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Marethyu316

Those are all good possibilities [for a novella Brandon is working on], but it could also be the one he mentioned during the first Book 4 update where an apprentice of Hoid is stranded on a minor shard world with an umbrella-based (Edit: oops!) magic system.

Brandon Sanderson

Please. It was a KITE based magic system. An umbrella-based magic would just be silly, now, wouldn't it.

I'm tempted to plot that one as a YA book, to be done after the Skyward novels. I'd like to do something YA in the cosmere, but have been waiting for the right moment.

coolRedditUser

Would Mistborn Era 1 not count as YA? I got those vibes from many parts of it, though most/all traces of that vanished in Era 2.

Brandon Sanderson

Mistborn Era One walks the line. (Having a teen protagonist for one of the viewpoints does indeed give it the vibe--and we did a YA printing of it, with YA covers.) Really only the first book would fit, though, and it's kind of a stretch.

Generally, YA is defined by the age of the protagonist, and the conflicts they're seeking. Vin's quest to find a home where she can trust the people around her is a YA style plot, but by the second book, it's drifted more toward adult style plots.

A lot of sf/f walks this line, though. There are arguments for some Game of Thrones to be YA for similar reasons. (Be aware that in the industry, content--meaning sex/violence/language--is not a descriptor of whether something is YA or not. It's age of the protagonists and the nature of the conflicts.)

CommonWerewolf9265

We know that Hoid has three apprentices. Are all of them human? Is Design one of those apprentices?

Brandon Sanderson

Design is not one, and they are not all human.  [...] I've almost written a book about one of them multiple times. In fact, one Secret Project started off about one of them. When I was planning one of the Secret Projects to do, there was a plan to attempt to do one of them. That was the kite magic system. And I never got beyond the design stage in that. The kite magic book would have starred one of Hoid's apprentices who is not human.

Brandon Sanderson

All right, I'm gonna pull upon the cloud here, and I'm gonna go to my archive, and let's see what I can find in here that I have outlines for that I haven't written.

There's one I know of for sure. I'm not gonna tell you what that one is. It's a secret project. One that I haven't talked about.

I don't know if we count Death By Pizza. I have a full outline for that. But that's a book I didn't write, and then I passed the worldbuilding off to Peter Orullian, who was writing a book based on it. Not using my outline, because the outline had some problems. But that would probably be number two.

Dark One became a graphic novel. So I don't know if you count that. That's, like, half of one.

Starburner would be number four-ish. That's the first full outline that doesn't have a book attached to it right now.

Don't know if you count Stormlight Five. The outline for Stormlight Five is very detailed. Six through Ten is less detailed; I do have them, but they're more like a paragraph or two about each book, so I wouldn't count them as a full outline.

Five in my "Novels to Write Someday" one. Which, most of them, you guys haven't heard about. One's the magic that uses kites; I've talked about that before.

I've got "Totally Not A Rewrite Of Episode I" that I wrote nine years ago. I just could not help it.

I have the five I mentioned earlier. In addition, in their own folders, I have I Hate Dragons. (Which I actually outlined the whole I Hate Dragons book, but I only wrote the little piece of it that was a writing exercise.) I have... six.

Six plus five, so eleven outlines in my Novels to Write Someday. And then two half ones that I passed on to someone else. And then all the Stormlight and Mistborn and things like that that don't quite count. So there you go, eleven. It's eleven only, right now. That's not very many. I would say that I've got at least that many in my head, maybe a few more.

Oh, and Secret Project, so that's twelve. And all of those are Secret Projects in a way, I guess. You've heard about some of them. One of them is The Lurker, which became Adamant, which I wrote one novella of, but I have the outlines for the rest.

Questioner

Any new concepts for anything in the cosmere in the works?

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah, always, lots. I was developing a kite-based magic system earlier this year. That one, I'm really excited to do at some point.

Glamdring804

Yeah, it’s dangerous to leave him unsupervised for extended periods of time, as a random novella might suddenly appear.

Brandon Sanderson

The latest one is a story I really want to write about one of Hoid's apprentices, set in the future of the cosmere (between era 3 and 4) stranded on a minor shardword and trying to figure out their kite-based magic system...

(No time right now, though. Stay on target...)

yahasgaruna

That sounds very much like the first story you wrote about Hoid, doesn't it? About him landing on a new planet and trying to figure out the local magic system?

Brandon Sanderson

Yes, it would be the spiritual successor of that story. I don't think it would work any more for him, the way he has developed, but I think it could play out very well with one of his many apprentices across the worlds. (Particularly if he's a little more organized about this in the space-age era.)

Someday, I really need to send my old discs from the early 90s out for data recovery, to see if anything is on them. It would be a hoot to read these old stories and really see how much of the Cosmere existed in embryo back when I was a teenager.