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Questioner

I was intrigued ever since I saw your State of the Sanderson about Death Without Pizza.

Brandon Sanderson

It's good. I'm one chapter, or no I guess it's like three chapters. I'm one day's work away from finishing my revision, to then kick it back to Peter [Orullian]. I'm really, really excited how it's turning out. He knows his metal culture really well, and one of the tricks has been integrating that without making it feel jokey and things like that. I'm very pleased with how it's going.

Questioner

What kind of metal influences were you going for?

Brandon Sanderson

...Peter really likes the lyrical metal like that, like Dreamtheater. I don't know my subgenres very well, but Apocalyptica gets a mention, that's one I knew, Dragonforce gets a mention, I knew them. But I guess Dragonforce is the same subgenre. My job is worldbuilding and plot, and his job is character voice and making sure all of that works. I'm fascinated by it all.

Questioner

So is he more in the editing process, or is he an official co-writer?

Brandon Sanderson

He's a co-writer! I came up with the plot and the worldbuilding, I sent it to him, he wrote the whole first draft. Now I'm doing the next draft and then I'm kicking it back to him to do another pass and make sure the voice still matches, and then we'll take it out to publishers.

Questioner

What's the character's name?

Brandon Sanderson

The main character's name is Jack Solomon.

Pagerunner

If you need to bring food into Shadesmar, why don't you need to bring air?

Brandon Sanderson

Y'know, we actually talked and thought about this. There are certain things I just decided for narrative reasons... I wanted Shadesmar to be travelable and I wanted it to be a real place, and so I just made air, I came up with kind of my own hacks. There are times I do this for narrative reasons. 

Let me give you an easier example. In the Mistborn books, and I've told people this before, I was working on speed bubbles. Slowing down time, speeding up time in a small little bubble around you, right? I went to Peter and I'm like, "This is what I'm going to do, what are the problems with this?" And he's like, "Well, redshift." Which means that basically you would be irradiating everyone with the light coming from inside the speed bubble. I'm like, "alright, we're just going to say that doesn't happen." This is where the line between for me science fiction and fantasy exists. When I'm building my story, I do try to have one foot in science with things like this. But I tend to work backward... A lot of science fiction starts with what we have now and extrapolates forward to [an] interesting, plausible premise. For my fantasy works, I start with some cool idea. And then I work backward in plausibility, trying to justify it. And we kind of meet in the center, but at the end of the day I am breaking the laws of thermodynamics, right? Just straight-up breaking laws-- I mean, we have our whole Realmatic Theory and stuff like that, but at the end of the day, I am trying to tell stories where certain extreme situations exist. Like, I bent over backwards to make the science of Roshar work with the greatshells, but at the end of the day, we still have to have a magical solution, right. To get beasties as big as we want to do, it doesn't matter how high your oxygen content is, if you've got .7 gravity or not, all these concessions we've made: the square-cube law says those things crush themselves. You just can't have things this big. And so we built in a magical solution. The spren creating this symbiotic bond is making it so these things don't crush themselves. 

And when I was looking at Shadesmar, there are a couple things-- what I want for the narrative is this place. I am going to work backward and try to make as many concessions and nods toward science as I can. But the air one, I just said "You know what? There's just gonna be air in Shadesmar. I am just gonna make it so that you can." I want you to be able to walk between the planets on Shadesmar, I don't want people to have to worry about bringing a Windrunner with them and plants or whatever to get oxygen. I'm just gonna make that the case. Your in-world answers, I'm like "Well, air kind of permeates and has escaped through and things," but really do we have an oxygen cycle there? We've got plants, but are they really--

The answer is, there is air in Shadesmar because I want there to be air in Shadesmar. 

Questioner 1

I know I mentioned my tattoo that I wanted to get yesterday, and I was wondering what, cause I want the planets that feature in that system to be colored and everything is black and white, and so I was wondering what color I could get for each of them.

Brandon Sanderson

Wow, ok, I don't know if I can answer that right here, you probably want to email that to us. I can give you an off the cuff answer. I don't know if it'll be like a canonical answer or something like that. Give them to me and I'll tell you what my instincts say.

Questioner 1

Sel?

Brandon Sanderson

I would do Sel as a blue color. Probably a light blue.

Questioner 2

Nalthis?

Brandon Sanderson

Nalthis i would do as like a vibrant pink, orange, or something like that.

Questioner 1

Taldain?

Brandon Sanderson

Taldain I would do as yellow.

Questioner 1

Would I do like the half and half or?

Brandon Sanderson

I would do half and half, yeah, or if you wanna do black and white. Black and white would work very well for them.

Questioner 2

Scadrial?

Brandon Sanderson

Scadrial I would do as a rust red, like a deep red.

Questioner 1

Threnody?

Brandon Sanderson

Threnody, lets see. 

Questioner 1

I was thinking like a dark blue/green mix as well.

Brandon Sanderson

The problem is you would want to do Roshar as either a brown or a Kholin blue. Probably a brown for the stone, so in that case you could Threnody as like a dark blue and you could do Sel as light blue. You don't have a green in there, so Sel could go green if you wanted it to.

Questioner 1

I forgot to ask about Sixth of the Dusk.

Brandon Sanderson

Oh, that would be mostly water, so that's a blue one.

Questioner 1

Like a vibrant blue?

Brandon Sanderson

Vibrant blue. So we've got three blues. But you can change one of those to green, and I would say Sel goes green.

Questioner 1

Like an emerald green?

Brandon Sanderson

Like a grass green. Because a lot of people are concentrating on the *inaudible*.

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

The Well of Ascension did not come at a price to Preservation's power.

TheNamelessOne (paraphrased)

My question was more in line with if Preservation gradually drained from the Spiritual/Cognitive to Physical Realms to refill the well, losing the power like Ruin. The answer was no.

Questioner

I have read White Sand and Aether of Night, and I don't know why they're not published because I loved both of them.

Brandon Sanderson

White Sand is not published because I don't feel that for one, Kenton has the depth of character that I like to have nowadays.  He's more an old school character of mine where he just isn't, personality wise, doesn't have quite enough.  Beyond that I feel that White Sand as a narrative meanders a little too much.  I feel if I cut back about a thousand words and fix him, we would have a good book.  Aether is not published because I feel that I wrote two different books and didn't blend them together very well.  There is the kind of farcical, Shakespearean, switched places, silliness, and it's fun, but it's like a mistaken identity almost sort of stuff and romance and things like that mixed with these dark things are coming out of the shard pool and destroying the world.  And those two stories never meshed together well enough for me to want to publish them.  

Questioner

So would you say it would take one more revision?

Brandon Sanderson

White Sand one more revision. I'm not sure what I could do with Aether of Night because those two just don't work together.  White Sand we are trying to do as a graphic novel.  

Overlord Jebus

Has Eshonai left for the Beyond?

Brandon Sanderson

Yes. I'll canonize this. I'm sorry. 

Overlord Jebus

*sounds of horror and shock* Noooo, nooooo, RAFO it!

Brandon Sanderson

You wanted-- That was a RAFO-bait but, so I never intended that-- If you want to leave this one out there-- But I never intended Timbre to be Eshonai's soul. When people said that in the beta, I'm like, "Oh, I guess you could see that, but I mean that's not how spren work, right?"

Overlord Jebus

I was going to say, so you're saying Timbre is not Eshonai's soul.

Brandon Sanderson

No. I never even thought they would make that connection. Because we saw Timbre in the previous book... I mean, I don't want to kill people's fan theories. But that one kind of blindsided me in the beta. I'm like, "Well I guess we'll go ahead and let people think that but no." No.

You can leave that one off if you want to tease people and things. Some people really want to believe that.

Overlord Jebus

I made a bet that Eshonai was not only still be alive after Words of Radiance, but would also become Radiant. And then the bet was if not I had to eat a shoe.

Brandon Sanderson

Oh no!

Overlord Jebus

So I've been trying to get out of it for like--

Brandon Sanderson

Well you could eat a gummy shoe or something like that...

But no, I didn't intend this. No. There are-- Yeah.

