There aren’t many New York Times best-selling authors out there who spend much of their free time helping out aspiring writers, but that’s what Brandon Sanderson is known for doing. (That, and supporting brick and mortar bookstores.)

So when I’m asked by writers to recommend writing resources online, I give them the url for Write About Dragons, a wonderful writing resource from Brandon Sanderson, author of the Mistborn series, and newly released Steelheart. If you weren’t a student in Brandon’s creative writing class at Brigham Young University in 2012, you can still watch all 13 lectures in video or audio, by visiting Write About Dragons. During the creative writing class Brandon discussed plots, genres, characters, description and even networking.  There’s now an additional series of lectures available that Brandon started giving this year (2013).

There’s a lot more on the site to explore (including a neat submission area, where you can upload your manuscript for peer reviews).