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Is The Apocalypse Guard going to be a standalone? I know you've talked about promising fewer sequels in your books now, but with Dan Wells co-authoring this one, I'm curious as to how you'll treat it.
If it works, and the collaboration is good, then I would be open to doing sequels. Dan is fun to work with.
And for when The Lost Metal?
Current schedule:
1) Stormlight Novella next week.
2) Finish drafts 4-5 of Book Four until July.
3) In July, finish the Novella, do a revision of The Apocalypse Guard, which I think I might finally have figured out how to fix.
4) August: Start either Skyward 3 or Wax and Wayne 4. Once that is done, finish the other one.
5) Middle of Next year: Decide next project after those two are finished.
6) Start Stormlight 5 January 2022, for Christmas 2023 release.
Will you ever revisit the Emperor's Soul world?
Yes. I've got another story about Shai I want to write, actually. Whether I'll get to it or not...
I had inspiration strike for a story I think will be really cool if I can find the time to write it. (That's always the thing, right?) But because I am moving more and more to coauthoring things that are not Cosmere, goal is that hopefully that'll leave me a little more time for Cosmere stuff, moving forward. So, we will see.
I wouldn't be surprised, for instance, if Skyward is the last non-Cosmere series I do that is not coauthored. So that I can divide some of my time off with another author. The experience of working with Mary Robinette on The Original has been so good. And the experience... even though he didn't fix it, Dan's improvements to Apocalypse Guard are so incredible, I'm actually gonna try and fix that this summer. I think we might do more of that. It's gonna depend on what people think of The Original, and theoretically the Apocalypse Guard when we release it.
[Nightblood] also is described as having a hooked cross guard, but nobody seems to include that in their art.
The sword on the cover of the Warbreaker leatherbound was designed with feedback from Brandon. We went through about a half-dozen variants on the quillons before we settled in on the one we used.
Calamity from the Reckoners series–is there any connection between him and the delvers from Starsight?
Yes. Very, very loose connection, but there is a connection.
Okay, because I was like, "They both come from the dark nowhere, quiet, they hate people and everything. There is a connection."
There is a connection. And Apocalypse Guard was kind of supposed to bridge between these things, but it didn't end up coming out, and it may not even be a bridge when we finally revise it because we have to make the book good, rather than worrying about that. But it was supposed to kind of do that. It's gonna work well if I can fix the ending. I've just gotta fix the ending.
We will find a time to eventually release this book [Apocalypse Guard]. It's interesting; when you add us together, oftentimes things just get weirder. They get better, but they get weirder. You can actually go listen to my version of that chapter read at some point in the past, and you will find it's actually much worse. Adding us together really does enhance. But the problem is: we go off the rails real fast in books, the same way we go off the rails in panels. So now, Dan's pitched it back to me to fix the structure, is what we need. The magic system is part of that, but it's really the structure, because the climax doesn't work anymore. It never worked; it still doesn't work. The character was broken in the original draft, and Dan fixed that. Because character is Dan's thing. Now, I've gotta figure out how to make the structure actually work. Which will be a project of mine coming up eventually.
What I love about it, though (and if you go and find his original thing, then obviously you'll be able to compare and contrast them and do your whole English essay on it), reading that, I can't really tell what is me and what is Brandon, because I think we managed to combine our two styles pretty well.
My voice for this book was already... Emma was a little goofy. And Dan just picked right up on that, and it was instant. The voice was a little off, in the first one. It was trying a little too hard to both be dynamic and funny. And it turns out just nudging it a little more self-effacing funny made the whole thing worked. And the character just snapped together. So the kind of just slightly off sense of the characterization ended up really working. But I had known that the magic was broken when I gave it to Dan, and I'm like, "Will you fix this?" And then Dan came back and said, "This isn't the sort of thing I fix. This is the sort of thing you fix." So we will find a time for that, eventually.
Who here is a big Brandon Sanderson fan? We've talked about doing weird collaborations forever. We actually did one. And if you are a big Brandon fan, you have probably heard about a book called The Apocalypse Guard. Which is one that he's been working on for a while, and he eventually came to me and is like, "This is broken! Help me fix it!" So I came in, and I fixed some of it. And we went back and forth and we did a few revisions, and we got to the point where everything's working except the magic system. And I'm not the a-hole that's gonna change a Brandon Sanderson magic system. So it's on the back shelf until we get a chance to go through and have him do another pass. But I'm gonna read a little bit of the first chapter to you right now.
Part Five: Updates on Minor Projects
For many of these little projects, you may want to glance back at previous State of the Sanderson documents to see what they even are, as this is pretty long already and I don’t want to keep making the same pitch every year. So really, take note if a specific idea interested you, but don’t worry if you’re confused and you don’t get many details here on these.
The Reckoners, Legion
Both are completed. Though I’ve had enough people asking after them that we’re toying with doing some audio-original novellas set in these worlds. For example, one of my big goals for Legion was to get it made into a television series. While that could still happen, as it’s under option by a production company, I’ve been thinking that maybe I could do something like that on my own—as an audio series. We could create a sequence of episodes written by a writer’s room with me as the “showrunner.” I could see doing something like this with the Reckoners to continue that story, for those who want to know what happens next.
If we can get these off the ground, I’ll let you know. Also, if you like The Original, please let me know—as that will influence me in doing similar projects with Legion and the Reckoners.
STATUS: Completed, but cool things could still happen.
Adamant
No change from last year. This space opera series of novellas is in limbo until I find the right time to work on them. It will happen eventually.
STATUS: No movement.
Starburner/Soulburner
Something’s happening here, but it’s hush-hush for now.
The Apocalypse Guard
Well, this book got weirder—as expected with Dan and me working together on something. It’s moved to the back burner, as even Dan’s revision wasn’t enough to get it where we want it to be. So this one is entering limbo for now.
STATUS: No motion for months now, might be dead.
Other Projects
Untitled Threnody Novel, Sixth of the Dusk sequel, another story with Shai, and The Silence Divine persist as “maybe” stories that someday I might write. They are joined by a Secret Standalone Cosmere Book, that wacky YA Cosmere Book with Magic Kites, Untitled First of the Sun YA novel (not involving Sixth), and a few others as Cosmere novels that might someday make it to the front burner. (Once Skyward is done, I think it would be good to do a YA book in the Cosmere, so I’ve begun working on possible ideas.) Aether of Night also is still hanging around, maybe needing a novel. So we’ll see. I’ll talk a little more about the Cosmere in a future section, after we get to the film stuff.
If I write a novella to go with the Stormlight Kickstarter, it has about an equal chance of being Wandersail (a Rysn novella), Horneater (a Rock novella), or a sequel to Sixth of the Dusk (which is tricky because it reveals maybe a little too much about Space Age Cosmere politics).
I hold out misguided hope we may eventually get a sequel with [Obliteration]. u/mistborn are you listening :-) ?