Brandon Sanderson

Chapter Six

Kindly pretend that you own a mousetrap factory

This mousetrap example is exactly the sort of thing I can do in a children’s book that I haven’t ever been able to make work in an adult book. I’m not sure why it feels so good in this format, while doesn’t quite fly in an adult book. Maybe it’s because when you write humor for the adult sf/f market, it seems like you can only do humor. You can’t have a hybrid story like this. Pratchett comes the closest, and I think his novels are legitimately good stories with good humor in the mix. But everyone else who writes humor seems to get dismissed as “just” humor. Their books don’t get much attention.

Here, however, I could–I thought–make a book work with good worldbuilding (if a little funny at times) and powerful characters who have actual character arcs in a book that is–essentially–a comedy. I think it’s because in the children’s field, books don’t need to be classified by genre. They already have a genre. They’re children’s books.

Either way, the humor in this book just works very well for me. It’s absurdist with a hint of satire, and it left me free to play with the form of the novel as well as the content.

17th Shard

Very careful roleplayers have counted the numbers of Inquisitors appearing in the novels and they claim there must have been 25 if Vin and Elend killed two Inquisitors between Mistborn 2 and Mistborn 3. Could you clarify the numbers of Inquisitors there were? They've literally counted.

Brandon Sanderson

They literally, yeah…No, I mean, I've got it written down somewhere. I'm now so separated from this book. I had always imagined there being around three dozen Inquisitors at any given time.

17th Shard

Oh, okay, so quite a bit more than 20.

Brandon Sanderson

Right. Well the thing you've gotta remember is that, with the powers they're given, they're pretty much immune to disease and things like that, particularly after they've gained their healing spike.

17th Shard

Right. Is that common to all Inquisitors?

Brandon Sanderson

It does not come to all. It comes to almost all. That's a pretty common one, but being an Inquisitor does not mean you get it. I think it mentions in the books that there's one spike that they all get, but I can't remember what it is.

17th Shard

I would imagine that would…well, okay, a steel spike so they could see.

Brandon Sanderson

Right. Yeah, obvious, but the thing is you've gotta have a Keeper to be able give a healing spike. The ones alive now pretty much all have healing spikes, but there were times throughout history when he needed a new Inquisitor and he didn't have a Keeper (a Feruchemist) handy. He could make an Inquisitor without that. That is not what's keeping them alive from the spikes being driven through their bodies.

17th Shard

So the linchpin spike is not always the same type of spike.

Brandon Sanderson

It doesn't have to be. The linchpin spike is just, when you're putting that many spikes together into somebody it needs a spike to coordinate them all. That is part of what's holding their body together from all of this damage, and it doesn't have to be the healing spike. The nature of Feruchemy is separate from that, if that makes any sense. For instance, you could put a few spikes into an Inquisitor without a linchpin spike, and they wouldn't die.

Questioner

Any more Mistborn stories in the works?

Brandon Sanderson

Yes. For those who aren't aware, when I pitched the Mistborn series to my editor originally, way back when, I pitched it as a trilogy of trilogies—a past-present-future—where I would do an epic fantasy trilogy and then I would jump forward hundreds of years and explore what happens with the magic in a modern-day technology level setting, and then I would jump forward hundreds more years and allow the magic to then become the primary means by which FTL—faster-than-light space travel—is able to happen. And so, the three metallurgic magic systems actually have FTL built into them. And so there will be a space-opera series set in the future, because I was able to plan all this stuff out finally knowing what I would be publishing. One thing that I ran into doing that was, when I delved into The Way of Kings and The Stormlight Archive, I realized that I wasn't going to be able to get to that second Mistborn trilogy any time soon, so I didn't want to have two big epics going on at the same time—I wanted, you know, one epic, and then other things—and so what I did is I said, well I'm going to try writing a short story in the Mistborn world, and this will be something exciting for people that, you know-- I kind of sort of do some of these things to keep Mistborn going.

And, I tried writing a short story and it flopped horribly. It was a terrible story. Wayne was in it, but otherwise it was awful. It just didn't work...

Okay. Anyway, so back to your story. I tried to write this short story, and it was awful. And I said, well, it's just not working, but there's some ideas here that I want to expand on. Maybe I'll write something bigger. And I started working on it, and I got about three chapters in, and said, okay, this is a novel.

Fortunately, I'd built into—this was a time where I'd built in myself a couple of months between Wheel of Time books to just do whatever I wanted. You can go back to my blogs at the time, and I said, people, I need a couple months to do something else to refresh myself. And so, I went in my outline to a full short novel that became Alloy of Law, and this is an interim book meant to be kind of more fast-paced, only focused on a couple characters, to deal with, you know-- I describe it as, sometimes you want to go have a big steak dinner, but sometimes you really just want to have a hamburger, and Alloy of Law is a hamburger. *laughter* It's faster. It's fun. It's meant to be a cool character interaction story, and with a mystery, as opposed to something that big.

And so I plan to do some more of those; I actually got about halfway through a sequel during moments of free time that unfortunately I can't continue because the Wheel of Time project went-- I would do it when I'd like send a revision to Harriet, and it would be, she'd be like, "I'll get back to you in three days," and I'm like, alright, I'll work on this. And then when the revision comes back, I don't keep going on this; I have to work on The Wheel of Time. It's not something I can put off. And right now with Stormlight 2—I have to do Stormlight 2; deadlines are so tight—but I will eventually get back to Shadows of Self, the second Wax and Wayne book, and you will get some more of those, to have some things going on in the Mistborn world until I get to the second epic trilogy, which will happen eventually.

namer98

I just finished the audiobook this morning, and in the setting are rules about how to not provoke shades of the dead. The rules are in order of least to most severe:

• Don't run
• Don't kindle a flame
• Don't draw blood

The post script talks about how these rules were based on shabbos as presented in the Torah. It was just interesting to see a non-Jewish author (In this case, Mormon) base something off of Judaism.

Brandon Sanderson

:) Thanks for the thread.

The Double Eye from the Stormlight books (inside front cover illustration of the magic in the hardcover of book one) has some roots in the Tree of Life also, and if you look at Alethi, you'll find some Hebrew poking through now and then.

namer98

I read all of your books as audio books because they are all so well narrated, especially the Wax and Wayne series.

I will have to keep a better ear out for the Alethi.

Brandon Sanderson

It can be easy to miss, as I play with it a little first, fitting it to Alethi. But Moash came from Moshe, for example.

MuslinBagger

Is that a hint of things to come? Is Moash like Moses or something? He is, isn't he?

Brandon Sanderson

Sorry. It doesn't mean anything other than "My editor is named Moshe, and I've always liked how the name sounds."

PM_ME_LEGAL_PAPERS

Speaking of which, there's a Lighteyes named Yonatan (a very Jewish name) that Wit insults in...I think it was Way of Kings. Is that based off of someone you know as well?

Brandon Sanderson

That is indeed. (Look again at what he's wearing.)

That's based off of my editor's nephew, who was included as a wedding gift.

Brandon Sanderson

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Vivenna Wanders, Then Is Confronted by a Thief Who Takes Her Dress

The next few Vivenna chapters are short. I wanted to convey that she's on the streets for a time, but didn't want us to have to wallow in her problems. I've seen books do that quite well, and I don't want this novel to focus on it. (If you're interested in one that does it well, Paula Volsky's Illusion has a nice section about what it's like to be a noblewoman who is forced to live on the streets.)

Instead, these chapters are the transition chapters for Vivenna's character. The representation of her going as low as she can go, so that later she can begin to rebuild. The dress was a problem—it was way too distinctive, and it could sell for enough that she wouldn't have to live on the streets. She could buy something cheap and modest, then put herself up in an inn. So, naturally, it had to get stolen.

I didn't want to strip her all the way, though. We've been through enough of that with Siri, and I really didn't want to go there in this situation. Vivenna can be brought down to the lows she needs to reach without having to be raped by a random man in an alley. (Personally, I think that rape is overused in a lot of fiction.)

Bradley Culvert

If you could be given one object from your books and brought into the real world, what would it be? And why?

