As we speak, I'm headed out the door for a two-week trip!

Week 1: New York City, where I fully expect to meet the Ninja Turtles. If there's time, I'll hop on over to the neighboring New Donk City to see Mario.

Week 2: Israel, where I don't have any idea where we're going and will leave that up to the tour guide. If I meet the Ninja Turtles there, I will be surprised.

I'm coming back on February 1st, but between now and then, I will be dead. RIP.

Know that I died as I lived: on my laptop.

-Will

I made a post about this on Facebook already, but I was told to put it on the blog as well, and so I shall!

Reddit's r/Fantasy hosts a contest every year called the Stabby Awards. It exists to promote excellent fantasy content across a bunch of different categories, and the mods of the subreddit work very hard at this every year. Each winner gets a real, no-kidding, metal dagger mailed to them with their name, work, and category printed on it; I have one myself, hanging on my wall, from when House of Blades won Best Indie / Self-Published in 2013.

The contest has gone on every year since, but I've never promoted it before, because it feels...inappropriate. Like I'm linking to it just to say "Hey, vote for me and not these other guys!" Also, I just don't care much about contests or winning contests in general, and I usually don't follow them myself.

This year, I've changed my mind. As a community, r/Fantasy has supported me to a frankly surprising degree ever since the launch of House of Blades. Thanks to many of you, I'm sure, my books get mentioned on the subreddit every few weeks, and recommended to people more often than that.

So this time, I'm going to do what I can to spread the word for them instead of the other way around! This is a cool thing they're doing, and it's worth promoting; there are tons of great authors on there, and you can upvote multiple people in each category, so it's easy to scroll down and support everyone you like.

Plus, I always find some new things to read on here. So that's new.

Here's the link to the voting page for the 2017 Stabby Awards, which also explains how to vote and how the contest works.

The r/Fantasy community is very supportive of independent authors, mainly because everybody wants more fantasy to read, and /u/elquesogrande, the moderator running the show, is particularly awesome. I've had interactions with him in the past, when doing AMAs for reddit, and he's got a heart of gold and eyes of steel. Or...wait.

Anyway, check it out, support some cool authors, and at the very least get an idea of some more stuff to read. Plus, support the people who are running r/Fantasy, because they deserve it.

Or don't. I'm not your dad.

​-Will

EDIT: Since everyone involved in this is a volunteer, they've also set up a GoFundMe page to fund the contest. Just getting that out there.

You remember how I told you I was going to edit and re-cover the first four Elder Empire books before releasing the last two?

Well, here's the first one. Enjoy the cover art for Of Sea and Shadow! The type is a work in progress (it probably won't just be plain white lettering in the final version), but the art is final. And awesome.

Enjoy!

​-Will

Cover art by Micah Epstein
Graphic design by Patrick Foster