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Hoiditthroughthegrapevine

Are the Dysian Aimians agents of Cultivation? If not, are they in league with another group (excluding the Knights Radiant) that we have seen?

Brandon Sanderson (written)

Kind of yes to both – kind of

Questioner

Is Mraize a Sleepless?

Brandon Sanderson

Mraize is not a Sleepless, despite the scar. Sometimes it may be something I use to indicate someone is a Sleepless. It's an excellent question, but I can go ahead and let you know Mraize is not a Sleepless.

I'm glad somebody asked that, because I realize now if I ever give a scar to somebody they're like "oh that means Sleepless," but not always. Sometimes scars just mean you've been in a lot of fights.

Questioner

As a medical student who is currently in my musculoskeletal class, how different is the internal anatomy of the "humans" of the worlds of the cosmere? Like structure and number of muscles, bones, organs, things like that.

Brandon Sanderson

In general, you wouldn't have a problem. There would be minor differences. Like, there's gonna be some slight anatomy differences for, like, Scadrians, who were changed to deal with the ash and stuff. You'd be like, "Wow, the lungs are different here." And Roshar is a lower-gravity, higher-oxygen environment, and you're gonna find longer bones, you're gonna find stuff like that on Roshar. But, in general, you would be like, "This is a human whose species is slightly evolved for a different environment." Rather than "this is not human at all."

Now, if you were to ask about an Aimian, either variety, they would be very, very, very different. You would be like Bones trying to operate on Spock. The Sleepless, you'd need a very different degree for dealing with them. I'm very excited to eventually get the Sleepless fully into the stories. They're from my second novel, Star's End, is the very first appearance of them. And they got ported over to the cosmere once I designed the cosmere. And are a really cool, in my mind, science fiction race that are not a hivemind, but an individual is made up of a group of large insects that share Cognitive load across all of them, and there's just so many fun things you can do with that. Because they can selectively breed parts of their own body to do different things and have, like, fifty generations of this group of insect that they are selectively breeding to do this specific thing, and stuff like that. Hasn't been a lot of space for them in the cosmere, yet. Just some brief appearances. They'll be very important during the space age.

1eejit

It's a shame we didn't get to see Rushu interact with the Sleepless.

Brandon Sanderson

I generally don't have enough time for Rushu as I'd like, so agreed.

AdelRD

Whatever is happening to Sigzil and his spren, is it related to the fact that the Sleepless forbid Rysn to bond a spren?

Brandon Sanderson

Yes. Also a good question.

Matt Hatch

I admire all these people. These are great, deep metaphysical questions.

Adam

I am amazed every stream at how little I know. Not how much other people know, but how little I know.

Brandon Sanderson

Let's just say you are finding out, or Sigzil is finding out first hand part of why that warning was in place. And he didn't get that warning. He should have. Let's say that other people in the Cosmere have been able to do it without it being a problem. And so, you know, if you happen to be an age-old immortal master of multiple arcanum, then you can get away with things that poor people like Sigzil have more trouble with.

Reverse_Tim

So I goddamn loved Shadows of Self, to me it was the best in the series and showed what Mistborn could achieve when you combine what makes it unique with a different genre.

But part of the synopsis on the back in retrospect really bothered me, namely: "All the clues suggest the killer is a rogue kandra - a secretive, almost mythical figure who acts from the shadows - called Bleeder..."

Now yeah it's not that big compared to the reveal at the end of the book, but the reveal that the main suspect is a kandra called Bleeder, doesn't occur until over 100 pages into the book. So by knowing this ahead of time, it removes a lot of the intrigue of the early chapters.

Did this bother anyone else when they read Shadows of Self? I've advised people reading the series in future not to read the synopsis

Brandon Sanderson

If I had my way, all of the summaries we got would be in world documents like the prologue to Elantris or the things the Sleepless write for the Stormlight books. Marketing material is almost always terrible in this way--the one for Hero of Ages I recall spoiling a big twist.

They don't let me write these, usually, and complain/change them if I do write something to go there. Or they reluctantly put it on the hardcover on the back, but still write their own "flap copy" summaries. Then they leave what I wrote off the paperbacks. It's frustrating.

Questioner

Is the third Bondsmith in any way related to the Sleepless?

Brandon Sanderson

I am RAFOing third Bondsmith. You will find out a lot more about these in coming books. That one's seeded for the story to answer, and it's not next book, right? This is stuff for… yeah.

SoarWay

The Sleepless let Rysn carry a Dawnshard around and continue to live her life as relatively normal. Could we assume that someone like Hoid would be able to interact with her without noticing she holds a Dawnshard?

Brandon Sanderson

Depends. You could not necessarily assume that.

beatupford

So once Huio swears the ideal and the bargain is made, why not use the Oathgate? Did I miss something here?

