StrikerEZ
Just out of curiosity, what's your current plan on potentially writing other books while you write [Mistborn] Era Three? You've mentioned in the past potentially squeezing in other books between those three books.
Brandon Sanderson
Still thinking I might do that. Tor wanted me to set out my schedule, 'cause we're getting ready to sign the contacts for Era Three with Tor. (Our contracts are weird, let's just say. Sometimes we just hand them books, sometimes we do it ahead of time. But this time we're doing it ahead of time.) And they wanted delivery dates, and I said, "I am writing the whole trilogy before I release the first book." It's what I've wanted to do ever since I wrote Era One, I wanted to do this again. So Era Three is going to be a trilogy, written, that won't get released. And I know I'm going to need a break between books to do other things. And so I'm still thinking that I'll do some of these books that I've been promising people in between, and then release them in some order. It's possible I could write these books, and they could be released while I'm finishing Era Three.
But it's looking like Era Three... it's gonna be a little while. We are pretty sure Stormlight Five is 2024 now. I do apologize on that; though I have been writing on that. These weeks, I only get three and a half days to write, a lot of times. There's so many other things that I need to be doing. Stormlight Five is moving along, but there's too many things going on with it, and I had too many movie things happen this year, it slowed me down, and so we are sure it's 2024 at this point. And then that means, where do we put Era Three? I want to write all three books, I want to have a little time in between each one to write something else. I want the Era Three books to be around two hundred thousand words like Era One was, not a hundred thousand words like Era Two; just feels like the right length. They could get longer than that; they could end up at two fifty or even three hundred thousand. So that's gonna take me a couple of years of writing before I even get them done and ready to go out.
So, you're gonna get an ending to Era Two. And then you're gonna get an ending to Skyward. And then you're gonna get an ending to Stormlight. Where, there are still things going on in those settings and worlds, but you're gonna get three pretty sizeable endings in a row. And then, we're probably going to be doing other interesting things for a while before you end up getting into Era Two of Stormlight and Era Three of Mistborn. Interesting things such as: a prose version of White Sand that is actually revised and looking good, a non-Cosmere collection of fiction. Dark One, the novelization, is another thing that you can look forward to; my original outline, I'm working on it with Dan Wells, with turning it into a novel, and I'm very pleased with how that's going. These things are gonna have to fill the void while Brandon works on Era Three. And potentially Nightblood and potentially Elantris sequels.
Sapphire Bombay
Do you have concerns about constraints on your time over the next twenty years? What books do you plan to write between Stormlight Six and Ten?
Brandon Sanderson
That's a good question. I have concerns; I absolutely have concerns. This is definitely the biggest challenge of my career, is fitting everything in. What do I plan to write then? That's a good time for Dragonsteel. Whether I can do Dragonsteel concurrent, because Dragonsteel is so involved (this is the Hoid origin series), whether I can do that concurrent or not is a big question. I might need something a little lighter, meaning fewer viewpoints, shorter novels in between. Which would lend itself toward another era of Mistborn, as I've told people.
But there's also the possibility that I write other interesting things. For those following the Secret Projects, there is definitely... two of them are related in an interesting way. And another one of them implies lots more, and I won't promise that I'm going to, but these are all things that maybe I will end up doing more of. Consider them all finished, and you can't ask me "when are you gonna do this?" because there are no promises. But who knows what will pop out of the brain.
