Found 14294 entries in 0.328 seconds.
I've studied aerospace medicine, so I wondered, Kaladin, is his Shardplate going to have any special properties that are going to help for very high-altitude travel?
Let's just say, the fact that his two surges have to do with pressure and with gravity, Let's just say that is on my mind.
Shai refers to an Unknown God, is this at all related to the rocks that fell from the sky that Shai's ancestors carved?
For her people, there is a relationship. But watch for mentions of the God Beyond in the books. There is more here.
In the third trilogy of Mistborn, when they do space travel. If space travel possible with members of Scadrial be able to go to other places in the cosmere?
The answer is, "You'll have to see!"
I'm going to skip asking you to tell us about yourself, I think you're already fairly well known. But are there any stories about yourself that readers wouldn't know?
Oh, I'm sure there are tons of stories about myself. The one my dad told at my wedding is a fun one. My parents, like any normal people, will occasionally let certain words slip through their lips around their children that they probably don't want their children repeating. I was 4 or 5 and I had learned to say, from my father, certain expletives. And I walked around saying them all the time. So my parents had to sit me down and say, "Ok we don't say these words because they are bad words." So I said, "All right, I got it."
I'm a Mormon, and in the LDS church children are assigned to talk in their own meeting. Your talk is like 30 seconds when you're a 5-year-old, and you're just supposed to get up and say, "I like Jesus," and that's the end. But I decided I would talk about these words, with nobody knowing, even my parents. So I got up in front of all the little primary kids and I said, "We don't say 'oh rust' because it's a bad word." And then I proceeded to talk about all the bad words I knew-to the other kids. That was my talk.
So there you go, Brandon swore from the pulpit in Mormon church when he was a kid.
Well done, corrupting the youth.
Is Roshar, or has Roshar always been the only large landmass on the planet?
Roshar is.... *Brandon then paused and looked up, thinking very hard* Roshar has always been the largest landmass--as long as there has been land.
With Forgery and ChayShan, can anybody from that country do them?
Forge? No.
[Does] the expansion of Jaddeth’s empire have more to do with greed and hunger for power, or the innate nature of Dominion?
Both. I would say both. The innate nature of Dominion probably caused the greed and hunger for power.
What would you say percentage-wise?
Well, one caused the other. It definitely started with Dominion. The Skaze are pretty thirsty for power.
Is there a connection between Sak's talent and Allomantic electrum? If so, what is it?
Yes. Reading a person's spiritual connections and possibilities. Similar powers, as is atium.
Why did Mat never meet up with the [Band of the Red Hand] again?
[Robert Jordan]'s notes had them going on separate paths, specifically because he wanted Mat to go to Seanchan.
But after events of A Memory of Light, you can assume he dropped in to check on them.
Was Bloody Tan influenced and/or controlled by Harmony or one of his agents? During those introductory events [in The Alloy of Law prologue]?
Controlled by Harmony? No.
Was he controlled or influenced by anyone outside of himself?
*sounds like he's about to say “yeah”* RAFO.
What's the most complex magic system in your books?
Allomancy is probably the most complex, I would say. Predictably when you start getting into the later applications of it it gets-- It's pretty complicated.
Did the game developers for the Witcher franchise get back to you?
They never did. I didn't expect them to, though. I was not calling them out. I was specifically just saying that if somebody asked me, I would. It's not like I was...I was trying to bury that. It went way bigger than I wanted to. But I think they already knew. I have made it clear to them I'd enjoy working with them.
Reen and Ruin, how much of the personalty that we saw in the books was Ruin, her actual memories, and how much of it was actually Reen?
Most of what you saw was this kind of weird amalgamation, because it's getting filtered through her memories and things like this. You can see mostly Ruin at that point, but there is some actual Reen in there mixed in. Maybe twenty-eighty. Eh, twenty five-seventy five.
