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Do you ever plan on writing something akin to Silmarillion for the cosmere?
Do I every plan to write something like the Silmarillion for the cosmere? Hehe. No I have no specific plans right now. I've read the Silmarillion-- Wow, he was a genius, but that's where you get to the mad genius stuff, right. Yeah, I have no plans right now to do that. Maybe you'll get me when I'm 70 and I'm like "Ennnhhhh... I must write my own Isaiah, I will do it".
The Reshi Island greatshells, are they born in the ocean?
Yes... In the ocean may be an extreme term for it.
Epigraphs in Mistborn & Stormlight: did you wrote them before, during or after writing the rest of the book?
Almost always after the book is done, with notes before certain chapters of what to include above that one.
Do the Knights Radiant have a nahn? Are they within the nahn system or the dahn system at all?
The nahn and dahn system is a more recent construct. They would be at the very height of it, I would say.
Okay. So the system hasn't been reorganized yet with Kaladin and such?
You'll have to watch and see what happens in the next few books. Because the culture is not used to Knights Radiant being around.
If Sazed got bored one day, could he split the two Shards he has?
Read And Find Out.
So for right now, there are fifteen Shards?
Right now, there are sixteen Shards, but fifteen Vessels. Well, not even that, 'cause, you know.
Updates on Secondary Projects
Dark One
My outline for this drew a lot of buzz around both Hollywood and New York. The story, if you aren't familiar with it, is about a young man in our world who discovers that a fantasy world has declared him to be the Dark One, and starts sending hit squads into our world to assassinate him. Pitched as "Harry Potter from Voldemort's viewpoint," the story follows this young man as he is forced to confront the possibility that he might do what the prophecies say.
We have a graphic novel in the works, and I've been doing pitches in Hollywood for a potential television show. So movement is certainly happening here.
Status: Going well. Might have art to show soon from the graphic novel.
Why can Sazed read minds in Alloy of Law when Ruin can't?
RAFO. Well wait, who's mind is he reading?
Wax's.
Eric argues he talks directly to Wax.
Mmhmm.
In The Way of Kings and Words of Radiance, you covered the relationship between Shardblades and spren...you never get around to Shardplate.
I’m saving that one on purpose, it’s a gun on the mantle, or armor on the mantle. So, you will eventually find out what’s going on there, okay?
How much influence... I know Harriet was very involved in the organization of the Wheel of Time. But she was also involved in The Way of Kings, right?
Harriet did a guest edit. Just a line edit, primarily.
Will she be doing more?
No, that was a gift she gave to me as a thank-you for working on the Wheel of Time books. She's a fantastic editor. If you're not aware of Harriet, Robert Jordan's wife, she discovered him and then married him. She's edited a few other books you might have heard of, such as Ender's Game, little tiny books. But she is retired, and has been for many years. So, she did a guest edit on Way of Kings, but she's not editing anything anymore.
Chapter Nineteen
Clod Arrives with Jewels
Early on in the development process, I knew that I wanted to have a Lifeless as a side character. They're such an interesting part of the world—in fact, they're a big part of the foundation of the setting, or at least what made me want to write it.
That meant having a Lifeless on Denth's team, and Clod as a character fit into place quite easily. I had worried about how to make Jewels distinctive in the team, after having Denth and Tonk Fah establish themselves for some twenty chapters before Jewels even makes an appearance. Working with that, I realized that by making her the Lifeless handler, I could add something unique to her—and to the team.
Denth knew that Vivenna wouldn't react well to there being a Lifeless on the team. That's part of why he kept Jewels away for so long. (In fact, when Jewels says, "Who's that woman?" in regards to Vivenna, it should have been slightly suspicious to you. She knew they had a new employer, and she should have made the connection. Indeed, she did. Denth had specifically ordered her to stay away until this moment, as he didn't want to scare Vivenna off.)
If you have read The Emperor's Soul, what do you think of Forgery as an art form? Is it one that you wish you could use?
It's pretty cool, I especially like the stamps... I think they'd be fun to design, just as visual props.
