Darkness (paraphrased)
Does the location of the Ghostblood tattoo correspond to some kind of rank?
Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)
No.
Found 14294 entries in 0.279 seconds.
Does the location of the Ghostblood tattoo correspond to some kind of rank?
No.
Could an awakened sentient object (e.g Nightblood) bond a spren?
Technically but the specific circumstances you would need are so bizarre, in practice no.
The new book, Skyward. Is that a Cosmere--
It is not a Cosmere. I need to reference Earth in it for it to work the way I want it to, most likely.
Is Wayne the author that's writing the Allomancer Jak stuff.
No, he's not. Good question, though! Good question!
As Brandon has mentioned, we have some scenes from The Lopen viewpoint [in Dawnshard], and I'm going to show you The Lopen chapter icon.
I don't know if this will wind up in the actual main books, but if we have a Lopen chapter, we might.
So far, for Lopen, we've been using the generic Bridge Four icon, because usually what's happening is I have a whole section where we get a bunch of different Bridge Four viewpoints, and it makes more sense. But we needed one for The Lopen.
I was gonna ask you for advice on writer's block.
Advice on writer's block, all right. My experience is that with writer's block, write anyway. Even though you don't feel like it ,you will write yourself through the writer's block nine out of ten times. And if you don't know what to write, that's not a problem. The way to get out of writer's block is to start your subconscious thinking about it. So, if you like to say, "Ninjas are attacking." Just do something. Write it the wrong way first. A lot of newer writers have a lot of trouble with writing something that's not gonna end up in a book, when they know it's broken. But if you write it anyway, your subconscious will be like, "Oh, what was wrong was, I had the wrong viewpoint for this." Or "Oh, I really need to be pushing from this character's motivations" or something. And if you just write this chapter poorly, you'll get that. And, one out of ten times, you'll do that, and you'll be like, "What was I worried about? This chapter turned out great! I should have had ninjas attack. This is how my book is now." Best thing is to do that, and kind of turn off your internal editor and just learn to go.
How do you get past writer's block, Isaac?
How do I get past writer's block? Caffeine. What I have found is I just have to bully through it. Reread what I wrote before, think about things, maybe do some bullet points of what you've seen that came before that, where I wanna get. Sometimes I skip ahead and write a scene that I really want to write.
Yeah, that helps, too. Or saying, "Okay, the scene that I'm trying just isn't working, let's just put it in a completely new location that's exciting and interesting to me."
If you have several different points of view, try a different point of view for that scene if that person's there.
And if it's the "I don't know what to write at all" writer's block, then just do something silly and goofy, 'cause you're practicing your skills, right. If a pianist doesn't know what to compose, they'll just sit down and play something to get themselves going.
it seems that The Lord Ruler still needed to store age "normally" but less. Did Miles ever have to store healing?
Yes. He did, but not in the normal way.
So, in the scene where Kelsier has all the metal around him, and he's Pushing and Pulling on [parts of the metal that are] not center of mass, is that something more along the lines of savantism, or is it just Rule of Cool?
No no, that I was pushing toward... I wouldn't call Kelsier a savant, but I would say that there were certainly steps toward that, and it's something I actually wanted people who were really skilled with the magic to be able to do.
So it's not Rule of Cool.
I would not call that one Rule of Cool, I would say that I want that to actually be part of the magic, that I wanted there to be some level, particularly in Pushing and Pulling, of skill that lets you deviate from the normal. And I've tried to show in other places that people who are really skilled can do some different things like that, particularly with Pushing and Pulling, both on emotions and on metals. So no, not Rule of Cool there, I do occasionally do Rule of Cool stuff, but I wouldn't call that one.
How many of the Stormlight Archive, how many are you planning?
There are two sets of five. The first five will come to a climax, and the second five are going to take place ten years later. Some of the cast will be the same. It's the same series but some of the cast will change. For instance, Lift is being seeded as a main character for that series. She'll be grown up, so she won't be quite-- She'll still be Lift, but she may not be quite as teenagery. She's a very special individual.
Renarin will be one of the main character in that series. Jasnah will be. And Taln and Ash, who are both Heralds that we barely see on screen in the current ones, they'll be main characters.
So, if Nightblood, unsheathed, killed someone, would their soul still go to the Beyond?