Listening. I'm trying to find a way to do some more Reckoners, now that the Apocalypse Guard fell apart.
Does that mean that Apocalypse Guard will not be done? The last news was that you would do it with Dan Wells!!
Dan did a pretty good revision, but at the end, he felt it was still missing something. We agreed that it might not be right to do now. Maybe someday I'll release it to fans, and see what they think the problem is.
Would the works you have not yet published ever be published?
Probably not, because they're bad. I found ways to fix some of them and release them in some form. White Sand was the best of them and we did graphic novels of those. Because the bad parts of White Sand was I went too long on the same ideas over and over. So we were able to trim those out and make graphic novels out of them and it worked really well. It's not impossible that the other good one, which is Aether of Night, could work that way. The problem with Aether of Night is, and you can find this online. We let the forum, the 17th Shard send it out to people. So if you go there and ask, you can get it.
It feels like two books that are woven together. There's a romantic comedy, and an End of the World Apocalypse. And they just don't mix real well. And that's the big problem with that book. You can read White Sand by signing up for my mailing list. Most of them just aren't that good is the problem. Maybe Ill release them for free on my website or something.
When in the books do you think is Hoid's most genuine moment?
When Shallan hugs him... maybe. You get him out of sorts there. He doesn't quite know what to do. I don't know if that counts as genuine. He often would consider himself as being very genuine. But you rarely catch him with his guard down.
A lot of collaborations coming up: Alcatraz 6, Death (Without Pizza), Apocalypse Guard, The Original. How many of these are you expecting to be officially coauthored?
If I release a book that someone else worked on with me, it will be co-authored. So I'd say all them--but like a lot of projects I have cooking, it's possible that any or all of them might not come together.
Updates on Secondary Projects
The Apocalypse Guard
I do someday want to do something with this book. I've given it to Dan Wells, my long-time friend and sometimes partner in crime. He's come back with some suggestions on how I could fix it, along with some brainstorming on where it could go as a series.
I'm going to give you fair warning, though. Every time Dan and I brainstorm together, weird things happen. Legion was the result of one of those sessions, as was Dan's book I Am Not a Serial Killer. (Which you should all go read, if you haven't.) The two of us are odd enough on our own, but together we're downright strange. (You should see the two of us in role-playing sessions, where we constantly try to out-bizarre one another with our character concepts.)
I fully expect something to come out of The Apocalypse Guard sessions I'm doing with Dan, but…well, don't expect it to be normal by any stretch of the word.
Status: In revisions, getting weirder.
My Year
January-March: Skyward and Legion Revisions
I kicked off the year quickly doing a second draft of Skyward. Pulling The Apocalypse Guard from the publisher, then promising them Skyward to publish in the fall of 2018, meant that I had to scramble. It wouldn't do to pull a book I judged to be of inferior quality, only to replace it with a book that I didn't have time to revise up to my standards. So you'll see a number of months dedicated to Skyward. (Which, if you somehow missed it, did come out—and is still sitting quite happily on the New York Times bestseller list many weeks later, so thank you all very much!)
Another thing I'd been putting off for months was the necessary revisions of the third Legion story. Tor was quite patient with me on this one, considering the Legion collection was scheduled for publication in the fall as well. But during these three months, I did multiple revisions of both books, eventually getting Legion into a polished state. (There was one more draft of Skyward still to do.) Legion Three, Lies of the Beholder, can be found in the Legion collection that was published earlier this year.
Finally, somewhere in here, I squeezed in an outline and world guide for Death Without Pizza. (Yes, that's a name change—no it's not the final name, but just a placeholder.) More on that later.
April: Children of the Nameless
Sometime around March of last year, Wizards of the Coast sent me an exploratory email. It being the 25th anniversary of their card game, they were wondering if I'd be interested in doing a story with them. As most of you know, I'm quite the fan of Magic: The Gathering. It's my primary hobby, and I have way too many cards. (Which still aren't enough, of course.) I was enthusiastic, and you can read more about the process I used to approach the story in this blog post.
I knew that by doing so, and by writing the story as long as it ended up, it would make getting to some of my other projects later in the year more difficult. (Namely, the fourth Wax and Wayne book, which I'll talk about shortly.) But this was kind of something I had to do, so I ask your forgiveness in taking this detour to Innistrad. I'm exceptionally pleased with the story and the response it has gotten, so if you haven't read it, I present it to you here! Reading it requires no prior knowledge of the card came or the lore surrounding it.
May: Skyward Final Draft
How long it takes to write a story depends on a lot of factors, but in general, three months gets me around 100k words. Shorter stories, with fewer viewpoints, tend to be faster—while longer stories with more intricate plotlines (like Stormlight) tend to take longer. But that's just for the rough draft. Generally, doing all the other drafts takes an equivalent amount of time to the first draft. (So, if the first draft takes three months, the second through fourth drafts will together take another three months.) You can see this at play in Skyward, which took about three months to write in the end of 2017, then took three additional months of revision to polish up.
I did sneak in a little time to do an outline for a piece called The Original in here as well, which took about a week. I'll update you on that in the secondary projects section.
June–August: Starsight First Draft
And, speaking of three month first drafts, here we get me buckling down and doing the sequel to Skyward. It's finished in its first draft form, and dominated my summer. In here, I also did detailed outlines for the third and fourth books of the series. (And this is where I determined for certain that the series would need to be four books instead of three.)
September–October: Odds and Ends
In these months I had some travel to record episodes of Writing Excuses, I did a quick second draft of Starsight to send to my publisher, and I did some revisions to Children of the Nameless. I also did more work on The Original, Death Without Pizza, and Alcatraz Six (AKA Bastille vs. the Evil Librarians, or Alcatraz vs. His Own Dumb Self). Finally, I slipped in some brainstorming with Dan Wells on how to fix The Apocalypse Guard.
Basically, I knew that November would be mostly lost to touring, and I was scrambling to get some work done on small projects to clear my plate for 2019, which will be dedicated to working on Stormlight Four.
November: Skyward Tour
I spent most of November on tour for Skyward, and quickly finishing up final revisions on Children of the Nameless. I got to see a lot of you while touring for the book, and had a blast—but these tours get more and more difficult as the lines get longer and longer. The tour for Stormlight Four in 2020 might require me to do some things I've been dreading, such as limit the lines to a certain number of tickets. It makes me sad to contemplate, but I'll keep you all in the loop about what we decide to do.
December: Death Without Pizza
I needed a break from all the other things I've been doing, so in classic Brandon style, I worked on something fresh and new to give myself a breather. This was where I was going to do Wax and Wayne Four, but doing Children of the Nameless meant that instead of three months extra space at the end of the year, I only had one month. (As CotN had taken one month to write, and one month to revise.) I had the choice of pushing back the start of Stormlight Four, or doing something else for this month and trying to sneak in W&W 4 sometime next year. I chose the latter. It's important to me that I let myself do side projects to refresh myself—but I also think it's important to keep to my Stormlight schedule. It would be too easy to keep putting off the big books until they stretch to years in the making. I told myself I was going to divide my time in half between Stormlight and other projects.