I'm not sure I'd be a Forger at heart... maybe. I think Brandon's playing around with some concepts regarding reproduction and the essence of content that are highly relevant to modern creative concerns, but that's another conversation altogether.
So do Inquisitors, when they use Allomancy, have to actually ingest the metals?
They actually do. So what is happening is Hemalurgy rips off a piece of one person's soul and spikes it somebody else and so it is basically taking off the piece of someone's soul that makes them an Allomancer and adding it to someone else instead and so then they act as an Allomancer just as it would happen.
In the original Knights Radiant, when they had squires, were all of the squires destined for bonding spren?
No... Many stayed squires forever and that was okay.
*asks for a "future quote of Harmony"*
This is clever, I've never had this before.
I wondered whether I could challenge you to do it...
*writes* "It is yours."
I don't know if that will actually be the quote, but you can come ask me after Mistborn 9?
[Lift, her abilities] how might that apply to elements? Fire, air, rain.
She just changes friction, so however it would interact with it in our world it will interact that way.
So fire would... I don't know how that works.
She could keep someone from lighting a match, possibly.
People tend to hear a lot of voices on Roshar in their heads. And I've noticed that a lot of people either have been confirmed to be in contact with Unmade or show a lot of signs of that. Is there a correlation there?
Yes.
If you were to break up Shardplate first, and then start regenerating it over a short person, would it regrow to full height? Or would it...
A little person could probably find a way to get their Shardplate to regenerate to their size.
Crunchgnar mentions that as a lesser demon, he is forced to give up the souls he has claimed to his lords - presumably demon lords, not the mortals with whom he engages in contracts.
How does demonic feudalism work? Under what circumstances do lesser demons come to have lords? What benefits does Crunchgnar receive for his vassalage (or peasantry)?
Basically, you do what the more powerful demon says, or you end up getting roasted. It's not quite feudalism. More, if you have a tasty morsel, someone is likely to steal it from you--unless you've already picked someone strong to give some of what you claim, so they can tell everyone else to shove off.
Speaking of the cosmere, because it's this multiverse that's the setting for all these different epic fantasy series, do you ever feel restricted by the cosmere in a sense of sort of wanting to do with a plot or the magic or wanting something really epic to happen but be like, "Wait that's not legal in the system I've created?"
It doesn't happen very often because, most of the times in my outlining process, I notice these things and I move something out of the cosmere. If it's just not going to work with the cosmere magic, it just doesn't have to be cosmere. And I'm really glad I gave myself that freedom because I think that you can get too locked in, right? If I'm like, "Everything has to be cosmere!" then either I'm going to break it, which is going to decrease the value of the continuity, or I'm just not going to be able to write some books that I'm excited about. And I don't like either of those options.
And so being able to say, "You know what? This magic that I'm working on for FTL does not match any of the ways that the cosmere FTL could work. I'm going to move this out of the cosmere." That's what happened to Skyward. Skyward was in the cosmere for a little while, but then I moved it out. I'm like, "No this matches other stuff better. I'm going to go with this FTL, that is not a cosmere FTL." That frees me like--
Skyward is a science fiction space opera, starship pilots and things like that. And if I would have done this in the cosmere, I would have just had to avoid talking about things that would be spoilers for other cosmere books, which would have been terrible, right? So either you have the Skyward books that have their hands bound so that I can't give spoilers, or Skyward gives all the spoilers, and then cool things happening in the future of the cosmere are just like, "whatever". I take option number three, which is I'm just not going to do this as a cosmere book because obviously it doesn't fit.
In your novellas Legion and The Emperor's Soul, there was a common theme of a creation of character. Were you making a comment on that as a writer?
The Emperor's Soul was much more so, specifically dealing with the artistic process. That was part of the theme for me. Legion was more "Wow, this idea's awesome." I originally told Dan (from Writing Excuses) that he should write this, it's really quirky. He said, "I got my own ideas—go write it yourself!"
If there are fabrials that can attract substances, are there ones that repel?
Yeah, there are.
With all the books you have planned, how many years of your life do you have planned out?
