Found 14294 entries in 0.344 seconds.
Was it a deliberate move on your part to make it such that on Scadrial, people who wear aluminum foil hats actually are safe from mind control?
Yeah, yeah that was a big inside joke. *laughter* When I realized it would work, I had to put it in. *pause* I’m doing some fun things. The gun thing is another one I’m very fond of.
THE WAY OF KINGS
The Mistborn books were successful. Many readers liked the idea of a world where the Dark Lord won, where prophecy and the hero were not what we expected them to be.
Because of how well it worked, however, I fell into something of a trap. When it came time to rewrite The Way of Kings, I floundered. I knew the story I wanted to tell, but I felt I needed to insert a major twist on the fantasy genre, along the lines of what I’d done in Mistborn. What would be my twist? What would be the postmodern aspect of this book? It literally kept me up nights. (Not hard to do, since I’m an insomniac, but still.)
Over time, I wrestled with this because a larger piece of me resisted doing the postmodern thing in Mistborn again. That piece of me began to ask some difficult questions. Did I want to be known as “The guy who writes postmodern fantasies”? There would be worse monikers to have. However, one of the major purposes of deconstructionism, is to point out the problem with self-referential material. There was a gimmick to the Mistborn books. It was a very useful one, since it allowed me to pitch the book in one sentence. “The hero failed; this is a thousand years later.”
There are a lot of very good postmodern stories out there, and I love the Mistborn books. But my heart wasn’t in doing that again. In order to write Mistborn the way I did, I also had to rely on the archetypes. My characters, for example, were very archetypal: The street urchin. The clever rogue who robs to do good. The idealistic young nobleman who wants to change the world. My plots were very archetypal as well: a heist story for the first book, a siege narrative for the second. I believe that a good book can use archetypes in new ways without being clichéd. (The Name of the Wind is an excellent example.)
In fact, it’s probably impossible not to reflect archetypes in storytelling. I’m sure they’re there in The Way of Kings. But I found in working on it that I didn’t want to intentionally build a story where I relied upon reader expectations. Instead, I wanted to look for themes and character concepts that I haven’t approached before, and that I haven’t seen approached as often in the genre.
There’s a distinction to be found. It’s much like the difference in humor between parody and satire. (As I define them.) In the first, you are funny only if your audience understands what you are parodying. In the second, you are funny because you are innately funny. Early Pratchett is parody. Mid and late Pratchett is satire. (Not to mention brilliant.)
And this is why, in the end, I decided that I would not write The Way of Kings as a postmodern epic. (Not intentionally, at least.) Mistborn felt, in part, like a reflection. There were many original parts, but at its core it was a study of the genre, and—to succeed at its fullest—it needed an audience who understood the tropes I was twisting about. Instead of making its own lasting impression and improvement on the genre, it rested upon the work done by others.
In short, I feel that using that same process again would make it a crutch to me. There is nothing at all wrong with what Mistborn did. I’m very proud of it, and I think it took some important steps. But it’s not what I want to be known for, not solely. I don’t just want to reflect and study; I want to create. I want to write something that says, “Here is my addition, my tiny step forward, in the genre that I love.”
To couch it in the terms of the Jewel video that started the essay, instead of creating a piece of art that screams, “Hey, look at those other pieces of art and hear my take on them,” I wanted to create something that says, “Look at this piece of art. This is what I think art should be in this genre now.” Part of me thinks that a video that was beautiful for its own sake, that didn’t rely upon the follies of others, would do more toward undermining those follies than would a video that pointed them all out.
And so, I tossed aside my desire to confine The Way of Kings into a single, pithy sentence explaining the slant I was taking on the fantasy genre. I just wrote it as what it was.
*inaudible*
That scene you're talking about, Robert Jordan wrote that scene himself. He did not tell us what the scene means. If you've read the last scene of the Wheel of Time, Robert Jordan wrote that. It's what became the epilogue. And he wrote it and left it, and Harriet said, he left it and he laughed. He laughed and smiled. She doesn't even know what it means. I don't know what it means. You can ask me when you come through the line, I'll tell you her interpretation and mine. But we don't know for sure what it means.
Will Kaladin (or Shallan, or any of the other characters) be going to visit the various places Kaladin saw in his dream, and if so, for extended periods of time or just short trips? I think the interludes are wonderful ways of showing other parts of the world, if I may also comment.