The truth is, I'm getting really anxious about getting back to Stormlight. That's a very good sign, as once I finish a Stormlight book, I'm usually feeling quite burned out on the setting, and need a number of months to recover.
[An image of all of Brandon's progress bars at 100%] well i guess that's it then, no more books ever
I've actually been doing a number of small things, as opposed to one big one, like /u/pm_me_your_ide guessed. Basically, I'm trying to clear my desk of small projects in preparation for launching into Stormlight 4 in January.
These little things involved a final draft of Secret Project (which I can't announce yet--but you'll know about it soon.) Working on an audio-original novella I've been writing with a friend. Signing large mountains of books for holiday orders. Tinkering with Apocalypse Guard, which I still hope to release some day. Filling out the Skyward 3 outline. None of these really deserved a progress bar, as none of them took more than a week or so.
I will post details in the State of the Sanderson in three weeks or so.
So, you've mentioned-- you have an idea of how the Cosmere's going to go. The ending of the Cosmere, considering you have seven more Stormlight books to write and years to go, does the ending of the Cosmere hang over your head?
Does the ending of the Cosmere hang over my head 'cause I've got a ways to go-- Yeah, it's starting to loom a bit! You know, when I was in my twenties and thirties doing this, "Ah! I can write every story, I've got plenty of time!", but now that I'm in my forties I'm-- let's make sure we focus and keep going on this. So one of my goals has been to try to learn to write novellas so that the random ideas that pop in my head became novellas and not novels, because the way I work, I can't stay on one thing between books I find that it burns me out really fast if I don't have something new to work on, but if that new thing to work on can be a novella like one of the Legion books, or like Perfect State, or Snapshot or something like that and then I can jump back on the kind of mainline book I can reset myself quickly. And that why you see me practice that and things like that.
My goal is kind of closing things off faster than I open them. This is why Legion got finished this year, why Alcatraz will probably get finished next year. Those of you waiting for a Rithmatist sequel *sighs* eventually. I need to get those other two closed off first. For those of you waiting for Reckoners, I consider Reckoners to be done. If I eventually fix and release Apocalypse Guard, that might answer some of the questions you have about the end of that series. Elantris and Warbreaker are both part of the Cosmere arc, what I'll probably do is I'll write Stormlight 4 and 5 and the last Wax & Wayne book over the next few years-- five years, next five years probably. *laughter* And then I'll probably stop and do Mistborn Era 3, which is the 1980s Mistborn, and maybe some Elantris sequels. And then I'll come back and do Stormlight 6-10 which take place about 10 years in-world after Stormlight 5. Same characters, at least the ones that survive. *eruption of laughter* That might be all of them! No spoilers there. But Stormlight is ten books. The way Stormlight will go is Book 4 is Eshonai, Book 5 is Szeth, 6 is Lift, 7 is Renarin, 8 is Ash, 9 is Taln and 10 is Jasnah. That doesn't mean that the person survives, it means that it's a flashback sequence. *nervous laughter* Just keep that in mind. So if your sequel wasn't on that list then don't hold your breath.
So in one of your State of the Sanderson posts you said that the "Wax and Wayne" series was going to come out in late 2019, but then you decided to write another trilogy that lasted two years, so--
So Wax & Wayne 4. Abandoning Apocalypse Guard has put me a little on the rocks for when I'm going to do that. Right now I'm planning Wax & Wayne 4 to be a book I use as a break from doing revisions on Stormlight 4. Stormlight 4 I have to start in January if I'm going to meet my stated goal of having them come out every three years, which I realize is a long time between books, but remember that they're four times longer than a normal book! *laughter*. You're laughing, but Oathbringer was 450,000 words, Skyward is 110,000. So Oathbringer is longer than four Skywards. I do have Skyward 2 done, and am going through the editing process right now. *applause* So Wax & Wayne 4 is very much on my radar-- I wrote the first one taking a break from Towers of Midnight, so the chances are good I'll need a break from Stormlight 4 and write it there. I don't know if it'll be out next year or the following summer. Stormlight 4 we're shooting for the fall of 2020, and I should be able to get it right around that time if I start in January, so that's the plan.
Aside from The Apocalyse Guard, are you planning on making a sequel to Calamity?
This is actually a really good question, because Apocalypse Guard was going to dig in to a few of the questions that Calamity asked at its ending. And so cancelling Apocalypse Guard leaves me saying, "Well, I maybe need to answer those questions." So there's a chance I will do a Mizzy book in the future. I'm not 100% sure, because I want to be closing off more things than I'm opening these days, so promising more sequels is a bad place for me to be.
But to run down the big sequel list, Legion is done. Reckoners is done. It doesn't mean that I might not do more, but just consider it done for now.
Alcatraz versus the Evil Librarians, halfway through the last book. Don't believe Alcatraz when he says Book Five is the end. He lies. You should know that from Chapter One of the first book. The last book is called Bastille versus the Evil Librarians. That one should be out pretty soon. That is the last book. You can trust me on that, because I'm saying it, not Alcatraz...
Rithmatist, I can't promise. It's the number one requested sequel I get. I was working on it when the Wheel of Time came along, and The Wheel of Time changed my career dramatically. It's been very hard to figure out how to do that sequel the right way. So no promises when on that, though it is still on my radar.
Warbreaker, Elantris, probably yes, but not until Stormlight Five is done. Stormlight Four, I start on in January. You can follow the progress bars. *applause* The last Wax and Wayne book will probably be also next year, as I need to take a break at some point from Stormlight.
If it wasn't on that list, then don't hold your breath. Most of the novellas I write, I write specifically so that I won't be starting a new series. Turns out if I write a novel, I'm very bad at writing that novel standalone by itself. Instead, I've written novellas in order to get the idea out of my head and be expanding the cosmere in interesting ways but not be promising sequels, okay? That said, there's a Threnody novel somewhere in me that will probably come out.
The Luthadel guard in The Final Empire, the garrison leader, his name is Bevidon, which sounds suspiciously like Bavadin.
It does.
Is there any connection there?
RAFO.
How has your worldbuilding changed over time to date.