So, that's gonna be a matter of-- There's gonna be disagreement in the cosmere about that. Nobody has been able to actively test it, because there are certain things you can see, but there are people who are actively discussing this concept.
So, no one knows for sure?
Nobody knows for sure. And I'll just leave it at that. It's an astute question that even Vasher has-- Vasher has his thoughts, but he does not have a definitive answer, and others disagree with him.
At this point, who do you think would win, Vin or Szeth?
That’s a tough one. I’d, at the height of their power? Vin probably.
What is the dark-glowing sphere?
Major big RAFO.
From a certain series of books about a prison, by this one author, we learn that authors love to torture their audience. How many nights did you stay up giggling and cackling to yourself with glee over all of the things that happen in Oathbringer?
This is why I'm an insomniac, right? You're all gonna be miserable. A little fun thing here, when the book was going along, I thought "Maybe I should cut it after Part 3." I gave it to Karen, who's my continuity editor, and she said "If you cut it here, I will strangle you. The fans will not get a chance to do it, because I will do it."
Is Investiture universal? By that I mean, if an Allomancer got Stormlight somehow could they use that to fuel Allomancy?
That is always possible, so yes. Â But in some case it requires some quote-unquote hacking, like an AC vs a DC current or we've got a 120 Volt and they've got 240. Does that make sense? It might require-- I guess hacking is the wrong term, adapters.
Can honorspren, or any other type of Knight Radiant spren, be evil despite their relationship to Tanavast or Cultivation?
Yes, because I don't call the Shards good and evil. There are no good and evil Shards in my opinion, like and so, what's evil and what's not evil- you can totally have spren that are of Honor that you would consider evil. They have free will; they are much more strictly limited in that free will than we are, because of their nature as spren. It's very hard for most spren to ever break an oath or to lie. That's just like- as manifestations of laws of nature makes it very hard for that to happen, but they can be cruel.
Have you ever read a book that has made you cried? Or made you so frustrated that you wanted to throw the book?
It's not that hard to make me emotional in a book. I'm normally a very even-keeled guy, but a really great story told really well can really get to me. It's part of why I wanted to be a writer. I've got a very even temperament. I wake up most days, just kinda feeling the same I did the day before. So, if there's, like, bipolar or things like this, I'm like the opposite. I'm, like, if you vary, like, people vary from a 0 and a 100, I'm, like, at a 75 all the time. Which can be really cool, except when everyone else is, like, super excited, and they all go to, like, 90 and 100, and I'm like, "Yay? That's cool. I'm happy too!" But a good story, that gets me, right? That can really get me. So, a lot of my favorite stories-- Anne McCaffrey was really good at doing this for me. But Terry Pratchett, right? They're comedies? If I mention that I like something, it's probably stirred powerful emotions in me.
What have I wanted to throw across the room? I'm sorry, I know that some of you really like this, but-- and I'm sure they're really good books if you're in the right mindset, but-- this is gonna date me a little. There was a sequel series to the Willow movie, which was written. And Chris Claremont is a great writer, right? I think this is the X-Men Chris Claremont. I don't blame Chris. [George] Lucas was involved. Strike that from the record. But I loved Willow. When I was a kid, I'm like, "A fantasy movie that doesn't suck! Yes! Nothing against you Beastmaster, but, you know, a fantasy movie that doesn't suck, and Warwick Davis was awesome, I love that movie!" And then the books came out, and in the first one, you're like, "Yeah, all those people you loved? They're dead." That's how, like, the prologue goes! And the character whose life they saved in the movie, and things like that--spoilers, it's been like thirty years--is, like, a spoiled brat, and everyone's personality changed. That's probably the book I'm the most, like, throw-against-the-wall-ish. I'm like, "No, don't kill all my favorite characters!" Here's a clue for ya: if people love a whole bunch of stuff, don't start the sequel with, "Yeah, all that stuff you loved? We're just gonna..." Don't Aliens 3 your movie. Don't do that to your books. It's okay to have loss, but don't have all the people you love die in between stories. Bad idea.
I think it's probably the remnants of the first agreement between the singers and humans. They were allowed to terraform Shinovar, and rule that area, but anywhere else, they were forbidden from. Eventually, it morphed into the "soil lands are for humans, everywhere else is for singers." Then, over the millennia, it became a religious teaching, "don't walk on stones."