Brandon Sanderson

The group isn't certain yet if they want to expend the military (particularly naval) might to secure the location just yet. It's not something you make on a whim; and now that the Sleepless have agreed not to attack them, Windrunners can fly back in a matter of hours, so they don't have to decide right now.

Wyndlerunner

The Sleepless. They’re not from Roshar. Do they have a single origin point in the cosmere? And if so, have we seen it?

Brandon Sanderson

They do have a single origin point in the cosmere. You have not seen it.

Questioner

Have we seen Chrysalis before?

Brandon Sanderson

No, Chrysalis is new. Chrysalis is not secretly one of the others that you've met, 'cause you've met two other Sleepless.

Rebecca Lovatt

What would you say your proudest moment has been along this journey of 10 years so far?

Brandon Sanderson

There have been several of them, the same type of moment. It's when people come up to me, and they say to me, "Brandon I was not a reader, and your books turned me into one." Because my story, which people can find because I've told it a thousand times, was that I was a reluctant reader. I didn't like books until fantasy novels changed me. I got into this because I thought, "I have to learn to make people feel like Anne McCaffrey made me feel." So in those moments when they say that, that's when I know I'm doing what I set out to do.

A close second is when they tell me I kept them up late at night. I feel nice and evil when I've done that.

Rebecca Lovatt

You have caused me many many sleepless nights. Like the moment I got Words of Radiance--I think I finished that in two or three sittings. Coincidentally, I did not finish my assignment that was due the next day.

Brandon Sanderson

Excellent. Corrupting the youth again. That is the theme of what I do in my life.

DracostarA

When the Sleepless refer to 'Surgebinding' with the Dawnshards do they mean it specifically in the Rosharan sense, or just because that is the word Roshar has for magic.

I.e. if this occurred on Scadrial would they still call it 'Surgebinding' or something else?

Brandon Sanderson

Surgebinding is kind of a catch-all for cosmere magic here, as you're assuming. Literally binding (using) surges (a word for what we would call types of magic.)

FirebreatherRay

So, Rosharans would look at an Allomancer or Feruchemist and say, "Yep, that there is a Surgebinder," correct?

Brandon Sanderson

Many Rosharans. Many would also just think of them as some kind of voidbringer or other mythological figure, from local lore.

HORSEthe

Wait, have mistborn been to roshar or am I reading this wrong?

Brandon Sanderson

What I mean is that someone like from, say, Bavland might have different stories they tell about creatures in the night than someone from Rira. So while they might call someone who uses strange abilities a surgebinder, they are probably more likely to talk about the local equivalent of something like a fae creature from local British lore.

Brandon Sanderson

Brandon here, with another progress update on your book. Previous update can be read here. You might have heard about my marathon write to push to the finish last week--but if you didn't, you can glance through my facebook page to see the hourly updates. Short version: the book is done! (Kind of.)

So where do we go from here? Well, I generally do five drafts of a book these days. The rough draft, which I finished last week, is only the first of these five--and each one takes roughly a month to do. So I've still got five months of work ahead of me, plus a little time between edits to do something else, before we're finished with this behemoth of a book.

I'll be doing the second draft starting next week. Fortunately, I've already done a 2.0 on several of the early parts--squeezing those in early so my editorial team could start working on them. This should make the 2.0 take less time than a normal revisions, perhaps two weeks instead of four or five. You can follow along, as always, on my website.

A 2.0 draft is me going through and fixing all the things I know are broken (and there are always a lot of those) while doing the initial polish of the language. Once done, I'll need to roll straight in to work on the 3.0 (the draft where I put in my editor/agent/writing group comments.) We've been workshopping this book in writing group since early last year, so I've got a lot of feedback already.

After the 3.0 draft, we'll start sending the book to beta readers and I'll (hopefully) take a short break to write a novella. (Rysn, potentially, involving the history and current lore of Aimia, the Sleepless, and some intriguing things like that.)

4.0 is the draft I'll do incorporating beta reader comments, along with any other editorial comments from the team at Tor. 5.0 will be my final polish, and 10% trim, where I try to make the book read better.

Goal is to turn that in July 1st. After that, it's into the hands of the copyeditors and proofreaders for several months.

The book is looking really good, and I'm pleased with how it turned out. That's relieving because at the end of Oathbringer, I had real concerns about Book Four. By this point in the process of a series, I've often reworked the outlines so many times that the last books are in a messy state--but the outlining work I did whipped this one into shape, and also organized Book Five in a lot of exciting ways.

Everything is looking great for the final book in this sequence 2023. Thanks as always for your patience. I'll drop by for another update in a few months or so to let you know how the novella went (if it got written) and how editing is progressing.