So, it's become a lot more deliberate. And it has become more-- One thing is I've let myself push further. I've found that worldbuilding is one of those areas in storytelling where I can let myself kind of off the chain, off the leash, and go steps further than I thought I could, and it still turns out well. A lot of times if you do that with story, for instance, if you do that with plot, the way to kind of go off the leash and do something unexpected with plot is to do something that's not foreshadowed and is not satisfying, which can make for a really interesting story. Go watch Into The Woods if you want to go see something that-- Yeah, half the audience groaned when I mentioned Into The Woods, for a good reason. That's not a reason to not tell those stories, but experimenting with plot can, in many ways, be something that fails pretty spectacularly. Good to do it, it's good to learn those things, but worldbuilding, I've found, I haven't found that I've gotten ever too far where it's failing because the worldbuilding is too different. I've failed with my worldbuilding because I haven't brought the elements together. In fact, Apocalypse Guard, one of the reasons I pulled it is the worldbuilding was not working. And I can't release a Brandon Sanderson book with bad worldbuilding, right? *crowd laughs* That's like the baseline, "No." It's not the only thing that was broken in it, but it was one of the things that was broken in it. So, more deliberate, allowed myself to stretch further, and I would say I'm always kind of looking for those conflict points, nowadays, in the worldbuilding. The points of conflict are really interesting to me.
You pulled Apocalypse Guard, will it ever come back?
I sat down with Apocalypse Guard and looked it over and since I couldn't decide what was wrong with it, I actually gave it to Dan Wells, who's a friend of mine, and I said, "Dan, can you figure out what's wrong with this?" We broke in together, we've been in writing groups together for a long time, and he read through it and he's like, "Yeah, I've got some ideas." So I actually, you know, wanted to work with him, so he actually jumped in to try and do a draft of it himself, and he fixed a lot of the problems, but he didn't fix the biggest problem, which is that the worldbuilding doesn't work.
Which is a really weird thing for a Brandon Sanderson book, but it's part of the reason we can't release it. I can't release a book with bad worldbuilding. I just can't. So while he fixed the characters, I still need to fix the worldbuilding. If I can, we will release it. If I can't, I'm sure even if I don't ever release it, I'll find a way to put it on my website or something like that. So you would be able to read it, and if we do release it, I'll make sure to release it in the failed version too for those who are interested so you can compare. So I think it's really illustrative to see how a professional fails.
Do you have any updates on the Dark One TV series?
It's got an interesting history. Dark One is one I've been working on for a long time, and I actually wrote out a big pitch for it when I pitched Apocalypse Guard to Random House, and I said, "Here's one of the other ideas I'm gonna write someday." They're like, "Woo. We'll keep this in our binder." And that binder made its way to their TV department, who read the pitch and was like, "We have to have this!" and came to me and said "Can we buy this?" I'm like, "Well, I haven't written the books yet." They're like, "We don't care. We want this pitch." And the pitch, the idea is that a young man in our world, a knight shows up to assassinate him, and he finds out that there's kind of a Narnia-esque fantasy world that his father visited when he was a kid and screwed up, and they are super mad. And they have prophecies that this kid is gonna be the next Dark One, and so they're gonna assassinate him before the whole epic-fantasy-thing can happen, and the Dark One tries to conquer the world. They're just gonna take him out first. And so it's kind of this twisting the story on its head idea. And it's a really fun pitch.
So they bought it from me. I expanded it to a 30-page outline, sent it to them. I can't tell you who they got, but they've got somebody very big attached to it, which I'm very excited about, someone who I was excited about that my assistant Peter just about fell over dead when he heard the person attached. And we should be flying out to do pitches to studios and places early part of next year. We wanted to be doing it now, but I have a book launch, and they want me there with them.
It's going really well. It's been a wonderful experience. I'm very hopeful with that, I think it will be a very interesting story if it happens.
A question regaurding Feruchemical iron:
So, while Sazed was guarding one of the gates to Luthadel, he tapped weight to compensate, he had to tap pewter as well. Also, when he was climbing a tree, his strength to weght ratio rised, making it easier for him to climb it. Wax doesn't have to do this- when fighting Miles on the train, he's fine without any sort of muscular enhancement, and when he is climbing in the sets base, he notes that he does not make himself lighter because it would simply decrease his weight and strength equally (in contrast to Sazed climbing the tree).
So, is this difference for the same reason people can push/ pull on atium, being the you hadn't fully developed your idea for the cosmere yet? Or is it some other reason?
Hmm. I think the mistake is more on me writing the Wax scene than in the original. (For him climbing, specifically.) I'll put Peter on this and see if it's a continuity error we want to fix.
As for Skyward, you said before that you got stuck because you weren't liking it, then you finally figured out how to fix it, will you write a blog post after release about how it was before and what needed to be changed to make it fit your standard?
Did I say that about Skyward? I got stuck on Apocalypse Guard, and pulled it for that reason. I don't believe I had any big issues with Skyward that weren't up to standards, just normal revision issues. The biggest hurdle came long before writing the book, as I was trying to figure out ways to approach this plot archetype in a way that wouldn't simply be a rehash of what people have done before.
Skyward: With Apocalypse Guard sharing a universe with Reckoners, and Snapshot (originally) being in there too, it looks like you are playing around with the idea of developing a sci-fi shared universe similar to the cosmere, if smaller in scope. Are these non-cosmere shared universes random one-offs that just happen to work together, or do we have something bigger to look forward to in the (distant) future?
I'm not actively trying to create anything else like the cosmere. More, there are ideas I really like that I've tested out in novellas that I want to expand upon.
I've been checking Dan Well's twitter pretty often, but there seems to be no update on Apocalypse Guard. Do you have any updates?
We got together before the cruise and did a big brainstorming session where we figured out once and for all how to fix the book--which is very exciting. However, it will take huge revisions (again) and this time, it's my turn to do that. So the ball is back in my court after he did a great job fixing characters. (The next fix involves plot and worldbuilding, which are my duties.)
In Calamity, Calamity's part of a mysterious group or civilization, really weird motives, we don't find out much about them. Was that <pointed, in any way,> part of the plot from the start?
It was.
Do you have a plan to explain that civilization?
I will someday explain that. At the very least, if I just have to sit down and write an essay on it, to give the closure. Yes, I will. And I do apologize for that. Apocalypse Guard was going to delve into this, but then the book got cancelled. By me.
Do you have any updates on the next Wax and Wayne book?
No updates right now; cancelling the Apocalypse Guard and writing a new book in its place has put me just a little behind, but it was the right thing to do *inaudible*. And so I'm just finishing up Skyward 2 and Skyward 1 is coming out in November and I have until January to write something else, because January I need to start another Stormlight book so if it doesn't happen before then I'll probably do it in breaks between chunks of Stormlight.
You were in Toronto, and you read something you'd written on a plane about a really young girl, and a coffee machine...
Oh, young girl with a coffee machine, yes, that was the Apocalypse Guard. The opening of it turned out really well, then I lost control of it, spiraled out of control. I haven't figured out how to fix it yet, but I actually pulled it from the publisher. And I will eventually release it, but I gotta fix it first. It was mostly worldbuilding issues. It just didn't come together at the end; too implausible, too many things to keep track of, too many infodumps.