I've been checking the site almost every day for years to complete the signed art print collection of the other 2 framed on my wall. Please tell me this [Hemalurgy table] will be produced same as the other 2? I've got very low numbers for the other table prints, and it's hard to understate how much I've been looking forward to completing this collection after years.
It will be available as a print, probably with more details in the boxes. I don’t know the timetable though.
Is aluminum shielding from emotional Allomancy strictly line of sight? So, can someone in the basement bypass somebody’s aluminum hat on the first floor
No, they could not. You just put enough aluminum there and it disrupts.
So it disrupts like a field.
Yep.
What can readers expect from the second volume of The Stormlight Archive? Any tentative title or release date?
I originally had titled the second book Highprince of War. I'm not sure if I will keep that title, depending on who its central character ends up being. With the Stormlight Archive, I am playing with the form of the epic fantasy novel in a way that's very exciting to me that I haven't done since Elantris. If you read Elantris, the form of that book was very important in how it developed, with its chapter triad system. The books in this series also have a very specific form. Each book will focus on one character. That character will get flashbacks exploring their past, to show you how they arrived where they are. But the book will progress the narrative for everyone. For instance, this book was Kaladin's book, and you got flashbacks for him. He will appear substantially in the next book, and you'll have lots of viewpoints from him, but it will be someone else's book and that character will get flashbacks. Each book will have one central character, with two or three major characters who have no flashbacks and not quite as much screen time—characters like Dalinar and Shallan in the first book, and to a lesser extent Adolin and Szeth.
The other thing that will continue is the interludes. I really enjoyed including those in the book; I'm not sure what people will think of them, but most of them are essentially going to be short stories set somewhere in the world, that enhance the main narrative and show different aspects of the world without forcing you to follow yet another plotline. They're just quick one-offs. You'll see those between parts in all of the other books.
Tentative release date? I have to finish A Memory of Light first. I don’t know how long that will take to write. In a perfect world, which is probably not going to happen, the ideal case is that I’m able to finish A Memory of Light by around August of 2011, whereupon it gets published in November 2011 and I start Stormlight Two January of the next year and it's ready for publication in November 2012. That would be the ideal situation. I often do manage to hit the deadlines in ideal situations, but I'm not making any promises on this one. I'm thinking 2012 spring is more likely for A Memory of Light, but we'll see.
If you could have the abilities of one of your characters, what abilities would you want and why?
Any one of my characters? Well I would love to be able to, if I were to pick one superpower it would probably be flying and so I would totally go with, probably Steelpushing just because I think it would be so much fun. The ideas of the, of the Lashings from Way of Kings would be a nice second but the Steelpushing just sounds like fun, so I would totally be a Mistborn. I would get them all.
Is the chronology through the whole cosmere fairly linear, or are there some Interstellar-relativity timey-wimey stuff at play?
Relativity is in play for sure, but I am not allowing time travel into the past in the cosmere. So while you might find places that move at slower/faster speeds, and while foreseeing future timelines is in play for sure, nobody will not be pulling serious time travel shenanigans.
Siri Enters and Sees Returned
Just a little note here. Returned live for eight days without a Breath, though the week is seven days long in this world. Why? Well, I figured that they'd need an extra day as leeway. On day seven, they start to grow weak and sluggish. If they don't consume a Breath, their body will consume their own on the eighth day of their life, and they'll die again.
In some parts of this world, Returned aren't worshipped, but instead seen as something akin to vampires. They draw in Breath to survive, and need a supply of people to feed off of. They tend to wear black, since it's the most powerful color for draining to Awaken things.
Didn't you do the RoosterTeeth logo and work on RvB animated ?
Can you talk a little about those two ?
I did!
The RT logo came about back in 2003, I think? I was a fan of the first season of RvB and I hung out in their forums. When they sent out the call to redesign their old clip-art logo, I was there. When other artists were offering mascot-style cartoons, I saw there wasn't anything wrong with the icons in their existing logo, they just needed a fully original representation. It's been one of the longest-reaching and most enduring illustrations of my career, and paid off quite well for what amounted to an afternoon's doodle of a rooster silhouette and some cartoon chatterteeth. I wish I'd drawn the key better, it's all asymmetrical and it never stops driving me nuts.
