Brent Weeks

Meet the infamous, I mean famous Joe Abercrombie (and me) at Powell's Books Cedar Hills Crossing in Beaverton, Oregon, April 29th at 7:00pm. This is a ticketed event for the paperback release of Joe's book The Devils. Link for tickets in comments. Come see which author still resembles his author photo and has a dreamy British accent. But I'll sign books, too! See you there!

Yes! I love hints. I'll give them when I'm sure I won't be lying. Hype is (probably?) a good path to profit, but under-cooked books suck, and lying sucks too. I don't want get trapped on the horns of that dilemma if finishing takes longer than I expect.

@jacob_allee Re-read The Apology recently, and realized it was quite funny! Like, wait, did the Greeks have a sense of humor that I'm picking up correctly (in translation!) 2500 years ago? Happened a few times and I realized it had to be deliberate. Wonder how much I missed....

I maintain that you are better off reading Socrates as tongue-in-cheek and with a smirk on his face far more often than many people do. It’s a mistake to assume that he always means and believes exactly what he says. He is happy to run a reductio ad absurdum without telling anyone he is doing so.

I guess that charity anthology Unbroken that I have a story in is gonna make it.

@Sharky_977 First, glad you enjoyed Gunner. A paradoxically easy/hard character to write. And edit. Voice came easily sometimes and then when I revisited months later, I'd have to work and work to find him again. Second, uh, Gunner isn't in this story. In my defense, his "apprentice" is!

@BrentWeeks That’s awesome! Gunnar is my favorite character in your books! Super excited to get my copy of this then

Launching at 8am PT/11am ET - Unbroken Anthology. Grateful to be part of an amazing project.

@InvisibleNinj11 I take some pains to get the martial elements right without bogging down readers in explainer paragraphs that slow the pace. If something becomes a difficulty for the character, it becomes relevant to the scene. If it's just for the author to show off, try to avoid.

@BrentWeeks i see you've taken up archery as a hobby? lol (even as far back as the Jadwin coup, we had some dude, maybe Agon, pulling an Alitearan longbow with the back muscles etc. etc. Strong start. Loving "Nemesis"

I've reworked a short story I'm calling Gunner's Apprentice. A few of you might remember it from my book tour reading for The Blinding Knife back in 2012. Yep, that one. I hope it brings joy to some new readers, introducing them to the emotional whiplash I like to think I'm particularly good at creating.

@BrentWeeks Super excited! Any hints or summary of your contribution?

@theguildwriter This one's really just a throwaway, though. The kind of word-bauble that distracts me for a few minutes and that I thought would provide some whimsy for Twitter. But I'm really flattered you'd try!

@BrentWeeks us readers going crazy trying to use this info to glean more info as to what’s in the next book

Weird part of my job: today I had to look up if "superpiscine" was a word and then decide if I felt okay coining it. Super- is Latinate, so "piscine" feels more natural than "ichthyoid", which is Greek-derived, so though "superichthyoid" sounds pretty great, it's hard to read, and mixes Latin and Greek roots. The other option of going full Greek with "hyperichthyoid" doesn't have the easy "superhuman" parallel that I was going for.

@MJD040865147265 I mean, Shakespeare coined a LOT of words, and a lot of really good ones, but I think anyone can add to the pile of human linguistic wealth. It was just some guy who decided to make the word "cool" cool. Best if we make useable trinkets, but anyone can try.

@BrentWeeks Pulling a Shakespeare are we?

@jonqpublik Not bad at all, but would take (most) readers more than the momentary hitch of attention that I'd like.

@BrentWeeks Parapiscine?

@Generik420 And that's good! If no one liked ugly things, the human race would likely total about 100M people, and I don't think I'd be one of them.

@BrentWeeks I dunno, I kind of like that one 😅

@egor_kulikov I'm not saying it's wrong. It's more an artistic consistency thing to me where I have slightly more stake in it if I'm coining the word. English is an odd mix regardless, and I don't expect others to obey my idiosyncratic (likely incoherent) rules.

@BrentWeeks There are quite a lot of mixed greko-latin words

@datastorm17 Superfishy, technically. (I've been studying words all day, forgive the pedantry.) And superfishy carries all sorts of wrong connotations. Andross Guile swimming? Superfishy. Kylar Stern swimming? Superpiscine.

@BrentWeeks Superfish!

"Hyperichthyic" is too ugly. Rejected outright.

In case that last tweet left you on tenterhooks, "superpiscine" would be a new word, but "super-piscine" has been used (uh, rarely) since 1800.

@cremieuxrecueil I think it was Rory Miller (martial artist, prison guard, etc) in his book “Meditations on Violence” who said If you get in a knife fight, one of you is going to the hospital and one is going to the morgue.

Mandatory marker fights until everyone realizes this is nonsense. x.com/i/status/20430…

We should make everyone watch this classic police training film until there are no more 'Why didn't they just shoot the knife out of his hands?' style questions.