The other thing that I might end up doing is, Dan and I are working on noodling on The Apocalypse Guard its possible that would be after Skyward, next YA thing. Because I've already written one book and the Dan can write the second book and then I write the third book. So taking a little pressure off, something like that. Dan has really good ideas on how to fix that book.
So is it gonna be kind of like a shared universe thing?
No, we would just co-author it, Brandon and Dan. What would happen is I've already him-- Like, the the first book. The idea is that he'll rip out the bad chunks and write newer things to go in there, and then he will write a second book, and then I write a third and together we have a trilogy. Which could work really well because Dan's strengths as an author really align well with my weaknesses, and my strengths align really well with his weaknesses.
[Brandon] how are you going to finish all this?
The only reasonable answer is the one that others have pointed out, unfortunately: I won't.
Most of the ideas I work on don't come to fruition. Others simmer for many years (like Skyward did.) My only real promise is that I'll make reasonable progress on the mainline cosmere books. Stormlight, Mistborn, Elantris, Dragonsteel. Even there, I can't say for certain if projects like the Threnody novel or the Mistborn cyberpunk will end up being written or not.
It must feel strange knowing that, right? Having your whole life’s work mapped out and feeling that you won’t finish all of it?
A little? But I realized long, long ago that I'd have more ideas than time to write them--and made peace with that.
There's also a kind of "natural selection" philosophy going on here. If an idea (like Skyward) manages to persist long enough, fight out the other ideas for a slot at the writing table, and actually turn into a book--well, those are the ideas that deserve to get written.
For what it's worth, I think you'll finish it all (and more) without a problem. And I fixed version 2 of the chart so the projected timeline isn't so exaggerated and it's much less depressing. And as long as you enjoy writing and keep cranking books out, I promise to buy every one - I'm planning to have an entire wall of just Sanderson books.
Well, thank you very much! I've been thinking a lot about this lately, though. I've been aware lately that I'm going to have to let more and more side projects slide away, an I'm finding ways to do it, so that I can keep my attention on making certain I finish my goals.
Well I think you've made a great compromise with the graphic novels for example - it's great to be able have that as canon without having to wait 30 years for everything else to be cleared out - but we still have hope that if you finish everything early there's a possibility of a prose version someday. And with your non-cosmere ideas like Adamant and Alcatraz it's great that you are collaborating with others to get things done. I don't know how much creative control you'd want to cede of the Cosmere, but you could always consider letting other authors play around in 1940-ish or cyberpunk Scadrial for example. Also, you could consider fan-sourcing some projects. Maybe it's a stretch, but if you held some contests for the more artistically talented fans, you might be able to collect enough submissions that match your vision to be able to build the worldbook. Or you could publicly release the script for Birthright or some other idea, and fans could try to build an open source video game.
Yeah, I've been pushing myself to let some non-cosmere ideas (like the Apocalypse Guard rewrite) to do as collaborations, to get them out of my system.
You make some interesting suggestions with fans. We're reaching an era where that sort of thing is increasingly plausible.
If I remember correctly, [Calamity] was sent to destroy the world?
Kind of, yes. He was sent to make it destroy itself. Apocalypse Guard ties into that, with further explanations, if I can ever get the thing to work.
So it's part of the same...?
Continuity, yes. She is from the same dimension Megan sees into, the main character is.
The other thing that was working for this character, that really made me interested in writing her story, was that she had a really failed Instagram. Not very good at it, thought she was better than she was. And I started putting little... she'll write out (you'll see one of them, when I get to it), she writes out what she calls Emma's Instructions. And these are just lists of things on how to live your life, that she writes out. The theory is, she's gonna post them on her blog.
So this character was really, really interesting to me. Particularly when I matched her up with the story I was working on, which is: the secretary to the Justice League has to save the world. So what it is is, Emma (I'm gonna read from the middle of the book, so I'll catch you up), she is an intern to a group called The Apocalypse Guard, which is basically a super hero team. They are not in the book. She is in the book, because they end up getting called away to do something, and through a kind of weird set of circumstances, she ends up on a planet that is doomed to be destroyed in a couple of weeks that they were planning to save. But they all have been called away to something else, and she's the only person from the Apocalypse Guard on the planet. She's the intern. And she's not very prepared for this, she does not speak the local language, it's kind of an apocalyptic wasteland that she's landed in. She's found a couple of people to be her guide, at this point, you'll see. But she has no idea what she's doing. And all she knows is that the planet's going to be destroyed in three weeks.
I actually did the worldbuilding on this based on some of the old-school concepts of the Flood. Where some of the old writer's believed, before Noah's Flood, all the water was in the sky, and you could see it up there, in the firmaments they called it, and then it came crashing down. And before that, some of the medieval theologians thought that there were no oceans until the water came crashing down. So I've always found that a really interesting image, so that's what's happening on this planet. She'll look up, and there's water in the sky. Big ocean in the sky... that is going to come crashing down in three weeks.
Do we have a date when the Lost Metal will come out?
We do not have a date. I have to write the book first. Lost Metal shouldn't be too far off. Dropping Apocalypse Guard and doing something else instead put me behind a little bit.
What do I like to do besides write? Excellent question.
My nerd hobby is Magic: The Gathering. So, I go to extreme lengths to foil out my cube, and things like that. I used to have a lot more time for things like this than I do now. And that's mostly having a family, right? As you grow up and put on your big-boy pants, you're like: I have three children, I'm gonna spend discretionary time on things that they enjoy. Which means I end up playing Roblox way more than I end up playing Dark Souls these days. But as they get older, I'm hoping they will enjoy some of the things I like, as I spend time doing the things that they like, as well. I actually have a pretty healthy work/life balance. I'm fortunate in that my job, I can do anywhere, at any time of the day. What I usually do is, I get up at noon. (Because I'm a writer. I'm not an insurance salesman, I'm a writer. This is just one perk to the job.) I get up at noon. I work from about noon until five. Then I shower, get ready for the day, hang out with my family from about 5:30 until 8:30, 9:00. And then I'll usually go back to work at about 10:00, somewhere around there, and I'll work from about 10:00 until 2:00.
I found that, for my writing... Writers are all very different, right? I like two four-hour blocks. By the end of about four hours of work, I'm brain dead. The words are just not flowing as well anymore. And if I take a break and go to a second block later on, I'm way more effective as a writer. I have the benefit of having no commute. So I can do things like this. All through college, what I would do is, I actually worked a graveyard shift at a hotel in Provo. And I would go to work at 11:00. And it's Provo, so nobody's there after 11:00. You're a really sketchy person in Provo if you're staying up 'til 10:30. So from about midnight until 5:00 or 6:00, I could write every night. And that's how I put myself through school, was working there. But these days, you know, I try to make time. I used to work Saturdays, and I don't anymore unless there's something like [a convention]. I take Saturdays off. I have a pretty decent balance. The only time where it gets a little unbalanced is if I have a big tour. And those can be pretty grueling. I would much rather have this problem than not, right? My first signings, you can find pictures of me with my grandma here at the Iona Falls Barnes & Noble, where I was sitting in the front, and there were five people there who were all related to me, and that was our book signing! And now I will go to... often, book signings start at 6:00 PM, and get done at 2:00 AM if I'm in Portland, or Seattle, or one of the big cities like that. So, you do that six days a week, in a different city every day, and it can get a little exhausted. So I don't love that part of it. I like the signings. I just don't like the twentieth signing, if that makes sense.