I’m intending to live till my 90’s probably, and I’ve got enough books for two books a year until then. But I also write quickly, so you’ll get books consistently and hopefully they’ll be funny and interesting. I really do try to work hard to make sure that they are each a self-contained story. The place where I stop doing that is in the last chapter and epilogue, where I really like to punch you, and I’m sorry, it’s just some sort of instinct that I have. It’s like “Oh, everything’s wrapped up—NO IT’S NOT!” So I’m sorry about that.
Can a Misting burn the god-metal alloys of their metal? If not, do the god-metals even 'exist' if there are no full Mistborn?
There are metals which exist that any Allomancer can burn, regardless of their own orientation.
Chapter Fourteen
They Visit Ranette
Ranette was a late addition to the story. I didn't start building her until I was working on chapter ten or so. (All earlier references to her were added in during revisions.)
I was feeling there was a hole in the story, that it needed one more character, probably a woman. I also wanted to add a gunsmith to the book, and so I started working on who she would be. Some hints of her personality came from the other character from the original short story. (Remember, the person who became Wayne was riding into town on a kandra with a horse's body. That kandra was female.) The personality I'd been developing there eventually jumped rails to become Ranette.
She's not kandra any longer, and I shifted some pieces of who she was to make her a more complete person. If you didn't catch the hint from Wax, she is indeed a lesbian, though it's not much of a big deal for the book. I try to find places for LGBT characters in the novels. (There's another one in The Way of Kings.) However, I back off from making much of an issue about it.
I guess I could be accused of not giving them full representation because of the fact that they usually have minor roles. The truth is that I'm worried I'd just do a poor job of it if I tried to write from their viewpoint; being gay is one of those things that tends to be very dominant in a person's way of seeing the world. It seems that there are a lot of pitfalls that I could saunter right into. I've think I've learned, after a lot of work, how to write female characters who (hopefully) don't feel wrong. However, I haven't taken the dive in trying to figure out how to write a gay or lesbian character.
But that's only one reason. There's a deeper one for me. Ranette will likely get viewpoints in the series, when I do more Wax and Wayne books. However, the books aren't about sexual identity, so I'll probably steer clear of that topic. In a way, I think that making a big deal of it could be more harmful. One of the reasons I put LGBT characters in my books is because they are a part of our world, and deserve representation in fiction. It's strange to think that in our world, LGBT people make up a significant minority of the population, yet in fiction (particularly fantasy fiction) they tend to either vanish completely or the story has to be all about who they are and their sexuality.
This strikes me as a bad way to do things. Just like not every book including women characters should be about feminism, not every book including LGBT characters should be about sexual orientation or gender identity issues. If they are, then that just highlights the supposition that they're out of the ordinary—it draws attention to that idea, rather than simply letting them be characters with a larger role in the story. We don't care about Lord Harms's sexuality, or Mister Suit's, or that of Miles. Why shine a big spotlight on Ranette's? It just seems divisive to me.
Anyway, those are just a few of my thoughts on the topic. Perhaps they will change as I ponder on it more.
The glyphs on the cover of the [US hardcover Stormlight] books do represent the Order of the Knights Radiant that is being investigated in that book, as is the color of the book. If you look, it represents the color [of the] them in their, sort of, periodic table of Surgebindings in the first book's front endpages.
Did a lot of the life on land from Roshar come from the sea? Because they all have shells. Or is that just the highstorm?
That’s just the highstorms. Good question actually. I mean I would say that evolutionary, certain traits that vanished on Earth did not vanish on Roshar because of the highstorms. But also things evolved independently similar attributes because of the storms. So it's a yes and a no.
I've read and reread Calamity looking for clues but I can't figure out what Mizzy's powers are! Why did you not reveal them?
I wanted to be vague because I need to have freedom to tweak them when I write a follow-up.
I have plans, but can't lock myself in too much until the outline for Mizzy's book is done.
When you write.do you see the characters as real people or cartoons or comics?
Real people.
If an Allomancer ate a Forged metal, what happens?