Brandon wrote a ton of worldbuilding down before starting to write the first book, and this particular thing is definitely something he planned from the start. He does keep a lot of stuff in his head, but sometimes that shifts over time. Part of our job is to make sure what's in his head now doesn't conflict with what has previously been published.
If the outline doesn't work for something, Brandon will change it while writing. As long as it doesn't conflict with published canon, it's always more awesome than his earlier plans.
Exciting news - Brandon just confirmed via livestream that the Leatherbound Tenth Anniversary Edition has an official piece by Ben McSweeney showing off the bridges - presumably it'll be similar to the one I linked, but more shiny.
At some point soon I think they’ll share a digital scan, or add it to the Way of Kings gallery on the website in a similar quality as you see the others.
It is not a Shallan piece, but rather a study by another ardent. It’s a little more mathy than Shallan’s work. I don’t think Shallan ever witnesses a real bridge run. By the time she reaches the Plains, Bridge 4 is part of the Cobalt Guard.
But yes, for everyone still confused, or confused in the future, by the mechanics of the bridge run, we got you covered. And a little something for the cosplayers as well. :)
The Venture-atium connection is something I wish I could have foreshadowed a little bit better. However, without Elend being a viewpoint until this chapter (the reasons for which I'll explain in a bit) there really wasn't much I could do to connect Venture and the Pits.
By the way, the "something a few years ago" that Elend mentions happening to disturb the atium production was Kelsier, the Survivor of Hathsin, Snapping and coming to an awakening of his powers–then bursting out of his hut and slaughtering every soldier or nobleman within ten miles of the Pits.
How many magic systems are in The Stormlight Archive, and how many of them haven't been seen?
I would say the only major one you haven’t seen is Voidbinding, it depends on how you count them. I count fabrials as one, Surgebinding as one, and Voidbinding as one. And then the Old Magic is kind of its own weird thing.
Is there anything in particular that majorly influenced the path that Skyward took at any point?
There's a big reveal at the ending that, once I came up with it, made me really excited to write the book - but you'll have to read it to find out.
You are known for being extremely meticulous in planning out the structure and details of your stories before writing. That being said, are there any times you have come up with a new idea or plot point as you are writing and just went with it?
Yeah, it happens all the time. I am, as I've come to learn, relatively detailed in my outlines compared to a lot of my contemporaries. (I am not the most detailed; I think that prize probably goes to Kevin J. Anderson. His outlines tend to be just basically the book, but shorter.) If you've seen me talk about my outlines, there are a lot of bullet points in there and goals; I don't know exactly what's gonna happen in each chapter, I'll know what I want to achieve in each chapter, which is a little bit different. I'll know, "these two characters need to interact, this information needs to come out, and this event happens to end the chapter." I'll know things like that. However, as I'm writing, as you're putting the book together, as you're getting in the zone and really getting to understand how the book is feeling and flowing, you start to change things, just from the first chapter. Not even it comes out exactly like planned most of the time. And this is just a part of the process.
Now, I am an outliner, which means that when one of these things happens, I will often go with it, but I'll also be revising my outline. I'll take a little bit of time to just go with it and see how it goes, often. But a lot of times, I'm already working on my outline. I'm already saying "oh, this is a much better idea, this is working way better." Trying to remember... from a first book, a time where that happened. Famously, Adolin wasn't a viewpoint character in the original draft of The Way of Kings, but that didn't happen during the drafting, that was during the revision process, so it's not quite what you're asking.
The personality that Doomslug ended up having in Skyward was not something I had planned out. I just kind of went with it as it came along as I was writing. A lot of the personalities of the side characters in Skyward are a good example of this. Like, even Jorgen's personality is quite different from what I had imagined in the outline. This happens a lot with characters for me that I'm writing, and who they are becoming is a much different person than who I maybe imagined them. Until I write through their eyes, I'm not 100% sure who they are. And this is the big thing that throws my outlines off. I know that my characters are going to grow to become different people than I imagined when I started, and the outline just has to adapt to that.
Unless it goes too far. Some of my fans who were watching back in the time, I added a character to Warbreaker just kind of on-the-fly as I was working on the beginning. And I really liked this character, they were great. So I'm like, "Wow, I want to bring this character on the adventure." And I wrote them into a couple of chapters, because they were just fun to write, and it just ruined the other chapters. The chapters no longer worked in the structure I was making, and it was a worse structure, and this character being along was taking away from the sense of isolation, which was a major theme for Siri in that book. And I was posting these chapters online as I wrote them for Warbreaker. I just eventually said, "This character is no longer coming on the adventure" and pretended they hadn't been there in the next chapter I posted. That happens sometimes, too, where you just decide to edit something down.