I'm glad you liked the interludes. One of the reasons to include them is to show parts of the world that I won't be getting to for a while, but this is an epic, and there will be characters traveling to various places you've seen. Maybe not all of them, but some places will be visited. Some for extended periods, some for shorter periods.
You've said you want to write a book set in the Southern Continent. I did enjoy the Emperor's Soul a lot, so I am curious about you writing that future book. How do they use magic differently, and why should we be excited about reading a book set there?
The southern continent is where people have discovered how to harness the metallurgic arts in a more mechanical method. (I've hinted several places that this is possible. I've been holding off doing it until we go here.)
About the southern continent, would it be possible for other Scadrians to discover this method of using the Metallic Arts, or is it unique to the southern Scadrians?
It is technology-based rather than genetics based.
In the past, with Alendi, when the mist spirit stabbed Fedik, was that Hemalurgic theft?
*evil laughter* ...interesting question! RAFO!
How do visions in the cosmere work? And I'm thinking Realmatically.
So almost always [it's] glimpsing into the Spiritual Realm. But you are often seeing it through the Cognitive, and so like a vision that...
So like the vision that Dalinar sees. What's going on is-- being pulled, and kind of stretched a little bit through the Realms, into the Spiritual Realm. Where a Cognitive construct is adding a framework to seeds that are set in place.
So that you can kind of comprehend the Spiritual?
You can comprehend-- and also there's a little bit of a life to it. Meaning it can respond to you and things like this, to an extent. So imagine, it kind of works like an AI. Imagine there's some-- You've got that power in the Spiritual Realm and you're adding a framework to it, that it is shining through, and that is giving you the vision. Complicated, I know. Spiritual Realm is supposed to be weird, and we aren't supposed to quite comprehend it, but that's why we've got the Cognitive framework there.
The Hallandren believe that the Returned are sent back in part to give up their Divine Breath at an appointed time. Was or is there such an appointed time for Vasher's Divine Breath?
RAFO. This is a Hallandren belief; it may or may not be true.
Interludes having characters on the other side of the world - when can we see Lift again?
She is seated (ceded)? for future use, indeed. Some of these interludes are for characters that I'll need in the future. Lift is there because she's going to do much Awesomeness in the future.
So... Shardblades are modeled after Honorblades. Are Honorblades modeled after something else?
The Honorblades were provided for the Heralds. The person doing the providing was aware of certain things. So, yes, but not really. I think it is-- I can answer a "yes," but it's more like a big asterisk.
In at least two of the books that I know of, a god is either dead or attacked in some form or fashion. Is there any reason for that?
Yes, there is an ongoing theme there, and it's primarily because there is an overarching story behind the story. The books are all in the same universe. And there is a character that's the same in all of the books. In Way of Kings it's Wit. He's actually in all of them.
I suppose one thing to wonder is how do you enter Shadesmar? We know of a number of people who are jumping from world to world through Shadesmar. Grump Thinker and Blunt, Hoid too. How are they accessing the cognitive plane to transport themselves across the lands?
Presumably Shallan's bond with the truthspren let her get in. How does this work? If she had only a dim sphere then does it not require any stormlight, any spiritual power? Is it a purely cognitive change? I could see some advantages to that. You could hop into this alternative dimension at will if you were being attacked, even with little power.
The scholars earlier talk of whether there is food in Shadesmar, so presumably others have visited it. Can non soulcasters visit it? Is there some fabrial that grants you access? Are they only referring to the distant past, when KR had the power to access it? Is it purely a thing of the mind that anyone can learn? Is it only possible if you have access to a splinter of a shard?
There are many ways to enter Shadesmar. You'll see more of this in the future. One thing to keep in mind about Shadesmar is that space where things are thinking is expanded, while space where there is nothing to think is contracted. In other words, in an empty void, you get almost no Shadesmar. This makes distances as we think of them very different there.
With the Alloy of Law being more Steampunk-style, and your genre of choice being fantasy, what things have you done differently in this book than in your previous ones?