If an Allomancer eats a Forged metal, there is going to be some Investiture in that Forged metal, but it's not going to be keyed the right way, so it'd be like eating a metalmind... If you're asking if the metal was Forged into a different type of metal, the Forgery will take and it will believe and... that's going to get really weird. I have not considered that. That's a "let me think about it." My instincts say that it's going to work like the metal it's become long enough to burn for a few minutes, and then that's going to break the Forgery, and it's going to snap out of it and become the other [original] metal. That’s my instinct, but I’ll have to think about it further. [...] It's going to be really hard to burn a metal that's Invested like that. The magics don't mix real well.
Eh, you can burn metalminds.
Yeah, you can, but it’s from the same "magic set", right? So...
Do Surgebinders have gemhearts like greatshells do?
RAFO.
Did you actually go through a horseback riding orientation for that scene in Words of Radiance, because that is literally how it works.
I have done it before in my life, and I was drawing on that. I did have to go get some horse experts, because I got some things wrong. That's kind of a little bit how my first experience riding horses went. I have a cousin who... rode show horses when she was younger.
What was the thought process behind Shinovar being so similar?
A couple of reasons. One is, by having some sort of Earth analogue on-world, I could give some contrast, and I could have a kind of an explanation for why they might use words like chickens and things until I can get to the big reveal. Like, if there weren't Shinovar there to act as a red herring, I think it would give away the twist very early.
Beyond that, I like the idea of the people that are like us being the alien ones to the society. Kind of helps separate it and make it this is a different world, this is a different culture. So, it gave me a lot of advantages. Plus it also gave an explanation for how they could-- humankind create a foothold on this planet after coming across. So, lots of different thought processes behind that.
Is it coincidence that Lightsong the Bold, God of Bravery's colors are red and gold, same as house Gryffindor?
It wasn't intentional, /u/kroen--but I'd bet that my view of "heroic" colors was soundly influenced by HP.
So how's Waxillium doing?
Slow but sure. I'm pretty sure I will be finishing it up soon here.
It'll be out next year, then? 2019?
Maybe. Maybe. I can't promise yet. It depends on how the writing goes the last half of this year. January 1st, I have to start on Stormlight Four. And so I'm trying to squeeze the last Wax & Wayne in after I finish Skyward 2.
Are there a limited amount of atium and lerasium alloys for each metal?
Hmm, yes…I suppose there would be but there are…
More than sixteen?
Yeah, way more than sixteen.
Oh wow. Okay. That's fascinating. More than sixteen and less than infinite.
Yes.
Do you know when <inaudible> be published?
I can't promise. I'm not a 100% sure. Probably between Stormlight 5 and 6, it would be my guess.
Did you have inspiration for Wit. I just think he's totally funny.
Yeah, it's just hard because Wit started, I started thinking about Wit when i was like fifteen or sixteen. He evolved over all that time. Every time I've laughed a piece of that became Wit, if that makes any sense.
After the WoT I made a decision to never read a series that is in progress. That's why I never read GRRM. Will I have that problem with the Stormlight Archive or will each book have very satisfying conclusions?
I try VERY hard to do that in all of my books. So hopefully, yes it will.
Were there highstorms on Roshar before Adonalsium Shattered?
Were there highstorms on Roshar before Adonalsium Shattered? I'm gonna RAFO that. I'm not gonna answer you, because I'm mean. Maybe someday you shall have your answer to this important question.
At the Yomen wedding [in The Alloy of Law], the newlyweds are talking to "a scruffy man who looked like a beggar, dressed all in black". Is this an appearance of Hoid?
His answer was that yes, in fact, it was.
"Arteth" from Sel and "ardent" from Roshar. Is that just a coincidence their similar?
Coincidence, yeah.
No linguistics shared *uninteligible*?
Nah, false cognate.
I asked what planet we have seen the kandra worldhopper on.
He said "You have seen her before".
I asked if she was an agent of Sazed
He said yes.
Does Hoid have a Hemalurgically charged Nicrosil spike?
It's... unlikely. Hoid would not want to open himself to the influence of Shards so using Hemalurgy on himself is unlikely. Although Hemalurgy is the easiest way to get other powers, he'd more likely do things the hard way.