Is the fact that Hoid has been a Dawnshard related in some way with the "bearer of the first gem" title?
Yes indeed.
Here's my theory, and I want to get it down here so when it turns out to be right I can say "See I called it!"
​Dalinar becomes the new Honor, Lift becomes the new Cultivation. Why? Cultivation touched three people, Dalinar, Taravangian and Lift. She planned for Taravangian to become the new Odium, so I figure the other two are the new Honor and her eventual successor Cultivation. At least this is Cultivation's plan, even if that's not exactly how it ends up happening.
RAFO indeed.
If you use different circle centers rather than the orthocenter, you can do 9-point conic constructions and make 9-point ellipses?
Yes.
Is that valid?
I would say yes, that could be valid.
Wasn't there a rule about ellipses being a little--
Yes, they are a little less strong.
--they're weak because the long sides are weaker than the short sides.
Yeah, but this would work. There's not much reason to use it because the other is naturally-- has a stronger integrity than this, but you could theoretically do that. The defenses that make use of an ellipse make use of the strengths of an ellipse already. But yeah that would be possible.
With an ellipse you are asking for your opponent to flank you and come at you from the sides. And then if he pushes your circle out you're in trouble.
To what extent can virtual objects be forced into Stephen's subconscious? Stephen says that "those who work closely with [him] know to just pantomime letting [his] mind fill in the details." Does there have to be a physical object present in order for it to interact with his aspects? JC conjures a virtual phone that clearly had no physical counterpart. Could someone lie to Stephen that they have a bazooka in a box, then pretend to pull it out and proceed to virtually blow holes in the room?
The object does not have to be present, but his subconscious has to see an idea as part of his psychosis for it to appear.
Obviously, we know that spren look different in the Cognitive Realm, as opposed to in the Physical. Seons, from Elantris. Do they look different?
Yes.
PART TWO: MY YEAR
I keep a handy spreadsheet to track my work throughout the year—it has a list of dates on the left, and then a column for words written each day, and other columns for goals and targets and the like.
One of the ways I keep myself productive on projects is by setting goals and tracking my progress toward milestones. Making progress really helps me feel the book coming together, and it keeps me motivated. It also lets me look back and see what I spent my time doing each year. So, I can give you specific dates of when I was working on what during the year.
January–July 12th: Rhythm of War
December 2019 on the 31st, I finished the first draft of Rhythm of War in a marathon writing session. Then, three days later, I launched into revisions. Revising a book this big is a long, involved procedure, using many alpha and beta readers.
It’s not my favorite part of the writing process, particularly with these long novels that take a ton of effort to revise. However, I’m extremely pleased with the resulting book. These days, I balance my time between Stormlight books and other projects—eighteen months on each, in rotation. It’s been working well, so I imagine continuing it for at least one more cycle.
That means I’ll start writing Stormlight 5 on January 1st, 2022 for a fall 2023 release.
July 13th–19th: Songs of the Dead Revision
You can hear more about this in project updates below. This is a book I’m working on with a friend, Peter Orullian. His latest draft came in, and it was my turn to do some work on a few key parts of the story before turning it back over.
July 20th–August 26th: Dawnshard
I would have liked to have had more time between Rhythm of War and Dawnshard, the latest Stormlight novella. (This one focuses on Rysn and Lopen, if you haven’t read it yet. The ebook is out now.) However, since I wanted to get it out to Kickstarter backers before the arrival of Rhythm of War, I had to slot it in as early as possible. To that end, I dove in and finished the first draft in July–August.
A fun fact in here is that my computer died halfway through writing this one, but I had a new computer within a day—since I work from the cloud, my computers are basically dumb terminals. This is probably my favorite thing about the modern writing process. Unless major cloud services somehow lose all their data at the same time my computer completely dies, I’ll never lose any writing ever again. (Something that has really happened only once in my life, long ago, but it was a perpetual worry for a big chunk of my writing career.)
August 28th–September 17th: Reckoners Novellas
My extra time this year gave me time to do a pass on these novellas, which had been in the works for a while now. (See the Mainframe announcement above.)