Just a quick caveat—I don’t really view Alloy of Law as being Steampunk, but they put goggles on the cover, because Steampunk’s really popular, but I don’t view it as being Steampunk because it doesn’t fit the Victorian feel. It’s much more Edwardian, it’s later era, the book is really based off of 1910 New York, the feel and the culture that is there, but it’s really a Mistborn book. I think when you read it, you’ll feel that it’s more a Mistborn book than it is a Steampunk, or a Western, or anything else. It’s Mistborn. It’s Allomancers with Guns instead. (laughter)
So what have I done differently? I really wanted it to feel like a Mistborn book, with some new elements. It’s really more of a Sherlock Holmes feel than anything else, because I wanted the mystery feel, and I wanted the character dynamic deal with things like that, so this was just a conscious choice to have two or three compelling main characters be in a more episodic story, and I was more focused on that than if it’s Steampunk, or whether this is what, I really want this thematically to feel like a Mistborn book.
Is Stormlight an infinite resource or a finite one?
Stormlight is a renewing resource.
For instance, a person's spiritual component knows how old they are.
Wow. Has this been talked about before? This kind of seems like a big tidbit. Now we have some idea of how Hoid changes his age?
I haven't said if this is a method Hoid uses or not, but it's part of the reason the Lord Ruler turned to dust when he lost his metalminds. (His body tried to match the age his spirit said he was.)
If they somehow killed the Lord Ruler in a conventional manner, would he still have turned to dust?
Yes. The metalminds would have stopped being tapped, and the spirit of the matter would probably still have had this strange effect. Not it didn't happen to the bodies of the shard vessels who died.
Would koloss spikes turn off when they die too, so dead ones shrivel up like raisins?
Hemalurgy changes the spirit. So not necessarily.
Okay, another question that's kind of similar to that one. Why are so many Alethi point of views used as opposed to others?
Why are so many Alethi point of views used as opposed to others? This was basically one of the changes I made as I was working on the series. I originally had planned to show all of these viewpoints, from all across the world, and I found that, when...the original time I tried this book, that since people's plots weren't interwoven together, the book was very difficult to read. Because people weren't connected to one another, emotionally and spiritually. And so because of that, when I rewrote the book, when I started again, I made sure to put Dalinar and Kaladin and Adolin in proximity of one another. So that this story...their stories would play off of each other. And so you would have a consistent storyline.
That said, we do have...you know, those three are all Alethi. But Shallan is not, and Szeth is not. And those two have fairly significant parts in this book. Most of the characters will be Alethi for that reason, that their stories are tied together. But you will....see, this is one of the reasons why, with this book, once I pulled everything back and was telling Alethi stories, I felt I needed to show the breadth of the world, and that's where the interludes came from, was me wanting to jump around the world and show all these different other characters and cultures, but shown in bite-sized portions so you didn't get overwhelmed with all of these different characters, that you knew when you go to an interlude, you can read this person and then you can kind of forget about them. You don't have to follow who they are, because they're there to show you the breadth of the world and what's going on, but not necessarily to show you...to go on a big distracting tangent.
Is all the chickens who are not chickens in Stormlight a big fat joke about [Terry Goodkind]?
No. Loan words into Alethi (chicken, wine, hound, etc) are a little bit of linguistic worldbuilding I am using for quite a different reason...
I'm guessing you aren't willing to elaborate on that point?
Book three will make it clear, but it is not so hard to guess right now. I will avoid saying more until November.
So if you were in the cosmere, and you know how it works, or how it all should work. Would you hack it like all ridiculously and like what would you-- Do you have a plan of action.
Oh yeah I would. I would have two choices. I would go hide on the planet I know is safe, and ride it all out. I have those two options.
What was the second option?
Well the second option is try to take over, right? 'Cause I know all the secrets. I don't know which one I would do.
Would you be able to hack it all?
Well, would I be able to? It depends on where I am in the cosmere, and how easy it is to get a hold of some Investiture.
But once you get some initial Investiture then you go out.
Then things start rolling. As soon as you can get one of the easy ones, it's easy to use, transfer.
Like Breath.
Yeah like Breath, or uh...
Mistborn?
Yeah, well Mistborn's harder, but you know Breath is the easiest I've approached so far. Unless you kind distill it, then you've got the... Anyway. We won't go there. You saw that in Secret History.
Oh, oh that.
Yeah. When you strip off all kinds of identity and stuff.
Connection Juice...not Connection Juice.
Connection Juice?
Yeah, that's what we're calling it.
Okay, okay I suppose.
How do you come up with all these names?
I do the language first and then I build names that fit. There’s no science to it, just instinct.