RvB Animated came around in 2008. By that time I was a Lead Animator at Humoring the Fates, a studio down in Florida. Burnieb asked if we could take on some original RvB animated content, and we gave it our best shot. I did the character designs, boarded it, keyed out the animation and put in most of the gunfire/blaster VFX, but the team at Studio Fates did the lion's share of the real work. We produced the whole thing in-house, and with a core team of less than a dozen.
This was before Monty and his team really revolutionized what Rooster Teeth could do with a blend of machinema and original 3D animation, which ultimately was the perfect solution for what they wanted to do. But it was a good early experiment and a rare opportunity that I'm proud to have taken part in.
I'm pretty sure we were the first production to adapt Halo for 2D traditional, we were certainly a year ahead of the overseas work on Legends. If you dig around in the archives of the studio's production blog, you can find all sorts of early design docs and pencil tests.
So you said earlier that color has a lot to do with things and in Warbreaker obviously color is like a big thing *inaudible*. Will that have a relation to anything else?
It will have relations to a lot of things, including the way The Way of King's magic plays out and works.
When you a get a Hemalurgic spike, if you just immediately... tap gold, do you lose the spike, or is the spike already in there and can't get out?
Okay: so hemalurgic spike, tap gold? RAFO.
Would the powers of a magical object change if it went to a different world?
It is plausible that they will, but most likely is that they don't work right. Most of them will not.
So are all these epic novels in the same universe? Elantris, Mistborn, Dragonsteel, all that?
I'm afraid that question is best left to the rest of you, for now, to discuss.
Were you gonna do anything with The Stormlight Archive with an RPG?
I would like to. We'll have to see. We want to support the Mistborn RPG while it's out, we don't want to abandon it. But once we feel like we've done that one the way we want to, you might see a Stormlight.
I need to get ahold of that, because I would almost be worried about, if you have a Mistborn character, especially in Era One, it would be too overpowered.
They made it work. The game is less combat-focused. There's social influence and gathering resources influence and combat influence are all separate, so you can have a duel of words where you attack someone's social influence that can be as valuable as attacking them on the streets at night. So because those two elements are so useful, what you end up having is, you can balance characters who don't even have Allomancy with characters who are Mistborn or with Mistings, things like that.
I was more thinking something like Twinborn, that you can almost balance that without getting any Mistborn.
The problem with Twinborn is, you get the right combinations, it's kind of OP. But it's a storytelling based system.
It seems to me that members of the [LDS] church generally like Elantris a lot more than people who aren't in the church and why do you think that is?
I haven't noticed that but if that were the case… boy. I don't know that whole Raoden just pushed through it has some sort of tying your spirit to it and that's definitely-- I could see that being relevant.
I've been told it's Hrathen's struggle with faith.
I think they like the whole-- the whole evil missionary thing would be something thing that members of the church would be like "Ahh evil missionary?! That's cool!" *laughter* So I think that's totally possible but I hadn't noticed that specifically. I think that it is also a book that is less focused on the action and fighting. Like Mistborn is more focused on that, and so I would expect that there's that relevant issue, perhaps, as well.
Will The Way of Kings series be based on one of the worlds and magic systems you have already created or are you inventing a totally new one for this series?
It will be new. There are going to be a lot of different types of magic in the world (I see there's a question below asking about that, so I'll answer more there.) But there will be two main magic systems for the first book. The first will deal with the manipulation of fundamental forces. (Gravity, Strong/weak atomic forces, Electromagnetic force, that sort of thing.) The second will be a transformation based magic system, whereby people can transform objects into one of the world's ten elements.
Has Midius found his way to Taldain at some point? If so, will we be able to see him there?
Taldain has seen visits from non-natives.
How do you get the different personalities for all your characters?
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.
