First a couple of updates. There’s a new Warbreaker annotation up covering chapter 54 (with more about Old Chaps’s background, aside from the usual discussion about the climax), and there’s a new collection of Twitter posts. And the second Writing Excuses podcast episode with Mary Robinette Kowal as an official member covers internal character motivations.

The new Mistborn book, THE ALLOY OF LAW, comes out on November 8th. Today, Tor.com released the first batch of sample chapters, with the prologue and chapter one. They will put up five more chapters before the release date, which means that the preview is going to be about a third of the book. That’s a large fraction, but I felt that after chapter six was the best stopping point for the preview: it’s a satisfying chunk on its own, and it gives a good overview of the different aspects I wanted to include in the novel. It actually takes you up through the end of what I intended to be a short story when I started writing it. Of course well before that point I knew I’d keep writing the story to its natural conclusion, and it turned into a 95,000-word novel. (For comparison, the first Mistborn book was 215,000 words.)

I think you’ll like the preview. Go check it out on Tor.com.