Chapter Eleven
OreSeur
If I ever do any short stories in the Mistborn world, one I would like to write would be from OreSeur's viewpoint near the end of the events of book one.
He was a complex individual, a true kandra in many ways—but also a rebel. It was no accident that he was assigned to Kelsier's team, who were planning to overthrow the empire. OreSeur was one of the only kandra willing to take that Contract, and he came out of a long retirement in the Homeland to accept it.
His motivations were his own, and I'd like to explore them. What would a kandra think, joining a movement to overthrow the Father of his own religion? What would he think when that movement actually succeeded? How would he react to, then, being assigned to care for the woman who had held the spear that killed the Lord Ruler?
Many of the Third Generation, TenSoon and OreSeur included, weren't as devout in their dedication to the Lord Ruler as many others. OreSeur himself had seen what the Lord Ruler had done to the world and the people in it. And yet, fighting against the man who was revered by his people in such a holy light?
Anyway, it would make for a good story. I can't tell it here, unfortunately, but maybe somewhere else I will.
Eventually, I'll explain why the kandra think that they are of Preservation, when the other races are of Ruin. We'll get to that, don't worry. Just watch for it in the text of the book.
I like how your book covers mysteriously lead us into wrong conclusions about who characters are. Who comes up with that? You mostly, or does publisher have input??
Mostly, those are the publisher's deal. I generally have some input, but only a small input. The longer I go, the more I have to say. Often, I will suggest scenes, but it's up to the publisher/artist to decide. For example, the cover of Mistborn 3 was originally a concept cover for the cover of Mistborn One. Everyone liked it so much, they decided to tweak the sketch and do a full painting for Mistborn 3.
Do you ever plan to use bio‐chroma again? It'd be a shame to see such an interesting and original idea left with a single book.
It is unlikely that I will use this magic system in a different book because it is distinctly tied to that particular Shard. The sequel likelihood is good. There is more to tell in this world, so there is a decent chance I will return and do a second WARBREAKER book (I've been calling it NIGHTBLOOD when I've mentioned it before). That isn't to say that there will never be magic systems that will repeat across series—in fact there's a decent chance that will happen—but I'm not going to say any more on that right now.
How old is Hoid? Or better yet (to avoid any trickiness), how many years has he lived through?
He's been alive since Dragonsteel. However, he may not have spent all of that time awake and alert.
In The Stormlight Archive, there are letters in the epigraphs. With those letters, is there some sort of Shardic postmaster? Who's delivering these letters?
I've been asked this before, actually. I wasn't asked it as early as I thought. I only started getting this one kind of recently. And my answer is RAFO. because, in part, it depends on the two planets you're talking about.
How do the Shin get Stomlight, if the storms are broken up by the mountains before reaching Shinovar?
An excellent question that you should be asking. (So…RAFO.) Note that they don’t use it as extensively as outlanders do.
Also note that though the storms aren’t as strong there, they do still reach Shin lands, to an extent.
When you're having a hard time writing some of your... for example, the Rithmatist, you said came out of struggling to finish something.
Yeah, I was struggling to finish another attempt at Hoid's origin story that wasn't working. So I jumped over and wrote something else.
I was wondering if you could talking a little bit about how working on another project... Is it the fact that that idea is sitting around in your head that's keeping you from...
Good question. So, the question is, "Working on another project. What makes me jump? What makes me excited? What's going on?" It's very dangerous to get in the habit of jumping projects. And I've trained myself not to do this except in extreme cases. But once in a while, you just hit a funk on a book so much that you don't want to let it become a theme, you don't want it to let it become momentum for you, or the lack of it. And so I would jump to something else that it's just repeatedly, it's just not working for me. And I know my writing style enough to know that that's not common to me. If it happened every project, then it would be a problem I'd need to push past. In that case, the book just wasn't working, and I'm gonna work on this other thing that I'm really excited about, just to make sure I'm recapturing my love of writing, and not getting into a funk. And that, actually, is kind of how I manage my writing overall. I will jump projects after I finish something to make sure I don't get burned out on writing. As soon as I finish something, I look for something very different to do, in order to keep myself fresh. And that's why you see these lots of different things for me, is because that is how my psychology works. I always need to be doing something new.
I remember there being something mentioned, the Thousand Eyes of Trell, somewhere in Mistborn, is that a real thing?
Yeah.
There's something behind that?
