via Sandra McDonald), which shows a video and lists in a neat fashion female genre writers that should be read.

6) World Cup of Fiction

So, unless you exist in a little bubble of happy ignorance you will know that the football World Cup is currently being played in South Africa. Jeff VanderMeer has introduced the idea of a literary World Cup to celebrate the fact, and, unsurprisingly given his wide reading in different languages, Larry from OF Blog of the Fallen has been all over that idea, producing the first of many daily World Cup posts.

7) A Mash Up of Authors

Again, this news raced all over the various book blogs, so I randomly chose Ken from Neth Space to bring you the news: which is that Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter are collaborating for two books! For me, this is an intriguing and unusual collaboration and I’m pretty excited to see what they are able to come up with.

8) The George R R Martin experiment

Now this is an unusual re-read of the Song of Ice and Fire books — Victoria from Speculative Book Review is intending to read only the POVs of those characters she likes. It is an unusual experiment, and is being done to check whether the story is still understandable when only dealing with a handful of characters. What do you think — good experiment or silly experiment? Since I’m talking about GRRM, he brought us a teaser from the upcoming HBO series of A Game of Thrones — excited much?

9) Fantasy Films vs. Fantasy Books

This is an article written by yours truly and hosted on the Voyager blog: asking why are fantasy films taken more seriously than fantasy books.

10) Mark Charan Newton speaks…

This was supposed to be just bringing you a couple of posts about hype, started by Mark and continued by Sam Sykes and then Gav of Next Read — but then Mark also wrote this lovely and thoughtful post looking back on his first year of being a published author.