Let me give a little bit of advice here. If there are those of you who are writers out here, there are two things that maybe to keep your life in balance I would recommend. The number one cause of breakups and divorce among my writer friends is that their spouse feels like the writer's ignoring them. It's very easy to do. As a writer, it's very easy to... it's one of these jobs, there are a lot of them like this. Being a schoolteacher is like this. You don't leave your job behind. Your job is always there with you; there's always a little bit more you can do. And because of that, it tends to consume everything if you let it. And you can be out to dinner with your spouse, but you're thinking about your book. You can be driving somewhere and giving only noncommittal responses, because you're thinking about the book. On the other side, if you happen to be the spouse of a writer, the number one thing you can do is jealously guard their writing time. For a lot of writers, a small interruption can mean... To you, it's like, "Oh, I need to ask this question for thirty seconds." But if that breaks the writer's concentration for twenty minutes, because they're spun in to the work, they're really into it, they get interrupted at just the wrong time, it can be a big interruption. So, the balance I suggest is to make a deal. Writer, when you're there with your spouse and your family, be there with your spouse and family. And then make the deal that, when the writing happens, they're gonna try to guard that door and protect you from being interrupted.
How do you get over writing block?
So, writing block is one of those things that is really individual. Having writing block, it's like going to a doctor and saying "I have a headache." The doctor's gonna be like, "Great, that eliminates nothing. It could still be anything." And writing block is the same way, it's all very individual. Why you're having writing block can be related to all kinds of hosts of issues. The most common ones have to relate with kind of a performance anxiety, that's very common. In that, when it's in your head, it doesn't have to be perfect yet, or you can imagine that it is perfect. And when you put it on the page, it's not. So, the worry that you're going to do it wrong or that you're already doing it wrong is a very big deal that stops writers. And usually the answer to that, to solving it, is just to write anyway. To be able to say, "It's okay if I write this chapte,r and it's not perfect. Because once I get something down, then I can start to fix it." Most writing blocks can be solved by just writing anyway. Oftentimes, for me, I have to write something bad before I start writing the right way. Like, Apocalypse Guard, I knew something was going wrong as I was approaching the ending. But if I never just not finished that ending, I wouldn't have anything to fix. So I wrote it anyway; I wrote what I had done in the outline, and it ended up... it didn't work. But now, I have something to work on that I can end up fixing. And a lot of people get stuck in that "I can't write it 'til it's perfect' sort of mode.
So, that's called The Apocalypse Guard. I'm not exactly sure when it's gonna get published, because I had some real troubles with the plot near the end of the book that kind of broke down. And I'm still trying to figure out what to do with them. I gave it to a friend of mine who's a really good writer, Dan Wells. And he's been working on the book and coming up with suggestions and things like that. Sometimes that happens with books. The Way of Kings, if you've read that one, I originally wrote the first draft of that in 2002. It wasn't until 2010 that the book finally came out. Sometimes you just need to let a book sit for a little while. So this one will sit for a little while. It might be a year or two before I figure out what I want to do with it. But eventually that will come out. My father is planning already for me to have the launch party up here. He is very, very proud of having influenced the Iona part of this book.
At the end of Calamity, I was wondering if the Prof and [David] together repair their relationship. They were kind of built up as a father/son kind of--
If I do any more books in direct sequence, what's going on with Prof would be be a factor in them. So I'm going to RAFO this just because I am planning...
Apocalypse Guard will not be a straight up follow up, but a sidestep, but I might do one someday.
...Does he ever get the chance to build a relationship with Tavi in another reality, similar to how David does with his father?
I'll give you a RAFO card on all of that.
So, with Apocalypse Guard being pseudo-shelved, and now Dan Wells being brought on as a co-author. A) How cool is that, and B) Is it, like, from the ground-up restructuring co-writing? Or is he coming in as, like, a super-editor?
So, what happened, for those who don't know, I wrote Apocalypse Guard, somewhat connected to The Reckoners books. That was my project for last summer. And to catch you up to speed, it didn't turn out. Like, I finished the whole book, and there are some really good parts to this book. But the book didn't work; some of the characters were off, some of the art was off. And I beat my head against the wall for a good month and a half trying to do revisions. And every revision I tried made it worse. And that's when I shelved the book. And I shelved the book and I started working on Skyward. This still happens to me. If you're a newer writer, and you're like "Wow, my book just didn't turn out," well,it happens to all of us. And then I did get the bright idea, it was about a month later, I'm like, "Who's the best author I know? It's Dan! Dan is the best author that I know." So I just called him, and I said, "Dan, is this something you would even consider? I would hand the book completely off to you, let you have it for, like, six months or a year. Do whatever you feel like you need to make it work, come back to me, and then we will write some sequels. Either I'll write one and you'll write one, or something like that. We'll collaborate on an entire trilogy." Because I've always wanted to do something with Dan. And this felt like a good place, because I couldn't get the book to work.
He was super enthusiastic. He's like, "Yeah, it sounds like fun." Dan likes weird things, this is a weird thing. Like, I'd never heard of someone doing this before. So, Dan took it, and he came back. We did a meeting over dinner, where I'm like, "Well?" He listed off-- All the stuff I also thought was broken, he thought was broken. He picked them out himself, he's like, "This character doesn't work, and this is--" So I'm like, "What do we do?" And so we just brainstormed for a while on what to do. And I'm kind of just letting Dan do his thing. It's not super-editor, like, he's ripping out entire chapters and rewriting them, things like that. Like, then there's one character who's just been ripped out of the story and a new one put in their place. Stuff like that. Total, takes the sledgehammer and goes to work on it. But, of course, preserving some of the stuff I think works the best. So, I haven't seen-- I've seen him with the sledgehammer, and he says "What about this?" I'm like, "I don't think that's a load-bearing wall." He's like, "Great," BAM. I'm like, "I hope this looks good when we come back." But it can't look worse than it did.
So, I'm not sure, still. Kind of, our thing on that is that, we're gonna sign a contract-- We haven't even signed contracts yet, he's just doing it. When we sign a contract, it will be like, we'll put a date in there that we think he'll turn it back to me, and a date I'll turn it back to him, and we'll see. I'm really excited, though. Finally being able to work with Dan, and finding this way to fix a story-- I'm excited.
Do you ever find that you are producing content so quickly that your mind comes up with a better idea after percolating for a while, and the book is already published? And if that does ever happen, how do you handle it?