Yeah.
Few days ago I was in my family home to take some books for tomorrow's signing and my grandma which was reading The Way of Kings couldn't let me because she was somewhere in the middle and she was... taken by it.
Excellent, happy to hear that. How many, how many of the older generation in Poland read fantasy novels?
I don't know, my mom does.
Your mom does?
Your mom is probably not that old.
Your mom is probably my age so yeah.
I think it's more the-- It seems so a lot of old generation reads fantasy in Poland, its involving all the time.
My parents think these are just fairy tales not worth telling.
What's that? Your mom does? That's ok, my parents were very, very scared. They wanted a doctor and I changed to write fantasy novels. They were very scared for me. They were like "What are you doing?" Now, they don't complain at all.
My grandma was scared at first too when I gave her Mistborn and she likes it the best I think.
Excellent, I'm happy to hear that. Good job spreading the word to your grandma.
Were the Ryshadium artificially created or enhanced, or are they natural?
Oh, RAFO! Good question!
Have you decided it'll be Rysn or Rock for the novella [between Oathbringer and Rhythm of War]?
Rysn for this one, Rock for the one between four and five.
Obviously not anytime soon since you have a busy schedule, but do you ever see yourself looping back to do a novella/short story between The Way of Kings and Words of Radiance? Maybe the Lopen story you mentioned? Or is it something that's not valuable now?
I do want to do this some day, for cohesion's sake. So I can see myself doing this. (Maybe in the stretch between Books Five and Six when I'm working on Mistborn Era Three?)
Do you imagine that this possible Lopen novella would be an evolution of the King Lopen the First of Alethkar short story you've mentioned? Or would they be completely distinct? Or do you just not plan on writing that short story anymore?
That's what I have in the back of mind, but I would have to seriously consider what I'm going to do once the time arrives.
Then I was wondering about the Dysian Aimians or the Sleepless. Do they reproduce at all, and if so how does it work? Like is it that one... is it asexual if they do?
So they reproduce, yes. But reproduction for them has a variety of terms. They can breed specific cremlings for specific purposes over time if they want to. They can also exchange cremlings if they need to, in order to improve their genetic diversity. Creating a new one is a different experience but yes. In fact, they... I've written sections, not for the books yet but where I talk about them developing and over evolving one of their cremlings to do something new.
Okay. If they do reproduce does it require two of them or is it more like they breed enough and then they split one off.
That's a RAFO for now, but the individual's consciousness is an interesting thing for them.
Can all Shards have champions?
This is a, um, Theoretically possible, but you will find more about the backstory of why this works here.
The settings of your novels often seem to be something quite different. It seems the majority of fantasy are basically earth with magic and maybe some cool animals to go along. The Way of Kings just feels different (and the Mistborn books for that matter)—harsher, darker, almost like what we would like call a wasteland. How and why did you create the world The Way of Kings in this way? The landscape of the Shattered Plains is especially unusual and evocative. Was it inspired by the landscape of the American Midwest?
The Southwest, particularly. My visits to places like Arches National Park, relatively close to where I live right now, certainly influenced me. More than that—and I've said this in numerous interviews before—I'm a fantasy reader foremost. Before I was a writer I was a reader, and I'm still a reader. As a reader, I grew a little bit annoyed with the generic setting that seemed to recur a lot in fantasy. I won't speak poorly of writers who used it very well—there are certain writers who used it extremely well—and yet a lot of other writers seemed to just take for granted that that's what you did. Which is not the way that I feel it should be done. I think that the genre could go many places it hasn't been before.
When I approached writing the Stormlight Archive—when I approached creating Roshar—I very consciously said, "I want to create something that feels new to me." I'm not the only one who does this, and I'm certainly not the one who does it best, but I wanted a world that was not medieval Europe. At all. I wanted a world that was its own thing. I started with the highstorms and went from there. To a person of our world, Roshar probably does look barren like a wasteland. But to the people living there, it's not a barren wasteland. This is a lush world full of life. It's just that what we equate with lush and full of life is not how that world defines it. In Roshar, a rock wall can be a lush, vibrant, and fertile place. It may look like a wasteland to us, but we're seeing through the eyes of someone who's used to Earth's flora and fauna. I've also said before in interviews that science fiction is very good at giving us new things. I don't see why fantasy shouldn't be as good at doing the same. Perhaps even better. So that's what was driving me to do what I did.