Brandon Sanderson

The Bands of Mourning would be pretty handy. They might be the single most powerful object that is an actual object. Unless you count, like, the Well of Ascension. I don't know; the Well of Ascension's, like, less an object. The Bands of Mourning might be it, though I'd be hard-pressed not to pick a living Shardblade, assuming that they could turn back into the spren. If having a living Shardblade meant that the spren came through and could bond with me and I could have my own cool spren and Shardblade, that would be pretty awesome, even if I couldn't get a hold of Stormlight to power it, that would be pretty cool.

Adam Horne

You wouldn't bring Nightblood?

Brandon Sanderson

I don't think I would bring Nightblood here, no. I do not think that I would bring Nightblood here.

Brandon Sanderson

Chapter Forty-Nine - Part One

My biggest worry about these chapters is that people will look at the map we put in the front of the book and realize that it doesn't match the text. I really do like Jeff's map–it's well-drawn, and it has a very cool feel to it. I love the little city designs; they give the map a different feel from many fantasy maps. Overall, I think this map fits the "mood" of the book quite well.

However, I myself didn't give him good enough instructions on how to develop the map, and now it doesn't completely fit what I talk about in the text. Since the landscape of the land is so important to the development of the book and the magic system, this could be a problem for some readers.

Anyway, yes, Raoden makes the connection here. The Chasm line is what has been missing all along. I tried to emphasize the Chasm several times in the text, reminding people that it's around. However, as I may have said in other annotations (the spoiler sections), I now worry that the Chasm is TOO obvious. Anyway, I suspect the discovery will work for some people, and not work for others. Hopefully, the characterizations and the events in the book are interesting enough that even if some people think this discovery is obvious, they'll enjoy reading anyway.

Billy Todd

How closely does Adonalsium map to the gnostic demiurge?

Brandon Sanderson

A little bit.

Billy Todd

So, not completely? I'm not completely off?

Brandon Sanderson

That's not off at all. 

Billy Todd

So, not the urge, but the demiurge. 

Brandon Sanderson

Oh, well I'll have to go read to make sure what I'm talking about then. Your answer is: I will go read and make sure I know. I thought I knew what I was talking about.

Billy Todd

So, there's the creator, which is the urge, which is the creator of the Universe. *large hand gesture* The demiurge is actually God. The demiurge is the one that creates [its] universe, *small hand gesture inside larger gesture* and entities living within the universe need knowledge of that which is beyond what the demiurge has created.

Brandon Sanderson

Okay, that matches pretty well.

Brandon Sanderson

Vivenna and Siri Reunite; Vasher Shows Off His Returned Breath

I believe that this is the first time in the book that Vivenna and Siri talk to each other. (Weird, eh?) I knew I couldn't make their reunion very effusive, since they're both Idrians, and Siri has learned to control herself. Plus, the situation is very tense. (And beyond that, despite Vivenna's coming to rescue her sister, the two were never terribly close. They were sisters, but separated by five years or so.)

This chapter focuses on other things, primarily the changes in the God King's personality and the revelations about Vasher. For the first, I hope they are plausible. Remember, the God King has grown a lot with Siri's help. Beyond that, he's been trained to look regal and act like a king, even if he's not had any practice talking like one. I think he works well here, projecting more confidence and nobility than he really feels, speaking in ways that don't make him sound too stupid, yet still betraying an innocence.

The bigger surprise is Vasher's revelation about his nature. I almost didn't put this in the book, instead intending to hint at it and save it for the second book. The reason for this is that I knew it would be confusing.

The big question is, if Vasher is Returned, why can he give away his Breaths and Awaken things without killing himself?

The answer is simple, in many ways, but I'm not sure if I have the groundwork for it properly laid in the book. (Which is why I hesitated in explaining it.) Remember when Denth said that Awakening was all or nothing? Well, he lied. (I think you've figured this out now.) A very skilled Awakener can give away only part of their Breath. It depends on their Command visualizations. So Vasher needs to always give away everything except for that one Returned Breath that keeps him alive. As long as he has that one Breath (which he's learned to suppress and hide), he can stay alive.

Patrick

Over your previous books you've developed a reputation as the 'magic system guy'. Was it therefore a deliberate move to hold back on the magic in The Way of Kings, at least compared to your earlier books?

Brandon Sanderson

Yes, it was. That's a very astute question. I've written a blog post that I'm not satisfied with, but that I'll probably be revising and posting very soon, that is going to talk about this. When I finished the Mistborn trilogy and Warbreaker, I felt that there were a few things that were becoming Brandon clichés that I needed to deal with. I don't mind being known as the magic system guy. But when I become known ONLY as the magic system guy, that worries me. It isn't that I sat down with this series and said, well, I'm gonna show them, I'm not going to do a magic system. But when I planned this series, it was not appropriate for me to shoehorn in a lot of the magic system in book one. Though my agent suggested that I do just that. He said, look, this is what you're known for, this is what people read you for; if you don't have this it's going to be glaringly obvious. My response was that I would hope that story and character are what carries a book, not any sort of gimmick—well, gimmick is the wrong word.

Something that I pondered and wrote about a lot—just to myself—is that Mistborn was postmodern fantasy. If you look at the trilogy, in each of those books I intentionally took one aspect of the hero's journey and played with it, turned it on its head, and tried very hard to look at it postmodernly, in which I as a writer was aware of the tropes of the genre while writing and expected readers to be aware of them, to be able to grasp the full fun of what I was doing. And that worried me—that was fun with Mistborn, but I didn't want to become known as the postmodern fantasy guy, because inherently you have to rely on the genre conventions in order to tell your story—even if you're not exploiting them in the same way, you're still exploiting them.

For that reason, I didn't want to write The Way of Kings as a postmodern fantasy. Or in other words, I didn't want to change it into one. And I also didn't want to change it into a book that became only about the magic, or at least not to the extent that Warbreaker was. I like Warbreaker; I think it turned out wonderfully. But I wanted to use the magic in this book as an accent. Personally, I think it's still as full of magic as the others, but the magic is happening much more behind the scenes, such as with the spren I've talked about in other interviews, which are all about the magic. We haven't mentioned Shardplate and Shardblades, but those are a very powerful and important part of the magic system, and a more important part of the world. I did intentionally include Szeth's scenes doing what he does with the Lashings to show that there was this magic in the world, but it just wasn't right for this book for that to be the focus. I do wonder what people will say about that. I wonder if that will annoy people who read the book. But again, this is its own book, its own series, and in the end I decided that the book would be as the story demanded, not be what whatever a Brandon Sanderson book should be. As a writer, that's the sort of trap that I don't want to fall into.

Will_Try_N_Sell_Junk

What's the biggest change you've made between drafts that would surprise readers?

Brandon Sanderson

Hm. Well, the biggest ones would probably all be Stormlight, since the first proper draft of that (in 2002) was far from the second version I did in 2009. Seven years of thinking about where the story went wrong led to some huge changes. (For example, in the 2002 version, Dalinar kills Elhokar.)

NightWillReign

in the 2002 version, Dalinar kills Elhokar

WTF WAT

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah. Adolin dies as well... And there are no spren. And Kaladin gets Shardplate/Blade in the prologue and trains to be a knight, though not a Knight Radiant, as that term is one I developed later...

Mason Wheeler (paraphrased)

What do you call it when a Faceless Immortal says two things that can't both be true?

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

Uhh... I dunno. What?

Mason Wheeler (paraphrased)

A kandra-diction.

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

*grinning* Oh yeah? Well, how do you know, when a Radiant shows up at your holiday party, that he'll be well-dressed?

Mason Wheeler (paraphrased)

Umm... no idea.

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

Because he's in-vest-ed.

Necarion

Is Taldain orbiting at a Lagrangian point? *Brandon laughs* It would make the orbits work.

Brandon Sanderson

*long pause* I'm not sure the implications, I have to think through implications before answering questions.

Necarion

The situation I'm thinking of, it would orbit the big star but at the same period as the smaller star.

