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    New York Comic Con 2022 ()
    #651 Copy

    irongnome (paraphrased)

    If a Radiant summons their Shardplate on Braize will it work?

    Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

    Well it depends, in the Physical realm or Cognitive?

    irongnome (paraphrased)

    Physical.

    Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

    And you are asking about Shards?

    irongnome (paraphrased)

    Plate specifically.

    Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

    Ah, okay. So if they have already been able to summon the Plate before it will work, but it will fail if it’s their first time.

    New York Comic Con 2022 ()
    #652 Copy

    Wizardlvl (paraphrased)

    What type spren would be Axies Black Lotus? Like the spren has he never seen that he really wants to.

    Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

    The Nightwatcher. He has gone like two dozen times to the valley but has never seen her.

    New York Comic Con 2022 ()
    #653 (not searchable) Copy

    Brandon Sanderson

    I’ve been saving Szeth[‘s flashbacks] for the end [of the first five Stormlight books]. I was either gonna do Dalinar or Szeth as the last one, and I ended up deciding as I got to Oathbringer that Dalinar’s flashback sequence really matched Oathbringer really well, which meant I moved Szeth to this book, the as-of-yet-unnamed Stormlight Five, which will almost assuredly have a certain set of letters at the start. (If you don’t know, I’m trying to make it symmetrical with Way of Kings. We’ll see if we can make that happen.)

    I intend these flashbacks to… you’ll notice that this kind of a more serene and peaceful start, as a contrast to some of the things that will be happening in the book otherwise at this point (to give no spoilers).

    This is just gonna be kind of a starting look at who Szeth was way back before this all started.

    Brandon Sanderson

    Szeth Flashback One

    Szeth-Son Neturo found magic upon the wind, and so he danced with it.

    Strict, methodic movements at first, as per the moves he had memorized. He was as the limbs of the oak, rigid but ready. When they shivered in the wind, Szeth thought he could hear their souls seeking to break free, to shed bark like shells and emerge with new skin, pained by the cool air—yet aflush with joy all the same. Painful and delightful, like all new things.

    Szeth scraped bare feet across packed earth as he danced, getting it on his toes, loving the feel of Cultivation’s embrace. He moved in a wide circle, getting just close enough to the edge to feel feet on grass before dancing back, spinning to the accompaniment of his sister’s flute. It almost seemed alive itself, providing him a partner for his dance, wind made alive through sound. The flute was the voice of air itself.

    Time became thick when he danced. Molasses minutes and syrup seconds. Yet, the wind wove among them, visiting each moment to linger, before spinning away. He followed it. Emulated it. Became it.

    More and more fluid he became. No more rigidity, no more preplanned steps. Sweat flying from his brow to seek the sky, he was the air. Churning, spinning, almost violent. Around and around, his motions worship for the rock at the center of the patch of ground. For when he was wind, he felt he could touch that sacred stone, which had never known the hands of man—but felt the wind each and every day.

    The stone of his family. The stone of his past. The stone to whom he gave his dance. He came out of the dance finally, panting, drenched in sweat. His sister’s music cut off, leaving his only applause the bleating of the sheep. Molli the Ewe had wandered onto the circular dance track again, and—bless her—was trying to eat the sacred rock.

    She never had been the smartest of the flock.

    Szeth stood, breathing deeply, feeling the sweat stream from his face and pool at his chin, wetting the packed earth below with speckles like stars.

    “You practice too hard,” his sister—Elid-Daughter-Neturo—said. “Seriously, Szeth. Can’t you just relax once in a while?”

    He looked to her as as she stood up from her seat in the grass and stretched. Elid, at fourteen, was three years older than he was. Like him, she was on the shorter side—though she was squat where he was spindly. Trunk and branch, Dolk-son-Dolk called them. Which was kind of appropriate, even if both Dolks were idiots.

    She wore orange as her splash—the vivid piece of colorful clothing that marked their station. A bright orange apron, in her case, across a grey dress and vibrant white undergown that poked through to cover forearms and collar. She spun her flute in her fingers, uncaring, like she hadn’t broken her previous one doing just that.

    Szeth bowed his head and walked over to get some water from the barrel. Rainwater had filled with pure, clean water, not a speck of dirt. He enjoyed looking through it, down all the way to the wooden bottom—I liked seeing things that couldn’t be seen, like air and water. Things that were there, yet not, all at once.

    “Why do you practice so hard?” Elid said. “There’s nobody here but the sheep.”

    “Molli likes my dancing,” Szeth said softly.

    “Molli is blind,” Elid said. “She’s licking the dirt right now.”

    “Molli likes to try things new,” he said, smiling and looking toward the old Ewe.

    “Whatever,” Elid said, flopping back on the grass. “Wish there was more to do out here.”

    “Dancing is something to do,” he said. “The flute is something to do. We must learn to add so that—”

    She threw a dirt clod at him. He dodged easily, his feet light on the ground. He might only be eleven, but some in the village whispered he was the best dancer among them. He didn’t care so much about that. He only cared about doing it right. If he did it wrong, then he still had to practice.

    Elid didn’t think that way. It bothered him how blasé she was about her practicing, but she didn’t like talking to him about it. She seemed like a different person, these days.

    Szeth shook his head, and tied back on his splash—a red handkerchief he wore around his neck—then went to count the sheep. A few minutes, when he walked past Elid on his way to count the ones on the other side of her, she was still laying and staring at the sky.

    “Do you believe,” she said, “the stories they tell about the lands on the other side of the mountains?”

    “The lands of the stonewalkers?” he said. “Why wouldn’t I?”

    Thirty seven, thirty eight... Were’s swallow?

    “They just sound so outlandish.”

    “Elid, listen to the words you say. Of course stories about outlanders sound outlandish.”

    There she is. Thirty nine.

    “But really, Szeth?” she said “Lands where everyone walks on stones? Like, what do they do? Pick them out in the ground and only hop from stone to stone, avoiding the soil?”

    Szeth glanced at their family stone. It peeked up from the earth like cultivation’s own eyeball, staring at the sky, unblinking. Six feet across, but maybe with ore of it buried, it was a vibrant red-orange. A splash for Roshar, like the one he wore. He’d chosen his color deliberately.

    “I think,” he said to her, “that there must be a lot more rock out there. I think it’s hard to walk without walking on stone. That’s why they get desensitized to it.”

    “But where do the plants grow, then?” she asked. “Everyone always talks about how the outside is full of dangerous plants that try to eat people. It’s all anyone ever whispers about. So...there must be soil.”

    True. Unless all these plants were like moss? He had trouble imagining fluffy curls of moss being dangerous, though. Maybe the terrible vines he’d heard about grew from patches of soil but stretched out long, like the tentacles you might find on a ***(Octopus creature from the menagerie in book two.) Or the ones from the things that lived in the tidal pools a short distance down the coast.

    “I heard,” she said, “they constantly kill each other out there. That nobody adds, they only subtract.”

    “Who makes the food then?” he said.

    “They must eat each other,” she replied. “Or maybe they’re always just starving. You know how those ones on the coast are...”

    Those ones. He looked, nervously, into the distance—though you could only see the ocean on the clearest days. His home of Clearmount was at the very edge of a broad plan, excellent for grazing, with the ocean beyond, on the south-eastern edge of Shinovar. An honored location, near the Zephyr Monastery just further along the mountain ridge, where one of the sacred Honorblades was kept.

    In Szeth’s estimation, it was the perfect place to live. You could both see the mountains and visit the ocean. You could walk for days across the vibrant green prairie, and there was never lack of grazing land for the sheep. He bent down next to old Molli, scratching at her ears as she rubbed her head against him. She might lick rocks and eat dirt, but she was also always good for a hug. He loved her warmth, the scratchy wool on his cheek, the way she always stayed nearby—to keep him company—when the others wandered.

    She bleated softly as he finished hugging her, then wiped the salty, dried sweat from his head. Maybe he shouldn’t practice so hard, but he knew he’d gotten a few steps wrong. And had stumbled a few times. Their father said that they were blessed in their lives, as people who could add beneath the Farmer’s eyes. Just the right station in life. Not required to toil in the field, not forced to kill and subtract—allowed to tend the sheep, and develop their talents.

    Free time was the greatest blessing in the world. Maybe that was why the men of the oceans sought to kill them and steal their sheep. If you lived your life out in the lands where everyone walked on stones, your morals withered, and you sought only to take. It must make them angry to see such a perfect place, full of people with time. The terrible men from the oceans couldn’t have that time themselves, so like any petulant child, they simply destroyed it in those they saw.

    “Do you think,” Elid whispered, “that the Servant of the Monastery will ever come out and fight for us? Use that sword during one of the raids to drive off the terrible men?”

    “Elid!” he said, standing. “The Servant of the Monastery would never subtract.”

    “I think you’re wrong,” she replied. “Mother says they practice with the Weapon in there. Why practice with it, except to—”

    “They will fight the Voidbringers when they arrive,” Szeth snapped. “That is the reason. No other.” He glanced toward the ocean, unreasonably worried that one of the strange raiders would hear. “Don’t speak of it. Nobody must know. If they realized the treasures of the monasteries...”

    “Ha,” she said. “I’d like to see the awful ones raid Zephyr, and face down the Servant. She can fly you know. She—”

    “Don’t speak of it,” he said. “Not in the open.”

    Elid rolled her eyes at him, still laying on the grass. What had she done with her flute? If she lost another, and father had to carve one for her again...

    She hated when he brought that up as well, so he forced himself to stay quiet. He pulled back from Molli, and then looked down at the ground she’d been licking.

    To find another rock.