If you were to be a misting, which...
Coinshot. Easy answer. Bouncing around off of cars and things would be so cool!
But without pewter, you would land too hard and break something?
eh, Wax manages. You just have to be really careful. Pewter would be number two.
It's a little odd that Preservation would inherently give up its power to fuel Allomancy, because you'd think he would preserve himself, you know? Does that make sense?
Preservation, as a Shard, is about preserving life, people, and the like. Not about self. No more than Ruin is about destroying self, or Cultivation is about growing herself.
Talk about your process of writing; and also about how you creatively approach it.
Every writer has a different process. There’s as many ways to do this as there are writers in the world. For me, my creative process is that I’m always searching for the ideas that I can connect into a larger story. I feel that a book is more than just one idea. A good book is a collection of ideas; usually a good idea for each character—something that forms the core of their conflict—several good ideas for the setting: something that’s going to drive the economy, something that’s going to drive (for me the magic) the setting—that sort of thing—and then several good plot ideas. These all bounce around in my head—I’ll grab them randomly.
An example of one of these was for Mistborn: For Mistborn, one of the original seeds was, I was watching the Harry Potter movies that had come out, and I was thinking about Lord of the Rings, which I had just reread, and I was thinking, you know, I like the hero’s journey: young, plucky protagonist goes, collects a band of unlikely followers, face the Dark Lord… and I thought “yeah, but those Dark Lords always get, just like, a terrible, raw end of the deal. They’re always beat by some dufusy kid or thing like that,” and I thought “I want to write a book where the Dark Lord wins.”
But that was kind of a downer of a book, as I considered it, a little bit, you know, “you read this book, and then at the end the hero loses,” that’s kind of a downer. So I stuck that in the back of my mind saying “I want to do something with that idea, but it’s going to take me a little while to figure out exactly what I want to do with that idea.” And then I was watching one of my favorite movies from a long time ago—both of these ideas come from movies, many of them don’t but these two did—Sneakers, if any of you have seen it, just a, like an amazingly awesome heist story, and I thought “ya’ know, I haven’t seen a heist story done in fantasy in forever,” little did I know that Scott Lynch was going to release one, like, one year later [The Lies of Locke Lamora].
But nobody had done one, and so I said “I want to do a fantasy heist story.” The two ideas combined together in my head. Alright: world where the Dark Lord won, a hero failed; thousands of years later, a gang of thieves decided to rip the Dark Lord off and kind of try to over thrown him their way, you know, making themselves-- by making themselves rich.
And those ideas combined together. And so a story grows in my mind like little atoms bouncing together and forming a molecule: they’ll stick to each other and make something different. Those two ideas combine to make a better idea, in my opinion, together. And then character ideas I’d been working on stuck to that, and then magic systems I’d actually been working on separately. Allomancy and Feruchemy, two of the magic systems in Mistborn, were actually designed for different worlds, and then I combined them together and they worked really well together, with the metals being a common theme.
I did all of that, and when it comes down to write a book I sit down and I put this all on a page, and then I start filling in holes by brainstorming. “What would go well here, what would go well here, I need more here” [accompanying gestures indicate different “here’s”]. And I fill out my outline that way, and I fill out my “World Guide,” as I call it. I actually just got—the wonderful folks of Camtasia (it’s a software that records screens) sent me a copy of their software so that I can record a short story, and I’ll go—I’ll do the outline, and then I’ll do the story, and then I’ll post it on my website and you can see exactly, you know, step-by-step what happens. Just don’t make too much fun of me when I spell things wrong.
It’s really weird when you’ve got, like, that screen capture going on, you know people are gonna’ be watching this, and you can’t spell a word, and it’s like “I don’t want to go look it up, I can get this right,” it’s like, the writerly version of the guy who refuses to go get directions. So I like try a word like seventeen different ways, and like “Gehhhh okay,” and then Google tells me in like ten seconds. Anyway, that’s your answer and I hope that works for you. Thanks for asking.
So, I'm entering a portion of my current book [Mistborn] where I have to devise a lot of names. Anyone want a Cameo? I could throw in something close to your name, or perhaps a version of one of your usernames, if you wish. Firstcomers get speaking parts.
Well, Lord Rian Strobe just got added to the book. He's even got a line! (He asks a young lady to dance.)