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah, well, I'll just say "yes", but I want to make sure I'm not saying "yes", without...well, yes that's how it has to work.

Necarion

Right.

Brandon Sanderson

Because [Taldain] I want to be not like Roshar where we have unstable orbits and things. Uh, but I… I'm saying yes, but I hope that doesn't get me into trouble scientifically.

Questioner

Is there a way for any of the Shards to circumvent the Cognitive Realm and resurrect somebody?

Brandon Sanderson

...So, resurrection in the cosmere is-- depends on if-- where your mind is, and the status of your body, and whether your mind and soul have kind of combined and passed on. If you get to them before that happens, then you can re-attach the soul to the body. And you see that happening in Warbreaker quite often.

Bystanders

The Returned.

Brandon Sanderson

The Returned, yeah. You just gotta get the soul before it passes on. Once it passes on nobody knows where it goes.

clyguy

Now Harmony tells Spook that Kelsier and Vin say hi. So is he able to reach into wherever they are?

Brandon Sanderson

He doesn't say that they say hi, he says--

Bystanders

They're doing well.

Brandon Sanderson

They're doing well.

clyguy

Can he see them or communicate with them at all?

Brandon Sanderson

He has interacted with them at some point.

Questioner

When you finished a book, or years away from a book, when you realized, "Oh, there was a loophole here, something didn't make sense." How do you react to that?

Brandon Sanderson

I react to it by saying, "Well, that always happens." Happens to everybody. You got two options. Well, maybe, like, three. One is, you just leave it alone. One is to do what Tolkien did, where he just rewrote the book. The Hobbit, he just did a new version that had the loophole closed. Or you can later on find a reason to explain it in world, which we call 'retconning' it. Any of those are fine. Don't stress about it: everybody makes mistakes. If Grandpa Tolkien had loopholes, then everybody's gonna have loopholes.

big12griff

I want a book published of Shallan's illustrations,that would be so awesome.

Ben McSweeney

A collected art book is most likely to happen in the 5-6 gap. Ideally it would showcase every artist and each illustration, plus our many alternate covers, which by then should be well over 100 pieces.

If there isn’t space in that book for the digital ton of ancillary sketches and anecdotes about the work that I’ve been collecting over the past decade, maybe there’ll be a Shallan-focused art book down the line (well, really it would just be a me-focused book, but that amounts to largely the same thing plus extras).

TL,DR: 4-5 years.

Questioner

A lot of people I know think that you are an atheist because you wrote such a believable atheist. And an atheist that we all liked in Jasnah. So, I'm wondering if you interviewed people or you got that from philosophy classes.

Brandon Sanderson

I did. Philosophy class mixed with interviews. And I spent a suspicious amount of time hanging out on atheist forums. Really what I would do is, I tried to find the threads where they complained about misconceptions about them, and things like that, and used that to inform creating Jasnah's philosophy on life.

Brandon Sanderson

Loose Threads

You'll notice, therefore, that I pile on the lose threads here. The most important one, of course, is the concept that Fjorden has gained access to the Dor (presumably recently.) The Dakhor are a newer development–Wyrn was just getting ready to use them against Elantris when the city fell on its own. (Dilaf wasn't the only Dakhor plant inside Arelon. But, those are stories for another time.) Anyway, I think I gave myself plenty of sequel room here. There are the questions about the Dor, about Fjorden, and about the seons.

That said, I can't honestly promise that I'll do an Elantris sequel. When I was writing during this period of my life (some seven years ago now), I was trying to create as many first books as possible. I was sending them all off to publishers, trying to get someone to bite on one of them so I could start a series. However, since I was a nobody, I had to write each book as a stand-alone as well. Publishers, I was told, like to get books from new authors that could stand alone or launch into a series. That way, they’re not committing to anything drastic, but can monopolize on popularity if it comes.

Elantris turned out to be one of the best stand-alones I did. I kind of like how it doesn't really need anything more to make it feel complete. And, I've got so many stories that I want to tell, I don't know that I'll be able to get back to this one. I guess it will depend upon how well Elantris sells, and whether or not Tor pushes me toward writing more books in this world.

Anyway, I've got plenty of things I could talk about if I do come back.

Daz925

Where were you in your writing process for Elantris-- I know it was your sixth book and you were on your nineteenth when you got it published or--

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah, good question.So, where was I in my process when I wrote Elantris and when I got published, which was my sixth novel. So what happened with my career, it's kind of a very weird thing. You find that everybody has a different path to success as a writer. I heard early on that your first five books are generally terrible and this was really relieving to me, because I--a part of my brain-- this would not-- someone else, this might've been the worst thing to tell them. But for me it was the best thing because my brain said, "Okay, good, you don't have to be any good at this for your first five books".

And so my first five books I experimented quite a bit in story and tone. I did a gritty cyberpunkish thing. I did a comedy. I did an epic fantasy. I tried a lot of-- I did a space opera. I did a lot of different things. And once I had done all that, I came back and said, "You know, my first love is epic fantasy, and it's what I really want to do." So I sat down to write book number 6, which was Elantris.

And at that point, I had gotten a few books underneath me. I kind of knew what I was doing, though I was not-- I hadn't figured out my process quite as well as I would have liked. Elantris and a lot of the books during that era I did a lot more discovery writing, and I naturally am better when I have a stronger outline. But that's where I was.

My biggest weakness as a writer at that point was revision. I had spent those five early books just trying different things, and that permission for me to not be good yet also kind of gave me the psychological ability to be like, "Well, I don't have to revise this one, because I don't have to be good yet." But what that meant is I didn't practice revision. So once I finished Elantris, I was not good enough yet to know how to take a good book and make it great. So it went the rounds in New York and got rejected; rightly so, because it was very flabby and had not been focused. And I know, from a guy who writes thousand-page books, focus is a weird thing to say. *laughter*

And so, when I actually sold Elantris to Tor, it was after it had gone through four or five drafts and I had finally sat down and kind of buckled down and said "I need to learn revision and learn how to make my books better". So I sold it right after-- right while I was working on Way of Kings in 2002, 2003, somewhere around there.

Cosmere.es

How was Perfect State born? Will you come back to develop the idea?

Brandon Sanderson

Perfect State grew out of me wanting to... a lot of the classic sort of cyberpunk idea, Matrix sort of idea, is: we live in a simulation, and this is just a terrible thing. And that's a pretty cool story, right? I don't know that I would want to discover I'm in a simulation. But, as often is the origin of some of my stories, I am thinking about, "Well, can I reverse that trope? What if living in a simulation, there was a really good reason for us to do it, and it actually turned out pretty well?" The idea of being: we solve overpopulation by giving everybody their own perfect place to live, in which they get to be some sort of cool hero and/or political figure. That felt like it was a cool thing to explore, where the story was not talking about how terrible this was, but was instead talking about the natural problems that arise. And I consider those two different things. Like, if I espouse a specific political philosophy (not to make this political), it is not me saying that political philosophy is without problems. (Because it probably is.) It is just I feel like the problems that philosophy has are ones that I would rather deal with, and are easier to deal with, than the problems another political philosophy might have. So, with Perfect State, the point of the story was not, "Hey, this would be perfect!" (Even though it's called Perfect State. That's kind of the irony of the title, right?) It's that "This is gonna have some problems. Let's explore what those problems would be and how the people who live in the system deal with it."

I could see myself coming back. Like, the two main characters of the story definitely have different goals and philosophies, and that is not resolved at the end of the story, even though the story itself is resolved. So I can see coming back even to those same characters. But there's a lot on my plate, so I can't promise when or if. I do know where the story would go. But that's very common for me.

Chaos

When did Preservation decide to imprison Ruin in the Well? No need to be specific, I should think. A simple "Near Alendi's time" or "Way before Alendi's time" would suffice, or whichever time of reference you want to use.

Also, this one is not a question, but nice Hoid reference in there. I especially like it how the Ars Arcanum refers to Slowswift as "bears a striking resemblance to a well-known storyteller." I'm on to you...

Brandon Sanderson

Way before Alendi's time. Hence the need for the prophecies. But Ruin managed to corrupt them.