    He stumbled back, part shocked, part terrified. This was a small one, compared to their other rock. Only a handspan wide. It peeked up from the earth, perhaps revealed in last night’s regular rain. Szeth put his fingers to his lips, backing away. Had he stepped on that while dancing? It was in the packed earth of the dancing ring around the stone, right in the path.

    What...what should he do? This was the first stone he’d ever seen emerge. Even the ones in other villages and fields—carefully marked off and properly revered—had been there for years.

    A...a new stone. Was it a sign?

    “What’s up with you?” Elid said. “Molli step on your toe or something?”

    He couldn’t speak, so he simply gestured. She, perhaps sensing his level of concern, he rose and walked over. As soon as she saw it, she gasped.

    They shared a look. “I’ll go get mother and father,” Szeth said, then started running.

    Szeth Flashback Two

    Szeth’s father, Neturo, knelt beside the stone. His mother, Zeenid, was in the town overseeing painting classes, so they’d sent a message to her via Tek, one of their courier parrots.

    Szeth wasn’t certain what frightened him so about finding a new rock. He danced around the other one daily. He loved their rock, and a new one was cause for celebration, surely. Except, he wished it hadn’t happened to him, finding it. Something new meant possible celebration, possible attention, possible change.

    He wanted things just remain calm. Quiet days full of languid breezes and gathering sheep. Nights beside the fireplace or candles, listening to mother tell stories. He didn’t want excitement or some new grand thing. Too much of a chance that it would upset what he already loved.

    “What do we do, Father?” Elid asked. “Call the Stone Shamans?”

    “It depends,” he said. “Depends.”

    Their father was a calm man, with a long beard he liked to keep tied with a green ribbon at the bottom. Head shaded by his customary tall reed hat with the wide brim, he had a good-natured paunch that spoke to his skill and talent as a cook. He had all the answers. Always.

    “Depends?” Szeth said, stepping up beside him—half hiding behind his bulky form as he peeked at the little stone. “Depends on what? We just do what is right, don’t we?”

    Father glanced at their larger stone, then at this one. “A single rock is a blessed anomaly. Two...might mean more. Might mean the spren have chosen this region.”

    “Wait,” Elid said, hands on hips. “What do you mean?”

    “I mean,” Father said, “there might be others, hiding beneath the surface here. Unlikely, but possible. Stone shamans will want to take the entire region, set it off, preserve it and watch it for a few years at least. See if anything else emerges.”

    “And...us?” Szeth asked.

    “Well, we’ll have to move,” Father replied. “Tear down the house, just in case it’s accidentally on holy ground. Set up somewhere else—wherever the Farmer finds land for us. Maybe in the town.”

    In the town? Szeth turned, looking into the distance—though the nature of the rolling hills prevented him from seeing *** unless he climbed up on top of one. It was close enough to walk in an hour or so. He liked it that far away. He found the place noisy, congested, smelly. In the town, it felt like the mountains weren’t right around the corner, because the buildings blocked them out. It felt like the meadows had gone brown, replaced by dull roadways. It felt like the ocean was far off, because you couldn’t smell the breezes coming in off of the water any longer.

    He didn’t hate the town. But he got the sense that it hated the things that he loved.

    “I don’t want to move!” Elid said. “We did something great. We found a rock! We shouldn’t be punished.”

    “If it’s right,” Szeth said, “the we just have to do it, though. Right, Father?”

    Father was silent. He stood up, pulling at his trousers, and waited. Soon, Szeth picked out someone hurrying along the path between hills toward their home. A single woman, wearing a long green skirt as her splash—an audacious amount of color for their station. White apron over the front, curly, light brown hair that punched up around her head like a cloud.

    She was carrying a shovel. Szeth gaped, jaw dropping. That couldn’t mean...

    She hurried up to them, shovel on her shoulder. Father nodded toward the new rock, and mother’s let out a relieved sigh. “So small? You had me worried with that message, Neturo.”

    “Mother?” Szeth said. “What are you doing?”

    “Just a quick relocation,” she said. “We’ll dig up the rock, haul it off a few hundred yards, then place it in the soil there. Let it rain a little, so it seems to have naturally poked up, then tell everyone about it.”

    Szeth gasped. “We can’t touch it!”

    Mother pulled a pair of gloves out of her pocket. “Of course not. That’s why I brought gloves, dear.”

    “That’s the same thing!” Szeth said, horrified. He looked to his father. “We can’t do this, can we?”

    Father scratched at his beard. “Depends, I suppose, on what you think, son.”

    “Me?”

    “You found the rock,” Father said, looking to mother, who nodded in agreement. “So you can decide.”

    “I pick what’s right,” Szeth said immediately.

    “Is it right for us to lose our home?” Father asked.

    “I...” Szeth pulled back, glancing at the house.

    “There might be dozens of rocks down underneath here,” Father said. “If that’s the case, then we should absolutely move. But in the hundreds of years that rain has fallen on this plan, only one has emerged. So it’s unlikely. Moving the stone a few hundred yards will still make the shamans watch this region, but without the rocks being so close together, the worry will be more nebulous.

    “But then again, we’d have to move it. In secret. We’re supposed to reverence stone, treat it as the home of the spren. That’s why you dance to it.”

    “We hate the stonewalkers on the outside,” Szeth said, “because of how they treat it.”

    Father knelt down, one hand on Szeth’s shoulder. “We don’t hate them. They’re people who just don’t know the right way of things.”

    “They raid us, father,” Elid said, arms still folded. “That’s not just them being confused.”

    “Yes, well,” he said. “Maybe those ones are evil. But it’s not because they live in a place with too much stone. It’s because of the choices they make.” He smiled at Szeth and nodded his head, his beard juggling like it did when he laughed. “It’s okay son. You can choose what you want. If you want us to go turn this in now, well, we’ll do it.”

    “Can’t you just...tell me what to do?” Szeth asked.

    “No, I don’t think that I can,” Father said. “Unfair to put you in this spot, I suppose. But the spren did it, so now we just live with that. We can move the rock, or move our home. I’ll accept either one.”

    “Maybe we should let him sleep on it,” Mother said.

    “No,” Szeth said. “No. We can...move it.”

    All three of them relaxed as he said it, and he felt a sudden—shameful—resentment. His father said he could choose, but they’d all three clearly wanted a specific decision. He’d made it, he felt, not because it was right. But because they wanted it.

    But how could all three of them want it if it wasn’t right? Maybe Szeth was just broken in some way that he couldn’t see what it was they did. Maybe it was all right to just...be lax about all of this.

    He still hated this entire situation. If they’d just told him what they intended to do, and then done it, that would have been fine. Why give him the choice? Didn’t they see that made it his fault what they were doing?

    “Let me dig about it,” Mother said, putting on her gloves. “looks small, but that can be deceiving. Wouldn’t want to find out that it’s secretly as big as a house under there.”

    They all stepped back, and mother started digging about it. Szeth winced each time the shovel scraped the stone. That was not a natural sound. He’d hoped that they would, indeed, discover that the rock was enormous—so that the plan had to be abandoned. But in the end, it was really was just kind of small. A foot across at it widest. He could have held it in one hand, if he’d wanted.

    No, don’t think like that, he told himself, putting his hand down to the side. Molli the ewe, seeming to have sensed his tension, rubbed up against him and he felt at her wool, her warmth. Hoping to draw strength from it.

    Even mother seemed a little unsure, now that she’d dug the rock out. She stepped back, leaving it in the hole. She hadn’t touched it at all.

    “You scraped it,” Elid said. “That seems...kind of obvious.”

    “Once we’ve buried it again,” Mother said, “nobody will see those scrapes.”

    “How much trouble would we be in,” Elid asked. “If someone finds out what we did?”

    “I suspect the Farmer wouldn’t be happy,” Father said. He laughed then, and it seemed genuine. “Might require some cake to make up for it. Don’t get that look, Szeth. We show devotion because we choose to. And so, the kind of devotion is ours to make.”

    “I...don’t understand,” he said. “Don’t the Stone Shamans tell us what to do?”

    “They tell us the teachings of the spren,” Mother said, she shouldered her shovel. “But we choose to interpret those teachings. What we’re doing here today is reverent. Enough for me at least.”

    Szeth thought on that for a moment. And wondered—as this was not the first clue in his life, but it might be the most stark one—if this was a reason, perhaps, they chose to live outside of town. Even other shepherd families lived inside the buildings there, beneath the shadow of the monastery.

    He’d gone, with his family, each month for devotions since he could remember. He didn’t dare think that his family wasn’t faithful. Yet...the older he got...the more he had questions like these. It was only today, however, that he’d had to really confront the fact. What did he feel about his parents doing something he knew the shamans wouldn’t approve of?

    They were still all standing there, staring at the rock, when the horns sounded. Father looked up, then whispered a soft prayer to the spren of their stone. The horns meant raiders, on the coast, coming in from the east and the lands of the stonewalkers.

    Szeth felt an immediate panic. “What do we do?” he said.

    “Gather the sheep,” Father said. “Quickly. We must drive them toward Dison’s Valley near the town. The Farmer has troops in the region. We’ll be safe if we move inland.”

    “But this?” Szeth said, gesturing to the rock. “This!”

    Mother, suddenly seeming determined, just reached down and grabbed it in two gloved hands. Together, all four of them froze, then looked inward toward their family stone. It sat there, unblinking, unmoving. None of them were struck down. And Szeth thought he could tell, from the way his parents relaxed after a moment, that they hadn’t been certain what would happen either.

    At least it seemed they hadn’t been secretly moving rocks around all his life. This was a new experience for them. Mother walked over to a nearby tree, then carefully placed the stone into a gnarled nook near the roots. She then hid it over with a handful of leaves.