OutKast: Elariel is a good fantasy name--won't have any problems with that.
Tekiel: Can probably use that one straight-up, if you want.
Okay, 'House Erikeller' just got mentioned as one of the major noble houses in the book. They probably won't have a big part, but they are weapons merchants, which I thought you might appreciate.
Gemm, I didn't so much as give you a character as base an entire cultural dialect off of your language patterns. They're a bunch of underground street punks who like to speak in a slang that (intentionally) confuses everyone else. There is a character in the book from that culture, though he's a few years younger than you.
Well, House Elariel and the Lady Stace Whiten just got cameos. House Elariel throws a party that some characters attend; Lady Whiten is a young woman that is supposedly one of characters' dates, but he ditches her. (Sorry. He's kind of like that.)
Okay, busy night.
First off, House Tekiel showed up in the book. In connection with that, I managed to work in House Geffenry and House Izenry.
My favorite for the night, however, is the appearance of Lord Charleir Entrone. He shows up only as a corpse, having been stabbed in the back while in a drunken stupor, but he has a reputation of being a twisted connoisseur of underground bloodfight gambling.
You should know something.
And no, it’s never a good idea to interrupt the flow of a good action sequence with a random interjection. Except here, when it’s funny. Remember Roger Rabbit’s law: You can do it–break any rule–as long as it’s funny.
Chapter Twenty-Six
This book, as I've mentioned before, is a little less "tight" than others I've written. There are chapters like this one, where nothing extremely important happens–I simply show life from one viewpoint, a state necessitated by one of the other two doing something very important. Still, despite it having very little to do with the overplot, I really like how this chapter turned out. Maybe I should force myself to do a strict triad system like this more often, for it forced me to have some chapters where the characters could just live. Sarene's light chapters center around her friends and family, giving us an opportunity to spend time with them and enjoy ourselves. The Lukel sourmellon exchange probably couldn't have happened in a book like Mistborn, where the pacing is far more tense.
And, how were the Radiants able to summon their Shardblades at the Recreance if they'd already decided to break their oaths?
Their Shardblades are part of what brought them to—part of the Oathpact—but breaking the Oathpact did not affect their ability to bond or unbond Shardblades.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Spook Remembers Clubs
Ah, fever delusions are such useful things for us authors. Every character should go through a few of them so that we have an opportunity to explore their backstory through the use of a very timely flashback.
On a more serious note, I'm glad I had an excuse for this one. I like to avoid flashbacks when I can—they're usually more of a hassle and an annoyance than they are useful. However, on occasion they can add something that would have been very hard to get across any other way. This is one of those times. We get to see Spook as a kid, the day that Clubs recruited him.
By this time, Clubs had already served in the Lord Ruler's army and had been wounded in the leg and discharged. Though I rarely mention it, the borderlands of the empire include a large population of rogue skaa who are constantly causing trouble. Despite what's believed in the rest of the empire, there were in fact some successful uprisings, most notably these clans who stuck to the desert wastes out there on the edges of habitable land.
...
Anyway, Clubs had been discharged, an event that left him without a means of supporting himself. However, during his time fighting, he'd Snapped and become a Smoker. So, he found his way into the underground, where he was paid very nicely for his abilities.
He was always a lot more softhearted than he let on. When he discovered what was going on with his nephew, he spent quite a bit of his savings to go rescue him and bring him back to Luthadel. Clubs spent twenty times as much money on travel expenses (skaa were forbidden to travel, so he had to stick to some very expensive hidden routes) as he did on that bag of coins he left with Spook's family.
Spook never really knew how much Clubs sacrificed for him. Or perhaps he did—his uncle's death, after all, affected him quite dramatically. Clubs was a far better parent to the boy than either his father or mother ever had been.
In Stormlight Archive, how are they paying for the wars before the one on the Great Plains? How was Dalinar funding his armies?
Usually they have an almost feudal system on Roshar where the city lord's in charge of collecting taxes and sending them in but a lot of the taxes from out around are going to be goods. It's going to be basically feeding the armies and things like that. The people who are living in like Hearthstone and stuff like that aren't paying any taxes other than in grain. But in the cities, they are and you can also see the more important the lighteyes, the better of a city they will get with a higher population because they get a percentage of those taxes. Like Roshone doesn't really get anything. He's basically taking care of someone else's lands.