Can all Investitures be classified as end-positive, neutral, or negative?
Yes, though in the overwhelming majority of cases, it's end-positive or at least neutral. Hemalurgy really is an oddity in the cosmere.
Bluefingers is left-handed
Saw the "what inconveniences do left handed people have?"
It seems left-handers get ink all over their hands when writing....or he could be a righty and they write right to left
Not much of a revelation, but wanted to share it.
I feel the pain of lefties, though I am not one myself. Every time I see them writing, I think of how inconvenient that must be.
I'd be happy to canonize this, but I'd be taking too much credit if I said this is what I'd thought of when writing. I had simply imagined that he wrote a lot, and was not always as careful about cleaning off his hands as he should have been.
Do you by chance suffer from hippophobia, which is the fear of horses?
I don’t, but I’m not terribly fond of them either. They’ve been mean to me when I’ve ridden them.
I was just curious, because Kaladin and Vin are both cautious when it comes to horses.
Yep.
Games and Other Licensed Work
I'm interested in doing some more video game work. Ever since I got to be part of the Infinity Blade games, I've had the itch to do this again. Right now though, there is nothing in the works that I can announce—I've had some short preliminary conversations with game studios, but no contracts. I'll continue to look at doing this, and will announce what I can, when I think something might actually be happening.
Unfortunately, Mistborn: Birthright never came together. (Though I'm on very good terms with the folks there.) And you can ignore any rumors about CD Projekt Red. Some fans got hyped when I said I liked them as a studio—and some news sites even picked it up as a story, for some reason. But that was just me mentioning in a random post that I think they do good work. I've never met with them—or talked to them—and have no reason to believe they even know who I am.
Video games aside, we do have some exciting and fun licensed properties that we've been working on, and I figured I should have a section in the State of the Sanderson for updates on these.
Dunno if you can answer this now, but if everyone is from Yolen way back when, is there a migration story?
Not all humans originated on Yolen, but the first humans were there. Watch the books for myths that hint at more.
How hard was it for you to get your first manuscript published? Did you send multiple copies?
It took me ten years of work to become an author who wrote books that were of professional quality.
Once I hit that point, my chances improved. Elantris was rejected half a dozen times over four years before selling.
Can Hoid safely have an MRI?
Why do you ask that?
Because if you have metal inside your body, and you have an MRI, which is magnetic, it's very bad for you.
You're just assuming that... That's a very clever way to try to get around a question that I have not answered and intentionally said I am not going to answer, so...
Also, tattoos. You can't have a tattoo with an MRI. The ink has little bits of metal in it.
You can't? Well, I assume there are tattoo inks that are not little bits of metal.
That's true.
Darksiders have almost as advanced technology as second Era Scadrians.
Yes.
But then we see Darksiders in The Secret-- in Mistborn: The Secret History. So are they gonna be the first spacefarers, are they gonna get there before Scadrians?
So, where it is right now is that certain things have happened to Taldain that have isolated it and cut it off.
Yeah, a little bit in Arcanum Unbounded talked about that.
And some-- they're under-- going through some difficult times, let's say... So, I will RAFO whether or not they're going to make it first to make it to space, but let's just say they were well on target to making it first before certain events happened.
Will all 10 Stormlight books be relatively close time wise, or separate centuries like Mistborn?
They will be relatively close, time wise. Across twenty years or so, rather than hundreds.
Three books or three authors you'd recommend to any fantasy reader?
If I were to recommend one, it would probably be the first Mistborn novel.
*laughter*
Apart from your books.
Terry Pratchett is probably my favorite writer. I really liked Anne McCarthy work and I think it translates very well to large or different types of audiences. I often give Name of the Wind to people, it's good introduction to fantasy, it's a really solid novel.
But of course there is also Wheel of Time. I genuinely recommend Wheel of Time to people who already love fantasy cause it's a big commitment.
My question is about Jasnah, and why she tried to assassinate Elhokar’s wife?