My work these weeks, then, was me getting the first drafts from the author and going through for my pass, working on them—mostly in an editorial role, making suggestions and helping beef up the story in various ways.
We hope to release these in 2021 sometime. So stay tuned!
September 18th–29th: Skyward Three
The third Skyward book (out of four) is my current main project, and things are going really well for it. (Particularly because I’m excited about the Janci novellas, and how they’ll tie together with the novel.) I dove into Book Three in earnest in September, first cleaning up the outline, then writing a short chunk of it before Dawnshard revisions came due.
I did take a day off in here to rent a theater (which was really cheap to do in the COVID months) and go see Tenet with my family. I love me some Christopher Nolan, and wanted to experience it on the big screen. I think you can guess from the way I like to plot that I loved the film—it might just be the most Nolany Christopher Nolan film that was ever Nolaned upon the world.
October 1st–13th: Dawnshard Revisions
I actually did a brief 2.0 of this between work on the Reckoners novellas earlier in the year, but the bulk of the revision process happened here, after we got back beta reader feedback.
Print and audio editions should be forthcoming. I’ve been thinking I’ll probably release the audio under my Mainframe imprint—even though this book isn’t a collaboration—as the print edition’s publisher is undecided as of yet. Translated editions should be forthcoming in most of my major markets.
October 14th–Now: Skyward 3
The tentative title is Nowhere. If you want to read the various updates on this book, look at the updates section. (I did also sneak a final polish of Dawnshard in October, and had a week off to do Rhythm of War launch party stuff in November.)
Did Taravangian go to see the Nightwatcher before or after Gavilar's assassination?
Um, oh man. I'm going to have to look at my timeline. I believe it's before, but I can't guarantee I'm right, because these things are all happening around the same time.
Because he says that Gavilar confided in him the night of.
Ooooh, you're right. Nope, it's after. It is after. You can send that question to Peter so we can confirm it. There might be something I'm forgetting about Taravangian.
Chapter Seven
I've taken some visual art classes. I'm terrible at drawing—as you would expect from someone without a lot of experience—but I felt it would be important to know how visual art works and how artists think. Listening to the professors talk was in many ways more useful than the practice itself, though I did enjoy the drawing as well.
(As a side note, my final project for an art class in 2002—a basic drawing class—was a landscape of Roshar with rockbuds and the like. I took a stab at doing my own concept art, and bad though it was, it did help me start to visualize the world.)
How Shallan thinks here is really a blend of how I think as a writer and how I've heard visual artists think of their process. I'm drawing heavily on my own experience, and because of that blend, I suspect that to many artists her process will sound odd.
The letters in [Oathbringer]. Are they all three from Shards?
...Yes.
Is the first one, is that one we know? Is that one we've seen yet?
They are all ones you have seen.
They are all ones we have seen.
Yes. Or at least you know.
Have seen or know of.
Yeah.
Jasnah is married? I may have misread it, but I'm pretty sure she refers to her husband in the negotiations
I think you might be mistaking Jasnah and Navani, as Navani refers to her husband (Dalinar) during negotiations. Jasnah doesn't appear on screen, though she does have a few lines via spanreed.
It's a little confusing because by this point, Dalinar and Navani have started using king/queen for themselves in reference to Urithiru as a separate kingdom. Jasnah is queen of Alethkar, but Navani is also Alethi and a queen--but not of Alethkar...so once in a while, I found alpha/beta readers getting tripped up by the terminology.
So Dalinar dropped his 'I must never be king' resolution? Kinda weird, that felt like an Oath to me.
You're referring to young Dalinar realizing that he couldn't want the throne, lest it lead him to turn against his brother? I didn't intend that to be a capital O oath.
For what it's worth, in the months after Oathbringer, he realized that as long as he wasn't putting himself on the same level as the others, they would worry he wanted more. So being named king was a way for him to calm the coalition.
Fourth - Outside of books, what influences his writing?
1. People he knows (Sarene is based on a friend, etc; also includes character conflicts)
2. Cinema, especially when it does something poorly and he wants to do it better
3. video games may be an influence, unsure.
Cursing in the Mistborn Series
I've taken a little bit of criticism from certain readers for the swearing I put into these books. I know that most of you consider things like 'damn' and 'hell' to be very weak curses, if even swear words at all. However, to some people, they can be offensive. Since I didn't use them in Elantris, some readers were surprised to find them in this series.