    “That will do for now,” she said. “If raiders do come to the home, they’ll think nothing of a stone. They don’t feel or commune with them—they ignore the spren.”

    Father and Elid went to start gathering the sheep. Szeth just held to Molli, who bleated softly, and wished this day had never begun.

    FanX 2022 ()
    #655 Copy

    Questioner (paraphrased)

    1. On a scale of 1 to 10, how similar are the processes of Command-Breaking a Lifeless and Unmaking?

    2. Is there more going on behind the scenes when an Allomancer burns pewter? I suspect that the process triggers a "mind over matter" state, where the user's desires are made manifest, albeit in a limited way. If so, can a pewter burner alter their Physical appearance, similar to a Returned (provided they knew they could and had access to enough pewter)?

    Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

    1. 7 they are similar

    2a. That is a valid theory. On the right track. 

    2b. Possible in theory

    FanX 2022 ()
    #656 Copy

    Questioner

    Is there a [Stormlight] 4.5 planned?

    Brandon Sanderson

    Yes, 4.5 is the book Horneater. Should be part of the Kickstarter for the Words of Radiance leatherbound next year. You should be able to just get that like you got the other one. That will be Rock's story. The plan is, I will write that at some point, and we'll put it in the Kickstarter next summer.

    FanX 2022 ()
    #657 (not searchable) Copy

    Brandon Sanderson

    This is first draft. So there's gonna be some stuff in this, things might change. Just be warning you.

    This is Kaladin from [Stormlight] Book Five.

    Brandon Sanderson

    Chapter Kaladin One

    Kaladin felt good.

    Not great. Not after spending weeks hiding in an occupied city, forced to stretch himself both physically and emotionally far beyond the reasonable limit. Not after what had happened to Teft. No, Kaladin didn't feel great. But he stood in the sunlight, looking out the window of his room.

    He thought that maybe he would someday feel great again. Knowing that, being able to recognize it, was enough. Indeed, there was an incongruent spring to his step as he walked to his barrack. Why did he feel good? Yes, they had protected Urithiru, but at great cost. Dalinar had set a deadline that was horrifically soon; war was coming upon them, and now Kaladin wasn't going to even be part of it. He was on leave; self-imposed this time.

    He'd said the right words, but had realized that those words weren't enough. Stormlight healed his body, but his soul needed time. Bridge Four and the Windrunners would go to battle without him. He should feel awful. A part of him simply refused to do so.

    He dug through his clothing, stacks of civilian clothing neatly laundered for him and delivered this morning. The world might be ending in ten days, but Urithiru's washwomen soldiered on. None of the choices felt right, and shortly he glanced to the wall where a new uniform hung, sent by the quartermaster to replace the one Kaladin had ruined during the fighting two days before. Leyten kept a rack of them in Kaladin's size.

    Kaladin had stuck it there with a Lashing last night after Teft's funeral, testing something he'd been told by the others: Urithiru was awake now, with its own Bondsmith, and things were... different. That Lashing he had used should have run out after minutes; yet here this one was, ten hours later, still going strong. The extended powers only worked in the city, but he could already see that going forward, this would be a very different place to live. Assuming anyone survived the next two weeks.

    A short time later, Syl poked her head into his room without any thought for privacy, as usual. Granted, his room didn't have a door, but a hanging cloth. Doors were in short supply, and they'd installed their first ones on the examination rooms up the hallway to offer privacy to the patients.

    Not that a door would have stopped Syl; she could squeeze through the smallest cracks. Except, today, she was walking around full human-sized, for some reason, and wearing a havah instead of her usual girlish dress. She was doing that more commonly, as of late.

    As Kaladin did the last buttons on the high collar of his uniform jacket, she bounced over to stand behind him, then floated up in the air a foot or so to look over his shoulder at him in the mirror.

    "Can't you make yourself any size?" he asked, checking his jacket cuffs.

    "Yeah. Within reason."

    "Whose reason?"

    "No idea," she said. "I tried to get as big as a mountain, once. It involved lots of grunting and thinking like rocks. Really big rocks. I managed a very small mountain; like, enough to fit in this room with the tip brushing the ceiling, but super narrow. That's as big as I could go."

    "So, you could be tall enough to tower over me?" he said. "Why do you usually make yourself shorter than me, instead?"

    "It just feels right," she said.

    "That's your explanation for basically everything."

    "Yep." She poked him. He could barely feel it; even at this size, she was insubstantial in the physical realm. "Uniform? I thought you weren't gonna wear one of those anymore. What happened?"

    He hesitated, then pulled the jacket down at the bottom to pull the wrinkles across the sides. "It just feels right," he admitted, meeting her eyes in the mirror.

    She grinned, and storm him, he couldn't help but grinning back. "Someone is having a good day," she said, poking him again.

    "Bizarrely," Kaladin said. "If I understand right, the world is slated to end in ten days."

    "To maybe end in ten days."

    "And the enemy appears to be mobilizing for some reason, rather than just waiting for the deadline. What do they hope to accomplish?"

    "Something nefarious, no doubt," she said.

    "More people are going to die," he replied. "Perhaps people I care about. I won't be there to help them, and..."

    "Kaladin Stormblessed!" she said, rising up into the air higher, arms folded. Though she wore a fashionable havah, she left her white-blue glowing hair floating free, waving and shifting in the wind. The non-existent wind, currently. She raised up until she loomed two feet above him. "Don't you dare talk yourself into being miserable!"

    "Or what?"

    "Or I," she thundered, "shall make silly faces at you all day, as only I can."

    "Those aren't silly," he said, shivering.

    "They're hilarious!"

    "Last time, you made a tentacle come out of your forehead."

    "High brow comedy."

    "A spinning eyeball growing from the end of it?"

    "Every joke needs a good twist."

    "Then it slapped me!"

    "Punchline. Obviously." She shook her head. "Storms. All the humans in the world, and I end up picking the one without a taste for refined humor."

    He met her eyes, and her smile was storming contagious. "It just feels warm," he said, "to have finally figured a few things out. To have made progress, despite it all. To have let go of that weight I was carrying and to step out from the shadow. I know the darkness will return, but I think... I think I'll be able to remember, this time. Better than before."

    "Remember what?"

    He met her eyes, Lashing himself upward, floating until he was eye level with her. "That days like this exist, too." She nodded firmly. "I wish I could show Teft," Kaladin said. "I miss him like a hole in my own flesh, still."

    "I know," she said softly. If she'd been a human friend, she might have offered a hug. Syl didn't seem to understand physicality like a human did, even if she had a more substantial body in the cognitive realm. He got the feeling she didn't actually spend much time there, though; she seemed more natural to this realm than the other honorspren, flitting about like the windspren she sometimes imitated. And indeed today, to cheer him up, she waved eagerly and led him out to the main living room of the family quarters. *inaudible* full human size wearing a havah, but flying about, moving with a swooping motion that was, honestly, a tad ridiculous to watch.

    Kal didn't fall, though, continuing to hover. Because, why not? It felt like he wasn't even using up his Stormlight; or if he was, it was constantly replenished, like what happened when Dalinar opened a perpendicularity.

    In the main living room, they found Oroden playing with his blocks. At Syl's suggestion, they spent a good half hour hovering the blocks in the air for the *inaudible*. It felt a strange use of his powers, literally harvested from the essence of a god. But, when he stopped, Oroden pointed. "Kaddin," the little boy said, pointing. "You need box!" "You," in this case, meant Oroden himself, who had noticed that everyone called him "you," and had decided that was just another name for him.

    Kaladin smiled, hovering up another set of blocks. Syl, shrunken down, hopped from block to block in the air as Oroden swatted and moved them. What am I doing? Kaladin thought after a little of that. The world is ending, my best friend is dead, and I'm playing blocks with my little brother?

    Then, in response, a voice deep from within him. Familiar, almost certainly imagined. Hold onto this, Kal. Embrace it. I didn't die so you could mope about like a wet Horneater with no razor. It didn't seem anything mystical, but instead... well, Kaladin had known Teft long enough to anticipate what the man would have said. Even in death, a good sergeant knew his job: keep the officers pointed the right direction."

    "Pyl!" Oroden said, gesturing to Syl. "Pyl, come pin!" He was off a second later, with Syl following afterwards as he hopped and pointed, then starting spinning around in circles with her twirling around him.

    Kaladin watched, seating on the floor amidst hovering blocks. His mother settled down beside him and nudged him in the side, then handed him a bowl with some lavis grain and spiced crab meat on the top. She wore her hair tied with a kerchief, like she'd always done when working back in Hearthstone. He took the bowl of food without complaint, though he didn't feel particularly like eating. As his mother eyed him, he dutifully started eating away. If there was a group more demanding than sergeants when it came to an officer's well-being, it would be mothers. When he'd been younger, this sort of attention had mortified him. Now, after years without, he found he didn't mind a little mothering. Truth be told, whether he wanted to eat or not, he needed the food.

    "How are ya?" she asked.

    "Good," he said around spoonfulls of lavis. She studied him. "Really," he said. "Good. Not great. Good enough."

    A block flew past, steaming with Stormlight, Lashed upward precisely enough to counteract its weight. Hesina tapped it with a hesitant finger, sending it spinning through the room. "Shouldn't those fall?" she asked.

    "Eventually, maybe?" He shrugged. "Navani has done something weird to the place. It's more than the fact that the tower is somehow warm now, and the pressure equalized. The entire city is infused, like a sphere." Water flowed, now, from holes in walls. You simply had to press your hand to the top of the hole and ask, and it came streaming out. You asked for a temperature, and it came out that heat. Suddenly, a lot of the strange basins and empty pools in the tower made sense. They'd expected spigots, but most locations didn't have those. Just mysterious outlets.