Now is that like on a property tax basis or is it more of a sales tax?
More of an income tax.
How do you come up with and create the maps for your novels? Is it a process of thought while creating the story itself or does it come later once you've written the story as a means to depict the places you've written about? Also do you scetch [sic] them yourself before having them drawn or is the process usually entirely done by a separate artist?
I usually sketch myself out something vague to use as reference, then make it more and more detailed as I work through the book. At that point, I approach and artist and have them help me come up with a good visual style for the book and the map. If it's an artist I know well, I can sometimes let them do more of the work—the Mistborn maps, for instance, were developed by Isaac with very little input from me beyond the text and some basic instructions.
Does the term Brightlord/Brightness have anything to do with eye color? Or is it related to the fact that money and artificial light are synonymous?
Yes. The problem here, answering this, does it have only to do with eye color? No, of course not. But eye color, and the fact that money glows, are both things that have been themes in Vorin culture for thousands of years now. And because of that, the two are very closely interlinked, it would be hard to pick which one is causing this and pull the other one out.
So, it is both. If you would an Alethi, they would probably say it has more to do with eye color. But culturally, the fact that money glows is just really deeply embedded into the way they think about light and the way they think about wealth and that sort of thing.
When asked by a fan about the third Mistborn trilogy...
"The third Mistborn trilogy [Era 4] is going to involve a lot of tying things together." "Allomancy has built into it faster than light travel." The fan mentioned the speed bubbles after that, but Brandon replied noncommittally.
The short is this: A fan asked if there were any holidays in the Mistborn world. I jokingly said Koloss Head-Munching Day. Fans ran with it.
is Koloss Head-Munching Day when people munch on Koloss heads, or Koloss munch on people’s heads? Just want it to be clear.
It’s the day the koloss celebrate by having a nice head to eat.
A lot of you may know I served a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in Korea, in Seoul. And missionaries have one day off a week, basically they call it P-Day. It's not a full day off, but it's basically a day off. Preparation Day. It's very common that missionaries will go play basketball or something. I'm not a sports fan; I appreciate sports. So I bought this sketchbook, because I wanted something that I could write in while watching my companions play basketball. And this is White Sand, my first novel. Handwritten. In '95 on these sheets of paper. And you can see me crossing things out, doing revisions, making my own kind of little dotted line here to do a scene separation, and stuff like this. And I just filled these things. With these tiny things. I can still read it.
"He wants you to visit him today?" Kenton repeated. "Who?"
"Regent. The Tower Seat."
I wanted you guys to see this. If there's ever a Brandon Sanderson museum, that needs to go in it. And that's how I wrote my entire first novel that I ever finished. Though, I didn't have a lot of time. One day a week. I didn't finish it those two years on my mission.
I came back and got a job. And the job was selling ties in a kiosk in the mall in Idaho Falls, Idaho. Because, while i was raised in Lincoln, Nebraska, my parents moved to Idaho while I was away on my mission. So I came back to a job selling ties. And it was actually a pretty good job, but you could only talk to people if they came up and started looking at your kiosk. Which was great; I'm not going to have to bother people; if they are interested, I can help them. But that also left me a lot of downtime to work on the stories. I had that. I also had a second job, which was selling corn out of a truck by the side of the road. (These are the great things my parents had lined up for me, when I got back.) And both of those left me time to keep working on the book. And then I eventually got it all done and typed it out and had my first novel finished. I think I finished typing that out after I'd gone back to BYU, and I finished the book. So, really, it took me from about '95 until '98 to write my first book. But part of that time was only one day a week.
Elend Plays Along
Perhaps it's cheesy to have Elend trust Vin here, and to have them understand each other because of the love they share. But by golly, I'm cheesy sometimes and I like it. So there.
Which of the villains from your books would you vote for as President of the United States
Ummm... Hrathen, probably. Hrathen is probably your best shot at someone who, at the end of the day, you would be okay with them having been President. Do not let Taravangian anywhere near the Presidency. Lord Ruler, better than Taravangian; still a pretty bad choice. Let's just go with that, Hrathen.
Hoid says he would watch Roshar burn if it meant his goals were achieved. Would Hoid go so far as to kill to achieve these goals? Can you give a hint about what his goals are?
Yes, Hoid would kill--if he were able to make it happen--to achieve his goals. His goals are super secret. Some you would agree with. Some, maybe not.
