Kaffeeklatsch with Brent Weeks
One of my favorite things this year (which has been filled so much with sadness and disappointment overall) has been the increase in availability of authors online. Sanderson live-streams every other week. Brent Weeks does one monthly. Tad Williams (which I don’t often watch but get notifications for) has also settled into a once a month or so schedule for streams. These present a unique experience to hear them talk about their books and writing in general and also take fan questions. For book nerds, it’s almost like going to a once-a-year signing experience all the time. And I love it. My kids do too, actually. Anything new or novel this year as a distraction has been great. I hope it continues at least some when the world goes back to normal.
So in August when random Facebook scrolling led me to see a giveaway for a semi-private conversation with one of my favorite authors, I naturally decided to enter. Did I think I would win? Definitely not. And to be honest, I almost completely forgot about the whole thing as school started the next week or so and life regained a small semblance of normal. Then just after Halloween I got an email from a person at Orbit Books US saying I had won!! What a shock that was, something that exciting doesn’t happen these days! Well, after checking a bit to make sure it was real and that I was actually awake, I responded and the date was set for the Thursday before Thanksgiving.
I should say, I have met Brent twice before: once at JordanCon 2019, and once at Weller Book Works in Salt Lake City last fall when he did the tour for The Burning White (Lightbringer #5). He’s a great person to chat with and an all around stand up guy afaik. His wife is really nice too, and they have a couple daughters the same ages as two of my daughters. So there was some connection there already. He even remembered me, once I told him where we’d met before. (I’m sure it was more because of my awesome friend Mel who LOVED his books and had bright purple hair with personality to match than anything I particularly had done. Unless moderate heckling about a single character counts.)
So back to the story… Just over a week ago we sat down around our computers with supposedly a cup of something warm (I had a cup of hot chocolate, but it was 3pm on a warm fall day, so it mostly just sat until it was cold lol). There was Brent, myself, and three others (though one had camera issues and didn’t participate much). We talked about books we’ve read of Brent’s (which was all of them for all of us; not much surprise as we self-selected into this). We talked about favorite characters. Gavin Guile (not the real one…), Teia, Kip, Durzo Blint, and others came up. Brent talked about challenges and payoffs in writing giant books. And how big of a book can you actually print before it has to be split. How to keep a story focused so it doesn’t balloon out of control and you need a lot of extra books to pull it together (but we all agreed one or two extra as fantasy readers is really okay). I asked about what to do when a character gets a very different reception from the way you were hoping, and how to salvage that, because I always give him crap about Liv Danavis. There was also a small bit of talk about what he’s working on now, but if I told you about it I’d have to kill you. Or something like that. But it does sound good and I will likely read it when it comes out eventually.
Not bad for a 40 minute call, really. I didn’t ask permission to share details from the call, and even if I did, I wouldn’t want to cheapen the experience by trying to take a ton of notes on specifics. It was fun to meet other fans in a variety of other states and share one of the things we have in common. A small afternoon chat like that was perfect for the 2020 blues. Thank you, Orbit Books US and Brent Weeks for a great 2020 reading-related adventure!
Picture: Me with Brent and my friends Mel and Dani at JordanCon April 2019. My favorite picture from the whole weekend.