This is dangerous, right? I think every author wants to go back and tweak things. And there is a fine line between pulling a Tolkien, where you go back to The Hobbit and you revise the ring conversation so it matches The Lord of the Rings, which has now become a classic conversation, we're all glad he did that, right? It ties The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings together better, it was a good revision. There is a fine line between that and Lucas-ing your work, right? Where instead of taking something and tweaking something to make it better, you tweak it just to make it different. I think there is a fine line there. There is a quote often ascribed to da Vinci, that a lot of people say it isn't his, but it's the idea that, he (maybe) said "Art is never finished, it is only abandoned."
You really have to take that perspective as an artist, you have to eventually just let things go. Not to sing an Elsa song, but you just gotta be willing to say "I'm done." And you are always going to have better ideas later on or ways you could tweak it. And more, it's not that you have better ideas. What happens is you change as an artist, and your goals change over time and the way you would approach something changes over time. While I've played in this realm, I've settled on that I should just avoid this most of the time. You could always tweak it to be better, and you've got to release something sometime.
I do find it very useful to finish something, write something else, then come back to the thing I've finished, because that gives me the right amount of balance between giving it time to rest so that I can approach it with fresh eyes, and also being regular with the releases. I haven't ever felt like I'm going too fast. I have had things that don't turn out too well, but those I just don't release. That happened with Apocalypse Guard last year where I wrote the book, I gave it some time, I came back and looked at it and it just wan't-- it didn't work. It was broken, it was not good, and I'm just like, "I've got to set this aside and think about it."
It's weird. Writing has a little bit more performance art to it than as a non-writer you might think. Meaning who you are in the moment, when you are creating this thing, the connections you make while you're making it are deeply influential to how the piece of art turns out. It's like you're freezing a moment in time for that author. Rather than trying to create the perfect work you are creating a reflection of who they are when they made it, and you have to kind of be okay with that as a writer.
Throughout TWoK, Kaladin complains that he is cursed. When others call him lucky, he thinks about all the times he has failed to protect people and considers himself unlucky. Everyone around him dies.
His Journey in that book takes him to Bridge 4, the bridge team that has the most losses, that everyone knows is a death sentence. Death being the end of every journey, this is appropriate.
But what I've never really noticed before is the importance of the bridge number. 4 is, in East Asian cultures, considered unlucky or cursed. In Chinese 4 is nearly a homophone to the word death. Buildings will skip the 4th floor, companies will skip from version 3 to version 5 of their products (Palm, OnePlus, I'm sure there are other examples but I can't think of them right now).
We already know that The Stormlight Archive finds some of its inspiration in anime/manga. We know that the Alethi are what we would consider ethnically East Asian. Dark hair, tan skin, and they don't have the large, round eyes of the Shin. It seems very fitting that the least lucky bridge, the one responsible for the most death, is Bridge 4.
Of course, Kaladin comes to believe he isn't cursed as he uses his powers to defend his bridgemen. 4 becomes the most envied bridge as they suffer the fewest deaths, have camaraderie, and eventually become squires to a radiant.
They are numbered unlucky and cursed, but turn out to be the most "lucky" of the bridge crews.
This all struck me today because at the end of Oathbringer, Dalinar casually mentions that his personal guard from Bridge 13 isn't there because that bridge crew became Teft's squires. 13 is the number in Western culture that we consider "unlucky" or "cursed," so fitting that it would be the second bridge crew to become squires of a Radiant! With that realization, everything about Bridge 4 clicked in my head.
Did anyone else catch this, or notice anything else cool with these numbers?
A lot of things fans find are coincidence...but neither of these are, actually. Those are both intentional, as are a few other little numbers things.
Numerology has not become a big thing in Stormlight during the development of it, but original (2002 version) The Way of Kings leaned a lot more heavily on numerology (gematria style word/number interactions) and that's still around in the world.
Projected Schedule
My projected publication schedule looking forward swaps The Apocalypse Guard out for Skyward and moves the Legion collection into the place of Wax and Wayne 4, reflecting what I actually wrote this year. (Note, these are always very speculative. And Peter is probably already worried about Stormlight 4.)
September 2018: Stephen Leeds/Legion Collection
November 2018: Skyward
Fall 2019: Wax and Wayne 4
Sometime 2019: Skyward 2
Sometime 2020: Stormlight 4
Sometime 2020: Skyward 3
My Year
January–June: Oathbringer Revisions
I spent most of this year doing revisions for Oathbringer. I did several exhaustive drafts during the January–June months, and did the final handoff to Peter (for copyediting and proofreading) right at the end of June.
June–Mid September: The Apocalypse Guard
Then, for the first time in what felt like forever (it was really only about sixteen months), I got a chance to work on something that wasn't Oathbringer or Edgedancer. I launched right into The Apocalypse Guard, the follow-up to The Reckoners…and it didn't work. I spent July, August, and part of September writing that. (I finished the last chapter sometime in early September, and turned in the second draft a few weeks later.)
September–October: Legion 3
I was already feeling a little discouraged by that book not quite coming together, though at that point I assumed I'd be able to fix it in revisions. (Well, I still think I can do that–I just think it will take more time.) Mid-September, I launched into Legion Three: Lies of the Beholder. That took around a month to finish, bringing us to mid-October. By then, I knew something was seriously wrong with The Apocalypse Guard, as my revision attempts were fruitless. So, I called Random House and pulled the book–then launched into Skyward.
October–November: Skyward
I have been writing on that book ever since, and you can read the blog post yesterday about that.
November–December: Oathbringer Tour
The tour was wonderful–somehow both exhausting and energizing at the same time. Here are some of the fan costumes that showed up this year. Thank you all for coming out to see me!
December so far: Skyward
Unfortunately, and I know you guys know to watch for them, there are no hidden or secret novellas or books for this year. I have been running around feeling behind all year, first on Oathbringer, and then trying to find a replacement for The Apocalypse Guard.
Updates on Minor Projects
The Reckoners
The Apocalypse Guard was in this universe, and we'll see what happens there, but for now I'm leaving this series alone. There might be a Mizzy book that I end up doing, but no promises.
Status: Trilogy complete. Series done, for now.
Updates on Secondary Projects
The Rithmatist
This continues to be the single most-requested sequel among people who email me or contact me on social media. It is something I want to do, and still intend to, but it has a couple of weird aspects to it—completely unrelated to its popularity—that continue to work as roadblocks.
The first problem is that it's an odd relic in my writing career. I wrote it as a diversion from a book that wasn't working (Liar of Partinel, my second attempt at doing a novel on Yolen, after the unpublished novel Dragonsteel). It went really well—but it also was something I had to set aside when the Wheel of Time came along.
I eventually published it years later, but my life and my writing has moved in a very different direction from the point when I wrote this. These days, I try very hard to make stories like this work as novellas or standalone stories, rather than promising sequels. I feel I did promise a sequel for this one, and I have grand plans for it, but the time just never seems to be right.