    He smiled as he watched Syl spin around Oroden, twirling himself, then left him with a few blocks as a distraction. She popped to human size again and flopped down on her back next to Kaladin and his mother, her face covered in an illusionary approximation of sweat. "How," Syl said, "do small humans just keep going? Where does their energy come from?"

    "One of the great mysteries of the cosmere," his mother said. "If you think this is bad, you should have seen Kal."

    "Oooh," Syl said, rolling over and looking to her with wide eyes, her long, blue-white hair tumbling around her face. No human woman Kaladin had ever known had acted such a casual way wearing a havah. The tight dresses, while not strictly formal, weren't designed for rolling about on the ground bare-footed. Syl, however, would be Syl. "Embarassing childhood stories?" she said. "Go. Talk. While his mouth is full of food so he can't stop you."

    "He never stopped moving," Hesina said, leaning forward, "except when he finally <clumped to the ground> to sleep, giving us brief hours of respite. I was required to sing his favorite song, and Lirin would have to chase him. And he could tell if Lirin was giving a half-hearted chase and would chastise him. It was honestly the cutest thing to see Lirin being chewed out by a three-year-old."

    "I could have guessed," Syl said, "he would be tyrannical as a child."

    "Not tyrannical," Hesina said. "He merely like things to be the way that they should be. As he saw them. Children often are like that, Syl, accepting only one answer to any question because nuance is difficult and confusing."

    "Yeah," Kaladin said, scraping the last of the lavis from his bowl. "Children. That's a worldview that obviously only strikes children, never the rest of us."

    His mother gave him a side hug, one arm around his shoulders. The kind that seemed to grudgingly admit that he wasn't a little boy anymore. "Do you sometimes wish," she asked him, "the world were a simpler place? That easy answers of a child were, in truth, the actual answers?"

    "Not anymore," he said. "'Cause I think the easier answers would condemn me. Most everyone, actually." That made his mother beam, for some reason, even though it was a simple thing to say. Then her eyes got a certain mischievous sparkle to them. He knew his mother, and knew to be wary of what was coming next

    "So. You have a spren friend," she said. "Did you ever ask her that important question you always asked me?"

    He sighed, bracing himself. "And which question would that be, mother?"

    "Poopspren," she said, poking him. "You were always so fascinated by the idea."

    "That was Tien!" Kaladin said. "That was not me!"

    She returned a knowing stare. Mothers; they remember too well.

    "Fine," he said. "Maybe I was intrigued." He glanced at Syl, who was watching the exchange with wide eyes. "Did you ever know any...?"

    "Poopspren?" she said flatly. He nodded. "Like, the stinky stuff that comes out of you when you think I'm not looking?" she said. "That stuff? The world is ending, and this is what you want to know? You're asking the only living daughter of the storms, princess of the honorspren, this question: how much poop do I personally know?"

    "It's just something that came up," he said, "now and then, when we were boys, if poop actually had a spren, or..."

    "Oh, I know tons," Syl said, barely keeping a straight face. "We had them over for dinner all the time. Stormfather and I. Knew an entire poop family."

    "I do not want to discuss the topic anymore," Kaladin said. "Please, can we move on. I don't need to know more about poop."

    Unfortunately, Oroden wandered over and was watching the conversation with interest. He stepped up and patted Kaladin on the knee. "It's okay, Kaddin," he said in a comforting voice, with a tone of repeating something he'd been told. "Poop goes in the potty. Do better next time and get a treat."

    This, of course, sent Syl into a fit of uproarious laughter, flopping on her back again. Kaladin gave his mother his captain's glare, one he knew from experience was good enough to make any soldier go white. Mothers, however, ignored the chain of command. And the glare only made her seem more amused.

    Brandon Sanderson

    One of the things that's a problem here is: Kaladin knows something he shouldn't know yet, that the enemy is mobilizing. Because this is probably gonna end up being chapter one, so we need to find out that information later. So you will probably find out that information in, like, chapter two or three, and be like, "Oh, why is the enemy mobilizing?" He won't know it yet. Those sorts of things happen a lot in early drafts, where you're writing through. You know the outline, you're not sure where the chapters will end up going, and things like that.

    This, we are planning for 2024. I'm sorry, it's not next year. But we plan to do a big Dragonsteel convention alongside it.

    FanX 2022 ()
    #658 Copy

    Questioner

    If you used Hemalurgic bendalloy in a fabrial, could you theoretically steal any kind of Investiture, even dormant Breaths?

    Brandon Sanderson

    Theoretically, there's a way to accomplish what you want to do, but I'm not gonna give you the details now, but yes, theoretically, there's a way to do that. You're hitting on the right idea.

    FanX 2022 ()
    #659 Copy

    Questioner

    If you were to be on Scadrial as a Mistborn and burn a god metal (such as, say, Honor), what would come of that? Would it be specific to the system that it's from? Or is it kind of like a blanket *inaudible*?

    Brandon Sanderson

    RAFO.

    FanX 2022 ()
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    Questioner

    We've seen in the multiple worlds of the cosmere the different ways they measure Investiture. And with it slowly starting to converge more and more, and also the seemingly imminent tabletop game in the works...

    Brandon Sanderson

    "Seemingly imminent" meaning "we have decided we are going to do it, but have no idea what we're doing yet."

    Questioner

    Do you have an internal, universal system of measurement for Investiture? And will we get any of that anytime soon?

    Brandon Sanderson

    We are working on it right now. I actually called up some physicists I know (and this is about five years ago, now) and said, "All right, we're gonna need some units of measurement so we can take a Breath and determine how much is in it," and things like that. And it just about broke their brains, because they're like, "There's just so much here." But we've been working on it.

    My goal will be to deliver this to you eventually. But we don't really need it until space age, which is post-Era-Three-Mistborn. But by then, I hope that we will have it. I hope we'll have it before then, but yes, it is something we are working on. It's not something I worldbuild, saying "how much Investiture's in a Breath versus a sphere." It's something we're gonna have to look at what I've done with all of them and come up with something.

    Questioner

    And it's not, like, intentionally secret?

    Brandon Sanderson

    It's not intentionally secret. It is something I've known for a while I would need. But that's why you hire very smart people and make it their problem.

    General Reddit 2018 ()
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    Snote85

    Let's say I had a really hard/special/magic metal file. I took it to Roshar and started shaving pieces off and catching them in a bowl. Would they dissipate and kinda puff into embers like the Shardplate does in places or would I actually have a bit of metal? If I did, would that metal shaving be able to be burned by a Mistborn? I won't ask what it would do, as I know that's a RAFO, just, would it be possible?

    Mistborn

    Yes, this is possible. Shardplate that grows replacement parts and/or heals itself (through using stormlight) is converting investiture into metal. So, in your theoretical world with a file that could file some off, you'd end up with a substance that you'd call a metal, though not one we have on earth.

    I'll RAFO if a Mistborn could burn it, but what you want to do here could be done. This is assuming that you're using a suit of dead Shardplate, as is commonly seen in the books so far.

    General Reddit 2022 ()
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    heynoswearing

    So Haunted Man is Nazh right?

    Yoitsthew

    That’s what I’m thinking so I hope one day we get some context as to how he went from an antagonist to someone [Nicelle Sauvage] is galavanting around with! Maybe when u/Izykstewart finishes Boatload of Mummies we’ll know a little bit more about the in between??

    Isaac Stewart

    Maybe someday there will be more context to that. :)

    Miscellaneous 2022 ()
    #663 Copy

    Scott Beckman (paraphrased)

    Which is scarier... Which is more dangerous: a sword that wants to destroy evil, or a Bondsmith with no bounds?

    Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

    A Bondsmith with no bounds.

    Scott Beckman (paraphrased)

    Can an unbound Bondsmith take that sword's... ability for himself?

    Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

    Not exactly, but something similar. Probably not what you're thinking, but he could essentially take what that sword is, yes.

    Stormlight Five Updates ()
    #665 Copy

    Brandon Sanderson

    Hello, all!  I know some of you may have been waiting for this.  It’s time for the first in a series of updates about your book!  I wanted to wait until I’d made good progress this month before I stopped to write one of these updates, and I do apologize for leaving you in the dark for so long.  I probably should have written one of these back in January, but it’s been an odd year for me, full of unpredictable timing issues. 

    So, let’s get the obvious questions out of the way.  Do I have a title yet?  No.  Still thinking.  I’d like it to fit the format of KOWT or KOW, but I don’t like most of the options that have presented themselves.  It requires more thought.

    When will the book come out?  I’m looking at fall 2024.  I have tried to be very forthcoming about this one—warning people for a while that 2023 might be too optimistic.  And, as I feared, I have been forced to let the date slide quite far into 2024 because of three issues.  The first is that I set myself up for a TON of revisions this year, and they’ve been taking more time than expected.  I still have two books to revise, though I’ve been spending all of August on Stormlight.  

    However, that isn’t the primary reason I’ve ended up pushing back the book.  I’d planned for these revisions, and could have done those while working on Stormlight.  The second reason I pushed the book back is that I knew this book, of all the ones in the sequence, deserved a little extra time and attention.  It will likely be the longest of the series to date, and I have to be careful to juggle all the storylines properly.  I didn’t want to be rushed on it, and—though it may shock you—an 18-month production cycle wasn’t going to cut it. 

    The third reason is one I haven’t been able to gauge as easily as the first two—something new to my life.  Lately, I’ve needed to dedicated more and more of my time to running a company.  I still reserve three days a week solely for writing, but that’s down from four days a week in previous years.  