DeliberateConfusion

Who would win in a fight between a Full Shardbearer and a Space Marine?

Brandon Sanderson

I don't know 40k well enough to say. But you will see Shardbearers in space some day.

Pariah_The_Pariah

...that's amazing. You've got high sci-fi fantasy coming? That'll be amazing.

Uh... Now I've got this image of Kaladin in modified shardplate(hell, can shardplate just serve as a spacesuit?) floating about in space and Syl appearing with a little bubble helmet.

Brandon Sanderson

The cosmere (the shared universe of my epic fantasy books) is interconnected, and eventually there will be space travel between them. Those books are quite a ways down the road, though.

Pariah_The_Pariah

I've known a long time of your cosmere! But I figured you'd take a "stargate" approach eventually -y'know, magical gates?

But actual Space travel?

I can imagine the various magical systems lending themselves well to that kind of stuff! I mean, gravity fabrials for artificial gravity, using some sort of cross-world steel pushing fabrial/biomechanical steel pushing device for a gauss rifle..

I mean, the last one is if you make this like space ship battles.

Windrunners and Skybreakers could just function as fighters themselves!

here's a question: how are cross world magics gonna work? Let's say a space freighter powered by fabrials enters Scadrial space. What happens to those fabrials?

Brandon Sanderson

Most of the magics are unaffected by being taken off world, though still subject to their own inherent flaws. Stormlight seeps out. Sand loses its glow. Metal can only be used by one with the right genetic code. Note that the magic from Sel is different, and is location dependent for reasons I don't think fandom has quite teased out.

Pariah_The_Pariah

Isn't Sel the original planet where Adonalsium happened?

Brandon Sanderson

Yolen is the original.

Brandon Sanderson

Title Page - Part Two

Okay, so here we see the words Final Empire for the first time. Continuing the discussion I had in the last annotation, one of the books that I wrote after Mistborn Prime was called The Final Empire. (I now call it The Final Empire Prime.) It was the story of a young boy (yes, boy) named Vin who lived in an oppressive imperial dictatorship that he was destined to overthrow. It was my attempt at writing a shorter book that still had epic scope.

This book turned out to be okay, but it had some fairly big problems problems. While people reacted rather well to the characters, the setting was a little weak for one of my books. Also, once again, I wasn't that enthusiastic about the way the plot turned out.

After that, I gave up on the short books. I proved no good at it. I decided to do The Way of Kings next, a massive war epic. It turned out to be 350,000+ words–I kind of see it as me reacting in frustration against the short books I'd forced myself to write. About this time, I sold Elantris, and Moshe (my editor) wanted to see what else I was working on. I sent him Kings. He liked it, and put it in the contract.

I, however, wasn't certain if Kings was the book I wanted to use as a follow up for Elantris. They were very different novels, and I was worried that those who liked Elantris would be confused by such a sharp turn in the direction of my career. So, I decided to write a different book to be my "second" novel.

I had always liked Allomancy as a magic system, and I liked several of the character concepts Final Empire. I also liked a lot of the ideas from both books, as well as some ideas I'd had for a great plot. I put three all of these things together, and conceived the book you are now reading.

Brandon Sanderson

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.

Brandon Sanderson

Well, Lord Rian Strobe just got added to the book. He's even got a line! (He asks a young lady to dance.)

Brandon Sanderson

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.

Brandon Sanderson

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.

Brandon Sanderson

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.)

Brandon Sanderson

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.

grampipon

Considering inside the hardcover Words of Radiance is a giant, extremely high quality, official art of [Shallan], and she totally looks like the northern european stereotype. We might need /u/mistborn for this, because sometimes even official artwork is a mess [with regards to ethnicity].

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah, I've had a tough time pushing to get the images to work like I want. (Oathbringer's cover was more successful here.) The problem is that a lot of artists work from models, and it's hard to find appropriate models.

I've let Shallan slide because I know that if the films get made, she's likely to be cast with a Caucasian actress--and am more ready to make a fight over Kaladin, Jasnah, and Dalinar. So I don't particularly mind if people see Shallan as white, for various reasons--the main one being the one that's been brought up in this thread, I believe. The fact that Vedens, Alethi, and Horneaters aren't real Earth races--and can't really be cast with them. Shallan, having all three bloods intermixed, makes for a difficult description--particularly since I know the average reader is going to peg her as Irish in complexion because of the hair.

I would say that it's all right to imagine the characters however you would like, as it's your version of the story in your head. The Whelan art in book two is how I think most people will imagine her, and I'm fine with that--I wish I'd been able to get Kaladin looking a little more right on the book two cover, though I was successful with Jasnah on book three.

Enasor

How would you cast Adolin? He's always been one I struggled to pinpoint too due to his blond hair and his mixed heritage. Blond hair and blue eyes do bring in given imagery which seems to clash with the Alethi racial identity. Or at least, it does to me as a reader. So how would you approach it while remaining faithful to your work?

Brandon Sanderson

I actually think Adolin could be somewhat easier than others.

When we make the movies, I'll probably suggest that we make anyone from Shin, Iri, or Rira (all along the coast there) look Caucasian. The books can handle a lot more of a learning curve, I feel, than the films--and we won't have things like the Interludes to jump over to Iri to explore their culture. So a race of strange, golden-skinned and haired people who ALSO aren't native to Roshar (different from the Caucasians in Shinovar) might just be too odd.

The Rirans, which Adolin comes from, are already a mixed ethnicity themselves--not even Iriali, so it's fine to make them Caucasian. So Adolin could be cast white, if they really want to. Basically, I'm expecting it to be a bit of a fight to get them to cast four of the leads (Kaladin/Dalinar/Jasnah/Navani) as Asian actors. Maybe I'll be wrong, but from what I've heard from actors in Hollywood, directors and studios are hesitant about not being able to cast known names in big roles. (Ignoring the fact that's hard for Asian American actors to become big names if they aren't ever given big roles...)

So, I can imagine allowing them to go with someone Caucasian for Adolin and Shallan, in exchange for pushing the rest of the cast to be how I'd like.

In a perfect world, though, I'd want someone like Dave Bautista for Dalinar--and someone like Alex Landi for Adolin. (Note that I'm not a casting director myself, so I have no idea who could act the role the right way--I'm just judging based on what I've seen of them in the past.)

Badloss

How would you differentiate the "weird" Caucasian Shin eyes from the others in that case?

Would you go for Alita Battle Angel eyes or something to make the Shin distinctive?

Brandon Sanderson

No, I wouldn't do that. In this theoretical land, the Iriali and those around them would also have Shin eyes. That's basically how it is in the text right now. (Drehy, from Bridge Four, for example isn't Shin--but he's mentioned as looking like a person from "Western Roshar" which means Caucasian to them.)

Badloss

Why do people think Szeth's eyes are creepy and "child-like" if Caucasian eyes are more prevalent on Roshar than being a uniquely Shin characteristic? I read it as the eyes being an exotic and strange Shin thing, just like their animals and plants.

Brandon Sanderson

They are exotic and strange. A pure-blooded Shin is a rare sight, and the way I have it now, even westerners like Drehy are mixed breeds. Even then, someone like them would not be something you see often. But at the same time, it might not be as rare as you think. Like encountering an American when in Japan. Something that happens regularly, but they still stand out. And many people from the rural parts of Alethkar would never have seen one.

DylanHuebner

I was wondering how the animation of the lifeless statues worked, in regard to the use of Susebron's Breath. If they were lifeless, then vasher wouldn't have been able to take his Breath back out of them, nor would susebron have needed such a great deal of breath to revive them—he just would have needed a password. But if they were simply Awakened, no password would have been necessary to animate the statues, just Breath and Command.

It seems like the statues could be neither lifeless nor awakened. Are they unique, because of the use of bone, or am I missing something? The only other explanation I could think of was that they were lifeless, but Susebron's breath wasn't used to activate the statues, he simply had it passed down from vasher, in addition to the statues. If that's the case(and then I've simply been confusing myself with unnecessary, convoluted logic), why was it necessary to keep the breath safe for all these years?