Brandon Sanderson

One of the big revisions I did to Dawnshard was: I didn't have viewpoints from him originally, Nikli, because I wanted to maintain the mystique of them [Sleepless]. I realized after the beta read that the coolness of seeing through their eyes was more important, and indeed there was an issue with Dawnshard. I expected, because people had read Oathbringer, and the scene in Oathbringer, that they would immediately pick out who the horde, the Aimian, on the crew was. The tattoos were suppose to make it very obvious what was going on. 

The emotion I was looking for in the book was not mystery, but instead suspense. These are two kind of complementary emotions, and suspense is - at least as how I'm defining it right now - "Oh no! This terrible thing is going to happen. How are they going to deal with it?" And mystery is "What terrible thing is going to happen? And who is going to cause it?" These are two different emotions.

If you go into Dawnshard with mystery being your primary expected experience, then what happened to beta readers is, they're like, "Well, Brandon's always tricky about these things. So the fact that he has a person with tattoos on this says that's not the person. That is not the Aimian; that's too obvious. So let's watch and see how he tricks us about who the Aimian is." When my intent was "Here's the Aimian. Be scared because he has a good relationship with Rysn, and terrible things are probably going to happen." That's sad and scary and tense. I realized after reading the beta read, "Oh this is not landing. I need to add a viewpoint as early as I can realistically get it in the story that says 'No, no no no. This is the Aimian. This is the horde. You're right, you're suppose to be worried about that. Not questioning about that.'" So I added that scene. I'm really glad that I did, because I enjoyed writing it. I think it adds a lot to the lore, and it is a fun scene to read, I think.

I'm very happy for the beta readers being confused on that point, because I think the story landed way better for a lot of the readers, because they could let go of wondering who the Aimian is and focus on the emotion the story is actually stoking in them (or it's trying to), which is the suspense of watching what's going to happen when it happens. 

This is the reason why I really depend on beta reads, is for reasons like this. When what I'm trying to do doesn't land. A lot of the people talk to the beta readers, I hear, and say, "Why did you talk him into changing this thing that I love!?" That's not what beta readers do. That's not what they're there for. They are there so I can see if what I'm trying to do actually lands, and if it doesn't I can reassess and find a way to make it actually land. Because if you read all of Dawnshard, thinking that the mystery of who is the Aimian is suppose to be the big reveal, and then it just turns out to be the most obvious person, you'd be like, "Wow. That mystery was lame!" Hopefully instead if you read it saying, "Oh, there's an Aimian on this crew. I see who it is. They are gonna try to kill the people on board. That's sad. Hey! I'm kind of liking this character. That's even sadder! How is this ever going to get resolved?" Hopefully that's the emotion you had.

Adarain

There seems to be a concentration of “aliens” in the west of Roshar, with both the Sleepless and the Iriali being non-Rosharan, possibly the Siah Aimians too (though I have my own headcanon about them); and of course the Ashynite humans arrived somewhere in the west too, probably in or near Shinovar. Is this a coincidence? It seems reasonable to me that in the past, Honor’s Perpendicularity was somewhere in the region and at least some of these groups used it to arrive on Roshar.

Brandon Sanderson

Not a coincidence. Having multiple perpendicularities on the land, mixed with easy-to-access Investiture, mixed with a vibrant Shadesmar side with actual cultures and cities all make Roshar a tempting destination. The amount of investiture flying around (literally) also makes the place a little easier to find in Shadesmar than other destinations might be.

There's also the fact that it wasn't created post-Shattering, like Scadrial was. There's just been more time to get to it.

Mycroft_canner

Did she use the command to manipulate the Sleepless? He seems pretty surprised it worked...

Brandon Sanderson

Rysn did not use the Dawnshard in this story, and indeed is incapable of it.

CorwinofAmber (paraphrased)

So one of the things I really like about this is that in the Ars Arcanum and the blurb on the back of the dust jacket, they're not just Brandon Sanderson explaining the magic system, or Brandon Sanderson summarizing the book for casual perusing, they're written in world by characters in the world, and I was wondering if you could tell us or give us a hint as to who wrote the dust jacket.

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

I can tell you it's not the same person as who’s writing the Ars Arcanum, and neither of those are Hoid. How about that? That gives you something. I had to fight to get in world text on the back cover. I personally really don't like summary blurbs. Those summary blurbs are either bland or they spoil too much, and they really get on my nerves. They're marketing copy, not author copy. And so I fought and I fought and I fought. I won with Elantris, getting the prologue on the back of the hard cover, but then they didn't do that for the paperback. But for the hardcovers of these I won, so I'm glad you appreciate that—I intend to keep doing that. But yes, they're being written in world by a group of people on Roshar.