So, what is the actual Firefight, Megan’s opposite, what’s their weakness?
I’m not going to tell you. That’s a RAFO.
I'm a new teacher; my students are really quick to jump on me when I make mistakes. I was wondering if there's any inconsistencies or characters or any of the aspects of the magic systems you made that you could go back--
Absolutely. Every book. Every book, there are things that I would want to change. And it ranges-- there's a huge gamut of different things.
For instance, in the White Sand books, my first book that I wrote, that we eventually turned into graphic novels. I had a really cool magic system that was about manipulating sand with your mind, and things like this. And then I added in a weird thing where you could transform sand into water for no good reason whatsoever. It doesn't match the rest of the magic system. Because I wanted to write myself out of a hole. And as a newer writer, I did that a lot more. It ended up kind of getting canonized, and when we went back, I didn't fix it that fast, and so it ended up in the first graphic novel, and I'm like, "We need to fix this." So, the third graphic novel-- we've given ourselves enough wiggle room, fortunately, that I can be like, "And that's not what people thought it was." Because I want it to be more consistent. So you get that third graphic novel, and you're like, "Wow, they can't do this anymore?" No one ever did it onscreen, so they were just wrong. 'Cause that totally just does not belong in that magic system.
The Mistborn books, the original trilogy, I worked very hard to make sure I had an interesting, tough, but also compelling female protagonist. But then I defaulted to guys for the rest of the crew. And this is-- If you want to write a story about that, doing it intentionally, that's a different conversation entirely. But when you just kind of do it accidentally, like, I did, I look back and I'm like, "Mmm, I didn't really want to do that". But I did anyway, because of just the way that every story I'd seen I was defaulting to (like Ocean's Eleven, and things like this), where my models were, and I didn't take enough time to think about it, where I think it would have actually been a better story if I would have thought a little bit more about that. Like, there are things like that all across the board.
I did get into a little-- trouble's the wrong term. But in Words of Radiance, I reverted it-- from the paperback, when it came out, I reverted to a previous version that I had written for part of the ending. And that caused all kinds of confusion among the fans, what is canon? And so I'm like, "Oh, I can't do that anymore." But I had gone back and forth on how a part of the ending was to play out. A pretty small element, but a part of the ending. And I had settled on one. And then immediately, as soon as we pushed print, felt that it was the wrong one. But you just gotta go with it.
I don't know. I don't think there's a strict answer on how much you can change, and how much you can't. Grandpa Tolkien went back and changed The Hobbit so it would match Lord of the Rings. And I think I'm glad he did. Even if I would have been annoyed if I'd had the first version that doesn't have the connection. When I read it, it had the connection, and it was so much cooler. I don't know if I have answers on that. But every book, there is something I would want to change.
Yeah, it’s dangerous to leave him unsupervised for extended periods of time, as a random novella might suddenly appear.
The latest one is a story I really want to write about one of Hoid's apprentices, set in the future of the cosmere (between era 3 and 4) stranded on a minor shardword and trying to figure out their kite-based magic system...
(No time right now, though. Stay on target...)
That sounds very much like the first story you wrote about Hoid, doesn't it? About him landing on a new planet and trying to figure out the local magic system?
Yes, it would be the spiritual successor of that story. I don't think it would work any more for him, the way he has developed, but I think it could play out very well with one of his many apprentices across the worlds. (Particularly if he's a little more organized about this in the space-age era.)
Someday, I really need to send my old discs from the early 90s out for data recovery, to see if anything is on them. It would be a hoot to read these old stories and really see how much of the Cosmere existed in embryo back when I was a teenager.
Could you write something about Dawnshards that we don't/won't know?
One Dawnshard is different from all the rest.
I want to know if Nightblood can be killed in the same way as a spren.
Well, that's a RAFO. Nightblood does not have the same spren bond, and so the renouncing of Oaths is not going to affect him, but there are certain things that could.
How long is the [Skyward] series going to be?
Skyward is a trilogy. And I usually write--you'll find my style for a trilogy is the first one stands very well on its own, and the second two will have more cliff-hangery sorts of things.