Brandon Sanderson

Wow, there are a lot of questions in there. If you follow the drafts, I think you can see the evolution of what became of the Lifeless army. Originally I had planned for the statues to simply have been placed there so that you could Awaken them—just in my original concepts, before I started the writing—and then that became the army.

I eventually decided that didn't work for various reasons. Number one, as I developed the magic system, Awakening stone doesn't work very well. You've got to have limberness, you've got to have motion to something for it to actually be stronger. So a soldier made out of cloth would be more useful to you than a soldier made out of stone, if you were just Awakening something. At that point, as I was developing this, I went back to the drawing board and said okay, I need to leave him a whole group of really cool Lifeless as the army. But that had problems in that the ichor would not have stayed good long enough. Plus they already had a pretty big Lifeless army, so what was special about this one? Remember, I'm revising concepts like this as the book is going along. You can see where in the story I could see what needed to be there. So I went back to the drawing board again.

I think the original draft of WARBREAKER you can download off my website has them just as statues, though at the time when I was writing that I already knew it would need to change. I was just sticking to my outline because I needed to have the whole thing complete on the page before I could work with it. A lot of times that's how I do things as a writer—I get the rough draft down, and then I begin to sculpt.

I eventually developed essentially what you've just outlined in the first part, before you started worrying if you were too convoluted. I said, well, what if there's a hybrid? What happens if you Awaken bones? Can you create something? The reason that you can't draw the Breath back from a Lifeless is because the Breath clings to it. If the Lifeless were sentient enough, it could give up its own Breath, but you can't take it, just like you can't take a Breath from a person by force. You have to get them to give it up willingly. So it sticks to the Lifeless. A Lifeless is, let's say, 90% of a sentient being. The Breath doesn't manifest in them, because they aren't alive, yet they're almost there. A stone statue brought to life would be way down on the bottom rung.

Is there something in between? That's the advancement I had Vasher discover—what if we build something out of bone, but then encase it in stone to make it strong, and build it in ways that the bone is held together by the force of the Breaths? That's really what you're getting at there, that you need a lot of Breath, a lot of power, to hold all that stone together. There are seams at the joints. What the Breath is doing is clinging there like magical sinew, and it's holding all of that together.

Vasher left the Phantoms Invested with enough Breath to hold them together but not to move. You needed another big, substantial influx of Breath in order to actually make them have motion, to bring them enough strength to move and that sort of thing. So it's kind of a hybrid.

Darkness (paraphrased)

Further on in that… do different gemstones hold a different flavor, or different "frequency" of Stormlight?

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

Umm…. Nnnnnnnnooooooo… But kind of? Here's the thing: So with the gemstones on Roshar… scientifically some of these gemstones are just really close to one another. Like chemical formula and whatever. But, their cognitive selves and their spiritual selves are gonna be very different because of human perception, right? (sure) And so, the answer is both a no and a yes because of that. So people's perception has sort of changed how the magic works, to an extent… but it's the same amount of investiture, just with slightly different flavorings.

Darkness (paraphrased)

Right, so… is it easier for a Soulcaster to turn rock into smoke with a smokestone as opposed to a ruby?

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

So… Soulcasting… is gonna really depend on whether you're using a soulcaster.

Darkness (paraphrased)

First is for a Soulcaster, second is for a Surgebinder.

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

A Surgebinder is far less constrained than someone using a device accessing surges, right? A Knight Radiant is far less constrained than somebody using a mechanical means of accessing magic, and I would include Honorblades as a mechanical means of accessing a surge.

Darkness (paraphrased)

Cool! So with the whole Jasnah scene, she inhales Stormlight, for using Soulcasting. So how is it the Soulcaster appears to glow more fiercely instead of growing dimmer in that scene?

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

Um… heh heh heh… So… this is perception on Shallan's part, watching and kind of resonating with the Soulcasting, and some weird things are happening that she sees, and not necessarily anyone else is seeing.

Darkness (paraphrased)

I love that! Alright… Also, did Taravangian recognize that Jasnah was not Soulcasting traditionally? Like was it the hand sinking into the rock that gave it away?

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

Taravangian knew and already suspected.

Questioner

I believe Dark One started in the cosmere. Are there any elements in the current version that we can identify as cosmere-ish? For example, the Well of Sorrows feels like it could have been a Shardpool.

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah, the Well of Sorrows got added during the cosmere part. So did Nikka being a ghost, when it was in the cosmere. She was, like, just a character until I did the cosmere version. And when I pulled it out, I left that. So, basically, Nikka the Cognitive Shadow is a cosmere leftover.

When it was cosmere, Illarion the White Wizard was going to be using cosmere magics that you don’t need any Investiture to use, in order to be pulling off some of his tricks, which I thought was an amusing application. But since we moved it out he can have actual… I mean, the whole “Destined One” is something I wrote in to the most recent. That didn’t exist up until version four, that is the version you’re reading. Before that, he’d have a fabrial and be like, “Look, what a powerful wizard I am!” And then use it to do something, and they’d be like, “Wow!” But that got written out.

Yes, there are some cosmere stuff there.

Nepene

In Warbreaker Lightsong mentions that the Returned's forms are dependent on contemporary beauty standards. In the Emperor's Soul Shai implies that if others did not find the Emperor's Soul plausible it would not take as well. Is my reading of their statements correct, is their magic dependent on how others view you as well as how you view yourself?

Brandon Sanderson

Yes. This is a factor.

Brandon Sanderson

The Dedication

I've always intended to dedicate my first published book to my mother. I poke a little fun at her here, since I can't resist. However, I really do owe a lot of who I am–and what I've accomplished–to her. When I was in elementary school, I had mediocre grades–and my test scores placed me as "below average" on several occasions. Well, she was bound and determined to prove that I was "gifted" despite those scores. She worked hard to get me to improve in school, and she was a prime motivator behind my reading habits.

Now, my mother is a very practical person. She believes strongly in practical professions that pay well and are stable. Writing is neither one of these. I think she realized early on that despite her hopes, she wasn't going to have a doctor or a business man–or even a scientist–for a son. She did convince me to major in biological chemistry as a freshman–though she said this was simply to put me in a better position for getting a scholarship (which I did get, by the way). However, I've always assumed that a little piece of her hoped that the bio-chem influence would persuade me to go to med school, or to at least become an engineer.

That, obviously, did not happen. The big bad English monster took me in my sophomore year. However, my mother has always been supportive, and it was her sense of dedication, excellence, and assiduousness that forged my determined personality. Without that sense of self-determination, I would never have lasted in this field long enough to publish.

So, thank you mother. Thanks for being proud of me.

Brandon Sanderson

Chapter Seventeen

The Mists Strike Down Demoux

I knew we needed a meaningful casualty from the mistsickness, somebody who we knew and cared about. I don't know if readers care about Demoux, but he's the only one among the crew who could be susceptible to the mists. My intention is that striking him down here impacts the reader directly, making the danger of the mists more concrete.

I maintain a paranoid worry that somewhere in this book, or the previous one, Demoux went out into the mists and should have fallen sick then. I can't think of an instance, and I do believe I could reasonably make this the first time he's exposed to them. But still I worry that I've missed something. I'm sure my loyal—and very meticulous—fans will let me know if I did.

(Note that Demoux would have had to go out in the mists after the time when they started killing people. This happened while Vin approached the Well of Ascension—by way of trivia, the mists changed the very moment the full power of the Well returned to be drawn again. Anyway, any times Demoux went into the mists before then would not have inoculated him.)

Kara Stewart

PART SEVEN: STORE AND LEATHERBOUND UPDATES

We’ve had a busy but amazing year! The first half of 2021 was focused heavily on fulfilling rewards for pledges made during our 2020 The Way of Kings 10th Anniversary Leatherbound Edition Kickstarter campaign. We shipped tens of thousands of packages all around the world and are proud that the majority of our backers received their rewards within a year of making their pledge. Many of these items are now available on our store for those who may have missed the Kickstarter campaign, and The Way of Kings leatherbound will continue to go in and out of stock as we sell out and reorder them. Note: the next printing currently in production will not be signed by Brandon.