    The meetings take two general forms.  The first category is meetings with my team.  Things like reviewing the production of the secret projects and leatherbounds to make sure things look and feel right.  Others involve deep dives into concept art for characters and settings, so that when we create products like the upcoming Stormlight miniatures, they can fit with a canon version of the characters.  This is something I resisted for a while, feeling like it was all right if different artists interpreted the singers (for example) differently.  More and more, though, Isaac and I feel that we should have specific canon examples for continuity.  

    Other meetings are editorial related, or publicity related.  Dragonsteel has kind of grown up the last few years, and I want to do it right.  That means being involved, as long as it doesn’t impact my time TOO much.  But all of that needs to be balanced with the numerous film and television meetings that have been happening lately.  Again, I want to do this right—which means being deeply involved in the projects that are moving forward.  (Announcements should be coming in the near future.)  That takes time.  So, the free time that I had during Covid to write secret projects is now being eaten up by a lot of these meetings.

    I’m still finding the right balance, but this last month has seen a lot of good progress on Stormlight.  I’m sitting at 65,000 words right now as of this writing.  Roughly 16% if we assume a 400,000-word final book.  (Though this one will, as I said, likely be longer than that—so that 16% might be more like 15%.)

    Unfortunately, progress is going to slow again as I have a couple of other deadlines due.  My goal right now is to do the last two revisions (Defiant and Secret Project Four) in rapid succession, in September and October, and be back to Stormlight in November.  

    For a teaser, though, here is what I’m working on: I’m going to write this book in phases, straight from beginning to end, through several character groupings.  For example, the first sequence I’m writing is Szeth and Kaladin in Shinovar, including the Szeth flashbacks.  I plan to write all of their plot, from start to finish, before moving on to the next sequence of characters.

    All of that 65k so far, except the prologue, has been on this plotline—and I’m loving how it’s shaping up.  I know the Szeth backstory has been a LONG time coming.  I hope it lives up to your expectations.  There are some interesting lore secrets here to reveal, and the climax is something I’ve been building to since book one—indeed, you’ll find death rattles from the first volume referencing the events here in this sequence.

    I plotted this sequence at 100k.  It’s looking a lot more like 150k now that I’m neck deep in it.  The picture is related!

    I know that four years is a long time to wait for a novel, and it’s been my goal in the past to keep that to 3 years.  My intention is that once this is done, we’ll have another longer-than-normal gap as I turn my attention to Mistborn Era Three (and hopefully the Elantris sequels) before diving back in to do the back five Stormlight books.  From there, I’m hoping to return to a 3-year gap between books until we push to the ending at book ten.  

    A long journey, I know!  But you’ll almost certainly have television and film projects in the interim to keep you occupied alongside the other things I do.  And I continue to feel that Stormlight works best in ultra-long-form novels, rather than the (far more profitable) option my publisher would prefer of one shorter 100k Stormlight book every year.  The experience of the thick book full of interconnected plotlines and smaller interlude flourishes is part of what makes the artistic vision work for these volumes.    

    As always, thank you for your patience.  My job is to make sure it’s all worth the wait, and I am striving each day to show respect for the trust you’ve put in me.  

    Next update should come around the end of the year, where I’ll let you know how my November/December went.  With luck, I’ll have managed another 70k or so across the two months, and land us at around 130k, which MIGHT be the end of the first sequence.  

    Brandon Sanderson

    Full disclosure: Final book might not have a specific glow to it. I told Randy "Some kind of darkness creeping across the land, visualized in an interesting way." This is what he came up with, but this was done BEFORE I wrote the sequence, and so it's only to be taken as concept art not illustrative art, if that makes sense.

    Miscellaneous 2022 ()
    #666 Copy

    /u/CallumQuinnCreates

    Hello Mr. Stewart. Isaac? Lord Ruler?! Well, anyway, I am very excited to hear that you are working on a Mistborn book! Can you give us any updates on your progress? Hope you are well!

    Isaac Stewart

    Very kind of you to ask! I just passed 100k words and am very excited by how it's all coming together.

    YouTube Livestream 49 ()
    #667 Copy

    Letters Words

    For a theoretical Stormlight live action adaptation, it seems like it would be difficult to accomplish filming outdoor scenes while eliminating any signs of plant life that would be completely out of place on Roshar. Would you be open to changing elements of Roshar's ecology to make adaptation easier?

    Brandon Sanderson

    I would not have to do that, considering the budgets that we have been regularly offered. We can digitally remove plants. The real answer to that is, we digitally remove plants; and that's expensive, but that's what we do. There's some places in southern Utah that we can film that are gonna look real good for the Shattered Plains. And then the other places that we would have to film, we can do volume stages for, or things like that. I don't think it's as hard to do as you say

    The bigger issue we have discussed, when some people have been pitching on Stormlight live action, is the spren. How many spren do you put into a scene? Those are pretty expensive (as these things go) effects, and how much are we gonna use, and how do you adapt that? And how do you not make the spren look like Looney Tunes, with someone getting hit on the head and stars spinning around their head, right? We all imagine them not being that, but you gotta make sure that it works. A lot of what's happening with spren is pretty surreal. How do you adapt that and and what's our budget for that? Those are questions that have come up.

    YouTube Livestream 49 ()
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    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.

    YouTube Livestream 49 ()
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    Readyfix7381

    Would you ever consider using the medium of film or TV to tell a Cosmere story that's not based on a book already published, but you write the screenplay for instead?

    Brandon Sanderson

    Yes, I would consider that. As a fan of cinema and of the modern era of television (which is just very long movies, which I just love how that's become the thing that people do now), then I can absolutely see myself doing this. I want to get more experience with it before I would try that, but the original pitch for Dark One (that is a graphic novel, and which we are now writing as a novel) was written as... not scripts, but an outline for a television series. That's how I originally, just... I was starting to work on it, I'm like, "This works so much better this way, this way, this way." So I outlined it that way. So I've kind of done it before. It wasn't Cosmere, and it didn't ever get made, and it wasn't a script, but it was a step that direction. So, absolutely can see that.

    And, you know, there's other things. For instance, I would like to make an Emperor's Soul movie, if the Cosmere ever takes off to the point that people are wanting something other than Mistborn and Stormlight. (Which, I totally understand why people want Mistborn and Stormlight first.) When they have done that and are like, "All right; what else do we have here?" I would like to do an Emperor's Soul. But I'm probably not gonna do Emperor's Soul as the same piece (and I've told people this before) where it is one person in a room the entire time. I would turn it into something that preserves the spirit of that, but is in a lot of different sets, a lot of different locations, with a larger cast, and turn it into something that feels cinemated. That's the one that I would adapt the heaviest, if I were doing that. There's thing like that that I would also like to do that are based on something, but basically I'd say, "What did I love about the piece I wrote? How can I make this for a new medium?" And I would start over with a new script.

    YouTube Livestream 49 ()
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    LewsTherinTelescope

    Back in 2014, you mentioned you'd already written the epilogue to Stormlight Five.

    Brandon Sanderson

    I have.

    LewsTherinTelescope

    Do you still plan to use what you wrote back then? Or have you had to scrap that version because of changes to the plan?

    Brandon Sanderson

    I have come up with some better ideas for how I want that to play out. So I don't know if that actual epilogue will end up in there or not.

    Now, the epilogue is different from the [postlude]. We have the prelude; in Stormlight Five, you will have a [postlude], as well. That will be different from the epilogue, just like the prologue was different than the prelude.

    YouTube Livestream 49 ()
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    Brandon Sanderson

    It's gonna be tricky to pick what I read from Stormlight Five [for the The Lost Metal release party] because I don't want to read something that is a spoiler for those who haven't read Stormlight, 'cause they're there for a Mistborn thing. It's likely you will get Szeth's first flashback, or one of the early Szeth flashbacks that I think is working really well, because that doesn't spoil very much for people who haven't read it, because it takes place in the past.

    Isaac Stewart Interview ()
    #672 Copy

    Cosmere.es

    I think that you will be the one who might write the story [for The Arcanist]. Will you be shaping it like a novel? Or more like thinking, because you have all of the experience with the graphic novel, into something that is going to be translated into a graphic novel, as well?

    Isaac Stewart

    I don't know yet what we will be doing with that. I have a lot of notes for what we're calling The Arcanist, but it might wind up having a title that has echoes of White Sand so that it feels like a duology. But also, we want people to be able to pick up The Arcanist and be able to say, "You can read this one without reading White Sand, if you want to."

    We've batted around several different ideas of: do we do it in a graphic novel? Do we do it as a novel and a graphic novel that comes out at the same time? And I don't know if we've really landed on anything that we're going to do at this point, for that. I would like to write it as a novel, and see what happens. There's also something fun about the idea of developing it as a novel and a graphic novel simultaneously; I know that there will be people who have read the graphic novel who would like to continue that story in graphic novel form. So, I wouldn't be surprised, if we get to this one, if it winds up being in both forms. But I don't know exactly at this point what we will do with that.

    Isaac Stewart Interview ()
    #673 Copy

    Isaac Stewart

    I should also mention that one other step in between there [Isaac's Mistborn stories] was working on the White Sand omnibus, which was a huge undertaking. I went back and I read all of Brandon's earlier works set on White Sand. His first novel was White Sand; we call that one White Sand Prime. His third novel was a continuation of that called Lord Mastrell. And then his seventh or eighth novel was also White Sand (which is out in the world as an unedited manuscript), which is what the graphic novel's based on. So I went back to all three of those, reread them, created a giant database of names, what happened, what the differences are, things like that. And then I reread the graphic novel with all of this information at my side, and then decided, "Okay, what do we need to do with the Cosmere graphic novel to really update it and bring it really cohesively into the Cosmere?"