The other issue is that writing about that era in America—even in an alternate universe—involves touching on some very sensitive topics. Ones that, despite my best efforts, I feel that I didn't handle as sensitively as I could have. I do want to come back to the world and do a good job of it, but doing an Aztec viewpoint character—as I'd like to do as one of the viewpoints in book two—in an alternate Earth…well, it's a challenge that takes a lot of investment in research time.
And for one reason or another, I keep ending up in crisis mode—first with Stormlight 3 taking longer than I wanted, and now with The Apocalypse Guard not turning out like I wanted. So someday I will get to this, but it's going to require some alignment of several factors.
Status: Not yet. We'll see.
On tour, I did a reading from what up until now was listed as "Mystery Project" on my website. If you missed the newsletter explanation, I've pulled the book I was going to release next year (The Apocalypse Guard) because it needs more work. Instead, I've turned my attention to something else—and after a furious bout of writing, I'm confident in where it's going. So it's time to announce Skyward.
Like Steelheart and its sequels, this is a kind of borderline YA/Adult project. In the US, it will be published by Delacorte Press (publisher of Steelheart) in the Young Adult section of bookstores, while in the UK it will be published by Gollancz (publisher of almost all my books) in my main line, shelved in the science fiction/fantasy section of bookstores.
I've mentioned Skyward before in summaries of stories I'm working on, but haven't said much about it. I started noodling with the ideas in 2012, I believe. (The year that the Write About Dragons recordings of my lectures happened, where I mentioned it briefly—but not by name.) The first outline thoughts are dated summer 2013. It's a book I've been wanting to write for a long time, and it finally came together this year.
It has its roots in some of the very first books I ever read as a young man getting into fantasy. Like many young readers, I was captured by books about dragons, specifically books about boys who find dragons and learn to fly them. These have been staples of the fantasy genre for some fifty years. For me, it was The White Dragon by Anne McCaffrey and Dragon's Blood by Jane Yolen. For others, the "boy and his dragon" story that captured them was Eragon, or How to Train Your Dragon.
I've always loved this story archetype, but I've never written anything using it. This is in part because…well, it's a familiar story. Too familiar. I wasn't certain I could add anything new to it. So I left it alone, letting ideas simmer, until in 2012 something struck me. Could I mash this together with a flight school story like Top Gun or Ender's Game, and do something that wasn't "a boy and his dragon," but was instead "a girl and her starfighter"?
Skyward was born, much like Mistborn, with me taking two ideas and mashing them together to see where they went. And they went someplace incredible—I grew increasingly excited about the project, as I saw in it a chance to both play in a space I loved, and do some very interesting things with story and theme. It wasn't until this year that I got the personalities of the characters right, but I really got excited when I found a place for this in the lore of stories I'd been creating.
The official pitch is this: Defeated, crushed, and driven almost to extinction, the remnants of the human race are trapped on a planet that is constantly attacked by mysterious alien starfighters. Spensa, a teenage girl living among them, longs to be a pilot. When she discovers the wreckage of an ancient ship, she realizes this dream might be possible—assuming she can repair the ship, navigate flight school, and (perhaps most importantly) persuade the strange machine to help her. Because this ship, uniquely, appears to have a soul.
As I've played with Skyward over the years, I tried to pull it into the Cosmere, then found it didn't work there. However, it is in the continuity of something I've written before. Something that isn't the Cosmere, and isn't the Reckoners. And no, I won't say anything more for now.
The goal right now is to have Skyward done in time for a publication date of November 6, 2018. We'll see if I can meet that deadline! I'm optimistic. As always, you can follow along on the progress bar on my website. Look for a cover reveal and chance to pre-order soon!
You know the sparring guards, for the Shardblade training, the guards they put on the Shardblades. Are they made of aluminum?
So, they are not. Peter will not let me make them made out of aluminum. He's my continuity editor, he keeps me honest. I tried to get them to be aluminum, but there are reasons why they can't be. So we had to make them their own weird little thing, unfortunately. But you could make a sheath out of aluminum for a Shardblade that would work.
He keeps me honest, so it's good, but I did try to fit them in that way.
[My son] would like to know when you're planning to write Bastille?
...We're close. The fact that I ditched Apocalypse Guard has slow me down a bit. I was planning to write Bastille very soon. But it's gonna depend on how soon I finish [Skyward], when I need to go into Wax & Wayne. I need to go into Wax & Wayne, like, July at the latest. So, it's gonna depend on how long Skyward takes. But I'm gonna try to slip it in there.
Here are the lists of things that I've noticed could be reasons why certain Herald images get chosen. I also picked up on alot of this stuff because the folks over at Tor have done a WoR re-read and have a dedicated "Heraldic Symbolism" subsection they devote for each chapter. They speculate as to why the specific herald(s) were chosen. Specifically Alice Arneson (one of the re-readers) has seemingly done some good research into this, so I'll give her credit for a lot of this.
I mostly listed these out for my own reference as I've been meaning to do so (since I usually keep them in my head when figuring this out when reading).
Herald of <concept> - things associated with that concept. Known examples: 1) Shalash: Herald of Beauty 2) Nalan: Herald of Justice 3) Jezrien: Herald of Kings 4) Taln: Herald of War 5) Ishar: Herald of Luck
Roles associated with a herald Known Examples: 1)Chana: Guards 2)Taln: Soldiers/war 3)Ishar: Ardents/religion 4)Vedel: Physicians
Essences (https://coppermind.net/wiki/Ten_Essences ): Essence, body focus, Soulcasting properties...(this one is a stretch as I've never really could pinpoint this well enough)
Jester/Masked face (as mentioned in other posts on this thread). This can be tied to chapters with Wit them or tied to concepts related to him, the biggest one (I think) being storytelling.
How'd I do? :)
Note: I loved the "Four Lifetimes" chapter's heraldic symbolism in Oathbringer (I'm a little over halfway through the book), but I thought that was great showing the different roles/lives Kaladin has filled: Surgeon (Vedel), Soldier (Taln), Guard (Chana), and Leader/Windrunner (Jezrien). Bravo.
How did you do? Pretty much a home run. There's only one thing you're missing, which you may have implied, and that's the gemstones. Also, there's a little bit more to #5 that will be explored further later in the series.
Your "Four Lifetimes" analysis is spot-on. Congratulations.
So, when a Shardbearer, they get caught off guard, or, like, they're trying to throw their Shardblade, you know that it <quickly poofs> But yet, they can give it someone else, and it doesn't poof. I was just wondering how that works.
Mental control. It's kind of in-- it's a control thing. Some people-- I mean, you have to practice it, and things like that.
So, it takes some kind of mental control to give to someone and allow them to use it?
Yes.
But it's something they have to practice at, it's not just a--
Mmhmm.
