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Legion Release Party ()
#1 Copy

Questioner

If his name wasn't Stephen Leeds, what would it be? Did you have an alternate name?

Brandon Sanderson

No, I didn't have an alternate name. If I were naming it now, I would think of something that works really well as a one-word title, because Legion is just too fraught with too many other different properties. And the name Leeds works okay, but not great. It's not as good, and so I would need a name like that, that works as a last name, but also works as a title. Like, when they did Castle. That works really well as both a title and as a name. And so it needs something along those lines. Monk was another good one. Like, this genre tends to do that. And so I wasn't thinking of Leeds. I was thinking of Leeds as a small internal pun, because he's the middle management of his own brain. But I don't think it works as well as its own in a  title. So it would still probably be Stephen, but I would find another word there.

Firefight Seattle Public Library signing ()
#2 Copy

Questioner

Do you actually know what's wrong with Stephen Leeds?

Brandon Sanderson

Do I know what's wrong with Stephen Leeds? I do know what's wrong with Stephen Leeds. Thank you for promoting that one. Legion's another of these novellas I did. It's got a fun story behind it.

So I was in a writing group with mutual friend Dan Wells, he writes twisted books about people who are messed up, and he was doing a book about schizophrenia.  He was deep into a schizophrenic’s mind, Dan does a lot of research hits these things really well and meanwhile I'm over here being me and I’m like “Oh this would make a great magic system” *laughter* I'm like “No, no, no, really if you had a schizophrenic and what if they heard voices and saw hallucinations, but the hallucinations helped them.  Like their superpower was seeing hallucinations." He's like "That's weird." I'm like "No, you should write this” and I tried to convince him to write it and I tried to convince him to write and finally he said “Brandon, write the dumb book, it’s not my book it’s yours” So I wrote it, it’s called Legion.

It is indeed about a guy who is a genius and he can become an expert in any topic but that knowledge manifests as a hallucination that he sees, which can than talk him through things. Like if he studies, say, computer programming, he can't program computers, but a hallucination could walk him through programming a computer...

I'm going to warn you, they only do limited editions of the hardcovers on most of these. So they're expensive. But if you buy that I will send you the ebook for free. The only thing I can do that on are my novellas, that and Emperor's Soul, but it is also online for a couple bucks as an ebook. Or you can buy the very nice edition by Subterranean Press.

Questioner

So he gets worse...

Brandon Sanderson

*hesitates* Over the course of the series he is getting worse and worse, despite what he says.