    At that point, that's when I wrote about thirty-eight new pages of material. Some of that's based on what was in the manuscript. And some of that are new scenes that I added because I felt like we needed a friendlier introduction to certain characters. Like Kenton, I wanted him to be really sympathetic from the get-go, which is something Brandon would have done (as I talked with him) if he were to revise that manuscript. So I developed a scene that I added at the beginning to try to develop him a little bit more. Adapting another scene with Khriss and Baon to develop her as a character a little bit more, and then be able to carry these scenes in the prologue through to the ending.

    So, in addition, we have fourteen new Ars Arcanum pages from Khriss that I wrote and ran through beta groups, ran through the company. So I'm working on writing in the Cosmere already.

    Isaac Stewart Interview ()
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    Isaac Stewart

    The process of me coming to write more in the Cosmere is very organic. I've been in writing groups with Brandon since probably 2005, off and on. I was there reading Mistborn from very early on to be able to make the maps, but also giving feedback on the manuscripts and giving Brandon ideas on how to expand the world visually. So I've been kind of part of the creation process. I don't want to take more credit than credit is due, but designing Luthadel (the map), designing symbols for that world, and working really closely with Brandon on that.

    When I started working at Dragonsteel, we hit a point with Shadows of Self and Bands of Mourning where there wasn't enough time to finish the broadsheets for that. And I saw, with all of the projects, that was a very busy year for us with Shadows of Self coming out three months before Bands of Mourning. I saw that I needed to step up and do the broadsheet, possibly. So I started putting it together, talked to Brandon, he's like, "Yeah, why don't you try. Give it a shot." I sat down and I wrote an Allomancer Jak short, Gentleman Jak in the City of Fountains. And I thought it turned out really fun; I think I was able to capture the voice of Allomancer Jak. It was a little bit wacky, which I always infuse my stories with a little bit of wackiness. And it was a lot of fun, and so Brandon was like, "Yeah, this turned out great. Let's do the next broadsheet." So I started really kind of writing in the Mistborn world with the broadsheets, so it's just kind of grown organically over time.

    I've had a bunch of stories in my head that I'd wanted to tell for a really long time, and I realize that a lot of the underpinnings of magic and things that are in my stories are similar, or maybe have been influenced by Brandon. Because at this point in my life, my fantasy writing is just influenced by what Brandon has already done because I'm just exposed to it all the time. So we started talking about the idea of porting some of the ideas that I had into Cosmere worlds. And one of these was Boatload of Mummies, which was actually inspired by a Lego set. I had this big giant ship that my brother and sister-in-law had given me one year for Christmas, and that sort of spurred me on to starting to get more Lego sets again, because I loved them when I was a child. But somehow, we also had all of these Egyptian Lego sets, and I had tons of mummies. And I'm like, "What am I gonna do with these mummies?" So I put them all on the boat, fighting the British Empire on this boat. And I'm like, "Huh, this is really interesting. I kinda want to see what that story is. It's kind of like Snakes on a Plane, but it's Mummies on a Boat." So that inspired that, and I started writing that set in our world. And I didn't get very far before I had to do other things; I usually am always working on a fiction project, and that's probably about the time that I was working on Jacob's Journal of Doom, and some of these other things. So I put it on the back burner. But Brandon and I decided that that story was a lot of fun, and how could that work in the Cosmere? And so we started brainstorming some ideas. We already had this character, Nicelle Sauvage (which Allomancer Jack calls Nicki Savage.) I already had this character that I had sort of started developing in the Mistborn world, and we'd seen her through the broadsheets. And so we thought, "What if she was the main character of Boatload of Mummies?" And then, where would this book be set time-wise, and what are the events, the Cosmere underpinnings that are going on there?

    ...

    Atfer I finished that [the White Sand omnibus], I'm like, "Okay, Boatload of Mummies. Let's do that, now." So that's where we're at right now. How do we make a mummy in the cosmere? That's a question, right? What are they doing, why are they there? All these questions come together, and we're forming a story around that. I'm about 90,000 words into it. I massively overwrite, so it'll probably be a fairly long book that we'll then trim down to around 100,000 words. And then we'll see; we'll run it through betas, we'll run it through groups here at work. We'll see if it's something that's good enough to publish. I'm interested in seeing if I can whip it into shape.

    r/books AMA 2022 ()
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    Pillmaken

    In my country (Chile), rural folks use the word "gancho" in exactly the same way The Lopen uses it. Did you know about it and put it into Stormlight? Or was it a coincidence?

    Brandon Sanderson

    It's an absolute coincidence. This is like when I found out that Elend and Straff... I built them using morphemes out of Germanic, not knowing that they're actually words in German (or close to words). No, I just built it out of the morphemes that I was looking for in Spanish, 'cause Herdazians, I'm using Spanish (particularly South American hispanic culture) as kind of an origin, a little bit of Mexican in there, to build them. And I just built the words using the sound morphemes, not even the meaning morphemes. And I guess I did a good job.

    r/books AMA 2022 ()
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    Starman of Admora

    After reading Mistborn, Elantris, and Warbreaker, I couldn't help but notice some recurring themes. What is it that entices you so much about the concept of living gods?

    Brandon Sanderson

    The idea of the Cosmere, the fundamental idea of the Cosmere, was: power of deity put in the hands of ordinary people. That is the Shattering of Adonalsium; that is the origin of the Shards. So when I built the Cosmere, that became one of the key themes of the Cosmere. And so, to tie all of these different books together (that are happening on different planets with different themes and characters and plots), I wanted some few things to link together. And that big linking connective tissue is: what do people do when they have the power of a god? Or even just a little fraction of it. What do they do with it? What happens? How do we explore that? And that theme is a connective tissue binding the Cosmere together, which is why you see me coming back to it time and time again.

    YouTube Livestream 49 ()
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    Brandon Sanderson

    These [film studio proposals] are not sure things; nothing is a sure thing in Hollywood. But I would be surprised if we aren't on set doing things [for an adaptation] in this time next year. I would be shocked if we aren't.

    Expect, in the next few months, some announcements that you might find exciting. I'm gonna let the people with whom I'm working handle that, because they like to do PR their way.

    General Reddit 2022 ()
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    jofwu

    Someone in the last spoiler stream pointed out that there's an OB flashback where Evi is pregnant, and it reads like it's referring to Adolin. But the timing doesn't work out. They supposed she could have had a miscarriage, and it's just never mentioned in the books. The explanation technically fits... But I doubt it was the intent.

    The timeline of the group traveling in Shadesmar in Oathbringer is kind of wacky. The time from Kholinar to Celebrant is extremely asymmetrical with the travel time from there to Thaylen City. I'll be curious to see if they tweak a mention or two of time passing in the OB leatherbound down the road...

    In TWoK it reads like Kaladin spends MANY weeks in Bridge Four before he goes to the Honor Chasm. But when you do the math it's something like two weeks? (ten Rosharan days) One of those things where there's nothing technically wrong, but doesn't seem to have been the intent.

    Another goofy one is that Shallan spent 6 months chasing Jasnah around by ship to petition to be her ward. Which, when you look at travel times elsewhere in the books, is pretty ridiculous. Did they like, sail around the whole continent once or twice?

    The single biggest issue, in my opinion, is that the whole Veden civil war happens in about a month. Navani shares the news about the Assassin in White murdering King Hanavanar at the end of TWoK. That's what sparks the war. Then you have Taravangian showing up in Vedenar in Words of Radiance, prior to the Everstorm, at the end of the war. The Thrill was involved, and tensions were building for a long while... But I'm not sure how they fought a whole war (with their level of technology) in a single month in a country that large.

    Peter Ahlstrom

    I asked Karen about these. She says:

    • Evi's pregnancy

    OB CH 36, where Evi is pregnant, is timestamped 24 years ago.OB CH 49, where Adolin is born, is timestamped 23 years ago.A pregnancy on Roshar takes seven of their months. We give the timestamps half a year of leeway.

    • Shadesmar travel time

    I don't have the calculations handy, but we certainly did them. The ship they got from Celebrant was faster than the one they took getting there, and it took them far enough that they could do a forced march to Thaylen City at a specific number of miles per day and arrive on time. We REALLY spent a lot of time getting this right.

    • Honor Chasm timing

    Kaladin is in Bridge Four 18 days before going to the Honor Chasm. He was already close to suicidal before joining.

    • Shallan chasing Jasnah

    It really depends on how directly they traveled and how long they stay in port. The Wind's Pleasure could have gone back and forth to smaller ports with shipments before they could find one going to the city she wanted to go to.

    • Veden Civil War

    I see it as having been a few small battles in each princedom, but then everyone saw a chance to be king and they converged on Vedenar. That left power vacuums in the princedoms and smaller landlords fought there. I don't think that most of the country was in as bad shape as Vedenar.

    r/books AMA 2022 ()
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    Mundane-Landscape-49

    Why DIDN'T the Rithmatists in Nebrask create a moat of acid?

    Brandon Sanderson

    A moat of acid around such a large perimeter proved too difficult to maintain. Acid loses its, well, acidity when it becomes adulterated with other materials--like rain. A moat of acid is just super hard; harder than water. They do, in places, have at least things like that. However, manpower and battle lines have proven the most efficient method to them so far.

    There are problems with this, and they're learning that they have underestimated their enemies. But the moat idea proved untenable, though it was discussed and tried in microcosm.

    r/books AMA 2022 ()
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    Affectionate_Box1625

    Will we ever see Marsh world hopping?

    Brandon Sanderson

    RAFO, but good question.

    Affectionate_Box1625

    I’d love to see a book with Marsh in Roshar. Any chance of it happening?

    Brandon Sanderson

    There is a chance, but I'll have to RAFO for now.

    r/books AMA 2022 ()
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    Gmaneagle

    If you could invite another author in to contribute to the Cosmere, who would it be or who would be on your shortlist?

