Writing Excuses anthology

[Juliana]

Those of you who are Brandon Sanderson fans may know he runs a writing workshop called Writing Excuses. I copied the following extract from his newsletter, which arrived today, and thought it might interest some of you, whether or not you are a fan of his work. Hope it's useful!

From Brandon Sanderson's official newsletter:

"A Cosmere story, “Sixth of the Dusk,” in Shadows Beneath
If you follow my blog and social media feeds you heard about this a couple of months ago, but I’ve released an anthology with the Writing Excuses crew (Mary Robinette Kowal, Howard Tayler, and Dan Wells) called Shadows Beneath. It includes four pieces of short fiction, as well as:

• Transcripts of the original brainstorming sessions for each story, recorded on Writing Excuses. (You can listen to them here.)
• The first draft of every story, for comparison purposes to the final draft.
• Transcripts of workshopping sessions we did for each story. (These also ran as episodes of Writing Excuses here.)
• A special “visual changes” version of each story, where we compared the first draft with the last one and put a strikethrough on each word deleted and an underline on each word added. (This will allow you to directly see the editing process of each writer.)
• Plenty of other bonus features for each story, including essays on writing and the editing process, other drafts, and other surprises.

If you are a writer or know someone who wants to become one, or if you just love to see things behind the scenes, I can’t think of another resource like this one. In this anthology you can see the step-by-step process of four different writers and follow the journey from ideas to polished works. But even if you aren’t a writer, this collection has four amazing stories that are well worth the value. (And check out the cover by Julie Dillon, who won a Hugo Award this year for her artwork.)

My story in the anthology is a novella set in the Cosmere, the universe shared by Mistborn, the Stormlight Archive, Warbreaker, Elantris, and the novellas The Emperor’s Soul and “Shadows for Silence in the Forests of Hell.” This new novella, “Sixth of the Dusk,” takes place on a previously unseen planet where people use birds to grant them magical talents, and a solitary island trapper discovers a plot to destroy his way of life—and maybe his entire culture. This story does some things I’ve been playing around with for a while, so I hope you'll check it out. You can read an excerpt here."