Well, you’re going to need to get to know Elhokar’s wife a little better before you get an answer for that. But understand that Jasnah is very deliberate in her choices, and protecting her family is one of her most important personal mandates.
Terry Brooks recently said he'll be doing more Shannara books and that he wishes he didn't use the title The Elfstones of Shannara already since his new arc is basically all about the Elfstones. Did your reticence to titling The Gathering Storm as such have anything to do with The Stormlight Archive? The Gathering Storm certainly seems like a perfect title for a book in the series.
Yeah. I didn’t choose The Gathering Storm. If you know the story, it all happened while I was asleep, and they said this was the title they were going to use. There were a couple of reasons. Number one, I knew I was releasing a book soon afterward that was in a series called The Stormlight Archive. Perhaps I pay a little too much attention to making sure that I don’t feel like I’m repeating myself. Kaladin in The Way of Kings was originally named Merin, and one reason I changed his name was because it sounded too much like Perrin. He had been Merin for eight years or so, but when I was just a Wheel of Time fan, it was okay to have a name that sounded a little like a Wheel of Time character’s. But now I may be a little hypersensitive to that.
Honestly, the greatest reason I might have preferred The Gathering Storm to have a different title is that I felt it was just a little bit generic, more so than recent titles in the series have been. Recent Wheel of Time titles have been beautiful; I love Crossroads of Twilight as a title, for example. But The Gathering Storm is a good title for a lot of other reasons, and it works very well for the first of that sequence. So I was satisfied with it even though it wasn’t the title I would have chosen.
You said previously that a slider's bubble is anchored to its position on Scadrial rather than on the slider's position or on the train (if the burner was on a train). If the slider was on a rock in space, would the bubble be anchored to a position relative to Scadrial, the rock or something else?
RAFO
Was the Lord Ruler using Feruchemy + Allomancy to Soothe all of the people around him? Or was he, as I like to think, flaring for so long that he became a Soother Savant?
He lived long enough and used his metals enough (particularly Soothing) to become nearly a savant in every area, if not a full savant.
You mentioned in your newsletter that you were thinking of doing a Mistborn film, and I'm wondering because it's an internal magic system, how you would differentiate which metal was being burned?
We've got a couple of tricks up our sleeve that we've been working on. One thing that we're changing in the screenplay is, when you burn iron and steel it makes metals glow blue rather than shooting out blue lines. Basically this will keep it less cluttered, and you can kind of dim the screen a little bit and show everything glowing blue. We're doing that, and when you start burning one of the, for instance, one of the metals that influences personality, we're gonna actually kind of like send a pulse out of the person, and have it kind of wash across people, and things like that, so we're coming up with visual clues to show them.
At the end of Bands of Mourning, they couldn't refill the heat medallions, was that the brass, or the nicrosil they were having trouble with?
Let's RAFO that.
Have we seen a Svrakiss in a book so far?
Um... RAFO
Can you tell us anything about Svrakiss, like are they originally from Sel?
Um... I'm not going to go into that.
Is Aslydin a Feruchemist?
Uhhhhhoooooh. RAFO. We’ll just RAFO that.
What did you do while writing Wheel of Time?
Alternated between writing Wheel of Time books and Cosmere books.
Where'd you come up with Wayne's kleptomania where he steals things and replaces things he finds of value. I think that's the funniest part of his character, that he determines that "oh, this is worth more than this" and "that is a good trade".
I have no idea where that came from, I can take no responsibility for that man. He just kinda popped out fully formed. I started writing a short story about him, which was where I started, I was gonna do a little Mistborn novella in the wild west era with Wayne as the main character. He was a riot but he couldn't be a main character, he couldn't be the main character. He needed somebody to play off of, and so the Wayne and MeLaan story got shelved--eventually I'll show people, I only got about a thousand words into it--and instead we got Alloy of Law.
If you burn nicrosil, will it deplete Feruchemial storages? Or just Allomantic?
Just Allomantic.