Speaking of our online store, we have rebranded and are now Dragonsteel Books! You will still receive the same great service and products, but we are positioning ourselves to continue to grow and provide a wider array of products in future years. Watch our social media channels (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) for announcements of new products and events, restocks on your favorite products, and more! We might have some fun surprises in store!

One of our proudest moments of the year was Dragonsteel 2021, the first multi-day event held in conjunction with the release of Cytonic, the third installment of Brandon’s Cytoverse series. We had two days of games, panels with experts and fans, live painting sessions, puzzles, cosplay, and exhibitors from Brandon-affiliated authors, artists, and partner vendors. We look forward to doing something like this again—stay tuned for future announcements!

Did I mention the future? This year we’ve restocked leatherbound books of The Way of Kings, Mistborn, The Well of Ascension, and The Hero of Ages. We are actively working on another restock of these books as well as Elantris and Warbreaker. However, we are excited to announce that in late 2022 we will be debuting the leatherbound editions of The Alloy of Law and Shadows of Self! These books will be individually bound and initially sold as a bundle for $150. After the first printing is sold out, future printings will be sold separately for $100 each like our other leatherbound books. Watch for preorders of these books to open up sometime next year.

Since 2022 will also include the release of the print edition of the Skyward Flight collection, the sixth book in the Alcatraz series, and The Lost Metal, watch our store for potential signed books and swag bundles for these three titles. We hope you will join us!

Brandon Sanderson

Well, it's finally out! Yes, we're doing Kelsier in Fortnite.

So what's going on behind the scenes? Well, Donald Mustard (director of Fortnite) is a friend of mine. We worked on Infinity Blade together back in the day. So, he asked if I was interested in sticking Kelsier into the game--and I thought it was cool. So we've been working on that for a few months.

Like I said (and several of you confirmed in this thread) it's not something I expect my general fanbase to go crazy over--but it's nifty, and I hope it will be fun for those of you who enjoy both properties. It's also been a blast to work with the Fortnite team.

They'll release more, but don't expect a huge crossover event. It's just a little fun thing that I'm doing with my friend, who happens to have accidentally made one of the most popular games of all time.

lazymomo5

Are there going to be any Mistborn specific mechanics in the game? Like steelpushing or pewter vials to grant regeneration or something like that. I don't expect it to happen but it would be cool and also a new kind of thing for those who don't know about Scadrial Magic.

Brandon Sanderson ·

No Mistborn-specific powers right now. (I hope to be able to work more with Epic on something like that in the future, though.)

puhtahtoe

Will anything about this be considered Cosmere Canon?

Brandon Sanderson

Nope canon here. Fortnite is all about crossovers these days, and is explicitly non-canon for all of them. It has its own canon, granted, about grabbing things from other universes--so in Fortnite this can be canon. But in our canon, the cosmere is a closed system, with no links to other universes.

zvons

More as in more about the kelsier skin or more like other cosmere content?

Brandon Sanderson

Sorry. I meant "More about this specific appearance of Kelsier in Fortnite." Don't expect other characters or things for now.

thystephen01

Please tell me he has allomancy? I’d love to see the knights radiants in any open world game with their powers.

Brandon Sanderson

For now, this is just using Fortnite mechanics. I do have aspirations for more--and think it's not impossible that Epic and I will do something more like that in the future. But don't expect allomancy in Fortnite anytime soon.

Argent

These recent AMAs have made me wonder about something. With the kind of public presence and interaction you have with your fans, you create a imbalanced sense of familiarity between yourself and us, your fans - we often feel like we know you well (or at least know much about you), while you, for the most part, don't know us beyond the few words we exchange at events. With this in mind, have you had to change the way you interact with people, online and off - and if so, how?

Brandon Sanderson

I recently watched a video essay on the idea of parasocial relationships, which is a topic getting some attention on things like Youtube right now. And, while I thought the essay was interesting, I have to say...I kind of disagreed with everything they were saying. (Not the data, but the conclusions--which generally centered around the idea that these relationships were somehow false or dangerous.)

Yes, the relationship is imbalanced like you say. But the video essay was making these relationships as some kind of scary or false thing--and I just don't see it. I do think you know me by reading my work and by interacting with me here. I don't think you see a false version of me, and I think you probably do know me pretty well, all things considered. And part of the reason I read book (and why I write them) is because it lets us get inside of the mind of someone different from ourselves.

If there were big things I wanted to change, I'd talk about them. Honestly, most of what I see from the fans seems pretty healthy to me. We in sf/f can take things pretty seriously, but we do it because it's fun and we like to obsess about things--but most everyone can step back when we need to and deal with real life too.

So...don't know if that answers your question or not, Argent. But I think you're used to that kind of thing from me by now... :)

Questioner

After reading your entire bookology--

Brandon Sanderson

Bookology, I like that.

Questioner

It got to the point where I was running out of books so I went on your website and found your recommended reads and after talking to some other authors I found some other connections to you, David Farland, Brian McClellan. Is there anyone else you would recommend down the same track?

Brandon Sanderson

Ok, authors I would recommend-- I'm going to go in a couple of different directions because not everyone might like the same sorts of things. I'm going to tell you what I've been reading lately. Brian McClellan's very good, and Brian McClellan was one of my students but I can't really take credit for Brian because he was really good when he came to class in the first place. Brian's books, if you haven't read them, Promise of Blood is the start. They are flintlock fantasies and they kind of combine a little bit of hard fantasy magic, like I do, and a little bit of the kind of grimdark grittiness and kind of combine them together into this cool mix. So the magic isn't quite as hard as the magic I do, meaning quite as rule-based, but the grimdark isn't quite as grim as the grimdark tends to go. The mix works really well.

I read Naomi Novik's new book, Uprooted, which is really good if you haven't read it. It's kind of like a dark fairytale YA but really twisted, so it's not intended for a teen audience because it is pretty twisted, but it's like how the fairytales really were, it's that sort of thing, it's really cool, it's very well written. Let's see-- I'm currently reading Dan's new book, that's not out yet. But I Am Not a Serial Killer. If you haven't read Dan's books they are great and they are creepy. It's about a teenage sociopath who hunts demons, to get that whole "I'm a sociopath and kind of want to kill people". Not that all sociopaths want to, but he does. And getting it out of his system is going and killing demons. 

Let's see, what else have I really loved. I like Robin Hobb's books a lot, if you haven't read Robin Hobb. Brent Weeks, a very similar writer to me. Brent Weeks, The Black Prism. It seems like Brent and I must have read the same books, a lot of the, growing up, and have the same-- because we both kind of independently started doing this kind of epic fantasy rule-based wacky magic kind of thing right about the same time. I really really like NK Jemisin, Nora Jemisin, her books are very literary so if you're not on the literary side of fantasy-- but the new one is fantasic, it's written in the second person, at least one of the viewpoints is. It's like the only book I've ever read in second person that works. And some of my classic favorites are A Fire Upon the Deep, by Vernor Vinge, it's very Dune-like, in that it's a science fiction that blends the best parts of epic fantasy together with it, and if you haven't read that and you like Dune, you'll probably like A Fire Upon the Deep. There we go.

Brandon Sanderson

Chapter Sixteen

Obscure References

Chapter Sixteen is the chapter for random obscure references and jokes. Perhaps I did this unconsciously, rather than having more full-blown asides (though my editor did cut one about soy sauce and ninjas from the next chapter–I’m serious) because I wanted things to move quickly.

Anyway, here’s a list of the references, if you didn’t get them all. First off, we have the Heisenberg joke–he’s the guy who is famous for his teachings and discoveries about the uncertain location of electrons. The wordplay with him is so twisted that I have trouble working it out, but it still makes me chuckle. This is probably the one that remained in the book that my editor likes the least–she tried to cut it three times.

