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Realized that today is the 10 year anniversary of when Elantris was first published, which launched Brandon to where he is today, with many wonderful stories, a great community, and many hours sunk into reading and re-reading his books to discover the many secrets, because as we know, "There's always another secret." This is a thread to congratulate Brandon on 10 years of fantastic writing, and wish him many, many more. Also, feel free to say how his books have inspired you, how they changed your life. Allow me to be the first. I cannot see how my life would be without Brandon's books, they inspired me to become a writer, and that's what I've spent the last 6 years of my life going towards, and I know that if I can write books the tiniest bit of an iota as good as one of Brandon's I can be a success. I have a purpose for my life, and I owe it all to Brandon Sanderson. Now my speech is constantly littered with references to books that other people don't get, which is part of me. I am so grateful to Brandon for his long years of writing, leading, and inspiring with his books. I wish you the best Brandon, and many many more years of writing in front of you. Happy anniversary.

Hey everybody, A lot of you might not remember me but my handle on 17th shard was Acharles78 (psednoym Austin Charles). I think---if my memory can handle the fuzziness---that I joined this site back in 2011. I joined this site because I wanted to get feedback on a fantasy book series I was writing called the Incarni---I think most of if not everyone on here now is new and wouldn't even remember me or that story because I haven't been on here for a very long time. I just wanted to write because I remained on the emailing list and loved being a part of this community and reading all your great stories and I thought I'd share some encouraing news. I'm going to be a published author on september 1st 2013, and not for the Incarni at all. In fact I hit a serious wall with that story when I realized that although I had spent well over two years world building and writing the first book in the series not once but twice, I dreadfully saw that the story I was trying to tell had been told before over and over. The infamous peasant boy--girl in this case, with an enchanted lineage and yada yada yada---Luke, Harry, et cetera. But like I've heard a lot of other authors say in the past that sometimes you just have a story that won't work and that its better to cut your losses. So I dropped it and started writing other books. The longest of which I'm about two thirds of the way through that's not fantasy at all, but a dystopian world-at-war epic with people with powers, fighting tournament, drugs, very not fantasy. I quit fantasy for the most part because I got discourgaged, but I just started writing other things. The book that's getting published is a novella called Sheeple which is going to be published by Damnation books on September 1st. It's about 28,000 words long and came at a time when I was inbetween two huge novels and needed something that I could finish relatively quickly. I found a niche in the weird tale genre and a lot of my shorter novel works tend to be that. I did a complete 180 and published something I wrote on pretty much a whim, which usually those stories end up being disasters for me. I wanted to add that I accredit a lot of my success writing through the last few years to this site, the community, as well as all of your feedback on things that I submitted. Not only did posting help me out but reading your stories helped me out as well. This is a really nice writing community on the internet. Lastly, I just wanted to ask if any of you guys here on this site have any similar stories you'd like to share, published or not, or anything else years of pounding your head against the wall on something that hasn't been working has taught you. Hope everyone is still writing and thanks for reading. Austin,