The short list of six nominees for the David Gemmell Legend Award is out, and for the second year in a row I have two books on the list. Towers of Midnight and The Way of Kings join Brent Weeks’s The Black Prism, Pierre Pevel’s The Alchemist in the Shadows, Peter V. Brett’s The Desert Spear, and Markus Heitz’s The War of the Dwarves.

Once again I’m honored to have two books nominated for the award named for David Gemmell, as he was such a fantastic author. (My favorite of Mr. Gemmell’s titles is Knights of Dark Renown.) Because this is a reader-voted award, that means you all took the time to stop by and give my books a nominating vote. That means a lot to me. Thank you so much!

I do find it amusing that I’ve now managed to lose the award more times than it’s been offered. But did you know that the winner gets a battleaxe?

I definitely want to hang that battleaxe on my wall one of these days, but as always there’s stiff competition from a set of very worthy nominees. All of these books deserve a read.

You can vote for the 2011 David Gemmell Legend Award here. If you already voted earlier in the year and are wondering what happened to your vote then, that’s how the field was narrowed down to these six finalists. All vote totals were reset when the short list was announced, so you should vote again if you have a preference on what book wins. (Voting for the 2011 David Gemmell Morningstar Award and Ravenheart Award for best fantasy debut and best fantasy book jacket is also now open.)

In other award news, this past weekend I went to the Whitney Awards ceremony at the LDStorymakers conference. The Way of Kings won the Best Speculative Fiction award, and it also tied with Dan Wells’s Mr. Monster for Novel of the Year. I’m happy the book has been so well received, and sharing an award with Dan is awesome. (See the following links for a complete listing of the nominees and winners.)

There are a couple episodes of Writing Excuses up that I have not yet mentioned. First Dan, Howard, and I did another braingstorming episode covering urban fantasy. Then at Penguicon, Howard and I sat down to record an episode with Nebula and Campbell nominee Saladin Ahmed to talk about non-traditional settings. Check them out.

Things are mostly working on my website after its recent server move–the library, annotation, and store pages are all accessible and functioning–but there’s still some work to be done in the site’s backend. The upshot is that I can’t yet add new annotations or library items. So the WARBREAKER annotations are on hiatus until that gets fixed, as are the WARBRAKER html chapters, and the expanded “I Hate Dragons” short will also have a delayed posting in the library.