A writer must choose how to convey his ideas, and it's hard to make a choice that will please everyone. In the Final Empire, using curses like these–rather than just making up ones for their world–was necessary. I feel that a few (if relatively weak) 'our world' curses were needed for this setting, as made up ones just didn't work. The tone they set wasn't right.
Would he also be able to have powers from Warbreaker without using Breaths?
Yes that is-- It is possible to power the magics with one another. Breaths are one of the-- it's-- yeah, let's just say that.
Is the Warbreaker sequel gonna have Susebron and Siri?
It's Vivenna and Vasher. And new characters. You'll get an update in it, if I ever do it, what's going on, but it won't be focused on them.
Hey, Isaac. Do you think there’s time dilation going on in the graphic novel?
No. Part of that is, if you take a look when you get to the climax, there’s certain things that happen there that make me think there’s not a lot of time dilation going on.
So they were asking, because they also know that we have the Mistborn Adventure Game, and the explanation for not having a role playing game for Stormlight is because it's not yet finished and it didn't make sense, but maybe for the moment that it's at least halfway, would you consider [it]?
Yeah, I would definitely consider it at Stormlight 5. That would be a really good time to do an RPG. So it's probably time, if we haven't been talking about it, to go talk to some people and try to build one. I've been really lucky with the people we've worked with, because Call to Adventure turned out to be just great, it's a ton of fun. And the people at Crafty Games have just been delightful to work with; I really like them. We've ended up with some really great stuff.
Doing an RPG, the big question would be do we do another indie RPG, do we ask Wizards of the Coast if they want to do a D&D tie-in Stormlight? I don't know, I'd have to get some feedback from fans on what they would want, do they want us to do it in the Crafy system, which one is most interesting to people? You guys can ask around, I think I'll probably start asking that question of fans in general and trying to gather some feedback so we know.
Yeah, I think Wizards of the Coast would be closer to a Magic the Gathering cosmere game.
Mmhmm, yeah. Well, you know since they're doing Lord of the Rings, it's not impossible now that we could get a Stormlight magic expansion or something like that. It's probably going to depend on how things like Lord of the Rings happen and whatnot. I'm watching all that to see how fan reactions are because fans are both excited and mad, which they seem to always be every time Wizards of the Coast does anything, and I'm not sure if they're going to settle on excited or on mad. The problem is Stormlight isn't on the size-level of something like Lord of the Rings. Not impossible, I don't think, so we'll see what happens.
Have you planned out the interludes for Book #3, and if so - any returning characters? Share one?
Yes, I have. Taravangian will be one, unless I move it to an actual chapter. We'll have to see how things play out.
On my reread of Reckoners, I remembered it being really kitschy and light-hearted, but the prologue of the first book is really dark. Is the rest of the book so light-hearted because it is David trying to make the best of a really crappy situation, or is it because it's Young Adult?
Yeah. It's also partially, I wrote the prologue, stepped away, came back, and wrote the rest... One of the things I regret about the books is that-- I was telling a story about assassinating superheroes. So I thought it was going to go darker than it did, once I found David's voice. And if I could go back, I might take out the baby skeleton... I couldn't cut it because it's such a great image, but I should have. My biggest regret with that series is the tonal mismatch... It's this thing where I'm like, "That would be the best book for, like, a fourteen-year-old to read of mine, except the prologue which involves dissolving babies."
Are you still planning on doing Mistborn in Space, because that would be awesome.
Am I still planning on doing Mistborn in Space. Yes I am… Mistborn was originally pitched to my editor-- I pitched it as a trilogy of trilogies--I've obviously gone off track on that on that--but I was going to do an epic fantasy, a 1980's level kind of contemporary, and science fiction all in the same world. Alloy of Law, I really fell in love with that time period for some things I was doing and I was like "I'm going to write FOUR BOOKS HERE" So there's now 13 planned. Who knows if I'll add more and things like that.
What are the pre-requisites for someone becoming Returned? Does it depend on how much Breath they have?
It does not depend on the quantity of breath, but I'm not revealing the specific pre-requisites, since I need to save something for Nightblood.
...On the subject of change, the Tenth Name of the Almighty, Elithanathile, He Who Transforms. Is this related to the fact that Akinah is divided into ten parts, and the things you find there?
Uh, yes... Are these things all related to the concept of change and why things are divided into ten parts in The Stormlight Archive, and the answer was "Yes, these are all very much interconnected."