    Brandon Sanderson

    To write in the Cosmere, I would have to pick someone I know very well. Isaac is at the top of the list, he knows Cosmere almost as well as I do. After that I would probably look towards my friends, like Dan Wells would be high on the list. It would be nice to have all these amazing authors write in it but I feel I need more of a solid base than what I have right now. Meaning more expansion, more experience of people who are not me writing in the Cosmere and guidelines on how to make a good Cosmere story. It would be very hard to go to some of the great Sci-fi authors and ask them to write in the Cosmere, like “you only have to read 15 novels!”

    r/books AMA 2022 ()
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    Mywuga

    In regards to the perpendicularities in the cosmere, were you at all inspired by the pools in the Wood between the Worlds in C.S. Lewis’ “The Magicians Nephew”?

    Brandon Sanderson

    So it's gotta be back there in the back of my brain, but I so vaguely remember the Magician's Nephew that I didn't even remember these exist, when you're saying that. So the answer is a solid “maybe.”It might be there in the back of my head.

    I wrote the pool into Elantris not even knowing what it did, because the cosmere had not been constructed at that point. And then when I was building the cosmere, I was writing Mistborn, I'm like, "All right, I know I want it to be some sort of portal." (I actually did know that, because I had put iconography in about it being a portal.) I'm like, "Where does it leave? All right, I'm going to build out the whole cosmere. I now know what these are." I had a pool like this in Aether of Night that I had as kind of a receptacle for a certain cosmereological things (or what became a certain cosmereological thing). I solidified that, but it's not like the pool that I wrote into Elantris when I put it there. Aether of Night was after Elantris; I just put it in there. "It's a portal to something" I had not built the cosmere yet. It is the first book where I started to think about that sort of stuff. Basically, you have a Hoid appearance, and that's it that was intentional; everything else was retrofitted onto Elantris.

    r/books AMA 2022 ()
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    verendus3

    Which of your worlds would you most and least want to live in?

    Brandon Sanderson

    Whenever I get this question, I say, “Can I go write quickly a short story in a really nice world where nothing is wrong, they have the internet, and authors can make a professional living as a novelist? Can I do that? I'll go quickly write one up and go live there." Because I don't really want to live in any of the worlds. I like air conditioning. Air conditioning isn't a thing in basically any of the cosmere worlds. You can make it work with various magic systems, but in most cases, to make it work with those various magic systems, you're going to have to be pretty high up in the social structure. Because most of these worlds have not gotten equality and things down, even to the level that we have. These worlds are not necessarily great places to live. And then beyond that is, generally there is some world ending event and/or disaster coming that I wouldn't want to be around for.

    If I have to pick, I usually say Scadrial because they are closest to the tech level I want. But they are also the most commonly subject to world-ending things, because there's gonna be four series, at least, in the Mistborn world. Maybe Nalthis would be better, because the fewer books I write about a place, probably the less likely the world is to end anytime soon.

    It is definitely not Threnody. We'll just say that.

    r/books AMA 2022 ()
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    jofwu

    You've teased that we might get movie/television news before too long...

    With so much of the cosmere left to write, are you concerned about movies/shows catching up to you? Would you make them hold off on a Stormlight Archive show until you finish, or are you comfortable letting adaptations get ahead of you?

    Brandon Sanderson

    It depends on how comfortable I get with the television and movie format. When Stormlight happens as a television show, I want to be deeply involved. I want to write some of the episodes, I want to be co-creator--and I am just not ready for that yet.

    If that is the place where we are (me being that deeply involved) then getting ahead of me is not that big of a deal. If it is not, if I'm not so deeply involved, I think I would resist letting people get ahead of me. This is tied up with some intricacies of how I am creating the cosmere--which lets me play with this a little. For example, we aren’t calling the first 5 Stormlight books era 1, but there is a 10 year time jump between books 5 and 6. So if I were to sell Stormlight, I could conceivably sell the first five--which will be finished fairly soon. (Knock on wood.) Then we will see how things go with the back five, afterward. (If I'm done with them, for example, or if we need to wait between the two series.)

    Regardles, jofwu, I am worried about this; it is something on my radar.

    r/books AMA 2022 ()
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    StefeSoo

    How much of Roshar, its history and its magic system did you have developed before even writing the first book? I’ve seen so many inconsistencies from other authors when developing worlds over multiple books, but I can’t fault yours. How do you maintain that consistency when writing?

    Brandon Sanderson

    I actually did make some problems with timeline issues. That is a problem when you have multiple flashbacks, it’s like Tetris, a very complicated game of Tetris. Getting all these events in people’s pasts to line up with the time needed to get them where they are today is a big issue when telling this kind of story. For me, Stormlight is a different beast from my other books, my friends and I have an inside joke we call worldbuilder’s disease. It’s where an author spends so much time building their world that they don’t write the story. If you don’t sit down and write you won’t learn what the needs of the book are. Generally, your worldbuilding should be done in service of the story* (*: if that is fun to you). Generally you want to ask, what are the themes of my book and how is the worldbuilding going to help me. I tell you all this to say that I made an exception to Stormlight, I sat down for 6 months and wrote an extensive lore book which is now an internal wiki which we use. The only reason that this worked the way it did was that I brought on a great team quickly. Karen and Peter are the unsung heroes of this, they are able to spot these mistakes before they reach print. You’ll see in the next book that I have brought on people whom I am calling Arcanists. These are fans who I have asked to check over specifically world building. This is very important to me because epic fantasy is about making you believe that it is real while you are reading. I don’t want to be one of those people where this is an inconsistency and breaks like William Shatner on SNL.

    Miscellaneous 2022 ()
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    AonEne

    Do the Lenses at the start of each chapter [of the Alcatraz books] correlate to the contents of the chapter in any way? Or just whatever's fun? 

    Hayley Lazo

    I always tried to pick ones that loosely have something to do with things, whether it's a chapter where they are used or introduced, or something thematically that happens in the chapter. Sometimes there's no correlation, we just needed to pick one. 

    r/books AMA 2022 ()
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    Puzzled-Barnacle-200

    If you were to write Mistborn now, as an experienced author rather than as your first published series, what differences would you have made to the story/world/characters?

    Brandon Sanderson

    A couple things. There are 3 regrets, well maybe 4. I really wanted to write the first book about Vin and have a female protagonist and do a good job with that. It's something I'd done poorly in the past (during my unpublished years) and I really wanted to do a good job on this one. But then, I made her the only woman on the cast, really. So I would fill out the cast with more women.

    I got tunnel vision and because all the stories I was using as blueprints (Ocean’s 11, Sneakers, the Sting, etc) had overwhelming male casts, I defaulted to that. This is the problem with bias--you end up perpetuating problems, just kind of going along with them because that's what you've always seen done.

    That is not to say that having an all male cast is bad. In some cases, chosen deliberately, it makes sense. I would not change Bridge 4; as bridgemen, it makes sense to have an all male group. (At least at the start.) But with Mistborn, I was actively using Vin as a way to show that with the metallic arts evening out things, the difference between male and female strength was minuscule. By having no other women on the team, I undermined my own message.

    Another one is that I think that I broke Sanderson’s first law. I used un-foreshadowed power in the ending and it led to a less satisfying conclusion than I would have liked. This is actually what taught me I needed to better with this, and if you watch my lectures on Sanderson's Laws, I lay it out more clearly.

    Third, in the first half of Hero of Ages, I don't like quite how much traveling there is. I don’t think it gets across the feel that I want. I would have set more in Luthadel. It feels out of place in retrospect because that story (the story of Mistborn) is sort of the story of that city. I could had the same book, but set it in a fortress within Luthadel. That would make the city's "character" remain in the third book, and let you see the progress (or in this case, the opposite) of the world through the way the city looks.

    When I make a film of Mistborn 3, I think I would move much of the action to the city. 

    r/books AMA 2022 ()
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    Victor-Romeo

    Some very successful authors have difficulty in delivering books to wrap up the series. Why do you think this happens, and what is the best attitude and healthy behaviours die hard fans should use to encourage authors to deliver the books they are hanging out for?

    Brandon Sanderson

    Anytime you get into “should”, that is dangerous ground. I am a creator and I do not think I should be dictating fan behavior. That’s your world as a community to decide upon; I prefer to let the community do it's thing.

    I do not think there is one good answer to this. (IE, why other authors are sometimes slow.) One common answer is that it has been a hard decade for a lot of people. Man, there are often difficult things about this last decade that have been draining to people. Then add on to that personal issues, and it is very hard for some of my colleagues to be creative in the way they have to be to write a novel.

    Another big reason is that many authors tend to be “discovery writers.” Their biggest strength tends to lie in character interaction and believability in those characters. They give their characters so much volition. A discovery writer does not know their ending, they just start writing and let the characters interact. While those interactions often shine, the authors often have weaker endings. That is not to say that all discovery writers have bad endings, it just takes much more revision. It tends to be very daunting and slows them down towards the end. It is simply an outgrowth of their writing style.

    Add on top of that expectations, and maybe never having finished something on this level before, and suddenly your stress is through the roof. These authors, I should remind, just started out like the rest of us. Unknown and just trying to tell a good story. To suddenly have the world watching can be extremely daunting, and there's really no way to practice for this. It can honestly be debilitating.

    I think all the various fan reactions are understandable and in some ways they are necessary to the fandom’s psychology. I do not visit the places that exist to complain about me, to complain about my style and tropes. But those places existing is healthy. It is healthy to have a place to talk to people with similar opinions to you or to just post some memes and have some lols.