The “British people are all well-mannered dinosaurs” crack also almost got cut, but I decided to keep it. It breaks the fourth wall a bit–essentially, it’s me admitting that I made dinosaurs act like proper, stereotypical Brits just for the heck of it. It’s a self-aware parody of the stereotype, which means that sentence could undermine the cohesion of the worldbuilding. But, well, the worldbuilding is all there to let us have fun anyway.

Let’s see…others. The dinosaur talking about the “C” section of the library is a reference to Michael Crichton, who wrote Jurassic Park (and Jurassic Park Two, which starred a character who had died in the first book, but who was so popular in the movie that they resurrected him in book two by simply saying, “Oh, you were mistaken. His wounds weren’t as bad as they looked”).

Grandpa Smedry saying “I’ll go for a walk” is a reference to Monty Python, of course, and Quentin’s “Wasing not of wasing is” is a reference to Spook from my own Mistborn series.

Did I get them all?

Brandon Sanderson

Vivenna notices the Tears of Edgli here, the flowers that drive Hallandren wealth and trade. I added these in an early draft, as I realized that there needed to be a cheap, easy source for all of those dyes the Hallandren use. (This was pointed out to me by my friend Jeff Creer, I believe.) The Tears offer something else as well—a reason for the wealth of the people. In early times, dye trades were extremely lucrative, and being able to control a method by which unusual dyes could be created would have been a very good basis for an economy.

I also like what it does for the flavor of Hallandren as a whole. This story happens in the place that is, in most fantasy books, far away. A lot of fantasy novels like to make their setting someplace akin to rural England, and they'll talk of distant countries that have exotic spices, dyes, and trade goods.

Well, in this world, Hallandren is that place. It's at the other end of the silk road, so to speak.

Jarett Braden

With a huge interconnected work like the Cosmere, do you ever worry when introducing a new concept in a book? How it may affect past and future novels?

Brandon Sanderson

I do. This is the biggest challenge of having a large, interconnected universe like this. And the farther you write, the more difficult and dangerous this becomes. And this is why I need to have a large team, and some really solid beta readers. Because every writer, when writing a book, can get a little myopically focused on that book only. Which can be a good thing; most writers, it doesn't matter, because that book is going to be that book. But because the interconnectedness and the continuity of the Cosmere is so important to me, it's really handy to have a lot of people looking over my shoulder saying, "Are you sure you want to do that? Because it has this ramification here." We're not gonna catch all of them. But I do like that protection, and it is something that I think about quite a bit.

It is one of the reasons why I tried to build the underpinnings of the cosmere to be adaptable to a lot of different of the types of magic systems I type to write. This is why these fundamentals of Fortune and Identity and Connection are really what kind of drive creating the magic systems. You're often going to see me wanting to create magic systems that do similar things. And having these sort of magic system underpinnings that both drive me to ask "what new could I do with this?" but also have an intended connectivity between them is really helpful in a lot of different ways.

But it is dangerous, yes. And if I were going to give advice on that, it would be that make sure your fundamentals 1) naturally fit the type of systems that you would want to build, and 2) have enough versatility that they can be adapted to a variety of different styles of system. And stay away from some of the big problems, like time travel. Very early on, I'm like, "Cosmere can time travel into the future. You can speed things up for yourself, you can slow things down, your movement through space. But you cannot go backward." And having a few rules like that... there are not alternate dimensions in the cosmere. There are different planes of existence. But there are not alternate realities. We are not going to have the sort of things. (That I played with in Steelheart, because I knew I didn't have it in the cosmere. The Wheel of Time loves to play with alternate continuities as one of its themes of magic, and I love it. But it was built in and baked in from the beginning and used very well well. I didn't want to go down that rabbit hole.)

Make a few rules like that, and I think that's helpful from writing yourself out of problems with solutions that break everything. And let's just say that it is very hard to not do that, as evidenced by many film series which have a lot of different people working on them who can make their films work, but often will break the rest of the continuity in order to do so. And we can't afford to do that in the Cosmere. That's not something that I want to do.

Questioner

How do you get the different personalities for all your characters?

Brandon Sanderson

With the characterization for me is a very organic thing. I acutally plot my plot in detail, do my worldbuilding in detail, before I start on my characters though, if I plan them out too much, they don’t have enough life to them. It’s a very weird thing to explain, but for me, what I have to do is I have to try writing through this character’s eyes, and if it doesn’t work, than I actually have to toss that chapter and try again, and often times you’ll see me start a book try a character a couple of times to get them right. And then they just grow into what they are as the plot goes along. And in fact, the characters have veto power over the plot, and so if I get to a point that I feel like a character would not do this, I have to either go back and cast a different person in this role, or...

If you are very interested in how I write, I do a podcast called Writing Excuses. And what it is is it’s through your browser, so you don’t do anything special, you just go there and press play, and it’s me and Mary Robinette Kowal who writes these books, they’re like Jane Austen with magic. (laughter) Yeah, she’s good. And it’s Dan Wells, who writes these really scary creepy books, but they’re really good, and it’s Howard Tayler. So anyways, Writing Excuses, all you aspiring writers, it’s Hugo-nominated, it's very well received, I think you’ll really enjoy it. You can look by topic, and find where I talk about writing characters, and we’ll give you a ton of advice. There’s two hours of advice on characters you can listen to.

Questioner

Trell, who is he? Or if you're not going to reveal that, when will you...

Brandon Sanderson

It's going to take a little while to dig into that. It's going to need Mistborn Era 3, is all the Trell stuff.

Questioner

But I want more Wayne! Wayne is amazing!

Brandon Sanderson

I know! We've got one more book of Wayne. Wax and Wayne 4, we still got a book of Wayne. And then in Era 3, you'll be able to read the comic books in-world based on Wayne. So that'll be a part of it as well. You'll get a little touch of Wayne in there as well.

mraize7

In Mistborn, has Harmony a perpendicularity like the Pits or the Well? and the Well and the Pits have disappeared?

Brandon Sanderson

RAFO!

Questioner (paraphrased)

Is there a Dawnshard in Aimia?

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

Yes. Well, there definitely has been a Dawnshard in Aimia in the past, that is why it has been protected so well, obviously. Maybe it is still there and maybe not, that is an open question for now.

Questioner

Are you planning to resurrect Kelsier?

Brandon Sanderson

Well, how far have you read in this book?

Questioner

I have read it all.

Translator

So he's not really dead.

Brandon Sanderson

Well, it depends on what you count as Cognitive Shadow. So resurrect… no… but…

Questioner

There was this quote about the kite that was without a string.

Brandon Sanderson

Yes, he’s looking for a string. He’s indeed looking for a string, so what’s actually going to happen is RAFO.

Brandon Sanderson

World Map

The world map for Roshar changed dramatically between various iterations of the book.

Work on this novel started when I was fifteen. Back then, most of the plots and characters were combined with another world of mine, called Yolen. (That's where the book Dragonsteel takes place.) Somewhere in my early 20s, after I had a whole lot more experience and knew (kind of) what I was doing, I realized that the plots I had going in this world didn't click well together, so I divided the books into two separate series.

I wrote Dragonsteel first, back in 1999 or 2000. (Although Dragonsteel was the third book I wrote in the cosmere—after White Sand and Elantris—it was meant to be the chronological origin of the sequence. Hoid was one of the main characters of that series. The first book even includes significant viewpoints from him.)

I started outlining The Way of Kings fairly soon after. That original map I imagined as a continent with three prongs facing downward, with a connection at the top. There was the Alethi prong in the center, Shinovar to the west, and a long prong with Natanatan on the east.

Over the years, my worldbuilding skills grew. And part of that growth was realizing that the map I'd designed didn't work well for the story I wanted to tell. I wanted something better, and I changed designs.

I gave Isaac the outline of this world that became Roshar. (Based on an iteration of a Julia set, though for a while I played around with making the whole continent a cymatic shape.) That didn't happen for Mistborn, where I basically just told him, "Make the world map as you wish, with these guidelines." Mistborn, I knew, was going to happen basically in a couple of cities.

The Way of Kings was going to be huge, and I wanted scope for the project. That meant a big, epic map. I'm very pleased with Isaac's work here. Do note that this is a southern hemisphere continent, with the equator up north.