Kaladin Concept Art used in my pitch of the series to Tor in 2008. Done by the incredibly talented Inkthinker, who eventually produced all of Shallan's pieces for the final book.
My god, that is sexy. Did he ever finish it?
He did polished versions of all of the characters, though I prefer not to show them around very much. The reason for this is that I generally prefer the readers to be able to imagine the characters as they have in their own minds, which is why none of the illustrations in the books are actually of characters.
On a more specific note, for this drawing, I've always preferred the rough version to the polished version. Something about the primal energy of this one is stronger. The polished one cleaned up the face, but for this picture, I feel that actually made it worse.
He did finish this illustration, but the sketchy version looks better for some reason. There's also a Szeth concept piece, a part of which ended up in the book as Szeth's chapter icon.
(Brandon mentioned changing Kaladin's plot so that he chose the "hard" path) What was the hard path?
Kaladin initially accepted the Shardblade and Plate in the first book, and the rest of the book was about him fighting with them. Really boring.
How come Vin doesn't get stomach aches when she takes-- When she ingests iron?
So it actually, legitimately gets burned away. It's gone.
So it's gone too fast to have a--
It, yeah. I mean if you sit around and just-- I mean, Allomancers are warned-- and Kelsier I think warns her, "Burn away your metals," right? Not good to have these in your system! But yeah, you would end up feeling adverse effects like that if-- yeah.
Have we seen the lady in the mask-- who's like related to the Ghostbloods--
Iyatil?
Have we seen her in another book, by any chance?
No, you have not.
Elhokar, when he's saying the First Ideal-- Which Order would he have been in?
Lightweaver.
How do you decide what scenes get depicted in the books?
With the Alcatraz books, I read it, I would fill out a list. The editor read it and filled out a list of different scenes that we would want. And then the artist would do that, as well. And then we would discuss and kind of narrow it down from there.
On these leatherbound books, I will usually approach an artist, and I may have a scene in mind. If the artist is already a fan, I will ask them, "Are there any scenes that you particularly like?" And we'll go from there. But I can't do that with every artist, because they all want to paint Dalinar freeing the slaves, things like that.
Beyond that, I start looking at moments that haven't been depicted before, but ought to be depicted. One of the examples in this one was Navani's painting of the thath glyph. We hadn't seen that done before. (And of course, about the same time, Brotherwise was doing their own version of it, as well. So ours and theirs came out at the same time, and they're both fantastic. Another one of those that's like that is, we had Micah Epstein paint the Heralds leaving their swords behind. And then Brotherwise also did a fantastic rendition of that, using our canonical Blade designs, which turned out really nice, as well. And it was so cool to see the same scene, painted in different ways by different artists.) But that's one of the things I do. And of course, there are these candy bar moments that you want to show somehow in the book.
One of the challenges with these books is that we already had, like, thirty pieces of art in them, in the form of grayscale pieces. For these books, they're two-color pieces. The same artwork that is in the other one; there is one replacement. You'll know which one it is. We'll talk about that one. We do have a few new ones. Ben McSweeney did a Sadeas's bridges piece. I think this is one that we probably should have had in the original book, anyway. We also, in the trade paperback of the Way of Kings, Ben did a piece of the cryptics. And we have taken that and added that into this one as a canonical piece by Shallan. And then we have a replacement for one of the old pieces.
That's sort of the process. I also go to Brandon and say, "Hey, are there any scenes you want to see? If there's something that he feels really strongly about, then we find somebody to do that. So, it's kind of approaching it from all these different angles., and then narrowing it down. Because there's always more pieces than we have time or funds to do. Or even space.
Dear Mr. Sanderson,
Given the motivation per the books that the Knights believed they were giving up their Surgebinding powers to prevent the destruction of Roshar à la Ashyn, in practical terms how did e.g. Windrunners break their bonds?
Since they believed they were doing the right (honorable) thing wouldn't simply deciding "I'm breaking my oaths for the good of Roshar" not damage the bond (especially if Fifth Ideal Windrunners have [attitude] similar to Nale's comment regarding his bond)? Or can one break the bond by force of will or decision as opposed to betraying oaths in a practical sense?
There is an explanation to give here, but it would have spoilers for Rhythm of War and Book Five, so I'll RAFO for now. Ask me in about three years and four months.