    It can be unhealthy when it becomes harassing behavior. One thing I do not like is how our society treats people who like things. If you speak about liking something online, people will try to rip that away from you. This rubs me absolutely the wrong way. This isn't to say all criticism and disagreement should be done away with. I like is interesting conversations between people who disagree. I disagree wildly with Peter (this is Peter Ahlstrom, my VP of editorial at my company) about Into the Spiderverse. He could not stand it, while it is one of my favorite movies. (He didn't like the framerate of the animation; it drove him crazy.)

    Fan criticism also becomes toxic when it becomes harassment to the creator. I do not know where these lines are, though. It's a tough one, because simply posting your opinion online shouldn't constitute harassment.

    If you want my opinion, if an author says they are working on a book, they are. I know these people; they want to be done as much as you want them to be done. But there are mental, emotional, and sometimes physical difficulties preventing it. At this point, there really isn't much you can do. And I bet that the harassment of these creators has slowed the release of these books.

    r/books AMA 2022 ()
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    Longshot_97

    This question concerns Mistborn Era 2. Aluminum at this time is supremely rare and quite expensive, and Wax is seen lamenting his profound lack of aluminum guns and bullets fairly often. However, couldn't he fashion a "Poor Man's Aluminum" of sorts by coating his guns (and potentially bullets) in a thin veneer of iron, then Feruchemically charging it? You've noted that metalminds can still be pushed, but much less than un-Invested metal. This could help him, in the absence of aluminum. So, is there a reason he has not done that?

    Brandon Sanderson

    The layer you would get by just that little coat would be so small that it'd have very little effect. Now, there's a pretty good argument for putting it into bullets. The problem there is: are the alloys that make good bullets going to work very well? Now, granted, aluminum doesn’t make for great bullets either. But any aluminum alloy kind of gets the property of aluminum. Where any iron alloy does not necessarily get the property of being able to allomantically or feruchemically interact with it in the right way. Can you get there? It's an excellent question that I perhaps should explore. I like this idea. But it's harder than you make it out to be. It is a good idea, though; it's a pretty good idea.

    r/books AMA 2022 ()
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    VeryNiceName16

    With everything else you guys are doing next year, what is the plan for the Stormlight 4.5 novella?

    Brandon Sanderson

    Still on my list to do when I finish Stormlight 5. I think it needs to be written; I am excited by it. We will see what happens, because Stormlight 5 is almost assuredly 2024 now. And that's partially the Secret Projects, but not as much as you guys probably would assume.

    The main reason has been movie and television stuff. As jofwu anticipated in the first question, I still can't say anything. This is the year the Hollywood came calling, and came calling in a very big way, even before the Kickstarter. They saw that, basically - all of Hollywood was watching and seeing that fantasy can work that is not Game of Thrones. The Witcher, and Shadow and Bone, and plenty of other excellent properties. I mean, Arcane is fantastic; another fantastic example. They're like "Oh, people like these and it can be done if it's not George R.R. Martin". And every one of those studio execs has had someone say "Well, get us one of these," or "get us more of these."

    And every one of them went to BookScan, which is the ratings for how books sell. And every one of them sorted the BookScan and said, "Alright, what authors are there out there that have not had anything made?" And, far as I can tell, I am definitely the best selling science fiction and fantasy writer who's never had an adaptation. I might be the best selling author in the world who's never had an adaptation. That's hard for me to say, because it's harder to penetrate different subgenres and figure out where their sales factors are. And, you know, it depends what you count as adaptation.

    Basically, they all arrived at the same name, and then the Kickstarter happened. They were already calling, and then they started calling more. And so this is the year where I've had to take numerous meetings with all of the streaming services and a large number of the various studios and producers and things. And that takes time. Just takes a lot of time to be on all of those meetings.

    We will bear fruit from this eventually. But I'm being very careful. In fact, when I did my call with Netflix, I led off by saying to them, "I am both very fortunate and very unfortunate. Very unfortunate in that I've never actually had anything made. I've sold tons and tons of things, and nobody was able to get one off the ground. That's unfortunate because I'm an unproven quality in Hollywood, and I understand that. I am also very fortunate in that none of those things actually got made. So nothing bad got made." And all the rights have come back to me, basically. And here I'm sitting in a world where everyone wants fantasy and I have my rights and I can say yes or no. That puts me in a very good position also. Which lets... you know, then I don't need the money. Hollywood doesn't know what to do with people that don't need their money. It's very bizarre to them. So we get to be very discerning and picky with what we want to do.

    Skyward Flight Livestream ()
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    Brandon Sanderson

    As I ended up writing the fourth book in the series I incorporated a lot--you haven't read it yet because it's not readable yet--from the novellas. We almost got the novellas switched to book three, er, book four, and Defiant book five, almost got the publisher to switch that but they were unwilling to do that and they did feel that it was too late in their cycle of publications. But in our head, these are basically book four. 

    Janci Patterson

    I think you're gonna be really confused to read Defiant without it. 

    Brandon Sanderson

    Yeah, I mean, I'm doing my best to make up for that, I will at least in revisions, but right now my writing group is very confused about some things, half of them have read the novellas, and half of them haven't-   

    Janci Patterson

    Oh, jeez, ok.

    Brandon Sanderson

    The ones who have read the novellas are like 'No, no this makes perfect sense.' Why they have kitsen with them in cockpits and why there's lots of different types of slugs. 

    r/books AMA 2022 ()
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    Dr_JP69

    I have a question about Shadesmar, is the Cognitive Realm round? How are landmasses "projected" here? Could I walk in a straight line and end where I started or would I end up in another place entirely?

    Brandon Sanderson

    If you walk in a straight line, you're going to MOSTLY follow the land mass on the other side. With some weird space-time deviations in places. You would not ever end up where you started, though, which is one of the things that is most disjointed about the experience. I realize that's very strange, and it's something I'll delve into in the stories eventually.

    YouTube Weekly Updates 2022 ()
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    Brandon Sanderson

    My good friend Dan Wells and I are writing a book together. It's based on Dark One, my original outline that became a graphic novel. We wanted to do a novelization, because the graphic novel  (while I love it) has a lot of the graphic novel creator's vision to it, and we thought we would do a novel version going kind of back to my original outline.

    He has finished a draft, and so I am doing a draft on that. I'm only 10% of the way through that, but I hope to breeze through that because I'm very excited by this project, and I hope that you guys will all be able to experience it before too much longer.

    General Reddit 2022 ()
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    Brandon Sanderson

    The problem is not that the covers [for Mistborn Era 2] are bland. The problem is that book series take a long time to write.

    When we repackaged Mistborn in 2007, this was the hot style. (When we picked this same style but with a different artist for elantris in 2005, it was right at the revolutionary point where these photo-realistic covers were hugely striking on the shelf.) You might not have liked it even then, but trust me when I say it was a very trendy and original style.

    However, visual art tends change far faster than literary trends. So covers of a series grow outdated fast. In 2010, when we we're covering Alloy, this style was still hot enough. But then it became so hot it grew stale.

    This leaves us with a problem.

    Do we change mid series to newer covers, and leave fans with an unmatching set of hardcovers? Or do we continue with an outdated style, and then recover when the series is done? I'm perfectly happy to change our method if people want, but so far, we've erred on the side of staying consistent. (And yes, paperback recovers are already being designed.)

    None of this is to say the artist is anything other than excellent. He is wonderful, and could give us something else if we asked. But again, then the books wouldn't match.

    One of the issues here is that the U.S. market prefers visually eye popping styles that are more illustrative, but then get outdated faster. While more iconographic styles like the UK uses tend to last longer but never be as dynamic. I know a lot of you prefer those styles, but they can get very bland. (If safe and stable. See the UK wheel of time covers.)

    There's a middle ground of course and all kinds of shades in the middle.

    Let me know your thoughts! I'll glance back at this thread over the weekend. Would you rather we repackage mid series and give you more interesting covers but not have the series match?

    EDIT: I did check back, and found what I expected. (Though it's good to have confirmation.) Keeping the books consistent across a format is how I'll still proceed, though I AM going to try to get some of our newer covers to try different things to see what you all think. And a I mentioned, if this cover style isn't for you, there's a repackage coming for the whole series (original trilogy and W&W) likely in trade paperback (the oversized paperbacks) coming sometime in the near future.

    YouTube Spoiler Stream 4 ()
    #700 Copy

    Brandon Sanderson

    If the Muppets came to me and said "we actually want to make one of your things", I would not do Mistborn. What would I do? I would do a new story. I never got around to making Mulholland Homebrew's Sinister Shop of Secret Pets, which is a middle grade book about a young woman who apprentices to... In this world, everyone has to apprentice and learn a magic. And she goes to the job fair, for your apprenticeship when you're fourteen and you gotta pick a magic, and you basically have release time from school and go study your magic talent. There's like hundreds of them, and she finds one called Leekromancy that she thinks sounds cool, and she wants to rebel against the normal magic her parents want her to pick. And she picks it, but then she learns it's power over legumes. She is apprenticed to somebody whose job is taking care of magical pets and having a pet shop. And finding their favorite foods and basically being a fantasy exterminator, but a humane one, where you have some weird magical pest in your house. It's like what I thought Fantastic Beasts was going to be. You have weird magical pests, what do we do to get rid of the brownies? We can just exterminate them, or we can call this guy, it's like the beekeeper who removes the bees from your wall humanely and then sets them up. He'll take the brownies, and maybe the brownies don't make good pets, so he'll send them to a Tiffany Aching book or something like that, and has this nice little pet store. Anyway, that's a story I never got to write, and I would pick something like that of the big list of books that I will never be able to write, and come up with an outline and say, "Let's do this together, Muppets! I don't think Mistborn is a good match for you."